The episode for this transcript can be found here.
00:00:00
>> CHEN: Welcome to the Excelability podcast. This is a brand-new series of conversations on success with people who happen to have a disability. Together we’ll uncover the attitudes, habits, techniques, and practices that enable these individuals to achieve astounding success.
00:00:34
>> CERF: Basically, I’m hearing impaired, although the accurate description would be hearing repaired because I’ve been wearing hearing aids since I was 13. For some people, a disability feels like you’re kind of incomplete or, you know, you’re not a whole person or something, and for a while I think I had that discomfort. Then I finally realized, wait a minute, my only problem is I just don’t hear very well.
00:01:07
>> CERF (CONTINUED): She lost her hearing when she was three and eventually discovered cochlear implants and scheduled the surgery and had the implants done. She got home, and I discovered that I couldn’t get her off the phone. She was like a 50-year-old teenager.
>> CHEN: Hello there, and welcome again to the Excelability podcast.
00:01:30
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): I’m your host, Jack Chen. Today we’re joined by someone who has profoundly impacted all of our lives. Vint Cerf is known as the father of that small thing we call the Internet. Vint is hearing impaired, or as he likes to call it, hearing repaired, because of his use of hearing aids. Vint will share with us the attitudes and techniques that have enabled him to achieve incredible success. You can find information about this podcast and previous and future episodes at www.teamexcelability.com.
00:02:06
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): That’s www-dot-team-E-X-C-E-L-ability-dot-com. You can follow us on Facebook at team Excelability or on Twitter, @teamxlability. Vint, thanks so much for being with us today and for sharing your insights. I really appreciate you taking the time out to talk with us and tell us, from your very illustrative career, some of the lessons and techniques that you’ve learned along the way.
00:02:34
>> CERF: Well, I appreciate the chance to chat, Jack. As you know, I’ve always enjoyed our conversations, so I hope that your listeners will find it of some value.
>> CHEN: All right, well, let’s start from the beginning. Can you describe your disability and how it affects your daily life, maybe, to somebody who’s not already familiar with what it’s like to have that disability?
>> CERF: Sure, I’d be happy to. Basically, I’m hearing impaired, although the accurate description would be hearing repaired because I’ve been wearing hearing aids since I was 13.
00:03:04
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I was six weeks premature, and they–I was put into an oxygen tank ’cause this was back in the 1940s, in the middle of World War II, and that’s all they knew how to do. The speculation is that the excess oxygen began a kind of a continued hearing loss. I–my hearing goes down by about 1 dB a year, but hearing aids have kept up, and so–and also the loss is flat from the frequency point of view, so I’ve really been aided literally by the development of hearing aids, and I’ve been wearing them since the late 1950s.
00:03:41
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So basically, I manage on a day-to-day basis thanks to electronics and little, tiny batteries that last for about a day and a half.
>> CHEN: Exactly, and so are there any particular impacts, say to your day-to-day life, that someone who doesn’t have a hearing loss might not realize?
00:04:01
>> CERF: For example, in this kind of a call I wear a headset, and for many cases where I’m chairing a meeting, for example, especially if–one that’s in a big auditorium, I would often wear a headset tied into the PA system so that I’m getting very good quality sound from people who are speaking into microphones. That’s the primary accommodation for situations like that where, you know, Q and A and meeting management is important.
00:04:30
>> CERF (CONTINUED): The only other thing that I would say is that if I’m doing public speaking, for example, I’ll have to explain that I need to run around with a microphone like Geraldo to hold the microphone in front of people who are asking questions in case I need to be close enough to lip-read, and so that’s a shtick that I practice. Apart from that, in restaurants I ask to be seated in the quiet areas. I prefer a back to the wall where I won’t be picking up a lot of sound from behind me. These are very simple, little things, and they’re all focused on being able to hear in potentially noisy environments.
