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Curious Worldview
Interviews featuring a mix of investigative journalists, affecting writers, economics, geopolitics, explorers and fascinating life stories.
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Curious Worldview
83: Bryan Bashin | The Blind Traveller, One Histories Greatest Adventurers & The CEO Of Lighthouse Foundation
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🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/bryan-bashin/
Bryan Bashin is The CEO of Lighthouse, an organisation in San Fransisco that empowers the blind. The subject of the chat is, among other things, James Holman, one of the greatest travellers in history.
James Holman overrepresents as an exemplary figure for everything that is possible to you when you are blind. For these reasons, Bryan Bashin, who is himself blind, finds him a tremendously inspiring figure, and therefore the perfect person to speak with about his wonderful life.
In This Podcast With Bryan Bashin, You Can Expect To Hear About…
- James Holman, The Blind Traveller.
- Bryans’s Own Experience Going Blind.
- The Best Thing About Being Blind.
- Enablement Vs. Disablement.
- + More & More…
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- 00:00 – Introduction
- 03:22 – James Holman in Bryan’s Words.
- 15:57 – How Blind People See.
- 20:22 – One Of My Favourite Lines Of All Time.
- 27:07 – Holman’s Ability To Listen & His Impression On Women.
- 33:32 – Holman’s Experience Of Australia.
- 37:48 – Bryan’s Favourite Anecdote From Holman’s Life.
- 41:24 – What Is The Greatest Advantage Of Being Blind?
- 44:27 – Bryan’s Personal Story.
- 55:22 – Modern Day Blind Adventurers & What Is The Lighthouse Foundation?
- 1:05:44 – How Modern Civil Planning Inhibits Life For The Blind.
- 1:09:01 – Me Getting A Little Bit Out There.
- 1:12:52 – How To Be A Better Communicator.
- 1:14:12 – A Moment You Can’t Believe You Were A Part Of.
- 1:18:02 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History.
- 1:21:29 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.
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I know one really shouldn't have favorites, but I just cannot help it. This was one of my favourite podcasts to ever record. The guest was a man called Brian Bashin, and the subject was the greatest travel in history, the blind traveler, James Holman. So first I'll introduce Brian and then I'll introduce a little bit James Holman, and then we'll kick on with the conversation. Brian Bashin is the CEO of the Lighthouse Foundation, which is an organization that runs out of San Francisco, and among many other things, among all the things they do, at the core of it, the whole point of the Lighthouse organization is to empower the blind all around the globe. And together Brian and I spoke about many other things, including Brian's uh story himself of going blind and living as a blind person. But as well, we spoke about someone who he truly, truly admires. He thinks is such an amazing inspiration for blind people everywhere. This great blind traveller, James Holman, who died in 1857, and when he had died, was recorded as the most travelled man in history up until that stage. And that's just measured by literally kilometres that he stepped, rode on horse, or sat in horse and carriage. James set foot in hundreds of countries all around the world, including the early 1800s outback of Australia, which could have been one of the most Wild West places of all Wild West places in history, throughout Latin America, throughout Europe, across Siberia, obviously all throughout the Northern American continent, and did it all differently to how other great adventurers and explorers had done it before him and were doing it at the same time. James wasn't an exceptionally wealthy person. He was sorely he was he he was on a military pension, he was firmly in the middle class. He didn't have a wide network of uh connections that he could lean on as well. James would simply set foot in a country, not really know its language, not really know anyone in it, and then come out on the other end having been wined and dined by all of the influential and famous simply because James would charm his way through a place. The idea of having this blind man travel completely independently made him an exceptionally interesting person uh to be around everywhere he went. There is a biography written of James Holman, which we speak about in the podcast uh by Jason Roberts, and it's called A Sense of the World. And it really is just this amazing account of this man, James Holman, going throughout his life, deciding that his physical limitations would not stop him from leading a normal life. And James led much more than a normal life, it was a very exceptional life. But in addition to being fully blind, the man couldn't see a thing. Uh, James repeatedly went through bouts of extraordinary uh physical ailments where he was sometimes crippled to his bed and he couldn't move. And um it's hard to imagine the type of pain and discomfort that James uh sometimes reported that he was in. So look, I'm getting a bit off on a tangent now, but it's the podcast with Brian Bashin. We speak about the life of James Holman. We also speak about Brian's own experience going blind. I ask him what the best thing is about being blind. Uh, we speak a lot about enablement versus disablement and across the board many other things as well. So, but I won't say too much more here. You can hang around to the end uh to hear the afterthoughts from the podcast as well as my ambition for this podcast. But with absolutely no further ado, here is the great Ryan Batch. Good evening. Or I should uh say good morning, Mr. Bashin. Thank you so much for giving me some of your time. Good good morning, Ryan. James Holman was a British adventurer and author in the Victorian era, which is the end of the eighteen hundreds. He was the first blind person to circumnavigate the globe, and at the time of his death, the most prolific traveller in history, for either blind or sighted. There are so many things that make his travel so exceptional, notwithstanding his moderate means, his mode of transport, or his lack of local contact contacts wherever he went. He experienced fame in his lifetime, but has since dropped off into relative obscurity. With that as a brief bio, can you introduce the audience to James Holman?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Okay. Was a blind person myself and a person who's professionally interested in making sure that blind people have a sense of our own history and legitimacy and things that are f forgotten. Uh I stumbled across James Holman maybe twenty years ago. He was not known to very many people then, even among blind folks then. And like so many other minority groups in the world, um, we need to understand our true history. That there were forebears who did extraordinary things, who faced discrimination and skepticism, and yet had that internal self-possession and self-confidence to do amazing things. So I first heard about James Holman from a mentor and friend who had found this obscure book about 19th century explorers. Um, one book, one chapter, and little by little I read about Holman. Twenty years ago, I actually went and got a l interlibrary loan from the Ohio State University, and they had a circulating copy of the 1823 Travels to Russia biographies. I I I got it, um, or book, I got it, I scanned it, and I was just astonished. Like, everybody's gotta know about this guy. What a spirit, what what an amazing, what amazing sense. Like, he was not a passenger, he was an actor in this journey, and what what James Holman decided in his twenties was I'm gonna do this on my own. It's so easy for a blind person to say, Oh, I'll just go with a friend, a nice-cighted friend, I'll go with a company or a tour or whatever. Well, in 1823 he understood that no blind person is gonna have an authentic experience unless he travels solo. So that's one of the main things about his travels. He shows up in a place, a city, a country, no contacts, no prior arrangements, just a blind guy himself figuring it out. You know, obviously he was gifted in sort of ad hoc relationships, he was charming, and he traveled with the uh uniform of the British Navy. People thought he was some sort of official that worked good and bad for him. Um, but generally, this idea of any person blind-sighted with disability without being able to have life on their own terms, that is a sort of an astonishingly modern story. But it happened in the 1820s.
SPEAKER_00It is uh absolutely unbelievable, irrespective of the age and even irrespective of the uh blindness. He was the most traveled person in the history up until he died. And then you add into these other elements the fact that he wasn't a man of terrific means, and that he was blind, he could not see, and in addition to that, had bouts of chronic pain and illness throughout his life, sometimes almost paralyzing him to a bed. It's so unbelievable, it borders on unbelievable. So, what are some of the most notable things that this man did, just to give us a sense of how remarkable an individual he was? Right.
