Opportunity Made Podcast Transcript, Episode 7

Matt Philipenko, Roll Over or Rise Up

[00:00:00] Matt: You see it all the time. People with different abilities that are being able to tap into something just because they got out of that victim mindset of saying, hey, I got diagnosed. I can't do anything. I'm just gonna shut down. The minute you let that take over, it'll basically just consume you. If you can break out of it and look, find a task, find a goal that you're gonna chase that rise up mentality of just chasing things.

[00:00:25] You're gonna lose on some, but you're gonna succeed on some, and that's what you just gotta roll with. I had a college professor say mistakes are cheaper than college. And that's lived with me forever.

[00:00:33]

[00:00:34] Katherine: Hello everybody and welcome to Opportunity Made, the show that promotes the idea that we can make new opportunities for ourselves and others on a regular basis if we take chances, are intentional in our actions, and invest deeply in our own lives. I am your host Katherine Lewis, an accessibility advocate, software engineer and executive director of the Leon Foundation of Excellence.

[00:01:00] I'm going to give an audio description of myself. I am a European American woman with short blonde hair. Today I am wearing a blue top and there is a brown wall behind me. I have a special guest with me, Matt Philipenko. Matt is a believer in Jesus Christ, a husband, father, son, and brother. He is blessed to work for Microsoft as a Customer Solutions Architect, also known as Microsoft 365 Apps Ranger.

[00:01:26] Diagnosed with Stargardt's when he was 19, he has spent the last 20 years adapting to this new normal that changes year over year. Matt believes in life we have the choice to either roll over or rise up. It's your choice. Matt, welcome to the show.

[00:01:43] Matt: Awesome. Thank you for the offer. This is gonna be super fun, super cool and hopefully we lift some lids per se, uh, just expand people's thinking.

[00:01:52] Katherine: Absolutely have everyone choose to rise up. Do you mind doing an audio description of yourself?

[00:01:58] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Matt Philipenko here. I'm a recently turned 40 year old male. I have grayish hair, uh, until my wife colors it. I'm wearing a white polo, uh, with, uh, Sunlight Seahawks logo on it for my son's football team. In a few hours it's Friday night lights down here in Florida, so we'll be going to the football game. Um, but it's great to be here and, uh, looking forward to the discussion.

[00:02:20] Katherine: And your son is doing pretty well in football, if I'm not mistaken?

[00:02:24] Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, uh, it's his passion. I mean, I don't care if it was football, chess, gaming. My youngest loves gaming. He's 20 feet away from me, like rocking out on a killer PC, um, so like, you just, I mean it, whatever you find your passion in, you just gotta lean into it fully.

[00:02:43] Um, I know at Microsoft, I mean, we talk all the time making sure that people find their, their love for their job, because if you hate your job or you hate what you're doing, I mean, it, it makes life really hard, um, to navigate through if you're, if you're just constantly in this like, regretful mindset of like, why did I choose this path?

[00:03:02] Katherine: Well speaking about Microsoft, you've been working there for quite a while. How did you fall into the career path that you currently have?

[00:03:10] Matt: Yeah, so it's super interesting. I interviewed, I mean, many, many years. I've been here nine years now. Um, this November it'll roll over into 10. Um, and basically I, I interviewed a ton of times.

[00:03:23] There's seven different positions that I interviewed for nine years ago over, over the course of three years. And then each interview consisted of a screening, a tech screen and a manager screen. So you'd have three different interviews. So basically I met 21 different people throughout these interviews trying to get in.

[00:03:41] Eventually, the last one clicked and worked. Um, yeah, I, I, I equated it to a lot of humility. Um, at the beginning, my first interview from a mindset perspective, I sat down and the support manager, um, I still talk to her today, she goes, what do you know about Excel?

[00:03:56] And I said, Everything. And she goes, oh, okay. And I quickly learned that, uh, that arrogance needed to be shaved off and cut down. I had no idea what to do with Excel, but I was just like, eh I could probably figure it out. But from, from that first interview to that last interview of knowing where they asked me that, and I just said, hey, I, I don't know a lot, but I know what I've done in my personal life.

[00:04:19] I talked about owning a video production company called Blind Spot Productions and Philipenko films. And then a side it business, a sole proprietorship called Don't Freak, Call a Geek. So those three small little sole proprietorships is what we did to thrive prior to Microsoft.

[00:04:34] I just shared that story in that interview of saying, hey, if I can make videos being blind, um, and solve IT stuff, I can make this Microsoft work. But that's how I, I landed it. I started in, uh, Fargo, North Dakota at that office.

[00:04:49] Katherine: I didn't know they had an office out there. That's pretty cool.

[00:04:51] Matt: Yeah. Second largest in the United States, so it's

[00:04:54] Katherine: Wow.