00:05:07
>> CERF (CONTINUED): Apart from that, you know, I remind people that I am hearing impaired and sometimes need to be–my attention may need to be gotten in order to hear someone. Otherwise I might just keep reading and ignore everything, but, you know, most people are pretty comfortable when they’re told, “Just–you know, just let me know if you’re trying to talk and I don’t seem to be responding.” Everybody seems to have been very accommodating.
00:05:32
>> CHEN: Yes, it does take a bit of planning, doesn’t it?
>> CERF: It does.
>> CHEN: It does. Can you tell us a little bit about the time, maybe in your younger years, when you actually realized you had hearing loss, how that discovery impacted you, say, socially, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise?
00:05:50
>> CERF: So it was apparent that I was missing something probably when I was in the third or the fourth grade, maybe, which probably made me about nine years old, and they were gonna put me in a lip-reading class, and then they decided that this would actually make me lazy and that I should really learn to listen, so they took me out of that class and left me in a regular class, and it wasn’t till I was about 13, so I would have been in the eighth grade, when it was very clear that I had a hearing impairment and needed hearing aids, so I had–was always sitting in the front of the room where I could see and hear the teacher better, but then there would be questions from the back of the room that I didn’t hear, and the teacher would answer them like, “Yes,” and, of course, that didn’t help me very much ’cause if I didn’t hear the question, I didn’t know what the yes meant.
00:06:40
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So that was the point where I started wearing hearing aids, and, you know, when you’re 13 years old, that’s kind of an awkward time to wear very visible behind-the-ear hearing aids, so it was socially awkward, and, of course, you know, if you ever get into a situation where you’re making out with a girl and your ears squeak because you get feedback, that’s embarrassing.
00:07:02
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So there was a period of time when I had to adjust to that. Over the years, of course, I’ve become quite comfortable telling people I am–you know, I wear hearing aids and, you know, there’s feedback if you put your hands over my ears and things like that, so for the most part I would say after I finally got through high school, I was pretty well-accustomed to wearing hearing aids and not feeling self-conscious about it, but in the early days it was a little awkward.
>> CHEN: Right, it definitely can be awkward.
00:07:30
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): Were there any particular shifts in attitude or thinking, any particular memorable situations that happened that helped you to begin on that journey to being more comfortable?
>> CERF: Once I got into the work environment, which would be, you know, in my early 20s, it is very clear, first of all, that in order to function successfully, I needed people to know that I might miss what they were saying, and I didn’t want to surprise them or try to fake it.
00:08:01
>> CERF (CONTINUED): For a while you feel like you could fake it, but then you get discovered. Like, you answer the wrong question, and instead of the embarrassment of having been caught out trying to fake it, it seemed a lot easier to just say, “Okay, I missed that. Would you please say it again?” and explain ahead of time that that might be a problem rather than being caught out, so once I got over that feeling of inadequacy, life got a lot simpler and easier.
00:08:31
>> CHEN: So it’s really battling that inadequacy that really helped you get over the hump?
>> CERF: Pretty much. I mean, it was feeling comfortable with this. It–for some people a disability feels like you’re kind of incomplete or, you know, you’re not a whole person or something, and for a while I think I had that discomfort, and then I finally realized, “Wait a minute. My only problem is I just don’t hear very well, and what’s the big deal? I’ll just tell people that so they can accommodate,” and everybody does, and it works.
00:09:02
>> CHEN: Making it public and known can just break the ice. In an article with “The Washington Post” you said, quote, “I traded in my cello for a keyboard.” Can you describe what it’s like to play the cello as someone with hearing loss and maybe why you opted for the computer arts, say, over the musical arts?
>> CERF: Well, first of all, by the–at the time that I was playing the cello I was–had only a very modest loss.
