Dr. Hoby Wedler
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Dr. Hoby Wedler is an insightful, disarming, and passionate thinker who loves to bring people together to help them see new possibilities. With the heart of a teacher, Hoby helps turn your dreams into realities. Hoby has been completely blind since birth. He is a scientist, an entrepreneur, a sensory expert, and is driven by his passion for innovative, creative, and insightful thinking. Hoby is remarkably tuned into his surroundings and has frequently chosen to walk the unbeaten paths in life over known territories. In 2016, Hoby earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from UC Davis. His fearlessness is infectious, and he has actively paved the way for others to join him in his quest to follow passions regardless of the challenges that lie ahead.
In 2011, Hoby founded a non-profit organization to lead annual chemistry camps for blind and visually impaired students throughout North America. In the same year, he began opening doors to the world of wine aromas by developing Tasting in the Dark, a truly blindfolded wine experience, in collaboration with the Francis Ford Coppola Winery. He has since expanded the program to a global market in a variety of industries and special projects. Over the years, Hoby has become a motivational speaker, a mentor, and an educator. He is also committed to making the world an inclusive, equitable, and accessible place for everyone.
In his work, you will find a unique trilogy between sensory awareness, scientific knowledge, and a love for sharing his insights.
Numerous people and organizations have recognized Hoby’s work over the years. To name a few, President Barack Obama recognized Hoby by naming him a Champion of Change for enhancing employment and education opportunities for people with disabilities. Also, Forbes Media named Hoby as a leader in food and drink in their 30 under 30 annual publication. Hoby’s dedicated to impacting everyone he works with by unlocking doors, overcoming challenges, increasing awareness, and expanding their horizons.
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Dr. Hoby Wedler.m4a - powered by Happy Scribe
Hey, everybody, this is Gustavo, your host of the Enabled Disabled podcast. It is my great pleasure to have Dr. Hobby Wedler here on the show with us today. Hobby is a PhD in organic chemistry and a cereal entrepreneur. He is a specialist in wine tasting, food and beverages. He's got a plethora of experiences to share with us, and I'm just really excited to have him on the show. A brief description of me. I am a middle aged Latin American male. I have short Brown hair combed to the front, and I am sitting in my conference room with some beige walls, and I have a black Polo shirt on.
Well, Gustavo, it's a real honor to be here. First of all, thank you very much for the kind introduction. I'm absolutely thrilled to meet you and your listeners and really become a part of the Enabled Disabled community. I come into the podcast, I commend the work that you do, and I think it's really cool. I think it's really special to celebrate people who are doing different things in the world with different abilities. I don't like to call them disabilities necessarily, but ways of doing things a little bit differently. Just a quick description of myself. I'm 34 years old. I'm a Caucasian male with the brownish hair, and I'm sitting in a Zoom, which is my office converted bedroom with a white wall behind, and I'm wearing a North Face jacket at the moment. Awesome.
Thank you so much, Robin. This is really exciting. I know we met at the Livable conference in Canada. You did an awesome presentation. We touched base afterwards. I'm just really excited to dive into all of the things that you're up to, and I really want to take a deeper dive as well into some of your experiences. And my first question for you is if we go back into your childhood a little bit, what drew you to the Sciences and Stem and that whole area, what were you like as a kid? And where did that interest start to develop?
Oh, man, that's a great question. So first of all, just for your listeners, so they know I have been blind since birth, so I was more totally blind. I attribute a lot of my ability to do things in this world and do things. I try to do things well as much as I can. And I attribute a lot of that to my parents being so open minded and positive about the fact that I wasn't any different. My blindness did not make me any different than an ordinary person who happened to be blind. So whenever they would introduce me, I was never Hoby weddler their blind son. I was Holy weddler their son, just like my brother sighted and two years older. And I just so happened to be blind. And that's the way that I was raised. But I think that so often low expectations of society, of family, of friends, whatever the case may be of people with disabilities lead to those people not really necessarily believing in themselves as much as they can. And the way that my parents just never lowered the bar and that's super high expectations of both me and my sighted brother made it possible for us to really believe in ourselves and get out there and do things.
My parents were nervous about my blindness, I'd say for about 12 hours until my mom decided to call her best friend from College, ARP. And when she picked up the phone and called, Harp's husband answered and said, hello, what's going on? Then all Barb could hear, this is 1987, so there weren't even speaker phones. But all Barb could hear was her husband saying, oh, no, this is absolutely terrible. What are we going to do about this? Oh, my gosh. And then R, being the person she had grabbed the phone, ran from her husband and said, what happened? And my parents told her that I was born blind. And she said, oh, God, blind we can deal with. I thought he was dead. So if I ever write a book, I'm going to call it a I'd rather be blind to death. I'm just getting there. But no, the reason that Barbara had that reaction is that her father's best friend, they're both professors at a research one institution at University, and her best friend was Tony Lee, blind since birth. His best friend sorry, it was totally blind and had been since birth. So she was surrounded with blind people doing things all the time.
This guy was a better handyman than anyone in their house. Whenever anything broke or they needed anything done, they just called John, who was her dad's friend. And he would fix dishwashers, he would change oil on cars. He did everything. So in her mind, blindness was just a trait. And that's it. It's interesting because I think oftentimes when you're around that as a child, it makes it that much easier to cope with. Because you're young, you're learning about the world. It's almost like learning a lot of different languages. When you're young, it's pretty easy. We learn to speak the languages that we speak, our first languages we learned when we were quite young. And then a lot of times we build on that later, but it's a lot harder to build on that network. So because of that, my parents said, okay, we trust her. My mom trusted her friend, and my dad did, too. And if someone else can do it, our son can do it, too. And remember, they had never really been around blind people. They had a couple of blind friends, loose friends that they knew over the years. But blindness never imagine your life changing, not thinking you'll ever need to deal with blindness and raising a blind child to, okay, our son is born, and Whoa, he's blind.