[00:04:55] Matt: Huge office. Yep.

[00:04:56] Katherine: What are they focused on out there?

[00:04:59] Matt: They have a bunch of different groups out there, but the, the Fargo group, when it first started, it was called Great Planes. Our governor of North Dakota, or the Governor, not ours, I live in Florida now, but the governor of North Dakota, Doug Bergham, used to own a company called Great Planes, and Microsoft purchased Great Planes quite a while ago. And when they did that, the Office Product Group, the office division moved some of their support folks there. A couple years after that is when I was trying to plug in. My friend Chad already started there and was working on the team so he was my inside access person that, that told me all this stuff. I, I mean, I would talk to him and just be completely motivated, inspired, just crazy almost over I gotta get in here. I gotta get this job. It's exactly what I want. I just set out on a course for it.

[00:05:43] Katherine: Through those interviews, which by the way, that sounds like a lot of interviews, but I love that you went from arrogance to humility. And humility is often underrated. When we're interviewing, we often don't say, I don't know. I'm not sure. I might be able to figure it out, this is how I would go about it.

[00:06:02] So it's very cool to see that throughout that process you were an active learner and realized that you needed to show up in a different way and that it was okay to show up in a different way and say, I don't know, and that that is actually what got you the job.

[00:06:18] Matt: Yeah. Right after I said that one of the guys that was doing the interview, that last one goes, hey, if you knew everything, you'd already work here.

[00:06:25] And I was like, oh, good point. Okay. So it was a cool eye opening thing of waking up to it and saying, hey, let's learn together. I mean, even after I first started too, I remember coming home my first week just bawling to my wife. I'm like, I can't do this job. It's so hard.

[00:06:41] Like, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm saying on the phone. I started in Premier Support, so you basically have a queue in front of you on the computer and you take cases. I mean, I'd get on the phone with customers and I'd have to mute my mic and then we were in cubes so I'd talk to my tech lead and then I'd unmute, say the answer and I'd mute, ask a question, unmute, do it again. Like just back and forth. And one of my customers picked up on it and he's like, who are you talking to? I wanna talk to that guy. I refused to talk to you anymore until you put that guy on the phone.

[00:07:11] And I was just like, I mean, there's so many moments, uh, like that in scenarios that throughout that time in support, um, I mean I love that, that whole support group, I think it's a great place to, um, for internal employees like to, if they started there just to, just to really build that muscle. Cuz it it, you build a different kind of muscle when you start in Premiere Support cuz you, you have to take escalations, you have to take, I mean, all sorts of scenarios you have to walk into with no idea what's gonna happen.

[00:07:42] Katherine: Yeah, I feel like a support role or working the phones is always a really good place for anyone who wants to truly understand a company.

[00:07:50] Matt: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

[00:07:52] Katherine: At Microsoft, you have really leaned into managing up when it comes to your accommodation needs, but that wasn't always the case before. So could you start back at the beginning? You got the job, you had Stargardt's. What was that like? And then how did it evolve over time?

[00:08:14] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Even prior to Microsoft, I worked for a vendor company. Back then we had CRT monitors. Like right now from my accommodations team, I've got a 43 inch Dell Ultra Sharp monitor. I've got a Logic keyboard with big text on it. So right now I'm fully equipped. Uh, back then though, I had a CRT monitor that I slid to the edge of the desk and I sat like this close to the monitor. I mean, I was maybe an inch away from the monitor and I would just move my head back and forth and read whatever was on the screen.

[00:08:45] There was sometimes where I would get these things called a retina migraine, um, where if my eyes would get so tired from trying to focus that these little squigglies and like cloudiness would come and it would almost be like stars and shimmering and it would slowly start at the bottom and then go all the way up.

[00:09:02] From the middle of my eye down, I would lose all that vision. So I couldn't, I couldn't walk, I couldn't move. It happens normally in like high stress moments. That's just a constant thing you just kind of gotta roll with. But when it happened back then I would just leave my desk and I'd go outside the side door and just sit on the stairwell or my wife would drive over and pick me up and then I'd go home and just take the rest of the day off and rest my eyes. If it happens now, what I'll do is just go rest my eyes and if I'm still working or I have to work on something, I have a voice turned on on my phone. I just double tapped the back of my phone to invoke narrator and it reads, uh, voiceover.

[00:09:40] From an accommodations perspective though, going back to the beginning, I started in Premier Support and then a few years later I went into the Premier Field Engineering where I worked out in the field, and I went and visited customers and fixed stuff.

[00:09:51] And when I was internal on support I didn't have to tell anybody about my eyesight, like nobody knew about it. It didn't really matter because I could zoom in with Microsoft Magnifier. I could do my job and I could zoom out. Customers never knew. The only people that knew were literally my colleagues that sat next to me because they would see these jumbo text images on my screen of, uh, me doing my work.