00:09:31
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I mean, we didn’t get to the details, but my loss was probably 15 dB, maybe 20 dB when I was 13, and as I say, it sort of went down by a dB a year, so at the point where I had this choice, what–I thought I had a choice to make between cello and computers, I was about 15, so at that point I was still hearing well enough that playing the cello was perfectly reasonable, and even now with a 65 to 70 dB loss I still enjoy music because, as I say, the loss is flat, so I’m not missing frequencies. I just need gain.
00:10:06
>> CERF (CONTINUED): At the time when I was 15 is when I was first introduced to computers, an interesting machine. It was called the semi-automated ground environment, which was a big tube-based machine that was housed in Santa Monica, California at the System Development Corporation. It was taking radar traces from the distant early warning radars in northern Canada, sending them over phone lines to Santa Monica, where people were looking to see whether there were any Russian bombers coming over the pole, and, of course, it was important to distinguish between the Russian bombers and the Canadian geese.
00:10:39
>> CERF (CONTINUED): In the end, no Russian bombers showed up, but I think a lot of Canadian geese went over the border, and if you ask me, they caused more problems than the Russian bombers ever did, but in that year–it was 1958, I started to get very interested in computers, and by 1960 my best friend and I had access to computers at UCLA while we were still in high school, and I thought that I didn’t have time for both the cello and this computing that was so mesmerizing.
00:11:07
>> CERF (CONTINUED): This was a wrong conclusion, but at the time I didn’t realize that, and, of course, looking back I regret not having continued to play, and maybe someday if I retire, maybe I will get back to it.
>> CHEN: That’s great. If you retire, I like the way you put that.
>> CERF: Well, you know, retirement sounds–sometimes it sounds good, but then I look at what would I do? And I–all the things I do now I would want to do while I’m retired, so who wants to retire?
00:11:34
>> CHEN: And then you can play the cello more.
>> CERF: Right, well, there is that.
>> CHEN: Could you talk a little bit about, during your younger years, whether you thought at all that your hearing loss might impact your future? Did it ever cross your mind?
>> CERF: It actually never really did. I mean, hearing aids really made a huge difference for me, and by the time 1971 comes along, I am at UCLA in graduate school, and we invent email.
00:12:02
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I didn’t. My–a good friend of mine, Ray Tomlinson, who passed away recently and who was very involved in the implementation of the early TCP/IP protocols also invented email even before he started working on TCP/IP, and so I was a heavy user of electronic mail in the year that it was invented and subsequently, and that was hugely helpful. Deferred computer-based communication has been an extremely important part of my life.
00:12:33
>> CERF (CONTINUED): Instant messaging, texting, and so on are all part of the, I would say, mechanisms that enable my ability to communicate comfortably, and so I think that has had a great impact on my career, and I probably, maybe even consciously, aimed myself in projects and jobs where email was available and therefore made my life much more habitable.
00:13:00
>> CHEN: You’ve been called the father of the Internet, received the National Medal of Technology and the Presidential Medal of Honor, inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 amongst others. How would you describe, or would you say that your disability has played a part in your success either as a barrier that you had to overcome or as a driver or catalyst of your work or some other influence?
>> CERF: So those are interesting questions. It certainly has never felt like it’s been a huge barrier to overcome. It was something you had to adapt to, and I have adapted my practices based on what I’m confident I can and can’t do.
00:13:38
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I would say, though, that because email was so important, that meant networking was important, and in fact, email was derived out of the original ARPANET project, which is the predecessor to the Internet. My role in the ARPANET program was to assist my best friend, Steve Crocker, in the development of the ARPANET protocols, the host-level protocols, and I met my colleague, Robert Kahn, with whom I did the TCP design, the core of the Internet, in 1973.
00:14:08
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I don’t sense that this disability has been a barrier. If anything, I think it probably aimed me in the direction of computer communication and networking, which has been an absolutely wonderful career for me, and as you can imagine, over the last 40 years, watching the Internet to continue to evolve, to expand and to host new applications has been enormously satisfying and also pretty exciting, seeing other people adding their ideas to this infrastructure and helping it to grow and become more useful.
