Author: Dr. Kirk Adams

In this energizing episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams welcomes back Jack Walters, co-founder and CEO of HapWare. Dr. Adams first met Walters at the Consumer Electronics Show and later invested in HapWare as a limited partner with Adaptation Ventures. Walters says HapWare just won one of Time’s Best Inventions for ALEYE, a wearable that communicates non-verbal cues such as hand gestures, body language and facial expressions through the sense of touch, and that the team is adding automatic object detection and text recognition that work with Meta smart glasses and need no prompting. Walters explains that the new investment round gives HapWare the means and the momentum for a successful launch, and Dr. Adams notes that Adaptation Ventures led it. Walters says pre-orders are open at https://hapware.com/preorder, where a $59 deposit secures a 20% discount, that they will probably close December 31st, and that HapWare is looking to build around 750 units in its first batch.

In this inspiring episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams welcomes Mary Williams, founder of New Start Health Enterprises, and her daughter, Sian Welch, its CEO, whose mission is helping catastrophically disabled people find a pathway from hospital to home. Mary Williams tells how it started in 1982, when she left her job as director of a 50-bed rehab unit after seeing very high-level quadriplegics returned to long-term care facilities with no hope of getting out, and promised a 27-year-old quadriplegic that she would never go to a nursing home. She says she had assistance to write the law for congregate living health facilities, which Sian Welch says became law in California in 2007, and Sian Welch explains that New Start’s three six-bed homes in the Chatsworth and Northridge areas of the San Fernando Valley serve 18 patients, with nurses around the clock, therapy and a model that gives people back the power to make their own decisions.

In this inspiring episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Kirk Adams talks with Victoria Hillard, founder of Blind Professionals Network (BPN), about her journey since going totally blind at 30 from neuromyelitis optica, a rare disease she says went unidentified for nine years; she was even treated for multiple sclerosis for a whole year. She describes the despair of early blindness, the day one of her children asking for food jump-started her, her training at the San Diego Center for the Blind, the 13 years she says she was ashamed of her cane, and the two-year steps that took her through psychology and then human services, followed by work as a switchboard operator, a quality analyst and, for over 15 years, a personal and professional development coach.

In this candid episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Kirk Adams welcomes Anthony Corona, founder of Anthony Corona Media and Sunday Edition, who was connected to Kirk by Jeremy Grandstaff and recently joined the Persons with Disabilities Media Co-op. Anthony describes his life before blindness and after blindness: he was the East Coast entertainment editor for The Associated Press when shingles in the tissues of his brain, eyes and ears left him completely blind at 40, and he says he is now 10 years in. He talks about teaching himself VoiceOver, mobility training, guide dog school, his first American Council of the Blind convention in Rochester, New York, in 2019, the internship that led to Sunday Edition, and his work at Open Doors Organization, where he was asked to head communications.

In this thoughtful episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Kirk Adams talks with Zhou Fang, an intersectionality practitioner and abundance mindset teacher whose podcast he discovered when it popped up in his iCatcher app. Zhou explains that her intersectionality work begins with her own experience as a Chinese immigrant who is not a citizen, from graduate school in Manhattan, Kansas, to her life in Portland, Oregon, and she compares Midwest hospitality with Pacific Northwest politeness, which she says can cost people the honest conversations that build real relationships. Kirk shares his own culture shift from “Seattle nice” to New York City, and Zhou describes how she uses intersectionality and the “yes, and” approach to help leaders become better, more thoughtful communicators.