[00:10:13] But, nobody really knew. When I transitioned into the field and I had to go visit customers, that's where things really started to evolve because I had to start traveling. I had to start flying. I remember my first trip to, um, to Seattle for a thing called Microsoft Ready, uh, for employees and I called my wife on FaceTime and I was holding up my phone and I'm like I'm supposed to be at a purple, purple six. And she's like, slow down, you're moving your phone too much. I can't see. I was having her try to tell me where the Purple Bay was, because that's where all the buses were picking people up.

[00:10:46] So even at that moment, I still wasn't in the right mindset of walking up to security or somebody in an airport saying, hey, I'm low vision. I need this. Can you get me to this spot? And basically, just opening it up. But while I was in the field I went and visited a customer, was doing a workshop. I use a Microsoft mouse with a magnifier button programmed on it so I can zoom in and out. And I went and visited a customer and my mouse broke. I had to get up. I slid my laptop over to the guy. There was like 12 of us in the room doing the workshop, and I slid my laptop over and said, hey, can you run my laptop? I'm gonna go stand by the protector so I can see this. And I stood by the screen and then talked through and almost led a class from the front of the room, like a teacher. When I got done, I would always have, we call them like a burn down meeting, uh, with my manager.

[00:11:31] After the session, I would check in with him, uh, when I was on the road from time to time, and told him about that. I told him that the customer was kind of, I could sense an irritated feeling of them being like, dude, what? Like this guy needs a mouse. Now I gotta press his buttons on his laptop. Like, what's this guy's problem?

[00:11:47] I remember him saying, hey, if they do that tomorrow, just get up and leave. He goes, you don't have to ask. You don't have to tell him. Just go get on the plane and go back home. He goes, we don't need customers like that, if they're gonna do that.

[00:11:59] That moment really lit the fuse for me internally at Microsoft to where I was like, dude, I just got some power. Okay, let's go. And literally, from that moment forward I didn't ask for really anything. I would just apologize if I wasn't supposed to be doing it. I would just like, Oh, sorry!

[00:12:15] Katherine: Yeah. You finally knew they're on your team and you don't have to be concerned about

[00:12:19] Matt: Yeah.

[00:12:20] Katherine: sharing your abilities and them siding with the customer or them just not being on your side.

[00:12:27] Matt: Yeah. Once you know they're in your corner, you literally feel like you're like Rocky Balboa. You were ready to just go rock and roll. From that moment though, I, um, I filled out this accommodations checklist and then the accommodations team, the process was super easy at Microsoft. I literally, I filled out the form, submitted the paperwork, and then a lady from HR emailed me and said, hey, go ahead and do some research, figure out what you want and then just purchase it with your Microsoft Amex. And here's the IO code that you bill your purchase to.

[00:12:57] And I'm like, are you kidding me? It's that easy. Like what the, what in the world? So I went online. If anybody's low vision blind on here, and you don't know who Sam Seavy is, it's called The Blind Life on YouTube. Phenomenal channel for low vision and blind, all sorts of accessibility stuff. I followed Sam quite a bit before that, and I went on his channel and he demoed the products that I went and bought. I bought from Freedom Scientific, it's called Ruby Seven. It's like a little desktop foldable magnifier.

[00:13:24] I got an Iris Vision Live. It's like a VR headset that I can wear that has a bunch of different modes, reading modes, television modes to where I can watch from a distance. And then I got a thing called a Clover Book Pro from Irie-at, and similar to a desktop cctv, it's a foldable one that mounts into a little tiny zip up briefcase.

[00:13:45] It transforms into a full desktop cctv. It has two screens on it. It has this little antenna looking video camera that flips up called the distance view camera. And what I do with that is when I'm in Redmond, when I'm sitting in meetings, we marker board a lot, we whiteboard, uh, people sketch out stuff all the time, and I usually have to get up for my seat and walk up next to the person doing it.

[00:14:08] And it makes 'em really uncomfortable if I don't know them. Having that distance view camera, I can flip that thing up and zoom in and stay in my seat and let them thrive in their own element and not have me right next to 'em, like making 'em feel awkward.

[00:14:21] Katherine: We will definitely link all of this in the show notes for anyone who wants to use any of this technology. It is really incredible the more people I talk to with different disabilities, how technology has empowered them and I know that that will continue. I mean, Microsoft is a really big leader in this. For LinkedIn, we're following suit. I hope that more and more companies do this and have Chief Accessibility Officers. They're thinking about accessibility, developing technology for this. Do you have any other resources that have really allowed you to thrive.