This is going to be a life changer. I can't imagine that. Anyway, they had high expectations of my brother and myself and they did many things, absolutely wonderfully. But the other one that I call out here is that they always encouraged us to take responsibility for our lives and our actions. I remember countless times, either one of them in different circumstances saying, hey, this is your life to live and you need to take responsibility for your life and for what you do so that if you succeed, you get the credit. And frankly, if you don't succeed, you can take the blame for it. How would it feel if you had to give everybody else credit for successes that should have been your own and to let other people take the blame for mistakes that should have been yours? And that was really a wonderful lesson for me. Again, the expectations were high. We had maybe different chores, but my brother and I were expected to work very hard. And that was the other thing that our parents did is they never hired anyone to do any work. We did everything ourselves so oftentimes. And my father in particular, really, he's a plumber, he's an electrician, he's a Carpenter.
He does it all quite well and wanted to teach us essentially as we grew up. And that was the main force behind their decision not to hire a bunch of work out. So it was not uncommon for us to get away from school, do three or 4 hours of homework, and then go outside and work on the house until dark. And that was a great lesson for me as a blind guy, and I think for anyone really. But when you have a disability, as you might agree, things take a lot longer. So it's just a fact of the matter. And it's not a problem. Not a bad thing by any stretch of the beans, but things just take longer. That's the way it is. One thing, I do another. And I remember my first fascination with science is when I was standing in our kitchen in April of 1990. I was still three years old. I was about to turn four, I guess it was April of 91. And I turned the tap on to the kitchen faucet to get a glass of water. This is something that I've done hundreds, dozens if not hundreds of times before.
But it was that time that I realized and I started thinking, wait a minute, this isn't magic. How is water getting from wherever it's coming from into my house? And that led to a lot of conversations with my parents. It led to me calling the water resources Department and actually my family scheduling a field trip down there to learn what they did and how they did it and why they did it. And that led me to really understand why there's this network all over the city. I know it sounds funny Gestapo, but even to this day, when I think about a municipal water and sewer system. I'm amazed. It's an incredible thing to really think through and understand. I remember another time I used to vacuum my room and the rest of the house. My parents told me to do that at a very young age. I remember switching on the vacuum cleaner. And you're right, thinking, wait a minute, what's running this thing? Okay. My dad says that electricity comes into the wires, comes into the house through the wiring, and it comes in the form of electrons, but then the electrons all go back out and into the ground.
So what's driving this vacuum cleaner? The electrons aren't really going anywhere except for through the Motors that we run or the lights that we switch out or whatever. And I realized that by talking to my dad and really figuring this out, I realized that we're not paying for the electrons themselves. Why do we pay for water molecules? We're paying for the force, the electromotive force behind those electrons or voltage behind those electrons. And that was really exciting to think about how when we pay for energy, we're really buying a push a force rather than an actual thing in some cases. And that was interesting. And that really got me thinking about science and then the rest of history. I'll talk to you about chemistry in a minute. But yeah, that's how it all happened.
Really interesting. Clearly, you were an exceptionally bright young man, and you have a natural curiosity about how things work, which is always great to see. I also think it's really important that your parents were able to sow quickly, obviously through friendships, through connections, but they were able to accept your difference quickly. It went from, yeah, we don't know what to do to, okay, this is fine. We're going to figure it out. A lot of parents struggle with that acceptance phase of just being able to deal with there's a difference here. What am I going to do? So it's really great to hear that you have not only that ability, but the friendships around them that we're able to help.
There's another element, a couple of points that I just want to respond with. On that note, I think a lot of people, yes, definitely struggle with that difference phase. And that acceptance of the difference is that, to be completely honest with, you think that some never really get past it to it. And I think that's a real struggle for either young people who are formed with a disability or people who become disabled later in life. And that's one of the things that we see a lot chairman of the board of the Earl Bomb Center, which is a center that really, by and large, help seniors with site loss, where to live normal and productive lives. And what's so interesting is one of the biggest issues that we see. These blind people come to us or visually impaired people come to us, and they're annoyed by their visual impairment, some name more than others. They want to get out in the world generally and do stuff. And I think a lot of times the family members, the spouses, the kids, whoever it may be, are the ones saying, no, this is what you can and can't do.
And I think that an agility, an ability to really approach this stuff with an open mind is absolutely the winning approach and the best way to go about it, because if we don't let ourselves accept and learn and understand, it's really hard to accept someone with who lives life in a different way than we might say is, quote, unquote, ordinary. And the other thing about that that I would say, too is that I think that so often people with disabilities, people who are blind, I'll just use us as an example, talk about, oh, these people are discriminated against me. They're treating me poorly. This is just so bad. They're just thoughtless people. And I think in many ways, it's not a matter of being thoughtless. It's a matter of not knowing. So it's not a matter of being rude. It's just a matter of not understanding what's best and what's right. And to me, that's really important. And that's a really important distinction that people are out to get us or discriminate against us necessarily. I think they just don't know how we go about doing things. And that's a really important and I think really interesting to think about as we go through our lives is when we talk about discrimination and that sort of thing, is that really discrimination, or is it just people not knowing or having low expectations, but we can do and just to bring it full circle.
I think that's what my parents did so early on in my life is they learn what it meant to be blind, and they learned how blind people did things. And that was immensely helpful. I should also say that my mom was actually working on her special education degree when I was born and said, well, shoot special education. My son's blind. I might as well specialize in blindness. So she was actually a teacher that's really impaired for the past 30 years or so. And having someone who knew a lot of what she knew, but literally in house, I think paid off in that sweet, because if you're going to be a teacher that students with visual impairments, you should understand how they do things and have those high expectations.
And certainly that was a big gift that was thrown in your direction. But also kudos to your mom for doing that, because she made it. I don't know when she was doing that degree, did she have a specific interest in special education that she felt she was going to be general special Ed?
And then this happened. This changed her life a little bit. And she said, why don't you specify this and study blindness. So it's very cool. I'm curious, just from your perspective, did you have a disability as a child?
Yes, I was born with my disabilities.
Okay. And it seems like you have very high expectations of yourself. So I would imagine you had a similar childhood experience.