SPEAKER_01So he he becomes blind at twenty five. He was sailing on a ship off the uh coast of the United States, actually, and he started first with racking pains in his limbs. Uh, we now know that he had uh a condition that led to blindness and also arthritis. So he got what was sort of like what we might call social security today. He was given room and board in Windsor Castle with the only requirement that he go into the cathedral and pray for the souls of dead, departed Navy people uh twice a day for the rest of his life. And Holman w was a really alive guy, and he said, I just can't I can't be cosseted up like this. I So on the premise of improving his health, he got leaves of absence to go travel first to see doctors, but then to actually study medicine in Edinburgh as a blind person and literature in as a blind person. And little by little he found like, gee, nothing really happens if he's not praying for the dead souls of departed Navy people. And so he went to France and then he got went to Italy and he traveled through so southern and central Europe. Now mind you, he is working out his own disability, the bigger of which might have been his arthritis. Uh there's a there's a scene that's just so aching. He decides, I am just going to work this damn thing out myself. I have to move my body. And so he gets a rope and ties it to the back of the carriage, and he's walking behind the carriage for mile after mile, sort of willing himself to improve his joints and all of that. I mean, this is the measure of the man he was. So once he got his tour through Europe done, he thought I he hatched a plan. He was gonna circumnavigate the world. Now, this was a period where there was no tourism, there were no hotels, there were no reservations. There you showed up and you sort of argued with a barkeep about is there a bed here, or made a c made a friendship and went to the village chief and did that. So his he hatched a plan, he was going to circumnavigate the world, go through Europe, go through Eastern Europe, and go all the way across Russia, and then the plan then was to take a ship across to the United States and so forth, the young United States. What happens is that this figure of a guy in British Navy uniform crossing Russia, nobody uh a blind guy, they the uh Tsars then thought this is a spy. Obviously, they're he's gonna meddle in the Russian Far East. And the Tsar actually sent at breakneck speed a group to travel across Siberia five thousand miles to catch him before he leaves Russia, and they arrest him and they drag him back and put him in a prison cell in Moscow to find out what he's about, this blind traveler, and eventually they release him, they throw him at to the Polish frontier, and that was his first trip. You can read about it in Travels to Russia, that 1823 book that first turned me on to James Holman. And he wrote four or five books. He then did other trips down to Africa. I remember in travels um tr voyage around the world, he was re feeling so bad by the time he was gonna start the African trip, he was he was in England, um, that he had to be literally carried on a stretcher into the boat because he did he w had such an arthritic flare-up with his disease. Um, but he was carried on the boat and he did make it all the way down to Western Africa and explore, you know, the remote parts of Guinea and other places that were off, off, off the beaten track, meeting with villagers and all this other in the end he visited every inhabited country in the world. Like you said, in 1832 he circumnavigated the world. Um and there are so many lovely parts of of this of this life. Um one is when he was feeling good, he thought nothing of climbing to the very top of the mass of the tall ships that were sailing across the Pacific, and people couldn't understand how this blind guy would do that, but for him it just made sense, he just climbed.
SPEAKER_00He was expected to live as a blind, cloistered invalid, yet he did all of these things uh that you're mentioning, and I love in the book he uh he self-diagnosed treatment for this what sounded like just horrible ailments. I couldn't imagine being in such pain that I couldn't move my body, you know, which at times it sounds like he was experiencing. Um, but he self-diagnosed his treatment as a continual change of scene and of climate, uh, which obviously I don't think has much basis in medical reality, but it was just this uh immense placebo that got him uh to get going. Um But could you mention some of these experiences he had with other people that actually didn't believe that he was blind because he carried himself so well? Uh climbing the mast is one of those instances, but perhaps you could say some more.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, remember um blind blind people, not just Holmen, were cloistered, lived short, awful lives for the most part. And so the idea that blind people were out in public doing stuff, you know, even today when I travel around, people say, like, who are you with? Uh, as if that I needed a caretaker at every moment. I know acutely why Holman traveled alone, because otherwise he would be insulated from the rest of the world and those perceptions. But here he was, he had this insatiable curiosity about how people lived, and in his books he would jot down, you know, what people were raising, what liquors were the best liquors to drink there, how in fact they were able to build a society along different uh uh purposes. He um he was one of those uh people who were against slavery and chronicled deeply when he was in Western Africa the awful abuses of the slave trade, which was still going on at that time. And later on uh the Ferdinand DePau Island off Guinea, they named the river in that island, it's the Holman River, they named it after him, it's still on the map. Um that's the kind of engagement he had. He would he would figure things out. Let me just let me just say that he was so early that he did all this and wrote all these books before the invention of Braille. So how did he do it? Well, he basically had a little frame with wires across and wrote on a piece of paper that had carbon paper, an early carbon paper behind it. And so he just uh held his finger as he wrote the stuff on the piece of paper, and so his output was handwriting, which he himself could never see. And eventually he got these hundreds and thousands of sheets out to his publisher and they translated that. This is the kind of inventiveness that he did in order to be master o of his own fate.
SPEAKER_00I love the scene of him walking down the street, and his explanation of knowing who was where, what age, gender, class a certain person might be across the street from him, and his comment that as the world moved away from cobblestone streets, it became harder for him to see. Um, I I wonder how much you can identify with this, and perhaps actually as a as a blind person, you're not uniquely, but in a very, very small minority to be able to say with authority how much did James Holman actually see? You know, for me as someone who uses my sense of eyesight to judge what's around me, I think it's impossible for me to really appreciate it. There's like, you know, comic uh Daredevil, the the Marvel uh character who sort of sees through sonar. Um I know you could make a caricature type of reference there, but yeah, I just I I I I was really interested to know how that all sort of works.
SPEAKER_01Um Holman was a very actualized blind person, and we do pay attention to many things. In our headquarters building that we designed in San Francisco, we have hard floors so that blind people, half of the folks who work at the lighthouse for the blind in San Francisco are blind, you can hear the gate of a person coming. You often can know who that is because you get to know their footsteps. And if it's a blind person using a cane, you know the cane technique of one blind person versus another, and you can tell who's coming down the hall. Um and so our you ask a actually very profound qu question, Ryan. It gets to the thing that Holman himself addressed. What is the legitimacy of blind perception? How can you say you traveled somewhere and experienced it if you hadn't seen it? So what I would say to that is the nature of travel and the nature of diving deep into diverse human experiences is is a a very deep engagement. It is about sight, but it's also about all the other senses. Uh but more than that, it's paying attention to conversations, it's putting things into historic context. It is understanding the network of relationships between uh villagers, chiefs, governments and all of that. Understanding the place that you're at it and all of the manifestations of it is far more deep and complex than just having images of buildings and things. And when I talk to people I know who've gone abroad on travel and I get a really good sense of what they're doing. If they're sighted people, they're often traveling and looking at things, looking at buildings without historical context, looking at scenery which may be beautiful, but why is it beautiful? How has it changed? What is the relevance to economy, agriculture, trade, relationships to neighbors, all those things? This is the rich tapestry that Holman unfurled. As a blind person, he is supremely engaged here. And if you part of part of why his books were so popular, best sellers in the 19th century, is because they were so much more detailed than other jer other people who were on their journeys who just looked at images. You know, he knew how what things tasted like, he knew how things were grown. He could look into the minds of his interlocutors and see what they thought about the future, about crops, economy, of ceremonies, of rites of passage, of all those things. So if Holman were here, he would probably say with a sly smile about the poverty of those whose travel experience is only about looking at stuff.