[00:14:55] Matt: Yeah, so all those tools that I mentioned were external assistive technology that Microsoft didn't make. But internally, what's really, really cool about working at Microsoft is I have access to, um, the Product Managers that own Windows Narrator, that own Microsoft Magnifier, that own, um, like all these different tools.

[00:15:17] The Seeing AI app. I can ping them on Teams and say, hey, I'm using this. I have a question. From a customer perspective we're building really, really cool features. At Microsoft, we have this thing called Fix Hack Learn. Right now we're just finishing our worldwide company-wide Hackathon week where it allows everybody to just hack for a week. You can turn on your out of office on your email and just lean in a hundred percent. You can either fix something, hack something, or learn something. And, um, all of the hackathons for the past few years, I've done accessibility projects with people.

[00:15:49] Last year, the team that I was on, a team in Dublin, Ireland we built a app that's in the store today called the Accessibility Reminder. And it's an add-in for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Office that basically allows me to collaborate with people. I can do it anonymously. So let's say there's like 10 people collaborating on a document, they're not, they're not being accessible, I can drop that accessibility reminder comment in there that says, hey, there's someone that's working on this with you with low vision and it nudges everybody in the document to, to start creating content that's accessible without me raising my hand going, hey, everybody, you're being insensitive. Help me.

[00:16:26] It's just a super cool app and you can do custom comments as well, like captions in PowerPoints, like there's all sorts of things that people might not think about because they're not impacted by it. These types of tools all come throughout that hackathon event. This week we've been working on some really cool stuff that we're gonna announce soon that are basically equipping organizations to understand their accessibility posture in their company.

[00:16:52] From a company perspective, just having access to those things internally has been super fun, super motivating. We learn a ton during hackathon week by leaning into that. On the engineering side, I work in the Office Product group. We get a hackathon every 90 days. So every 90 days we get to do this.

[00:17:10] Katherine: A couple of things. One, the accessibility reminder is available in the app store, correct?

[00:17:16] Matt: Correct inside your office app. So if you go to the insert tab, it'll say get add-ins. When you click on get add-ins, there's a search box. In that search box, you type accessibility reminder, and it installs right away.

[00:17:28] Katherine: That is amazing in so many different ways. One, so people don't have to disclose that they have the need or they have the disability, but it keeps everybody accountable. And I find with accessibility, that is the most important piece. If you're not experiencing the disability itself, if you haven't been educated, if you haven't been exposed, if you're not training your mind to be thoughtful, then the next best thing that we can do is hold each other accountable. Accountable for learning accountable for using accommodations.

[00:17:57] Matt: Yeah.

[00:17:58] Katherine: When you're doing these hackathons, are people pushed to create accessibility specific things or is this a drive from them that they want to create these tools?

[00:18:08] Matt: So it's really fun, Microsoft has a bunch of different hacks that you can do. The one that we did this year, the one we've been doing every year basically, we do Ability Hacks is what they're called for accessibility or any type of ability type hack. They have these big calls. I think there was like a hundred and some people on this call that I joined a couple weeks ago and you basically get to pitch your project. We have two projects that we were working on this hackathon week and we got developers that signed up, we got designers, we got a Docs person that writes Microsoft Docs articles.

[00:18:39] All of these people came together. We didn't know any of them. They all came together. One common goal to execute on this app. The projects that we worked on this week one of 'em literally started from zero and we have a full on demo today. That one will be in the Windows store, in the Microsoft store, um, within the next, I would say six months at least, and, and maybe sooner.

[00:19:04] We just have to walk through some process checks and things like that once we get ready to release it. But so many of those, like these are built grassroots by just people coming together for one common goal. Our team for this one, it stretched from Redman to North Carolina, to Florida, to Dublin, to London.

[00:19:26] It's brilliant. We had people in all those locations and we all collaborated together for this whole week building stuff. We have these things called employee resource groups. I posted in there and said, hey, I've got two hack projects. I need devs, design, product managers. I listed out the roles that we could really use on the project and got like five pings right in there from Teams and people saying, I'm in, I'm in, I'm in.

[00:19:47] Katherine: I love that so much because that embodies the startup mentality move fast, break things. Everybody gets to opt in and say, this is something that I'm passionate about and I want to see come to fruition.

[00:19:59] You get so much more energy when that's happening rather than how things happen, which is your manager comes to you and says, hey, we need you to do this. And yeah, you're gonna do it, but it's very different than when you get to opt in. I feel like so many more companies should start doing that. The amount of work that gets generated and the new ideas that comes from that just sounds amazing. Once they are released I'll go back and add them to the show notes. I wanna transition here, Matt, into Stargardt's Disease. How you got it? What is it? Uh, let's go a little bit more in depth there.