Yes. I think it may have taken a little bit longer for my parents to get to that acceptance stage, but it helped enormously that my father is a doctor, and so he was able to navigate the field of how I was going to get treated, where we were going to go. I was born in Brazil, so we moved to the United States two. And then my mom just was full on board, learning everything she could from the occupational therapist, from the physical therapist. She was really the driving force. And you can do it. You're going to walk, you're going to do these things, you're going to go to school, etc. And she really implemented. She showed me what having fire in the belly really means and motivated. But yes, I think we had a lot of similarities and a lot of fortuitous circumstances, too, which helped.
And I think that the bottom line here is that positive people in our lives really made the difference between success and expectations and a lack of success.
And I think those are all really important nuances. When you are navigating relationships or opportunities or let's say, getting into College, how do you try to differentiate between, let's say, somebody who doesn't know, who might just be there's a fear factor in what we don't know a little bit or a sense of discomfort versus that discriminatory attitude? Because certainly there's been situations in all of our lives in everybody's life, I don't care who you are, where you were discriminated against in some way. You were told you couldn't do something, you were told you weren't good enough, you weren't given an opportunity because of whatever specific thing that person didn't like about it. So how do you navigate and get the feel for what's really going on?
I find that if people are willing to listen to what's best for me and I'm able to explain it to them and then also ask them what's best for them and really gauge that level of inclusion, I understand. Even if they've said things that are ridiculous, I know that is them not knowing and they're willing to learn. There are certain people you might talk to, and I think you can think of a few of them maybe from our recent past, current events in the United States where I feel like if you were to say to them, hey, listen, this is how I do things, and I'm still just as productive. They just wouldn't listen to you. And I think that's true discrimination. But really, when someone is willing to sit down and have a conversation about how well the best response I've gotten is, hey, can I join your workforce? I don't know. Tell me what you can do. That's a great response. No, you can't because you're blind is a very discriminatory response. So it's gauging on their ability and desire to learn. And by the way, I'm a lifelong learner too. So I love learning from other people.
And there's a lot that we can teach as people with disabilities. There's a lot that we can teach the non disabled population about how to work with us and how to interact with us. And I'd say most people are more than willing to learn.
I think that's true. As long as you can get in the room with them or get face to face with them and they're willing to take that first step, then there's an opportunity there. And what seems like you're right. What seems like discrimination on the surface is not necessarily that. It's just not I agree. It's not knowing or it's a little bit of fear, discomfort or this that people just need to most people are willing to get over that.
And if they're unwilling to get over that and they know they're doing it, that's discrimination. Interesting.
Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think sometimes you also hear people from the disability community say we shouldn't have to do that extra work. We shouldn't have to bridge that extra gap. It's more responsibility on our shoulders to do that. We should have the same kind of opportunities and the same chances as everybody else. How do you respond to that?
That's an interesting one. And I have a bit of a strong opinion, in my opinion might be counter to others, but I just feel like, hey, when students around me who have disabilities that ask for extra time on assignments, I would always think, hey, Unfortunately, I'm really sorry to say this, but unfortunately can't ask for extra time in life. That would be really nice. So we're all here have one life to live. My feelings are complex. I think we should try to accessibility and full inclusion is absolutely necessary. Like a website should be accessible to both you and me. Entering and exiting buildings should be accessible to both you and me. All these general things should be totally accessible. When people tell me they shouldn't have to work harder than sighted people to get a really good job or non disabled people to get a really good job, I have a hard time with that because we live in a capitalist society. And if I'm going to get a job and I'm going to compete with a cited workforce, I frankly need to be better and different than the sided people who are working with to get like.
My other thing is I do not resent hard work. I do not resent other people. If you have eyesight and you can use it, my gosh, by all means use it. I get that. I don't hold a grudge just because you have something that I don't. And I would hope that the world wouldn't hold a grudge for having something for me having something against me for me having something that they don't. And I like to think about it. I might not be able to see, but there are other things that I'm not one of these guys that thinks, oh, my other senses are like powerful, sharpen, like Daredevil, because I don't have my eyesight. I don't necessarily think that. I just think I use my senses differently, my other senses differently. So I have ways of approaching the world that are different than other people and maybe a little more cute than other areas. And boy, if any disadvantage we are faced with, most disadvantages we're faced with, let me rephrase that. I do not mean any. Most disadvantages were faced with, I think can be turned into advantage with the right attitude and the attitude of holding a grudge and saying we shouldn't have to work this hard and we shouldn't have to do things too differently.
I think that's a negative. When I hear that and I've heard it a lot in our community, I think of that as a negative mindset. The more positive mindset is let's do this life and let's be the best disabled people we can possibly be, because what more is there to life?
It's interesting. I think that there's definitely some I've had some people on this show where they're in academics right now and they're really accomplished people the way their brains function. Like they needed more time on tests. And I think that can be okay.
I do too.
But there's also something to that negative mind state that I agree with. I would just hope that as a society, even a capitalistic one, that we can break down those barriers a little bit more and more over time so that at some point in time, whether it's 100 years from now, 50 years from now, whenever it is, people don't assume that because you have a disability, you are less than or you're going to have to work hard. That's where I think we need to shift the narrative. But I do agree with what he said.
Let me be very upfront. I do not think people with disabilities are lesser should have to work harder, necessarily. And the lesser one is the one that really caught me. We are equal. We are absolutely equal. But we might have to work harder. That's just part of life. But I do not think we are lesser and should occupy. Like I said before, I think we need to work hard enough to be better than our competition. I agree.
And everybody does that's. Part of the point of living in a capitalistic society is you have to prove your value.
Absolutely. No, I'm glad this is really an engaging and insightful discussion here. Just to think about this stuff and to ponder how old it is.
Absolutely. I like this philosophical slant, because it's always interesting to get other people's opinions and feedback on this, because, like you said, it's a complex subject. There's not an easy answer that you can point to and say that's the solution.
Especially the society that we live in today, likes to hold scapegoats and likes to think, oh, they're so much better than me. Because and then fill in the blank, oh, if only this was not the way it is now. I'd have a million dollars. Oh, if only. If only. But wait a minute. Why do you step up and say, what do I have? How can I thrive?
Absolutely.
