Month: June 2026

In this warm and practical episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Kirk welcomes Lauren DeVillier, Chief Executive Officer of Exceptional Minds, the Los Angeles nonprofit academy and working studios that train young adults on the autism spectrum for careers in animation, visual effects, and a newly launching game-arts program. DeVillier traces her path from property manager on Bill Nye the Science Guy through Microsoft, Yahoo, and Disney to her first year leading Exceptional Minds, and lays out how the organization works: a three-to-four-year vocational academy (mirrored online nationwide), two revenue-generating studios doing VFX and animation for major studios like Marvel, Sony, Disney, and Blumhouse, and a blended funding model of tuition, California self-determination/regional-center funds, earned studio income, and $1.5–2M a year in fundraising.

In this energized episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, his first-ever return guest, Kirk reunites with Jerred Mace, founder and CEO of Seattle assistive-tech startup OneCourt, fresh off attending a FIFA US–Australia match in Seattle where he used OneCourt’s tactile broadcast at a live sold-out stadium for the first time. Kirk narrates the experience in vivid detail: feeling the ball travel across the pitch under his hands, sensing shots go wide, and syncing to the crowd’s roar while seated beside a blind high-school student also using the device. Mace recaps OneCourt’s origin story, inspired as a UW industrial-design junior by videos of blind fans following matches through a companion’s tactile signing, and explains how the tablet-sized device translates official league tracking data into trackable vibrations on interchangeable silicone overlays, about a half-second behind live play.

In this candid episode of Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams welcomes Robert Annis, a London-based coach and organizational psychologist, and founder of NEURO (neurocharity.org), an inclusive charity built to make neuroinclusion a competitive advantage rather than a matter of ethics alone. Annis speaks openly about his own “late diagnosis” at 45 (he’s now 47) as profoundly autistic, with co-occurring ADHD, prosopagnosia (face blindness), aphantasia, alexithymia, an absence of interoception, and severely deficient autobiographical memory, a lifetime of “masking” that finally had names. He explains why he founded NEURO after growing frustrated with charities focused on awareness alone: he wanted real social change, so he deliberately built NEURO to look and operate like a business consultancy, meeting leaders in the language of innovation, adaptability, and talent rather than moral obligation. It’s a thesis Dr. Adams shares in his forthcoming book, The Disability Dividend: Supercharge Your Bottom Line Through Disability Inclusion, that the resilience and cognitive diversity forged by overcoming barriers are exactly what organizations need to thrive.

In this illuminating episode of Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams sits down with Jack Walters, co-founder and CEO of HapWare, to explore ALEYE, a haptic wristband built to give blind and low-vision people access to the visual, nonverbal layer of communication that makes up the majority of human interaction. Walters explains how the system pairs with Meta smart glasses to capture a live video stream, classifies gestures, facial expressions, and body language through the company’s custom algorithms, and translates them into intuitive vibrations on the wrist, a handshake, a smile, a wave, someone walking away across the room, all in under a quarter of a second. He traces HapWare’s journey from a research project at the Colorado School of Mines, where he met his blind co-founder Bryan Duarte (one of roughly twenty blind people worldwide with a PhD in computer science), through candid lessons about early prototypes that delivered real value but were bulky and uncomfortable, to a ground-up redesign led by industrial designers recruited from Hydro Flask, Tesla, and Rivian, the goal being a wearable people are genuinely proud to wear, not another device that lands on a shelf after a year.

In this forward-looking episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, host Dr. Kirk Adams sits down with James Dykstra, founder of CodeStack Systems, to unpack why so many businesses are watching their AI initiatives stall, and what it actually takes to fix that. Dykstra traces his path from a childhood spent tinkering with DOS to finance and strategy roles at Amazon and Microsoft, then to co-founding a services firm built on the conviction that technology should improve lives. The central insight: companies rush to buy powerful AI tools, but those tools only magnify the gaps in fragmented, poorly tracked data. Using the analogy of a high-performance engine that is useless until it is connected to the rest of the vehicle, and of data as crude oil that must be extracted, refined, and piped before it can power anything, Dykstra explains CodeStack’s “work backwards” methodology: start with a client’s three-year vision, identify the tools and data required to reach it, and consolidate that data into a single platform rather than ripping out and replacing existing systems.