[00:20:34] Matt: Stargardt's Disease, it's an inherited retinal disease. The way I understand it, I might be wrong, so if there's like a medical professional listening or like gimme some grace, but basically your parent, mom, dad have to have a bad gene of one of them.

[00:20:47] And then when they have that, it hits both of you. So that happened to me. I was the lucky one. I have seven brothers and sisters, eight of us, but three are from my mom's first husband, five are from my biological dad. Out of that my sister has Stargardt's and I have Stargardt's.

[00:21:03] We've had it our whole lives. I wasn't diagnosed until I was around 19 years old. My wife and I worked at a nursing home together and that's where we met. Prior to getting married, um, basically was going down the hallway, couldn't see residents, and we went to the local doctor there and he goes I don't know what this is. It looks weird. It's something like weird bullseye. Um, he goes, I don't know. So he referred us to another doctor over in the east side of North Dakota. They knew what it was, but they couldn't confirm that it was Stargardt's. So then my wife drove us to Minneapolis, to the University of Minnesota.

[00:21:36] One of the funny things is the eye charts, I have a photographic memory. I can remember, like really good with numbers. So if like never gimme your credit card number. I'll memorize these things and I would memorize the eye charts. And when I went to the University of Minnesota, they used this like cannon looking almost like a old artillery type cannon that shot the eye chart against a mirror and then to another mirror on the wall.

[00:22:01] And it created this distance and there was multiple charts inside this thing. So I walk in, I look to the left, memorize the chart, get ready to sit down, and I'm sitting up getting ready to just ramble off the letters that I memorized. And, um, the lady goes, okay, are you ready to go?

[00:22:18] And I go, Yeah, sure. And she goes, Click, click, click, click, click, click. And fires this rapid fire thing and changes the chart a bunch of times. I'm sitting back there and I'm like, I can't see any of this chart now. It's way too far away for me to memorize it. So like totally bombed that. From that exercise we went into all these other tests where they hook you up to a computer. You do these visual field tests.

[00:22:37] You did a thing called a Fluorescein Angiogram where they inject liquid, like they figure out what parts of your retina are already fallen apart and basically dying. For mine, if you look at my retina, you'll see it and then it looks like these little white stains almost that show up.

[00:22:55] And those little white stains are the deposits of vitamin A that my eyes can't like wash away and get rid of. Instead what it does is it grows and deposits and then kills it and it basically turns into a black blind spot. If you look at those clinical trials over time, and when I was going through that exercise, you'll see it was like really small and then it just gradually gets bigger.

[00:23:16] And that's what happens with anybody with Stargardt's. If you talk to anybody with it, the beginning of their journey was different towards the end of their journey. That's why I said in the bio year over year it's gonna change because it will progressively deteriorate. And that's where you lean in and there's organizations out there like the Foundation Fighting Blindness sponsoring pharmaceutical trials and clinical trials on trying to find a cure, trying to find medicines to prolong the sight that people have.

[00:23:45] Katherine: When you talk about the end of the journey, is the end of your journey, the end of someone's life or is there a distinct end of the progression of the disease?

[00:23:54] Matt: It's not necessarily the end of life. A lot of people with Stargardt's, that have had it for 30 plus years, they'll get the blind spot that's so big that literally they're looking to the right to see you because if they look directly at you, they can't see you standing there anymore.

[00:24:08] For me right now, I have the coolest magic trick ever because I can look at stuff and make it disappear. But it's the worst trick ever because I'm the only one that gets to see it, um, cause nobody else gets to watch it disappear.

[00:24:19] If I look at our light switch on our wall and I look directly over at it, it's gone. It basically blends in the rest of the color on the wall. Sam did a video on what it looks like with Stargardt's that is phenomenal. It's exactly to a T what my sister and myself see. I share that with a ton of people all the time for them to see it on video to go, wow, okay, that now I get it. If I'm standing talking to somebody in a room and I look directly at 'em, I can't see their face unless I get like three or four feet away from 'em.

[00:24:47] And if you get into like that two foot circle range in front of somebody, and they're not like family, it gets really awkward, uh, when you're standing that close. When you're talking to somebody that is at the end of their journey, they might be looking to the right to see you so that they can talk to you. A lot of people will wear sunglasses, um, just so it doesn't make people feel uncomfortable and stuff like that.

[00:25:07] Katherine: Let's try this. If you had an orange in the palm of your hand and you had your arm extended out in front of you in order to see that, what would you have to do?

[00:25:19] Matt: I'd look above it. If I look directly at it, won't, I won't see it. Or I have to get really close, like if I'm cutting something.