With me. I think a lot of people and this has nothing to do with the disabled community. I just think a lot of people waste their lives away worrying about what other people are doing and why they can't do that versus what can we do.
Absolutely. If we can shift this back, I want to try to get highlights some of the practical ways that you applied that. Can you remember the first time as a young man or going through school or even in College where you started to see and develop some of those advantages that you have by being you and by working like, you don't have to dedicate all that time to seeing the world the way other people see the world. So you're cultivating your other senses, you're cultivating problem solving skills, you're cultivating your identity on all these other elements that people don't pay as much attention to, which is really interesting.
Yeah, sure. Thank you. I don't necessarily know when these things started to come around, but I'm not saying that I'm, like, hugely gifted in any area, but I would be absolutely remiss if I said that I didn't have to work just as hard as my peers to understand chemistry. It's a visual science. I spent a lot of time working with my reader and my assistant and working with my lab assistants to make sure that the chemistry that I was studying was accessible to me and that I understood it quite fluently. I'll give you two examples. In the world of chemistry that was interesting. It was in high school, actually, my freshman physical science class, when I realized that I just had a knack for chemistry. Whenever we did chemistry or talked about chemistry, when we had the whole chemistry unit to study relatively small part of physical science, it just clicked. It made sense. When it came time for honors chemistry my junior year, I took the test and the instructor to figure out how to get me how to get me into the class because she was all worried about having a blind student in there, and she's, like, can't deny him this.
He got the highest score on the entrance exam. So how are we going to do this? And we work together to find a great assistant who had taken the class figure before who would work with me in the lab and write down my answers on tests and problem sets and whatnot in print. So that was great. I was able to thrive in chemistry. And then really when I got to organic chemistry at UC Davis, I realized, oh my gosh, I really am a spatial thinker. A lot of times I'm going to travel a difficult or even just a new route on foot. And maybe with some bus journeys in there too, I will have learned it ahead of time. And I'll run through it in my mind the night before or I'm in the shower that morning or going to sleep at night. And I'm thinking through these routes and the streets and how they connect and buildings and all this stuff. And I realized one day I said, hey, wait a minute. I'm using the same skillset to think about organic chemistry and how atoms fit together and connect together to form molecules. I use my same skill set here that I use for my survival as a blind traveler while walking around.
And then I realized, oh, my gosh, nothing. I have to visualize everything. I can't look at anything with my own eyes and know what it looks like. So whether it's desks or arranging a classroom with people in them or a molecule of benzene, it's all in my mind. I realized early that point, wow, if I can think about where buildings are in terms of meters and kilometers, and why don't I shrink those distances down to nanometers and angstroms and think about molecules and how atoms connect to form molecules? So that in chemistry is where I realized that I had an advantage when it came to visualization and problem solving. The disadvantages of the community of scientists really likes to present their stuff in a very visual way. So my challenge as a chemist was actually not doing the chemistry that'll happen fairly easily. The biggest challenge for me was getting the chemical information from the visual world into my mind and then getting my results back out into the visual world, whether it be in a presentation or publication or what have you. So that's where all that sort of started with chemistry. Now, in terms of my sensory background and the fact that I have a highly refined palette and I'm really a sensory specialist now.
That all started when I was about eight years old, when my parents would hire me to make them large pockets of soup, which they would freeze and take to work for lunches. So my Christmas gift, I think when I was nine years old, was a ten gallon soup pot. And I developed some really good soup recipes early on. I've always loved working in the kitchen. I'd always loved food. I'd always loved smelling things and identifying what they smell and all this sort of thing and said, Shoot, can we turn this into Am I really training my palate? I went out to Davis, UC Davis, did my schooling, and ended up it's a big wine school. So I ended up taking a couple of classes in winemaking and wine appreciation after I was 21, of course, and realized that while wine is interesting and I can apply all these other flavors that I've paid attention learning over the past many years to the wine industry and describe something complex like a wine using some of those predetermined aromas, which are really vocabulary words. I think of aroma and flavor and texture as a language where the different things that we smell and identify are literally just vocabulary words where I need to know the definitions.
So those are the times really for me that all this stuff started to click and I said, wait a minute, maybe I do have an advantage here. And my goal was to teach chemistry, by the way, that's why I got my degree in it. I've always had the heart of a teacher and still do. Hence, you're coming to my cocktail happy hour on Wednesday night. We're going to talk about the history of different drinks and why they are made the way they are and all this stuff. So I love teaching. Now I do it more in the food and drink industry. But my goal was to teach chemistry and under me, teach advanced high level chemistry. I wanted to be the professor whose students first saw when they got to College all thinking that chemistry was this dog on prerequisite that they just wanted to get through so they could get on with their degree and do what they really wanted to do and maybe get a few of those students excited about studying chemistry. And I took several chemistry or I actually taught had the honor of teaching several chemistry courses while at Davis in graduate school and realized ultimately that students don't like to speak chemistry and they don't read the textbook.
That's another whole issue. But they don't like to speak chemistry. They literally don't like to hear something and understand it and then think about it. Of course you're going to need some visuals. And I did those. But spending so much time and money with assistance, making beautiful presentations with videos and photos and animations all over the place and then having to memorize them second percent little cohesively and coherently that just didn't teach chemistry. And I decided that maybe a career of food and beverage would be a better one. Going off on a tangent here. So I'll stop. But there's a reason that I knew about food and beverage and was excited about it at that point in my life.
Fascinating. I hope you write a book one day kind of diving deep into how you think and problem solve and figure stuff out, because this parallel that you made between visualizing your environment in your mind and how everything gets connected and where tables are in space and spatial awareness and being able to bring that down to the atomic subatomic realm and then retranslate it back into the visual world, that is fascinating. There's just so much there that I hope you explore down the road because you have a lot to teach us about how to think and visualize things in my mind.
I hope I get the opportunity. Thank you.
Absolutely. And so when you started to get into wine, you also came up with this concept of tasting in the dark, correct?