SPEAKER_00It might sound cliche, and forgive me if this you roll your eyes and everyone in the audience does as well, but maybe he actually saw more than other people did. Yeah. I I'm convinced of it.
SPEAKER_01Uh reading his books today, they're enjoyable a hundred and fifty years later because of that engagement he had.
SPEAKER_00So this is um, without a doubt, my favorite line from the book, and to this day, just one of my favorite lines of all time. And it was James Holman's surmising travel as the following the invigorating embrace of risk, the engrossing immersion of the totally unknown, and the intoxicating company of women.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Um you know, he did live in the 19th century, so we don't know too much about that last part of his. Although there is hints of it, isn't there? There are hints of it. And um, yeah, risk. I'm thinking about this guy who was so interested when he got to Italy of climbing to the very brim of Mount Vesuvius, then roiling and boiling after a recent eruption, and getting his cane so close that it's singed by the the hot lava. I mean, this is a guy who really wanted to penetrate every aspect of life. And um maybe this is this is a time to actually acknowledge that the way that so many people have learned about this obscure story about James Holman is through one remarkable author, and that's Jason Roberts. He lives here in Northern California and in twenty oh six he published A Sense of the World, which is the s James Holman's whole life story. And I had been reading about Holman myself. Thinking maybe this is somebody I might want to do something with myself, literarily speaking. And then when I heard that somebody had just published the first book on Holman in a hundred and fifty years, I thought, oh damn, he's gonna get it so wrong. And I picked up a sense of the world and read it. And I realized that Roberts had absolutely embraced these qualities of Holman. And I actually couldn't understand James Holman uh story as a blind guy. How did Jason Roberts as a sighted guy do it this so well? Have the understanding and empathy to put himself into the shoes of a really actualized person. And I got to know Jason Roberts, and he told me that he was the son of two parents who were deaf. And there's there's no analogue between deafness and blindness, but there are resonances about people misunderstanding, people not seeing the rich world that a person with a disability inhabits, people um simplifying and othering. And um I got to know um probably a powerful aspect of why Jason Roberts was able to get the story so right.
SPEAKER_00And it was upon his recommendation that I ended up reaching out to you because um I read about No, in fact, I read a book called Off the Edge of the Map, which was written by Scott Rank, and it's about some of the greatest adventurers of history. And then whilst I was interviewing about him, I said, on the short list, who were the people that sort of didn't make the cut? And he said, Well, there's this remarkable blind traveler, and I said, Oh wow, that sounds amazing. Why didn't you mention him? Anyway, I looked further into him and then saw uh Spencer's book, uh, read it and then uh you know reached out uh to you. But it sounds like you were a year too late, you could have gotten the jump on the biography. I mean, is it still worth giving uh his James Um Holman's life, you know, another sort of back-to-front sift over? I mean, there's hundreds of biographies of thousands, I think, of Churchill, for example. You know, there's there's room for two or three different ideas.
SPEAKER_01I really think Jason Roberts wrote the definitive and enduring biography. Everything else would be fraught, I have to say. So, but we do want uh working in the blindness field, um, it's very important for our community to understand that people have gone before to great accomplishment. And uh we I first learned about Holman through uh a banquet address by the blind leader Kenneth Jernigan in I think 1972. His speech, uh Blindness is History Against Us, mentions James Holman and a dozen other forgotten blind figures who did um extraordinary things. You can still find that speech. It's worth it's it's a sort of electrifying speech about the lost history that we have. I think the role that I'd like to do with James Holman, beyond just making sure more people know about this cool, amazing man who lived life on his terms, is just getting the word out there. That's why six years ago the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco um made uh an international prize for blind achievement called the Holman Prize, and this prize gives three winners $25,000 each, not to salute some past glory, but to do something amazing in the future. And so we're doing things, we're funding this current year a blind woman from the UK who's gonna spend a year traveling in Japan on foot by herself, like James Holman, going to remote islands, you know, trekking through the mountains and experiencing Japan, savoring it as a blind person and writing about it. That's just one of many prize winners that it that will win the prize. There's a sort of uh sort of um uh moonshot is maybe the right metaphor that we hope to do, which is uh the International Astronomical Union names things around the solar system. Uh and the names for geographic features on Pluto are about explorers and uh discoverers. So we've proposed that one of those features be named after James Holman and enshrined there so that for all time people will say, Holman, what is this crater or scarp or mountain range on Pluto? And we'll get back to this extraordinary guy in the 19th century who was still influencing in the 21st. So we know now that James Holman's name is in the name bank for application to um a future geographical unit on Pluto, and it couldn't be happier.
SPEAKER_00He hope he hope he gets it. Yeah. Uh Brian, just a few more anecdotes, if you don't mind, from Holman's life. I'd love to hear what you think about um the way Roberts wrote about Holman's impression that he left on women. Because my reading of it was that it wasn't of a sexual nature, it was of a deep companionship. He was a man because he was blind who listened more intently than probably anyone anyone ever met. And there is story after story of him sort of swooning women, um, almost unintentionally, simply because he was a great listener and a terrific talker, I suppose, as well. So how how do you read that um, you know, fascinating sort of kernel of his life?
SPEAKER_01I see that, and I see an echo in the in the 21st century as well. I mean, what do humans, women or men, want in a in a partner or in an engagement? They want somebody who's present, deeply present. And I see Holman as almost like a I don't know, a vacuum cleaner of experiences, sucking in details, savoring them, taking great joy in them, wanting to, wanting deeply to know. And so that's the first thing. What is attractive? The attractive in a partner is is that kind of deep presence. And the other is uh a sense of your own self-confidence, self-respect, self-worth. And Holman, who could have been that invalid in a cloister, you know, used everything he had in order to live life on his terms and did this ex extraordinary thing um until his death in 1857. Um I I think I think what we all want is to see actualized human beings um in the in the zone, in the flow, calculating how he can sail to someplace where there's no transit, how can he talk his way past the stupefied skepticism? Um, in some respects, the 19th century, everything was ad hoc. Nothing worked, everything was a negotiation. The world was a lot easier then. If I wanted to do something like Holman did now, it would have to be with reservations and schedules and um, you know passports and all kinds of other sort of authorities control and all of that. The 19th century for all of the problems was an area where somebody could just improvise on a vision and a romantic uh sort of direction and and achieve something.