00:14:44
>> CHEN: I really like what you said about aiming you in that direction. It almost seems as though the hearing loss was a driver, or it pushed you in that direction so that you could do all this creation and really change the world.
>> CERF: I did have one other thing I want to add, though, and it’s an interesting irony.
00:15:02
>> CERF (CONTINUED): You know that Alexander Graham Bell married a deaf woman, and so did I. My wife, Sigrid, has two cochlear implants, but when I met her and later we married, she was totally deaf, and she was a very, very accomplished lip reader and raised two sons without ever having heard their voices, which is pretty amazing, but then when she was–after 50 years of deafness, she got to–a cochlear implant and then a second one ten years later, but I should point out that she didn’t lose her hearing till she was three, so she had auditory memory, and that helped to make the cochlear implants more effective.
00:15:46
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So she’s now lived with her ability to hear a number–a couple of decades. We’ll put it that way, and so in a very funny way I feel like I have a sort of parallel to Alexander Graham Bell, who works on the telephone, and I work on the Internet, and we both have deaf wives.
00:16:02
>> CHEN: What a great comparison. Turning to a little bit of a different topic, you’ve spoken at many venues, including testifying before Congress, delivering the commencement address at University of Pittsburgh and Gallaudet, and even at the White House. Has your hearing loss impacted your ability to speak and interact with the audience, or would you say that folks have pretty much adjusted to that?
>> CERF: I would say that I have adapted various methods to deal with this problem.
00:16:29
>> CERF: I mean, I just recently did a panel that I moderated, and the thing that you do when you know you’re gonna be in a situation where there are a bunch of people, some people asking questions with roving microphones, and you can’t get plugged into the PA system like I would normally do with a headset, then you ask people to put speakers aimed at the stage instead of the other way round so that you can actually get good quality sound. There are a bunch of tricks that you learn to play in order to improve that, and in a worst case, you know, I can just say, “You’re gonna have to repeat the question,” or maybe someone else who’s on the stage who can hear it will be able to repeat the question.
00:17:07
>> CERF (CONTINUED): This is all about finding various ways to overcome interference, so to speak, with ability to hear. The thing that makes it easier, of course, is if you’re very comfortable with the fact that you have to do that and you don’t–you’re not embarrassed to ask for accommodation, and I’ve gotten way beyond that, you know, over the many, many years that I’ve done public speaking, and I think the most important message here is to get very comfortable with asking for accommodation on the premise that if they want you to come and speak, presumably they–you want–they want you to be able to hear the questions as opposed to being the guy that came to speak and wouldn’t listen.
00:17:45
>> CHEN: So it sounds, really, like creativity after getting comfortable is the critical aspect of that.
>> CERF: Yes, I think that’s a good way of summarizing it.
>> CHEN: Any particularly funny stories that you can share when you were at a speaking engagement and your hearing loss came into play?
00:18:03
>> CERF: Well, I’m not sure that I can give you one from a speaking engagement, but I can tell you one fairly early on in my social life where I realized that I shouldn’t try to fake it.
00:18:15
>> CERF (CONTINUED): At one point I was sitting around a pool in my back yard–this is when I was probably in my late teens and early 20s, with a couple of friends, and I noticed that the skimmer on the pool was making quite a bit of noise, you know, big slurping, sucking noise ’cause it was, you know, pulling water in, and there was a–it turns out that there’s a way of preventing that noise by dropping a great big cork into the skimmer, and so I got up noticing the noise, and it was interfering with my hearing, so I was walking towards the skimmer, and behind me I heard someone say something, and I presumed that they all had noticed the same thing and that they realized I was going to do something about the noisy skimmer, and so they said something, and I said, “Yeah, I’m gonna put a cork in it,” and suddenly they burst out laughing, and I turned around and said, “What’s so funny about that?” and they said–well, what they had actually said was, “Gee, you have a beautiful bougainvillea in the back yard there.”