Correct. Which is truly blindfolded wine tasting. And that concept originated actually would work through Francis Ford Coppola. So right when graduate school was beginning, undergraduate school was ending, I got a call from Francis Ford Coppola's team, and they said, Francis wants a wine tasting that's not gimmicky, that's done in complete darkness and wants to have it led by a blind person. Is this something you'd be interested in? When Francis Ford Copelis team calls and says, Francis heard about you and wants you to do this, you say yes, and then you hang up and realize what you just agreed to, maybe get a little worried about it. But keep a long story short, Francis and I developed the experience together, and Francis really just gave me the reins and said, do it. So I developed this experience of tasting in the dark, starting as a hospitality experience for the guests that would visit the winery. But it soon took off with a national sales team, and I was lucky as a computational chemist because my advisor was very lenient. And being computational, my laptop was literally my laboratory so I could work from the road. And he wanted me to explore what options would be best for me after graduate school.
So I was able to travel with them and do a lot of really exciting tasting work and led me to all sorts of other people, not only in the wine industry, but in terms of food and beverage and even product design. And I learned that, wow, there's a whole world of sensory specialization out there that I can delve into, which is really exciting because I'm the only person that I do as a non digital sensory specialist. But it's also hard because I'm the only one that does it. And people aren't necessarily looking for sensory specialists unless they know me or they know really exactly what they're looking for. But the whole point, just to circle back on the tasting in the dark, the whole point of the blindfold is to temporarily remove the sense that you use to obtain 85% to 90% of the information you take in from your surroundings. When we temporarily remove that sense, what else can we do? What other parts of the world can we focus on? How is our life? How is our ability of understanding the world changed when we take away one key sense like that? Can we pay attention more closely and listening to conversation?
Can we feel the chair we're sitting on better. What does the Zoom smell like around us? How does the wine taste in your glass? And I would never say, okay, make it like a game. Now you get to be me for an hour and you put on this blindfold. No one's going to know what it's like to be me, but it's a temporary view into a world that maybe people haven't necessarily gotten to explore.
No, there's a lot it's a super interesting concept because in my company, part of the experience that we're selling and trying to get people excited about our music reproduction systems. Right. I believe that when I listen to music, if I do it in the dark with my eyes closed, with a great system, it's a totally different experience than listening to music, background music, both or music at a party.
Et cetera, because you're paying more attention.
You're paying more attention. The performers, you get that sense that the performers are in the room with you. It's something much more transformative and powerful. And I see similar things happening with the wine tasting or even I know there was a restaurant down here that was really good in Fort Lauderdale. They closed recently, but they had a tasting in the dark. But you did the whole meal in the dark. It wasn't just the wine tasting.
I've been to some of those that are amazing and some that are, let's just say, not so good that make the blindfold such a game. But you're absolutely right.
Would you say that also helps when you're teaching and you're trying to refine your palate with something like wine, for example? I imagine that there's a lot of marketing out there in the world where I say marketing in the bad context of marketing, where you're just being sold a bill of goods like this bottle of wine is coming from. It's a French wine and you're paying a premium for it. And it's not necessarily better than a $20 bottle of wine or $30 bottle of wine. So how do you I would imagine that getting that palate refined helps you understand not necessarily what objectively the best wine is, but what you actually enjoy and what you actually take pleasure in that experience.
It's true. And wine is just like any other art form. And for whatever reason, we're very good at looking at visual art, and that's what I like. That's what I don't like. We're objective. It's all subjective, but we know what we like and what we don't like. And the reason people don't necessarily treat food and beverage the same way they say, oh, is this good or is this not good? And then you have experts to explain to them what they should and shouldn't like. And maybe one thing that pairs well with the dish and one thing that doesn't pair well with the dish, the same sort of thinking. For me, it's just all about art and it's all to understand what you like and maybe have issues with it. It's all about just trying more things. It's all about practice, deliberate practice. Yes.
So you have obviously enormous positivity about you clearly, and you're super bright human being.
But thank you.
In your experience as an entrepreneur, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that are part of the audience, people that I know. What would you say to them as somebody who has you've talked a little bit about this before. You've had successes, you've had failures. Like when you are in business and you are out there and you are trying to make something and bring something to the world. What's the attitude that you have and learning experiences when something doesn't can't be afraid to fail.
You can't be afraid to say, okay, the entrepreneurs that I see that fail have this dream. It's their passion, it's their product or their service. They're so proud of that. They just think in their head the rest of the world is going to like. And when reality sets in, hey, this isn't going as well as you thought it might. You have to be willing to pivot. And that word was so overused in 2020. So I almost don't like to use it here. But you have to be nimble. I think being nimble is the most important part of entrepreneurship. And shifting to meet what your market wants, I think is so important. But the biggest thing is having an abundant mindset and saying, that didn't work. I've tried 500 things. Now let's try 600 because we're going to find something that works. We're going to figure this out. With a positive mindset, you can make anything work. I am convinced that with an open mind and not being, of course, we all have our down days. I'm not in some Miss Pollyanna always positive, always happy. We're on a human. We have a great day. We have our lousy days, we have our mediocre days right in the middle.
But what we all can do that I think we don't do enough is remember to maintain that ultra positive way of thinking when it comes to the work that we do and the lives that we live. Don't be an optimist, but look at situations in a very real manner. If you're so negative and always worried about that day to day success, it's tough. So I think when things don't work, patience is super important. That just being able to make changes as needed to accommodate your market. It's really interesting. I worked with countless winemakers that should be right. They love their product, they're artists. But then a sensory team might come in and say, hey, the consumer actually wants this wine to be a little bit fruitier. How dare they tell me how to change that? My wine needs to change. This is delicious wine. But really, when you respond to what the consumer is telling you, they want more, you're going to be better in business. So sometimes we have to let our own passion not get in the way of good business. Interesting. And you know what else I would say? Yeah.
What else?
Entrepreneurs don't necessarily think. At the start I was naive about this. Being a business person and an entrepreneur is well over 50%. Marketing. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, they're not going to buy it. So it's all about marketing. And that can be anything that can be word of mouth, that can be digital, whatever you want to do, social, search engine optimization, paid advertising, whatever the case may be. But man, if there's anything that marketing that entrepreneurship is, it's marketing.
So how do you think about marketing? What is marketing to you?