SPEAKER_00I just want to emphasize you you really um made uh a strong inflection on saying everything he had. He used everything he had. Um and I yeah, like I said, I just want to emphasize the fact that not only was he blind, not only was he borderline um I don't want to say cripple, but he was he had such an overwhelming physical problem where he was yeah, shackled to a bed routinely. Not only was he those two things, but he wasn't royalty, he wasn't extraordinarily rich. He went into a country without knowing anyone, most of the time not knowing a language, and would turn out on the other end, involved in somehow uh making better those that he interacted with. Like I just, yeah, I want to really hammer that point home. It is another level of admiration and exceptionalism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and these days, um, in disability, we call him a person with multiple disabilities, and the current buzz and uh valorization is intersectionality. We're not just a blind person, we're not just a person with uh, say, physical disabilities. We are the intersection of many things, minority status. Um, we're living in a time where people are talking about privilege and all of these other things. He was a middle class guy with multiple disabilities. Um, this is the embodiment of what we're trying to do now by bringing all of our identities together and yet pushing beyond them and seeing these not as multiple problems, but multiple characteristics that sort of enrich a life and are where people live, not in some kind of abstracted thing. So um he can be seen as sort of that prototypical intersectional person with disabilities and yet finding his own way. And not, again, yeah, and again, in in the 21st century, in so many countries, we don't have the Windsor Castle, but we have our social securities and our person uh personal uh improvement plans and all these other things um that can tend to restrict and cosset things. Um and the fluidity of busting out of that and saying, I'm gonna figure it out, that's that's a characteristics we really want to encourage in all in all human beings, d with disabilities or without.
SPEAKER_00That's I mean, that's super interesting. Am I hearing in what you're just saying there uh a sense of almost um disdain or regret that there are so many sort of welfare systems designed to just supplement what otherwise might be, you know, an ambitiously led life. Am I reading too much into that?
SPEAKER_01Um I will say that um the welfare systems in so many countries become a ceiling and not a floor, that welfare is withdrawn the moment you show some enterprise instead of sustained. There are only a very few places in the world where um it is the floor and that somebody's uh blind pension or support in Social Security continues. Um most of the times here in the United States, if you put if you earn $2,000 and put in the bank through your own enterprise, you're disqualified from SSI's uh supplemental security income. It's a it's the biggest disincentive. If yeah, if you work, if you show enterprise, your your all your supports are withdrawn. So that is an unintended consequence of what started as loving progressive legislation, but in reality, working in this field, it needs to be rethought.
SPEAKER_00That's a fascinating sidebar, and perhaps we'll be able to return to it at the end when we speak more about the lighthouse organization in your own uh life. Uh but I couldn't I would not forgive myself if we left the conversation without speaking about Holman's experiences in Australia, uh, because he went to this country in the early 1800s. I mean, Australia was as it was more Wild West than America's Wild West was for the for the first you know 50 to 100 years. So um he was there in the thick of it. I'd love for you to just speak about what he did there and uh the experience.
SPEAKER_01Well, he was an intrepid explorer, and let's pick up your point. When was first fleet? Was it 1770, if if memory serves?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, within a 10-year give or take.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, so this was a time when uh there was probably no more roughly newly settled land on the planet than Australia, and so no facilities, you know, food insecurity, uh working everything out. And into this mix comes Holman. Uh, it's you know, it literally is the edge of the earth, and and there he was. Um I I think um even getting to Australia, navigating the barrier reef, so many wrecks, so much uh uncertainty about this. Um I I just think that um it would have been far easier for him to stay on the known travel, say, say the ports in South America or or um the West. Um but he he chose to go all the way out to Australia. And when he got there, what did he do? You know, I'm I'm a little fit hazy on the examples of of his time in Australia, I have to say.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's okay. I'll I'll cut that. I'll cut that last bit. I should have I should have also done more research to know. I think he just he definitely crossed the outback, and um what I remember from the book was the the sort of takeaway was the way he developed relationships with the aboriginals, um, because to this day, um a um another I mean not to make this political, but yeah, another another um race, is race that word, that was just totally subjugated by colonialism, and um it was I mean it was really bad for a long time there, and Holman was there when it was at his worst. So for sure everyone around him was was being extraordinarily racist about these Aboriginal people, but instead Holman saw the human in them, he saw the humanity in them. Um, and again, it's just more testament, like you said, in Equatorial Guinea, he became a big part of uh uh the movement against slavery. And um yeah, perhaps there is something to that, you know, the more one travels, the more the less racist one becomes, to say crudely.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, and I was struck by how he got to know individuals in as he went in West Africa, he would talk about the tribe, the customs, he would talk about um individual women and their lot and how they were going to succeed or fail, and slavery and their own way that they were going to survive in in the context there. Um this was not somebody who is just snapping photographs, this was somebody obviously you could see was caring about their stories and their their existence. These people show up as individuals rather than as just caricatures.
SPEAKER_00My last question directly about Holman. What is your favorite anecdote of his life?
SPEAKER_01Well, when he was first traveling across Siberia a hundred, two hundred years ago, there were these ways that people could travel where you would hire a horse and a carriage and you'd go until the horse was exhausted, and then you'd give the horse uh to a station and pick up a fresh horse and continue that way. It was a a system long gone. But he found a way to do this across the 5,000 miles of Siberia and making sure that the people that were accustom accompanying him as drivers uh changed. So they didn't start. He was savvy enough to understand that what we see as people with disabilities is a tendency for custodialism, somebody in charge, somebody's gonna take care of you. He wanted to be freshly arriving in some remote Siberian village on his own without that that horse driver to have too much investment in him. So he had ways to change the driver, change the horses, and show up as just himself. And that insulation and that mediation from daily experience is something that so many people with disabilities feel. Somebody speaks for you, somebody speaks at you, somebody speaks around you. Um, and he knew deeply that the only way that he could have the direct experience was to have it, and it was at at greater inefficiency and difficulty, but the result was he had the pure experience. And I I think that in microcosm is a sort of metaphor for uh his entire life.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned at the start um the importance for a minority to know their history, and we're speaking here of the blind minority. Holman is clearly a hero for you, and I'm sure many other blind people. I wonder if there are records of people before Holman who were blind.
SPEAKER_01There are many, and to this uh history, I must add uh a new book that came out within the year called Their Plant Eyes. This is a book about blind history going all the way back to Greek mythology. Uh you might um you can you can look at many, there were quite a few uh Greeks who were blind and philosophers and so forth. Um, of course, we all know the tropes of about Homer and Milton and all those people in writing, but also in science, you know, uh Nicholas Saunderson, for instance, was the Lucasian professor of mathematics who directly succeeded Isaac Newton. And Saunderson worked out, Saunderson, completely blind, worked out the theory and mathematics of optics as a blind person. You know, we have we have many, many forebears of Holman. Now Holman and others may not have heard of each of those, but now we know these stories, and now we're assembling them and and really savoring them. So it is it is a it is a rich history, and uh we're fortunate in the blindness field to have people who have chronicled some of these lives uh to good advantage.
SPEAKER_00What do you think the greatest advantage is to being blind?
SPEAKER_01I love the question. Um if you work at it, you can achieve um a depth of focus and an intimacy with the world, with thought, with history, with personality. If you work at it, um so much of the world of distraction is gone. So you can have you you can, if you value it, um have a kind of Zen like focus on deep and important things. I have to say that um there are many instances of people who've been blind and then have their sight restored, and then everything else becomes a feudal looking at details um and superficialities instead of um the connections, the thought, the history, the context that um that blindness can give someone.
SPEAKER_00So I take it you're not necessarily distracted by the cheap dopamine of social media and uh things to yeah, just take your attention. That's it's true.