00:19:16
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So much for faking or assuming what somebody just said.
>> CHEN: Oh, my goodness. Let’s turn to the corporate setting a little bit. A lot of folks who may be listening are working at companies as well, so your insights into the corporate arena would be helpful as well.
00:19:36
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): You’ve been the senior vice president at MCI twice, the VP and chief Internet evangelist at Google, the commissioner for the UN’s broadband council and digital development, and chairman of the board at ICANN, president of ACM, which is the Association of Computing Machinery, and many more. In your corporate life, would you say that your hearing loss has been a barrier or an enhancement or both?
00:20:01
>> CERF: I can recall a big challenge when I left Stanford University after I was an undergraduate. I went to work for IBM, and my job was running a timesharing system. This is in 1965, not very long after timesharing had been invented in the early 1960s at MIT, and so working in a datacenter back in those days meant pretty noisy, air-conditioned environment, and there were times when I needed to take phone calls, and that was hard in a noisy environment like that because hearing aids didn’t have the kinds of mechanisms that we have now, which are called telephone switches, that use magnetic induction, electromagnetic induction in order to take in the signal, which is what’s happening right now.
00:20:47
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I mean, my hearing aids are now on what’s called T-switch, for telephone switch, and the headset I’m wearing is delivering the sound purely by EM, and the advantage of that is that there isn’t any acoustic noise that gets into the system.
00:21:03
>> CERF (CONTINUED): On the other hand, at the time that I was working at IBM this was much harder, so occasionally I would have to ask people to call me back or call them back in a quieter environment in order to take the calls. As I say, I finished IBM–I finished working at IBM in 1967 and returned to graduate school at UCLA and very soon thereafter got involved in the ARPANET project, during which email got invented, and again, I will say that the email removed the need to be on a lot of phone calls.
00:21:39
>> CERF (CONTINUED): However, in my corporate life I have done a great many conference calls, often purely by telephone, and that could be a challenge, especially if you have people calling in from all over the world, and the quality of the telephones is not always wonderful.
00:21:57
>> CERF (CONTINUED): The thing which has made that more habitable is that often people were on the conference calls, but they were also online texting each other or, you know, instant messaging or had a chat room open or something like that, and so technology has continued to be an aid to communication for me since the Internet really has grown up during the course of my career except for the first few years of working at IBM. After I got to graduate school, email shows up very soon thereafter.
>> CHEN: Now, in turning to the topic of disclosure, which is something that is very challenging for many people, many people have challenge disclosing because either they feel they’ll be stigmatized or they feel like they don’t know how to ask for help, or if they ask for help, they may feel that others won’t understand. Do you have any advice for people who may be struggling with this particular issue about how to disclose and whether to disclose their disability?
00:23:02
>> CERF: I think that disclosure is–you have to judge when it’s timely to do this. I don’t think–I don’t introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Vint Cerf. I’m deaf,” or, you know, “I’m hard of hearing,” ’cause I don’t feel that that’s necessary, but if I get to a point somehow in a conversation, for example, where I am having trouble hearing, then I will say, “By the way, I’m hearing impaired, and I may need some help,” or, “Can we go to a quieter spot?”
00:23:34
>> CERF (CONTINUED): This happens a lot when you go to, you know, receptions, where the noise level tends to be up in the 95 to 100 dB or worse, and I will often say, “Can we step aside? Can we go outside? Can we go to another room? Can we go somewhere where it’s quieter?” in order to have a reasonable conversation, but I think I allow the circumstances to dictate when it seems appropriate to say something.
00:23:59
>> CERF (CONTINUED): In a work environment, if you absolutely are going to need help and it’s clear, for example, you’re in a wheelchair or–so in a sense that’s sort of disclosed instantly, and you don’t have to think about it. For other people, though, where a disability might not be obvious–I mean, what if it’s a cognitive disability? What if it’s colorblindness or, you know, some other thing which is not obvious? Deciding when to do that and how to do that is often an individual choice, and I guess if there was any advice to give, it would be to try to get comfortable with disclosing for two different reasons.