Marketing is just telling a good story and being totally honest. So I'm resurrecting a brand that I built and didn't end up launching with because I got involved in other things. But I'm resurrecting a brand called Blind Truth. And I don't want to talk about the products that we're going to be producing yet because it's very new. And we'll talk about that maybe when we meet in the next podcast. But to me, Blind Truth is exactly what I stand for. This is a story of someone who happens to be blind, who went out there and just said, let's do this, let's make this happen. And I'm not going to give you any. I'm not going to be a slippery marketer. Slippery marketers today are people that spin a data point that is true into something that's very far fetched. And my whole thing is, let's be honest, let's be true and let's tell a good story that's true, that is meaningful to people and people will cut it.
The good answer, the honesty. I think there's too much we know there's way too much spin out there in the world and not enough honesty and not enough standing your ground for what you believe in and being able to communicate that clearly why you value those things, why you stand for those things, and why you're making what you're making totally. This ties in an interesting way too with a lot of your life philosophy, which you have. I highly recommend. And we'll talk about how people can connect with you a little bit later. But you've got a great newsletter and you have a really interesting PDF that people can download where you dive into this concept of exceeding expectations.
What are these mindsets that we need to exceed expectations?
Yes. Can you talk a little bit about what that means to you and how you develop that?
Oh man, I sat down at the end of last year and I just said I need to write down on paper why I think is the importance of exceeding your own expectations and challenging yourself. Because I heard a lot of people saying, oh, if I could only do this if I could only do that during the Panda. There's always only talk. And I said, let's just talk about how we can do it together. And it's all about taking on challenges, taking risks. And when we fail those risks, it hurts a little bit. But when we succeed, that just boosts our confidence. It's like an injection of confidence and motivation and move forward. And all these things that help us do our very best as we go through the lives that we live. So for me, those mindsets, I'll just briefly outline them, don't compare yourself to other people. If you think you're better than everybody, you're going to be copy. And if you think you're not as good as other people, you're going to feel like there's always someone you resent. We touched on that earlier. The next one is believe in yourself. If you don't believe you can do it.
If you don't have extremely high expectations of yourself, don't even try. It's going to be hard to challenge yourself and succeed and know that you can succeed. And the third, and I think this is the one that I found to be most productive is when I feel daunted by that challenge, I break it up into a lot of little challenges. So that's what I did with my PhD is like when you're standing at the bottom of this wall and you're thinking about how the heck am I going to climb that wall, do it in pieces, do it in a little burst, build a ladder and climb the wall that way, break it into steps. And then the fourth one is be consistent. Just basically, if you're going to do something and challenge yourself, you're probably going to do better at it if it's something you're interested in. And you like, and the fifth we've already touched on is just don't be afraid to fail. But it's all about the mindset here is all about how to exceed your own expectations by challenging yourself. And sometimes I feel like people and I have been culprit of this as well.
Sometimes we choose the safe option when we go the safe direction, when really we could be pushing ourselves. And I'm not like one of these. So you got to be driven and you got to run a marathon and then do a Triathlon and sort of thing. No, let's just do your personal best. Always do your personal best. And then you'll totally believe in yourself and love what you do and you'll do anything you want.
I think it's really well thought out hobby, because when you're talking about, first of all, exceeding your expectations, so it's you the person, right? You're meeting people where they are at. If they are not in a place where they can take all those risks and they're still going up that ladder, you're meeting them where you're at. And you're saying, look, wherever you are today, try to do let's figure out where you want to be tomorrow, even if it's one step or half a step in one direction and let's go there. And when you conquer those little goals, those little obstacles, it starts to build over time. Momentum, if you keep at it.
Oh, my gosh. And the mental momentum is just huge, and it's what we need and it just pushes you forward.
And momentum is obviously a big thing there. But I love that. And I agree. I'm not that type of person either that I don't need to prove myself anymore, but I'm going to do this feat or I'm going to swim this amount of lapse or I'm going to be this successful of an entrepreneur. It's about my expectations within myself to feel good and to feel like my life has a sense of purpose in me.
Exactly.
That's brilliant.
Who would not agree more?
I wanted to ask I know it's a little bit. I want to talk about Hobie essentials, but I had a question that I wanted to ask you before that I didn't. When you were talking about the work that you're doing helping people who maybe they're middle aged or later in life who have a vision loss, how do you get them to because you have an advantage of being born that way since birth? I have an advantage having my disabilities since birth. This is all we know, and we've had our whole lives to adapt to it and to figure things out. How do you help people who are making that transition for the first time? What's the difference in the mindset that you have to break through?
Oh, my gosh. When you've had something one way your entire life and then it all of a sudden switches sometimes faster than others, I think it's really challenging to break that mold and to get the right mindset of okay, I'm going to get the training I need and I'm going to do this and be the best blind person I can possibly be or the best whatever person I can possibly be. I ultimately think it's life mindset. I like to think that you and I because I think we're pretty similar in the way that we think in the sort of abundance mindset that we have. I like to think that if one of us were to lose another ability, like if I were to lose my hearing, would it be annoying? Oh, you bet it would be. But I think with the right mindset, you can just overcome it and deal with it. And by the way, it's all about expectations. If you're 65 years old and 70 years old and you start experiencing sight loss and your spouse thinks it's a lifelong detrimental problem, won't let you cross any streets to go to the grocery store, you're probably not going to believe in yourself either.
So to me, it's a holistic approach whenever possible of not only working with that one person who is experiencing the issue, but working with everybody around them too. And to be fair, this is just my philosophy. I'm just on their board. The magic of the organization is with the instructors, people who do this day in, day out. They are the ones who are changing lives and who are transforming lives.
Okay, that's fair. But I'm sure you're bringing your part being part of it. You're bringing your experience and your knowledge and your insights into the equation, too.
I definitely do. And one of the things that I'll say that's just interesting to me is that sometimes I feel really disadvantaged in exactly what we're talking about because I don't know what they're going through. I don't know what it's like. And I can only imagine what it's like to lose the ability to drive, to have someone take your keys away from you. How vulnerable is that? And how it feels like freedom is being taken. But it doesn't have to feel that way. But I totally understand how it could and why it could. So I feel very lucky. You use the perfect word. We are advantage because we have had our disability since birth.