SPEAKER_01Um no, I am distracted by that. Uh I have to work at it. There may not be images, but there can be a torrent of news in one in my pocket all the time, podcasts and social media, and news and all that. There is we live at a time for the first time where blind people have more access to more stuff than a lifetime could possibly encompass. You know, even within living memory, there were people growing up in the 1920s who never threw away a scrap of braille of any kind. Just because braille was so rare. It was produced, every dot was produced by hand. Um now we live in a in a galaxy of information, and I could read Google News from morning till night and everything in between. Um that's the difference. So the difference and it It's a hunger, whether you're blind or sighted, uh the hunger for a kind of um peace and purity in how and how deep and how how as you said, how much in the sea of dopamine and adrenaline we want to go and how much do we want to actually spend some time lingering and savoring so that we bring to our lives the same thing that the slow food movement brought to cooking, um pausing and savoring.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned off-air that it would make for an entire podcast in its own right, but I would love to hear about your own story. Um, you know, were you born blind? Did it come to you later in life?
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think my story is pretty typical. You know, 95% of people who are blind were not blind children. They became blind as adults. Really? Okay. That's it. Yes, 95%. So James Holman, for instance, becoming blind at 25. That is the normal demographic. Um, when when people who aren't in the field think of it, they think most people born blind never have seen or seen only briefly. So the 95% of us who are blind have this um pivot in our lives where we go from processing the world visually to non-visually. And so in our field, the challenge is this is this is not really about eyesight. This is about how humans adapt to change. Because when you become blind, it's you gotta learn a lot of stuff, and you've got to you've got to go through a lot of stuff. So, where do you get your mentorship? Where do you get the image of what a successful self-possessed blind person is? Every blind person has to go through this transformation. Um, this is why Holman is so important. He went through his transformation and he did not take it lying down. Um so whether you're an international traveler in the 19th century or somebody who aspires to be a real estate salesperson in the 21st century, um, the process is similar. You've got to change. And change is not what you see on an eye chart, change is whether you consider change your friend, whether you see life as an adventure like Holman did, whether a new country, a new tribe around the corner is just gets your juices flowing, or whether everything is a f is a threat and you're brittle and you sit at home and wish life hadn't changed and you think about the past. And uh Holman's life um really informed mine. When I was I was a sighted kid at 12, I got an odd medical condition that trashed my corneas, and then by the time I was 20 at at uh at Berkeley, I was legally blind, and I had to work out like all right, I know there are cool blind people out there doing stuff. Where are they? Most blind people never met another blind person when they became blind. We're like what one thousandth of the population? You're only you're the only one in the school, in your school, you're the only one on your job, you're the only one. All these things. The answer for all of this is learning from our collective history and people who are just here around the corner, and people who are 200 years past um in a different country in a different time. It's about how comfortable are you with change, and that's what we try to teach at Lighthouse for the blind. That's the thing that every blind person, when you first become blind, worries about. How can I, what if, all of that? And so for me too, I was that young kid, and the secret to m whatever success I may have achieved is just meeting people who are living life on their own terms and doing it while blind.
SPEAKER_00Did you what was your experience with your own mental health when you turned 20 and could no longer see? Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01You know, um, like every self-respecting teenager, 20-year-old, I did uh I did all these negative behaviors. I hid, I tried to pass. You know, just literally like light-skinned blacks will try to pass, or people with other disabilities would try to pass. That's that's a kind of internal lying. But it shows the deep um problems we have with assumptions of society. Why would a teenager want to lie about the fact that they can't see the chalkboard in a class? Because of layers of it, stereotypes, expectations, conformity that a teenager lives with. So I tried to pass, and I did sort of pass, but I also restricted myself. I didn't go out when it was dark because I knew I I I I thought it I would have no way of getting back. Um I lied about whether I could see to make people uncomfortable more comfortable. Um, I did this for as long as I could, and most blind kids do this as long as they could, to make their parents feel better about this quote tragedy that's happening with their daughter or son. You know, to make institutions like teachers make it easier on them so they don't have to learn Braille and produce uh textbooks and whatever things in Braille, to make employers feel like it's gonna be okay, so you can be hired, um, but the employer is not supportive in that way. There are many, many um paths that point to that um lying or prefer uh sort of prevarication about your disability. And I went through those in my early 20s as well. Yeah. It in terms of mental health, well, I'm an optimist and I'm determined and all of that. But the real business of mental health is being honest to yourself and being vulnerable. And when I was 20, I was not ready to be vulnerable about it. I wasn't ready to be talking about it. Um, and that came later through the security of my own self-definition and whatever accomplishments I have achieved and all that. But um the world is full of people who are fully blind and have partial sight and people moving into this category and moving out. Um wherever you are on that spectrum of disability, though, you do need you need the stories, you need the archetypes, you need the Holmans, and you need the woman next door who's just just doing ordinary work like every other ordinary-sided person, but she's doing it with a disability. You need those in your head. That's why this interview and the other interviews and Jason Roberts' book about James Holman are so important.
SPEAKER_00That's uh very I mean, I don't have a very sophisticated thing to tag on the end of that. It's it's it's rather beautiful though, you know. It's um it's it's it's it's an overwhelming message of optimism and resilience, and um I'm sure you get it all the time, but you you just can't help but admire it, you know. Yeah. There is a to return to the book uh briefly, there is a rather funny anecdote the way um uh uh Jason, Jason writes it, and it's about everywhere that Holman went, someone had a unique cure for blindness that they insisted on trying upon him. I wonder if there is a modern equivalent of this, and uh people are constantly pitching you the cure for blindness. Oh yes.
SPEAKER_01Uh and it's you know, modern is not so far away from the past. You take a dozen people in a room, each one will be able to tell you a dozen stories about when they were in a public place, um, somebody approached them. And I can tell you this. I was in San Francisco uh 20 years ago, and I was just going to an appointment. I was dressed in business dress, and I heard a little seven-year-old girl say, Oh, can I talk to you, Mr.? And I said, Sure. And I it's like a seven-year-old, they're always curious. They haven't um imbibed this idea that a nine-year-old might about don't talk to strangers and don't mention the fact that somebody's using a wheelchair or whatever. Seven-year-olds are just humans that they're inquisitive. So I thought, oh, sure. What do you want to talk to me about? So I sort of knelt down a little bit to be at her height, and she said, Can I pray for you? And you know, I as a former sighted person, I'm just as aghast as now as a blind person, that somebody would just stop you in the middle of the street and think there's something so worthy that uh they would invoke their deities to change who I was. And that happens every year for every blind person, every all the time, in 2022. Yeah. So yes, we've heard of um people who have cures and people who um pray for change and all of that. That has happened since the beginning of time, I think. Um it speaks to something kind of profound, which is that um a view a pluralistic view of who constitutes um people will always include this. We'll always include people with disabilities and people at every stage of age and everything else. It's the narrow view that says, uh, you have to look like me, you have to act like me, you everything has to be okay about you, all that that's the that's the view, that exclusivist hierarchical view that we have to really pay attention to. Um and I think if some of the resonances that we hear about diversity, equity, inclusion, black lives matter, all these things are a huge cry to recognize our personhood, and not um that we are following one single one size fits all idea of what being human is. And I think every time we take some ground on that, we make ourselves a better and more representative culture, and our job is just to keep keep the pressure up.