[00:25:26] Katherine: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:27] Matt: Thankfully, my family is massively helpful. A hundred percent of the driving, a hundred percent the cook, like every, everything in our house. They all help daily, uh, help me adapt to different things. I don't have to do a lot of tasks that I could do, uh, to where it, it would be impacted heavily by my eyesight. If I get close enough, I can make things work. If I'm in a restaurant, like when I used to be traveling a lot, I would take pictures of the menus or I'll ask the server, hey, what's the top three popular things on the menu? And they'll be, they'll just ramble 'em off and I'll pick one. It's funny because when I'm with my wife, my wife's a really big advocate for me. Uh, if we're out in public and I'll say, hey, what's the best burger that you have?

[00:26:11] Like, the person won't know because my disability's hidden. They'll be like, dude, it's on the menu. And she's like, he's legally blind. Like she'll tell him, he's asking for a reason. He's not asking because he's just, he's like. So she'll be a massive advocate for me to help out in public, um, different scenarios. I mean, it happens a lot, um, all over the place. From menus, walking around. She'll always help me, especially if we're at like Walmart and I start looking at a product or something. I'm like, ooh, I'm gonna go to the computer section and geek out for a little bit.

[00:26:42] And then they take off and they go do their thing. It's almost like a Marco Polo, uh, event, because I'm trying to find them. I'll call their cell phone. I'm like, hey, where are you at? I'm in, I'm in aisle 36 by the milk, and I'll like run over there as fast as I can to try to find them. My wife has blonde hair. So I'll walk up to a blonde and get about five feet away and then I'll b line because I'm like, nope, that's not her. It's a journey.

[00:27:04] Katherine: It makes a difference when you have someone who's willing to advocate for you and stick by your side.

[00:27:10] Matt: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:10] Katherine: What has to exist within a human being to be that strong of an advocate for someone else, because it takes a lot of work. It takes extra empathy and thought. Do you know what needs to be there in the substance of their character?

[00:27:25] Matt: I don't, I don't know. I mean, it's, cuz I'm not the one that's doing it like I'm the one receiving it. But I mean, it's, it's mind blowing. We got married shortly after the diagnosis. She knew about my eyesight prior. She knew what she was kind of signing up for and still leaned into it 100% and still does today. From a character perspective, I couldn't answer it cause I don't, I don't know what it takes. I think from outside looking in, um, it's all about empathy.

[00:27:52] It's all about the experience of where someone's at. I think internally at Microsoft, even externally with customers, um, when people aren't creating accessible content, it's not because they just dislike people with low vision, blindness, some sort of disability that is impeding them from collaborating on the content that they're creating.

[00:28:12] They're not doing it maliciously. They just don't know. So their awareness is low. Once we make them aware, it's our job as a company at Microsoft, we have the accessibility checker, it's our job to make it easy. Right now, it's kind of hard to make things accessible. You have to basically run a bunch of tools, find out what's broken, click through, add the contrast, add alt text.

[00:28:34] You have to do all these things to basically fix the inaccessible content. And that's just for one document. If somebody's doing this and they're on a team that has like, uh, 500 PowerPoints combined over the past 15 years that they've built, that's a lot of work for someone to sign up for.

[00:28:51] Our tooling that we're working on is to evaluate and then the accessibility reminder app that I brought up earlier that's publicly available today is to enable the user, and then the apps that we're working on this week is to empower people to solve it to, to basically fix, um, the documents and things like that.

[00:29:10] But the core of it is building empathy. Microsoft last year required every single employee to do this series called Accessibility 101 Training and basically walk through accessibility, um, and all 220,000 plus employees, it was a required training. So everybody, that year, every single person had to take it.

[00:29:31] So what that did is that created this movement that everybody at the company now had a baseline of okay here's where we are. I heard that in that training. I heard about alt text, I heard about a screen reader, like they, they weren't completely, um, unaware. And once they have the empathy, then fixing your PowerPoint, fixing your Word document, your Excel file, it's not like a I have to, it's because I want to after that.

[00:29:55] Katherine: Yeah, Microsoft has so many resources. I believe the training that you're talking about, Matt, is publicly available.

[00:30:01] Matt: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:01] Katherine: If you're using Outlook, you can use the Accessibility checker at the bottom of any email that you send. You can check your documents, you can check your PowerPoints. If you are a developer, you can use what's called Accessibility Insights. You just download it into your browser, and then you can check any of your front end code for accessibility issues. It won't catch all of them, but it catches a good chunk.

[00:30:24] And so that's a great way to start making sure that your code is accessible. Now at Microsoft, they were big advocates for you. You had accommodations, but there were some moments where you had to like do some extra advocacy work for yourself and reach out to higher ups, and you're not afraid to do that. So, uh, share some of those stories. I really admire your gutsiness and some of the asks that you've had.