00:24:42
>> CERF (CONTINUED): One, you want people to understand that you have a disability as opposed to thinking you’re stupid or something, and the second one is that people are often afraid to ask, and they may actually learn something and make your interactions with them far more comfortable if you’re in fact willing to disclose that you may need some help or that you may need to do something different than most other people do in order to communicate.
00:25:10
>> CHEN: Yeah, I really like what you said about the appropriateness and how when the situation dictates that you will have an issue or may have a performance issue, then that’s an appropriate time to talk about it. I really like that.
>> CERF: In a sense, it allows you an excuse to illustrate the nature of the disability or the challenge that that disability poses because you’re right there in a situation where it’s important for your–that person or persons to know.
00:25:39
>> CHEN: Exactly, and maybe not to wait too long before it becomes a major problem, which can happen.
>> CERF: Right.
>> CHEN: Now, I’ve heard you tell this funny story about your wife and how she could–that she could leave the table and still hear conversations.
>> CERF: Yes.
>> CHEN: I’d love to h–for you to tell our listeners a little bit about that.
>> CERF: Well, let me give you a little background.
00:26:01
>> CERF (CONTINUED): First of all, I had already mentioned Sigrid a little bit. She lost her hearing when she was three and eventually discovered cochlear implants, and she was actually online and sent an email message to one of the physicians at Johns Hopkins University, where implants are–surgery is done and scheduled the surgery and had the implant done and then when–came back to Johns Hopkins after a couple of weeks to let everything heal, and she was activated, which sounds kind of vaguely religious, but she–her speech processor was turned on, and a map was put in, which is mapping sound coming in to electrodes that were being stimulated artificially by the computer.
00:26:45
>> CERF (CONTINUED): These electrodes are embedded in her auditory nerve inside the cochlea, and it makes the brain think it’s hearing, and within about 20 minutes or so of installing the initial map, she picked up the phone and called me, and we actually talked to each other on the phone after having been married for 30 years without the ability to do that.
00:27:02
>> CERF (CONTINUED): Now, there’s nothing funny about that. It’s when she got home that it got funny. She got home, and I discovered that I couldn’t get her off the phone. She was like a 50-year-old teenager. It didn’t matter who called, you know? It could be, you know, telemarketing, and she would say, “Oh, hello, how are you? Where are you? Oh, you’re in India?” you know, “Which part of the country are you in? How–” you know, “How did you get your job?” and, you know, at one point AT&T called and wanted her to switch to AT&T.
00:27:29
>> CERF (CONTINUED): This is when I was senior VP at MCI, so she goes on for half an hour, and finally this poor telemarketer says, “Well, are you gonna switch to AT&T?” She says, “No, my husband’s SVP at MCI, but thanks for calling.” Then–the part that was really lovely, though, was she called up the library, local library, and said she wanted to get recorded books for the blind ’cause she wanted to hear words that she knew but hadn’t heard until now with her implant, and they–remember now, she’s on the phone, right?
00:28:02
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So they said, “Oh, fine, no problem, name, address, phone number,” and then she says, “Now, you’re blind, aren’t you?” and she says, “No, I’m deaf,” and there was this long pause while she’s trying to figure out how is that gonna work? So she–Sigrid ended up getting all kinds of assistive equipment to go with her cochlear implants, so she got FM transmitters and receivers, so if she goes to a lecture, she just hangs a transmitter around the neck of the speaker or puts it on the lectern, and then she can pick up the FM signal from 150 feet away, and that’s the thing that she sometimes will leave on the dinner table at a noisy restaurant.