SPEAKER_00Speaking of archetypes, clearly Holman is the North Star for you. You mentioned this amazing British woman who's going to walk through Japan this year. Who were some modern day sort of blind adventurers that you would like to draw attention to?
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Well, what I want to say first is that this idea that to be exceptional means you've got to climb a mountain or go over a river or do some athletic fit feat of prowess justifies your existence as a blind person. That's sort of like that's starting to feel very anachronistic. The white adventurer privilege, um, hiking up Mount Everest, uh, you know, all this kind of stuff. That is really feeling uh narrow and tainted right now, I have to say, where the frontiers in the world in life are not just climb some amazing thing or taking some incredible trek in the 19th century. Absolutely, that was incredible. But now you could fill a small stadium with people who have hiked mountains and gone down rivers. Uh athleticism is is a nice thing, but there are other ways of being remarkable, and that could mean um like Milton penning uh enduring phrases that last a thousand years, or it could be like people I know in my daily life. Um one example is Chris Downey, who is a friend of mine here in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was in his mid-40s working as an architect, fully sighted. One day he woke up from uh what was supposed to be routine surgery, and the next day he was full completely and fully blind, couldn't see a thing. So, what did Chris do? Uh he said, Well, I just want to go back to work. And he didn't know anything about blindness, he never met blind people and all that. Somehow Chris thought, uh, I just need to be an architect. That's what I am. So he within 30 days, as soon as he got the stitches out from his brain surgery, he went back to work as an architect and said, I'll figure it out. And he invented tactile ways to do his drawings, new ways to work with clients and customers. Uh, Chris has a thriving architectural practice now. He works all over the world. He designs buildings for human beings, incorporating some of the things that that we know and love, acoustic elements, for instance, in the design, human elements about how one travels through space. Um, and so his gap was 30 days uh between sighted and entering and succeeding in a profession that everybody thinks architecture is about images. That's sort of the last part of what architecture really is. It's about peak experiences and talking to clients and getting to know them in ways about what gives them pleasure, what gives them meaning, and what gives them a sense of beauty and designing for that. You have to about be a huge communicator, and you have to be able to listen and remember and be moved by other people. And Chris completely mapped from visual to non-visual, and um he's he's gotten almost every honor now in the architectural field in the maybe uh I'm thinking now 13, 14 years since he's blind. Um, I remember he had when it was 10 years after he was blind, he had a huge party of his friends and business associations celebrating 10 years as a blind person. He's got his head screwed on right about what blindness is and and what actualization is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what a I mean, what a remarkable guy to be able to turn around and just not feel sorry for yourself and just get on with it. Yeah. So that I think transitions really well into Lighthouse. Um, you spoke a little bit about the Holman Prize and how you're sort of giving a grant funding to uh blind people to go on and do amazing things. Um, but I imagine there is you know more to the organization than that. So if you could talk to me about Lighthouse.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're kind of remarkable because we're 120 years old. Sorry we missed Holman by about 30 or 40 years. Um but Lighthouse started as a philanthropy. 15 women started the organization, and over those 120 years, we've become an organization of about half blind people and half people who are are fully sighted, working together to invent everything from employment services and uh technology consultation and uh stores with adaptive products and retreats where people learn how to be blind and all of that. It's a comprehensive blindness organization. We we s we have so many extraordinary people in our community, blind and sighted, who help out in inventing things. I think an overall um overarching characteristic of ours is that we know that most people who become blind don't know any blind people. And so the idea is how do you get them to have the privilege that I had of meeting cool blind people and learning to be like them? Most people don't have that connect connectivity. So our audacious idea in the Lighthouse is let's design spaces where that happens. We're not just gonna send you into a braille class and call yourself fully formed as a blind person or because you know the right keystrokes on your computer or smartphone to do it. It involves that sense of self-confidence and self-respect. And you only get that if you get to hang around a community of people like that for a while. So we've designed Lighthouse with spaces where people gather. And in fact, here we are in a high rise in San Francisco. We have 29 beds upstairs so that we can have retreats, ad hoc ideas, long immersive connections. That's our building. We've operated a camp north of San Francisco, um an hour north in Napa. And here the idea is is to spend a week or several weeks together with other blind people. Yes, we teach stuff, yes, there's structure, but there's also time to go on long walks in the wood, to cry, to celebrate, to cheer on each other, to meet people you don't know. Maybe the biggest, biggest instructional technique is serendipity. Who will you bump into that you don't know? What what conversations, what networks, what relationships? It's the same thing that every minority group either has or craves. In a society where the social fabric has unraveled, that you know, two years in the pandemic of being uh housebound or really under-socialized, you know, in a world where people don't have those rich community um gatherings, organizations, clubs like they used to be even in the middle of the 20th century. Um, we're hungering for that kind of connection. So as a program development, building the space where people can gather together like that for days to weeks, not as a lifestyle, but as a as a remarkable sort of immersion. I say if you if you wanted to learn Spanish, you you don't take an hour once a week to do it. That's how blindness is taught in many organizations. An hour a week to learn. If you want to learn Spanish, you go to Oaxaca and you spend a summer in immersion and you only do that. And now you're not gonna live the rest of your life in Oaxaca, but you've learned what you need to learn to go on with your life. That's the model in blindness at Lighthouse.
SPEAKER_00I um I love that you said serendipity there. You're really unintentionally speaking my language now. I have a long draft of what will one day be a published book called Invite Serendipity into your life. And I think there is a line here that I I know you'll appreciate. Um it's taken out of context from an author called Nasim Taleb. He's talking about something else, but the line is that how can you predict a future of infinite possibilities based off a finite experience of the past? You can just repurpose that for the uh yeah, repurpose that for serendipity because you don't know what the potential node of connection is going to be with each additional person you meet, and each additional conversation you have, and each additional blind experience that you hear about. You you just you cannot map into any sort of predictability where that could take you in your life. And so it sounds like with this uh immersion camp specifically, it's forced serendipity. It's saying, You don't we we can't tell you what you're gonna get out of this, but it's going to be something. Yeah, you nailed it.
SPEAKER_01And uh not all serendipity is grand, like I met this person who's an engineer just like I want to be, and all that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I bumped into my wife, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Uh our experience as blind people is serendipity every minute. It's like you walk down the street. Ah, I found the edge of the curb. Ah, I heard the sound that of jangling keys. That's somebody getting into the car. Ah, I heard the swish of the door opening. That's where the entrance is to that building. All these things are, in a sense, paying attention to cues that are around us all the time that we may have overlooked, and then magnifying this serendipity. So if you if you want to know somebody who's living a life of strategic planning, ask your neighborhood blind person.