[00:30:52] Matt: Yeah, so that Accessibility 101 series that I brought up, like the training, um, our Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny, and Kathleen, they're C level folks that report to our whole C-Suite. Kathleen runs HR so I was like, Microsoft is doing all of these other trainings, like we have diversity and inclusion training, we have all these different trainings that are, that we're all doing. Um, but at that point, and at that time there wasn't one for accessibility. And I'm like, I am on board to do trainings and equip people and build knowledge and do this, But I was like, we're, I'm, I feel like I'm left out.

[00:31:28] Like our, this whole group for accessibility inclusion is missing. At that point I didn't really ask anybody. I just figured, hey, why not? It's better just to email. I could email our CEO tomorrow. I have no idea what's gonna happen when I do it. You just kind of ask for forgiveness and, and roll with it.

[00:31:45] But I emailed Kathleen and she immediately looped in a few other people looped in Jenny, and then immediately right after that, Jenny goes, hey, it's great to hear this, uh, feedback, Matt. We're actually, starting this next fiscal that was last year. We're starting this next fiscal where each employee at Microsoft is gonna be taking the Accessibility 101 series.

[00:32:07] It was this super cool outcome that I didn't know they were already working on. They already had this stuff set up. They were already gonna do it, and I just emailed all the way up to the top to ask, um, and figured I'd get redirected if I shouldn't be there.

[00:32:21] Internally, a lot of people call me a bulldog. I'm very bullish about the accessibility stuff. If you're building something and if you try to add accessibility after the fact, if you're a developer and you're adding it, it's at the wrong time.

[00:32:32] It has to be throughout the full build process. When we do that at Microsoft too, or at, at LinkedIn, at basically any company where you're developing software, you enable other people.

[00:32:43] There was a gentleman on my team that was working with his garbage disposal and it turned on and he messed up his hand. He was in a bandage, so he was right-handed and he only had his left hand. So he had to recalibrate his mouse for his left hand so he could do work for a little while until his hand healed, but, I pinged him on the side and I was like, hey, do you know about read aloud and dictate?

[00:33:08] Like you can still send and receive emails through, uh, you can turn on, you can open the email, you can click read aloud, put Bluetooth headset in, it'll read your email to you. You click on reply, you click on dictate, and you speak what you want it to type and it types. Um, and he was like, whoa. And those features were built for accessibility, but it worked for him.

[00:33:32] I have a slide that I share in a lot of presentations that I do around situational disabilities. Every single one of us will be eventually at one point in time, disabled with something. And the products that we're building, those can be used in those moments by people that aren't living with it for the rest of their life.

[00:33:49] It may be like a situational timeframe. When developers and product managers and everybody thinks about accessibility, you're, you're not just building for the billion people that have disabilities. You're building for everybody because eventually someone's gonna need your tool.

[00:34:04] Katherine: Which by the way, Matt did say 1 billion people do have disabilities. So if that's not enough to think about accessibility, think about the other six, 7 billion because as you mentioned, everyone at some point could have some kind of disability.

[00:34:20] There are three different types of disabilities: permanent, temporary, and situational. Permanent would be something such as yourself with Stargardt's where it's can't go away. Can you explain temporary and situational?

[00:34:33] Matt: Yeah. So situational would be all based on your situation. Let's say you're working outside, you're at the park, you're on a laptop, you don't have a mat type screen on your laptop, you have a glossy screen that's really shiny and you can't see your emails, you can't do your work.

[00:34:47] You might turn on narrator or read aloud or Windows H is a new function and Windows 11 that allows you to dictate, hey, start Microsoft Outlook. Like you can basically invoke actions by voice. And using those in a situational element where it's either loud or bright or something puts you in that situation where you have to use that accessibility.

[00:35:10] The temporary one would be like the gentleman that I talked about on my team that chewed up his hand in the disposal. My wife broke her leg a while back and had to walk through that. There's times in our lives where, uh, we will have a temporary disability.

[00:35:24] I think it could leverage both of those spectrums of situational and temporary, but like having a baby and if you're trying to hold your son or daughter and still do work, you're limited in your movements now. Using accessibility tools can allow you to still do that, but still get work done at the same time.

[00:35:43] Katherine: Thank you for walking through that. And then we also have invisible versus visible disabilities. Could you explain that too?

[00:35:50] Matt: Yeah. Yep. So invisible would be like mine. If you saw me at the, at, I'm going to the football game tonight. If you went to the football game, the only way you would be able to tell that I have something going on is because I use binoculars when I'm sitting in the stands so I can see my son play.

[00:36:04] Um, but if I'm walking around or doing stuff like that you would've no idea. That's from the invisible standpoint. So there's a ton of them, tons of neurodiverse, like there's all sorts, a huge plethora of disabilities that people can have that are completely hidden that no one would know.

[00:36:20] I grew up in Minot, North Dakota, and I used to be on this thing called the Minot Commission on Employment for People with Disabilities.