But it's also interesting that you are able to put yourself in their shoes. Not perfectly right, but you have this ability to empathize and to try to get inside their headspace to understand what they're going through. And that, to me, is a big part of the key for just this is human understanding, period. But a big part of the key for how we can help nondisabled people understand us a little bit better. Just practicing that empathy so important.
It's so important to be able to exactly like you said, put yourself in someone else's shoes and say, hey, wait a minute, what would it be like if I was that person? And honestly, Gustavo, I think the main reason that people treat us so differently and fearfully is because they're worried about becoming us. And I know that sounds weird, it might be controversial, but being disabled is the one minority you can join any time in your life. And if we all live long enough and are lucky enough to live long enough, we probably will join this minority. But I think people are afraid.
I agree. And that's why going out into the world and doing something. That's why having a good attitude or being able to teach, listen, learn is so important because I hope people start to understand or maybe not fear it as much. Maybe they can say, look, it's not the end. It's just a change in the path. I'm going to have to make some adaptations so it's not easy. But I agree with you, and I've thought about this too. If I were to lose, say, my vision, my hearing, just anything that I have today that I wouldn't have tomorrow, I think there would be a little bit of a grieving process because I wouldn't be quite the same person that I was today. But once that period of time is over, I do trust in my ability to adapt and to problem solve and to figure it out.
This is really important to me, Gustavo, one of the things that I think truly creates diversity is having struggled and had to problem solve all the time. We as folks living with disabilities, always are solving problems and figuring out tinkering and figuring out adaptations and ways to make life doable for us. And I think that really is when we say we want a diverse team. We don't only want a team that looks different in a photo. We need a team of people who have different backgrounds, who can think differently. And I really do think that being disabled has given us so much sort of grit because we've had to struggle.
Absolutely.
It has. Yeah.
And like you said, the ability to think in different ways, to see the world from different perspectives. I think it's changing and it's getting better, but it's still astounding to me that more people, more business leaders, more companies, more industries haven't gotten around to that realization.
You bet. It's not just hiring a diversity officer and checking the box. It's about really getting in there and solving problems.
I think there's an interesting tie into I would wager a lot of money. Right. I think there's a lot of leaders out there today who are still they want to make the final decision. They still think that the way they see things is the way to go, and they surround themselves with, yes.
People.
Right. So it's people who aren't telling them something they don't want to hear, people who aren't going against the grain. I would wager a large amount of money that as a leader, you are the type of person who truly values those different inputs and those different perspectives.
And we need them.
Takes them into account.
I had a disturbing conversation with a friend of mine who's just a family practitioner, and she said something recently that was, like, really alarming and really disturbing. She said if I tell my patients, if I'm the one that tells my patients they have to stop eating a certain way or they need to stop smoking or they need to exercise more, they're just going to go to a different doctor, and I'm going to have less patients, and my ratings are going to go down. Okay. And she still tells people exactly what she thinks. And other doctors are a lot more popular than her. That's scary.
That is scary.
Anyway, it just tied in and it was a thought right at the top of my mind.
Yeah. That strikes a chord. That's something that we should change.
Oh, we should. Yeah.
So, Hoby, can you tell us about Hobby Essentials? Tell us about what you're doing and what you're bringing to the market.
Thank you for the opportunity. I'm super excited about Bobby's essentials. We actually launched. It's amazing how long these things take. We had the idea in September of last year, my partner and I. And we launched the company officially in late August of 2021 with two products. It's a seasoning blend company. So we have Cappy paprika, which is think like your delicious barbecue rub for grilling vegetables. Delicious on chicken, delicious on pulled pork. I use it as a replacement for chili powder, all these things. And then Rosemary salt, which is a really nice, fine Flake salt that has a bunch of Rosemary and Sage and little garlic and actually lemon juice powder. And it's just really nice and savory, I think. Roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, anything you might stick in the oven and roast. It was definitely all over the Thanksgiving table. This year best roasted chicken or Turkey, in my opinion, is butter the bird and Rosemary salt. You need those three ingredients in a 450 degree oven for about an hour and 15 minutes. Just creates the absolute delicious Bull roasted bird. And that's for a chicken. And, of course, the time is going to go up if you're doing a Turkey that's all temperature sensitive as well.
But I just love the fact that I developed these pallets or these products with my palette, with my knowledge of chemistry. We've been using them in our kitchen for better part of five years now and just say, hey, wait a minute. Why aren't we making these things that we love available in the world? And the biggest comment that people have been making is they want more products. So I'm in the process of developing about four more products right now, and we're going to get the market in Q, one of 2022 with these two products. People like them, so they're not going anywhere. But another four additional products, which I think are going to be really good. And I'm really excited about. And by the way, you can find that at Hobies, H-O-B-Y-S Essessentials, esentials.com.
Fantastic. When you're developing these seasonings. I know. Say, for example, with barbecue right there, you can just travel to different parts of the United States and find different kinds of rubs. Some people are about the sauce, some people aren't. I know in Brazil, when you go to a Steakhouse, it's mostly just salt.
Gillian barbecue. Oh, my God.
I do, too. Do you take those different cuisines across the world and study them, or is this about your palate and what you enjoy and the flavors that you want to bring to the experience?
That's interesting. Thanks for that question. No one's asked me that before on a podcast. It's really insightful. I take into consideration what when people are eating what they say they like, what is pleasurable, what is satisfying, and then we build that into our products. So people like a little bit of sweet, but I don't want it to be unhealthy sweet or even just a little bit of coconut sugar. People like the taste of black peppers. So the happy pepper has a lot of black pepper in it. And then in the Rosemary case, I could go on with each ingredient in the Rosemary salt case. There's a cool flavor that restaurant chefs get by using a lot of herbs in their cooking. And I thought, now how can we allow the home Cook who doesn't want to spend a whole lot of time at that same amazing sort of restauranty herbal flavor to their cooking? And I think a really good way to do it is with Rosemary salt. So it's about looking at what people find satisfying and pleasing and then trying to figure out how we can create those flavors in products that we okay.
Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. I'm looking forward to trying it. My next question for you is obviously we can talk for many hours and I am looking forward to doing that in future podcasts, as am I, online and offline. But have I missed something in this conversation that you feel is important to talk about?
Just the one party phrase that I have for people is mindset is everything. If you have a can do positive, loving mindset, you can do whatever the heck you want.
I like it.
And if you want to put in the details of the show how people can get a hold of me at either Hobbywedler.com or Hoversessentials.com, that'd be great.
That's my next question. So how do people reach out? How do people contact with you Besides? So let's start with Hobby Essentials. They go to Hobby Essentials.
Correct hobby with an S. Hobies Essentials.com. And there's a contact form, products available online. It's also around the holidays. It actually has a really good corporate gift. If anyone wants to think about that for next year, that's definitely an option. And there will be more products as well. But my site is Hobby. They can actually reach me@hobby.com. That's hobby.com and or Hobby weddler my first and last name. There's contact forms where you can just get a hold of me on LinkedIn. That's just Holy Webler. H-O-B-Y-W-E-D-L-E-R or just send me an email. Hobby Hoby@hobewedler.com and don't be a stranger. Get in touch. I like to talk to anyone beautiful.
And Besides, I know that you've got these companies going. You're obviously a really busy human being, which is awesome. You also offer some consulting services as well. If somebody wants some sensory design help.
Product development in food and beverage. I have done a lot of work on product design, designing textures of products and packaging design. Anything that has to do with how things feel and making more satisfying feel or sound of your product. I do all that. I do a lot of it. I love that work.
Have you done that with any technologies with, say, for example, a phone or a computer or a tablet?
Yes, we have. We actually worked with a very large company out of Silicon Valley on the way their glass texture feels for their next iteration of smartphones and trackpads. Interesting.
Is there anything that you can say about what you thought was missing with those other industrial design team is very sensory oriented.
And they wanted a glass that felt more silky. And they went to their glass manufacturer and said, hey, we need a glass that feels more silky. And the glass manufacturer said, we don't know what to do, but we know this crazy sensory guy. So they called me and we work together on really defining metrics of glass texture and how glass feels. And it was enough to give them and we put together a whole tech day where they felt different glass surfaces under their fingertips and compared them to the textures of different foods and beverages that they were consuming simultaneously. And that gave them enough information, enough insight, and enough expertise in the area of glass texture to choose their next class.
Remarkable.
That's fun. I love doing work like this. And by the way, I'll just throw it out there. I do some coaching with budding entrepreneurs. You're just getting started. You want a little bit of a bit of help with that mindset or with your business concept or whatever the case may be so it don't be a stranger. Reach out.
Beautiful. One other question, if you're okay with that, just because you brought this up again, I've had different entrepreneurs on the show. I know people offline that are going to be on the show, and a lot of people talk about and I know this is a challenge is how difficult it is to get funding, especially as an entrepreneur with the disability and especially in the assistive technology realm.
Charge.
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what your experience with that has been and some of the ways that can as a community get through those obstacles or if you see anything change?
If I was really good at getting funding, I'd be a lot further along than I am? No, I think it's just all about relationships and showing, and it's hard, it's competitive. It's showing that your product is the one, it's the best. And that comes down to what is your expected cash flow. You got to write a good business plan. And the hardest part of business planning, in my opinion, is projecting sales on something that's brand new, that doesn't exist yet. You can use data on similar products and that sort of thing and usually get pretty close. But if you can show the business will cash flow positive. That's only one part of getting funding. I realized the other part is passion and drive and showing your commitment to what you're doing. This is truly what you care about and what you will do if they know their money is going to be put to good use. And hopefully we'll generate a return. The other thing I'd say to to me, just a good rule of thumb is if you can secure funding in terms of debt, so you take out loans, that's going to be a lot your first option before you go to equity.
Equity is giving up part of the baby and debt is having to pay someone back over time. So I definitely prefer debt when possible. There are definitely times when debt isn't possible and you have to seek equity. But assistive technology is really hard and it's really hard to get funding for. I haven't personally tried it, but a lot of my friends, I'm sure a lot of your friends as well are in that industry. And the problem is that the market is so small and I feel weird saying this. I would invest in some technology that I knew was going to make a difference in people's lives just because I like to think I'm a good person. But as a business move, it's hard to say. And please, if you're listening to this, don't hold this against me. But I understand why it's hard to get funded because the market is very small and that shouldn't make it so that we don't get funding. But sometimes there's a lot of teaching that we have to do on why their investment a lender or funding sources investment will come back and be returned with a vengeance in the assistive tech space.
So being very creative and really putting on your head of the teacher and explaining to people why this matters, why, number one, they're going to get their money back because that's what they care about in this society. And number two, why your product is really helping people live better and more Proactive lives.
I've never pitched an idea to a venture capitalist, but my understanding of as an entrepreneur, a small business owner is there's a lot of short sighted thinking at play there where I think the venture capitalist, so much of it is a crap shoot. So you'll hear a lot of successful venture capitalists say, look, we're investing in the person, not so much the idea, because you never know.
So true.
We feel that hobby is going to be a nimble enough to pivot to what the market says. And maybe that technology can be used in other ways in other fields that we haven't thought about yet, just in case the initial idea doesn't succeed. So I think there's some shortterm thinking there where maybe they're less willing to believe in that person or because they don't see all of the other market applications. I think there's a tendency to look for the unicorn.
Right.
I want to invest in Facebook, the next Google, the next, whatever it is, rather than they'll invest in you though.
Yeah, they'll invest in you if you show your tenacity and your passion.
Exactly.
You can win in any market.
Maybe that assistive technology is going to generate 5 million in sales 10 million in sales. 50 million in sales a year. That's still a sustainable, healthy, incredibly valuable business.
Oh, totally.
So it's an interesting topic, but very interesting I want to thank you so much for the time for the generosity for the discussion. I'm so happy we met and I'm just extremely grateful that you took the time to be here.
I'm so grateful that we met and this is the first of many absolutely thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.
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