00:28:40
>> CERF (CONTINUED): She’ll have the little FM transmitter, and if she goes to the ladies’ room, she just leaves the transmitter on the table so she can hear what the conversation is even when she’s not at the table, and so we have to tell everybody, “Don’t say anything secret. Sigrid might be snooping.” [pause]
>> CHEN: I love that story. Hey, Vint, are there any people with disabilities that you particularly admire, and if so, is there anything that you’ve learned from them or that we could learn from them?
00:29:11
>> CERF: Well, Jack, you know, you’re one of my heroes, and I am terrified every time I see you because you go blasting down the hall as if there couldn’t possibly be anything in the way, and I always worry that, you know, you’re gonna run into something, but somehow your Spidey Sense manages to keep you working safely, but you do things that a lot of other blind friends that I know don’t do, and I’m impressed by that.
00:29:37
>> CERF (CONTINUED): What it does is remind me that people with disabilities often don’t really feel disabled. They just know that there are some things they have to accommodate, and I’m always impressed by people who are comfortable in their own skins that way. There’s another Googler who I have known for probably now 40 years or more now, Ken Harrenstein, who happens to be born deaf, and so he signs, and he has a couple of signers available to him that Google supplies, and in a sense there are two things to admire there.
00:30:10
>> CERF (CONTINUED): One is that Google supplies people to assist Ken in his job, day-to-day job, and second, that Ken is incredibly agile at working in an environment where he needs this signing interpretation.
00:30:27
>> CERF (CONTINUED): He’s really, really good at it, and he doesn’t seem to miss a thing, so a person who has made a career despite that kind of challenge, your challenge and his challenge, always impresses me because it just seems like it’s a big barrier to overcome, and yet I suspect if I were the person asking questions in this interview, you would tell me, “Well, it’s true, I can’t see, but you know what? I can accommodate. I can make up for that. I have ways of dealing with it,” and Ken would say the same thing, I think.
00:31:03
>> CHEN: And really, so it’s about finding a way to do what you really want to do even though it may be hard.
>> CERF: That’s right, and the thing that’s always impressive is that people like you and Ken make it seem not hard.
00:31:17
>> CERF: In fact, you may recall when you and I were on a GVC once, and at some point in the conversation we were–both, I think, felt compelled to go look something up in Google, and I was starting to type, and you were listening, and I could hear the Google system speaking to you because you were using a screen reader of some kind, and I stopped typing because I was so completely fascinated by the fact that you could hear and understand what was being said at what sounded to me like three or four times the normal rate, and so I just sat there thinking, “I wish everybody at Google could hear Jack using Google at this, you know, triple speed,” because it seemed pretty astonishing to somebody like me who’s half-deaf, and I–that was an important object lesson for me to see how you had used these technologies to overcome the problem and in fact in some ways speed things up faster than the rest of us.
00:32:18
>> CHEN: Vint, I remember that very well. You know, I’m a really firm believer that the lessons we learn as people with disabilities can really impact and enhance the lives of our non-disabled counterparts.
00:32:31
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): Any particular lessons that you’ve learned that you think would apply to our non-disable compadres?
>> CERF: I think the most important lesson is not to make any assumptions about what people are capable of doing and capable of accommodating. You know, how many times have you seen someone who has no arms but uses their feet to paint, for example, and you think, “How can anybody ever do that?”
00:32:54
>> CERF (CONTINUED): The ingenuity and adaptability of the human brain and body are truly astonishing, and I think that also for our colleagues who aren’t–don’t have a known disability now, as they get older, of course, they may experience some kinds of disability, whether it’s poorness of hearing or eyesight or maybe, you know, your body just sort of creaks and groans like it didn’t used to when you were 22, and so I think that’s an important life lesson for everyone, that as you age, sometimes there are things that you either have to do differently or can’t do anymore, and that’s not terribly different than what you and I experience every day.
00:33:40
>> CHEN: Right, and so there are a lot of things that you’ve mentioned, like feeling comfortable asking for help, that can really be applied, I think, to folks who have–who don’t have a disability.