SPEAKER_00I I I might be stretching the time here, but I just want to quickly get your comment. On sort of modern civil planning, um, just because again, that anecdote of Holman walking down the cobble street, you say in the lighthouse office you have hardwood floors, that's that ability to have specific sensory noises in your environment is clearly just uh cancelled out by a busy traffic street. Um we spoke off air about Stockholm and you like it. I can tell you where I live, walking on the sidewalk is a horrible experience because you're right next to cars all the time. And um, yeah, I don't know if there's any comment in there to be made about how modern cities are uh are made, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean personally my aesthetic is I hate noise, I go camping to enjoy the deep silence, which is hard to achieve in the in the world and all of that. Um sometimes progress comes with costs. I met a blind guy who was telling an old blind guy who told me the worst thing that happened in the United States what happened just after World War Two from a blind perspective, it was the invention of refrigerated air conditioning. And so all these shops, as you would walk down in a in a city which used to have big open windows and areas for just natural ventilation, all got sealed with glass. And so as a pedestrian, as you walk past, you wouldn't hear the clank of what was going on or conversations or the smells or whatever, all sealed shut. So people are, yeah, far more comfortable inside air-conditioned buildings, but it makes for sensory impoverishment for blind people and probably everybody else. You know, that that's a law of unintended consequences. Noise is a is another thing. How how small engines got past, you know, leaf blowers and other things which for half a century really ruined our experience. If they're anywhere near, I can't hear all the cues that I used to to travel. Now, luckily, California and some other states are banning those finally. It took two generations, but it will really help the quality of our urban existence. So um things will things will come and go. Electric vehicles, yes, um, they will make for much quieter streets, which is great. But we found as blind pedestrians that we can't hear them when they're traveling 10 miles an hour. So the organized blind got together in the in the United States, and now every car produced ha makes an artificial sound below 20 miles an hour. That's yes, it's required now, it's an international standard, and then you'll you'll hear a sort of space age sound. It's not the engine anymore, but it's a simulated sort of hum or whoosh from little speakers in the car's grill. That is a blind um originated requirement now of every new.
SPEAKER_00That's a fun little anecdote at the end there. Um Brian, bear with me, this question might be a little bit out there, but um there is very theoretical chat, none of it's proven, but there might be a lot of stuff happening around us in our universe, but even on our planet, that falls outside of our sensory perception. Um, and you can only speculate as to what that might be. But I just wonder for you, when you turned 20 and lost one of your senses, how you feel about that and whether you have any sort of ruminations about what a five-centred person might be missing out on, or what we could pay more attention to, or whether perhaps you have a a grander theory about there being far more sensory input than we can even understand ourselves.
SPEAKER_01Uh, much like the latter, I think that the the universe and our daily experience is so rich that we don't have the brain big enough to even if you properly tune to really savor three senses, let alone four or five or six. You know, I I really think that um I was a science writer in the early part of my career, and part of what I covered was um space, space probes and all of that. And astronomy, which the popular conception is of some astronomer peering through the eyepiece of a telescope, that hasn't happened in a hundred years. Astronomy is a set of measurements and a set of data, and there's no requirement for visual capacity, and there are blind astronomers and there are blind chemists and people who understand that doing science today science which Richard Feynman called intimacy with nature. Um doing science today requires thought and doesn't require um doesn't require the actual physical sight. So much of what science does anyway is measuring things in areas that we can't experience as humans either. Ultraviolet, x-rays, infrared, gravitational waves. None of this is felt. It can be sonified or made tactile or other ways of things, but it's just however it gets into the brain, whether it's a visual way or an abstracted way, all of the conclusions about it come from from your brain. You know? If you attend something and then go back to your house, all your experiences are locked in your head as memories and thoughts. You don't have to be there uh in a constant uh series of perceptions in order to experience it. So um there's a you know, there's a there's a dynamic here. When you pick up a phone and have a conversation with a dear friend, you don't hang up from that phone call and say, Oh, all the things I lost because I wasn't seeing my friend. You just had a phone call and you just had that experience. That's my perception as a blind person. I'm having these experiences all the time. And I'm not ruining the fact that they entered my head or my heart because uh they were not visual. They're just as legitimate and just as profound. And this idea of that blind people go around waking up every day saying, Damn, I'm blind when I'm missing. Most blind people I know wake up every morning and say, Damn, I'm late for work. That's that's it.
SPEAKER_00This is a very selfish question, but I would love to ask you what advice you might have for me to just be a better communicator. Um, because as we highlighted with Holman, he was an exceptional communicator, and he really put that down to the fact that without one of the sensors the other was heightened and he would listen more. Um I got the sense that you resonated with that a bit as well. Um yeah, what w what would you say? How can one become a better communicator?
SPEAKER_01Well, um, you know, t technically and narrowly, if you do a podcast, if you have uh photographs, if you describe them. Describe, you know, they're all tag your graphics, those all narrow website kind of practices, which are best practices. Um being present in a conversation, I have to say this is not a disab disabled or non-disabled feature, but I I can tell you I I work in organizations and groups and conversations every day, my whole working life. And in a mixed group of blind and sighted people, if you have a conversation, sometimes you you get come to the end of the hour and somebody says, Well, what about this? And the blind people will say, Oh yeah. She said that, she talked about this, and the sighted people may not have paid attention. They may have been looking at something else or paying paying attention to something visual. But I see an extraordinary disconnect with the ability to track and remember and notice things that blind people often do. Now, this is not some mystical um compensation or ability. This is just because if you just do something a lot, you'll get pretty good at it. And so if my life is involved in conversations where it matters that person felt heard and acknowledged, I'll get pretty good at it because that helps me with my job.
SPEAKER_00I wonder if divorce rates are really low amongst the blind.
SPEAKER_01Um that is a statistic I do not know, and it's surely confounded by other things, but uh it's really worth looking at.
SPEAKER_00Finally, uh, Brian, these are two questions that I try to leave with every guest on the show. Um, the first is could you describe a moment in your life which looking back on, you just cannot believe that you were a part of it? And let me know if you want more context.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, I can tell one really easily. Um while leading the Lighthouse for the Blind in 2014, I got um an email from a couple of an attorney saying that somebody had noticed the lighthouse and our work there and had passed away and left us some money in their will. There was something about that email that I knew was significant, and it turned out that there was um a businessman in Seattle, Don Zirkin, who um in his eighties noticed the lighthouse, followed our website, looked for a sort of bold, scrappy idea of what blind people could be. I learned later that Don Zirkin himself was visually impaired like a lot of 80-year-olds are. But he was in the closet about it, that age, that generation, that shame. But he wanted to do something bold and dynamic. So he left us his entire fortune essentially, and it was a hundred and thirty million dollars. It was the largest gift to blind organizations in the history of the United States, largest single gift. And uh it transformed who we are and the scope of who we are and our ability to really be bold in a sustained way. And there was later on I got to know Serkin's friends, I went to his house, I saw his stuff, all of which we inherited, um, and came to know the matter of uh of a man who wanted to not be bound, hide bound by former definitions of what was possible. It's what he did in his own business and what he hoped for for the blind. So that was an extraordinary moment in my career.
SPEAKER_00I can I can only imagine. Were you the uh sort of head of Lighthouse at the time?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was I was CEO then.
SPEAKER_00Wow, sorry.
SPEAKER_01So it was my my responsibility. But I know that our website and the stories we told on it directly influenced Cirkin because we have a view of blindness which we call you know being blind positive. Not all those cloying ideas about the awfulness of being blind and all that, but just understanding the rich and beautiful way blind people experience the world every day. That is uh for many a revolutionary uh idea, but for most of us at Lighthouse for the Blind, it's the way we live every day.