>> CERF: So–yeah, that’s correct. The other side of this also is not being afraid to ask how I can help. I think when you and I first met, I wasn’t sure what I should or could do to make th–you know, to be of assistance, and you taught me that the best thing to do is not to grab your hand or arm or anything but let you hold on to my elbow, for example, because you could follow where I was going.
00:34:16
>> CERF (CONTINUED): You could tell I was going downstairs or upstairs by the change in, I guess, angle of my arm or something, which was an important lesson for me, and I would have been uncomfortable asking, but you’re accommodating in that regard, and I wasn’t afraid to ask you questions, and you may recall the question I did ask once because I was so curious and you were so–seemed so willing to answer.
00:34:40
>> CERF (CONTINUED): I said, “Do you cook?” and you said, “Yes,” and I said, “Well, how the hell do you know when the meat’s done?” and you said, “Well, I put my finger on it,” and my reaction was, “Well, I’m not eating anything that you cooked recently.”
>> CHEN: I remember that. I remember that. [pause] Well, you’ll still have to come over for dinner one day, Vint. I promise I won’t touch the meat.
00:35:00
>> CERF: In which case for all I know it’ll either be well done or raw, one of the two.
>> CHEN: I’ll use a meat thermometer. How about that?
>> CERF: Well–
>> CHEN: A talking meat thermometer.
>> CERF: A talking meat thermometer, well, that’s a great answer. The other alternative is, is that you always serve steak tartare, and that’s it.
>> CHEN: There you go. That’s the other answer. So we’ve been talking about disability and success. Do you have any final thoughts, tips, ideas for folks out there?
00:35:28
>> CERF: Yes, I do. First of all, I want to say that technology is our friend here and that as time goes on, more and more technical means for recovering body function is being invented, and we should take advantage of that. At some point it seems quite likely that we may even augment our normal capabilities with ones that are super-normal, in which case everyone may end up making use of these technologies in order to essentially advance human capacity beyond what is normal to super-normal.
00:36:05
>> CERF (CONTINUED): Someone recently was telling me that if we get accustomed to using artificial intelligence that we have dialogue with, as we would with Google Home, that someday we might simply wear a thing that looks like a hearing aid, but in fact it’s connected to the net. When you speak, it hears what you have to say. We had a–something kind of like that with Google Glass, as you may recall, where you could have a–it wasn’t quite a dialogue, but you could tell it to take a picture or ask it a question or ask to get directions.
00:36:35
>> CERF (CONTINUED): So the idea that we might use technology, regardless of whether we have a disability or not, to augment our own capabilities seems like it’s very likely in the future, and so everyone, in some sense, will have an opportunity to advance beyond normal.
>> CHEN: Well, Vint, in that world you’ll have a leg up on us because you’ve been wearing hearing aids for so long already.
>> CERF: And I’m accustomed to using them.
>> CHEN: And accustomed to using them, exactly. Well, hey, Vint, thanks so much for taking out the time.
00:37:02
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): I really appreciate it. You’ve had some really wonderful thoughts to share with folks out there, and I’m really excited for folks to be able to hear and to learn and to grow and to be able to find where their success really lies, so thanks, Vint, again, and we really appreciate your time.
>> CERF: Oh, I always enjoy chatting, Jack, as you know, and I look forward to our next conversation.
00:37:30
>> CHEN: This concludes our conversation on success with Vint Cert, father of the Internet. Vint has shown us that his success factors, including feeling comfortable with your disability, asking for help when needed, employing technology wherever possible, and using disability as a driver for career direction have enabled him to achieve world-renowned success. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. You can find out more information about team Excelability at www.teamexcelability.com.
00:38:08
>> CHEN (CONTINUED): You can follow us on Facebook at team Excelability or on Twitter, @teamxlability. Thank you, and have a blessed day.