SPEAKER_00Finally, Brian, a conversation between any two people of history, dead or alive, no language barrier. If you could listen to a podcast, who would it be between?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a good one. Um well I'd love to see a conversation between James Holman, who died in 1857, and another guy, Newell Perry, a blind Californian who was born a decade after Holman. Uh Newell Perry uh really set this next generation of blind people to organize together to start this sense that blind people could support themselves. Almost no blind person worked uh in the nineteenth century. Holman found his career in writing, but that's the exception that proves the w rule. Like one percent of blind people worked. You were all wards of the state or wards of the family. What Newell Perry did in California starting by graduating the University of California in 1896 and going on to getting a doctorate in mathematics was assemble a cadre of people who said, We're gonna change it. We're gonna change legislation, we're gonna change perceptions, we're going to change um the the idea that we're not lone and isolated. We're gonna learn about our history and we're gonna make the world the world we want. And so that eventually came to found the California Council of the Blind, the National Federation of the Blind, and all this disability um activists that are here now in Berkeley, California, where I'm talking to you and beyond that are is the crucible of what we now call disability rights movement. It started here, and it started with people who just thought if we get together and work together, we can do nothing less than change the world, and it actually happened. I'd w I'd love to see the individualist James Holman talk with the organizing force in Newell Perry. That would be a great conversation.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Well, Brian, uh that brings us to the conclusion. We've timed it perfectly. We you have about 30 seconds left. Um yeah, I I get the sense, we'll see how this uh ages, this comment in retrospect, but I I really get the sense that this is one of the best podcasts um I've ever had the privilege to record. So thank you very much, Brian. Um I yeah, was so stoked to speak to you about Holdman. I think he's one of the most fascinating characters of history.
SPEAKER_01And similarly, Ryan, you ask fearless questions and unusual questions that I don't get asked. So I really appreciate your deep sense of inquiry, and I look forward to any way we can continue the conversation.
SPEAKER_00Matt, I'll be hitting you up for some beers when I come to San Francisco. Likewise. All right. All right. Cheers, Brian. So I wonder how much you guys picked up on that. But one of the great themes throughout The Sense of the World, Jason Roberts' biography of James Holman, was how James would leave this amazing impression on people that he would meet throughout his travels as being this exceptional listener or an exceptional communicator as well. And Brian said it explicitly in the chat, but basically, when you're blind, when you're robbed of one of your senses, you know, if I'm t if it if you're talking to someone, all you can do is listen to them. If you can't look at them, if you can't be distracted by things around them, you have to actually listen to what they're saying. And so I find it hilarious how women would swoon over James Holman and you should look him up. He wasn't a particularly attractive guy, but they swooned over him because he listened to them. And I think we can all relate to this, ourselves having been in conversations where we weren't listening as well as we should have, or talking to other people who aren't listening at all to what we're saying. They're very dissatisfying interactions, and then on the other side, we've all had the experience of where two people are very actively listening and engaging with one another and really giving a shit and really learning and trying to listen to what the other person is trying to say. I think that is actually at the core of this whole podcasting thing. I know for me as a very heavy podcast consumer, we're not even a part of the conversation yet, we're listening intently nonetheless, and we would probably notice many more things than the people actually having the conversation themselves do, just because we're paying so much more attention without having all of the mental bandwidth taken away to actually engage in that conversation. Humans, us at the core, we we need to talk to one another, and some of us need to talk more to others. You know, maybe that comes down to the whole extrovert-introvert line of things, but we at our core we need to communicate, and that's largely done uh through conversation, and I think this sort of podcasting boom does. I think the podcasting boom is really sort of evidence of that. This real hunger for people to have great conversations and and and to talk with other people about interesting things, about their own interests. It's so rare that you actually get to talk to someone about something you're interested in. Because how often do you actually meet a person who really gives a shit to what you're listening to? That's the that's the most amazing quality of a friend in my eyes. Someone who can get interested about things you're interested in because they know that it matters to you. And that's why it can be so charming to have someone who actually listens to you, whether it's feigned or not. It's better to not feign an interest in what another person is saying. It's much better to actually give a shit and make the interest. But that's what a great friend is to me, and obviously in a partner, you need to have that as well. They need to they need to actually give a shit about your interests enough to listen to them. They don't have to do them themselves or learn themselves, but enough to listen to you speak about them, and then we have to reciprocate on the other end as well. That's what makes you a good friend or a good partner. Anyway, I'm really going off on a tangent here, but I think that within that simple lesson of how does one communicate or why a blind person might communicate better than a sighted person, uh, I think there's just so much in there that you could open it up for a very long time. But just the importance of listening to another person and how much we need to communicate, just what it is one of the things that differentiates us from all the other animals. How much we talk to each other about more than just what's immediately in our environment and immediately addressing our needs, although that is probably what we speak about most. Anyway, so look, I said off the top that I know I shouldn't have favourites, but there was just something in me when I was speaking to Brian. Um, I you know, I felt like I was talking to a friend, which which is is very rare, especially in this podcasting thing. Um many of the podcasts you listen to, you'll sense this. I can say, you know, breaking the fourth wall, as it were, behind the scenes. You know, much of the people that come onto this podcast, they're not that you know, they're not your friends. You know, they're not people that you have ongoing dialogues with them. Personally, I try to engage them in as much ongoing dialogue as possible, but they're uh, you know, it's very rare that you actually can form some sort of personal relationship with the guest on the show. Otherwise, you know, it really is a transactional, hey, we're both interested in the same thing. Would you be interested in promoting your book so I can then have it as a podcast episode? You know, that's um it's completely transactional, which doesn't mean it's not right or not good or anything, but that's I mean, that's the reality of it. That's the nuts and bolts. But with Brian, I really felt like, hey, this guy um doesn't just see this as a way to promote the Lighthouse Foundation. He's like uh he's he's interested and he's really curious. And we have been speaking, so that's a great thing. I felt, yeah, very what would you just say, comfortable, familiar in the presence of Brian there. Um, and that's why I think it it was a personal favourite as well. This man, James Holman, I just find one of the most inspiring characters of history. I think he's so amazing, and more books and biographies should be read of him, and uh movies should be made of him, even if they're embellished, um, because that's also just one of the most amazing sort of stories or facts from history that this man, completely blind in the 1800s, just made his way around the world like any other person, and most people interacted with didn't even realize he was blind because he just carried himself so well. So, anyway, a lot there. Um, ambition for the podcast. My hope is to corner the podcast market for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is that you're listening in from. And the sad reality of making of realizing this dream is that I think the only way that it can happen is just more and more and more reviews. Assuming what I'm doing in mind stays constant and even gets a little bit better, just in terms of the quality of the thing, you know, I'm working on that. But for you as the listener, engagement with the algorithms is the other side of the equation. So please leave many reviews, please say many mice things, please put five stars into Spotify and uh five stars on a comment into Apple, and wherever else you see it, spread the word, tell your main. Tell your family, shout it from the rooftops. That's um I think both sides of the equation. So thank you so much for listening. If you still are at this stage, you're a legend. Uh A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts is the biography. Check it out. Uh if you want to donate to the Lighthouse Foundation, or if you're yourself blind, you'll find a lot of value in the Lighthouse Foundation. I'm sure you probably already know about it. But if you don't, and uh yeah, I'd love to hear from you, all of you. Cheers, ciao, take it easy, see you next time. Ciao.