[00:36:26] And we had a gentleman that was in a wheelchair. In North Dakota it snows up there, so people would shovel the snow and they wouldn't use the standard snow plow on their sidewalk. They would use shovels. So they would shovel out just enough to get their legs through.

[00:36:43] And then you'd have someone in a wheelchair that would get out of the accessible van or the car, whatever they showed up in. They'd get off the ramp and they'd get to the sidewalks and we videotaped a thing to kind of provoke businesses to make sure that they were using the right, uh, snow plows and the right companies to make sure that their paths were accessible for people in wheelchairs.

[00:37:04] Because there were so many times where somebody would show up in a van and they couldn't get to the door of the business because the snow, it was just piled too high and they'd have to go home. Sorry to kind of go off on a tangent there, but that's visible. You can physically see, uh, that they need help. It's just important to, to know both of those spaces. I'm a big believer as well in making everybody feel present. My kids have adapted to it really well, where, uh, if they see somebody with a disability, they'll wa like, you just don't, there's no difference in treatment. Like, you just, we're all human, so you just walk up and say, what's up? Say hi, um, no matter what. You just kinda move through life with that mindset and you don't end up excluding people.

[00:37:47] Katherine: You bring up a really good point though, that there's so much businesses can be thinking about for people with visible or invisible disabilities. I was interviewing a gentleman named James Campbell who was on the podcast. He had a spinal stroke and is now in a wheelchair and he was talking about the same kind of thing, how so many businesses, if they even do have ramps, they're at the back of the building or the angle is incorrect or it's too narrow to actually have a wheelchair on that ramp.

[00:38:18] I would love to know how do we encourage more businesses to be thoughtful in this? Because if you're not educated in it, if you haven't lived the experience, it does seem very arbitrary and you don't wanna offend anyone. And it can be scary to take that first step. So what can businesses do to gain more accessibility awareness?

[00:38:40] Matt: Yeah, so most of the, um, cities that we operate in, there's like a place called vocational rehab. Most cities, most metropolitan areas have a voc rehab facility or a place that's helping people. That's the first place that I would go if I was a business, I would reach out to my local vocational rehab, say, hey, how can my business get plugged in?

[00:38:59] We're looking at opening a new burger joint down the road. It's a brand new build. How can we make sure we're accessible to ADA standards? If I'm not building a new brick and mortar location and I'm moving into the old Walmart, how do I make that accessible?

[00:39:14] Is the front accessible? Are the ramps accessible? A lot of things can be retrofitted. I know a lot of mason concrete workers that have shared inputs on, like, they can move ramps, they can pour new ramps. That's super small easy work to get done and it goes a long way.

[00:39:30] There's a lot of material online too. There's a specific government entity now that basically is looking at all sorts of accessibility from mobility, from vision, from hearing all these different things to make sure that in the United States specifically that we're operating in those places correctly.

[00:39:48] Katherine: You just mentioned in the United States specifically, I know that Microsoft operates globally, so I wanna lean into that and say what momentum are you seeing in other countries around accessibility, if that's something you can speak to?

[00:40:02] Matt: Yeah, yeah. I mean, not necessarily deep into it , but there's a lot of really cool stuff that's happening in Europe where there's companies and local governments that are going, oh we gotta make this website accessible. We gotta make sure our government websites are accessible. We have to make sure, and they're basically leaning into this a hundred percent. And what that is gonna do is it's going to evolve into legislation later on that will equip companies and people to start learning like those processes.

[00:40:38] The more governments and the more countries that lean into this and start building standards to follow and policies to follow, it's gonna start to align people in more of a focused effort of saying, hey, if I build a new business, it's just part of the process of building, just like when we're building a new application, we have to build accessibility into it. When these companies are building a new brick and mortar location, build accessibility into it.

[00:41:01] Make sure you have handicap accessible doors, ramps, everything's there. You have tables inside that are the correct height. I mean, just think about everything cuz there's so many moments where people don't think about stuff and that predicament that you put that person in when they try to receive something accessible and it's not, it's really rough on that person.

[00:41:20] Katherine: Yeah, I believe there's a bunch of other countries doing some work as well so there's a lot of momentum, a lot of things that are happening. I wanna go back to something that we talked about offline, which was your experience in Disney World. Could you share more about that?

[00:41:37] Matt: Yeah, it was back in July. The Foundation Fighting Blindness were on the Microsoft radar, but from an event standpoint, they weren't there. So what I did was I worked with the team from the Foundation Fighting Blindness and the accessibility events team at Microsoft, got everything set up to where they funded my event booth. And then another guy at Microsoft, his name is Phillip, he's got Stargardt's, lives here in Florida as well. I live on the west coast. He lives on the east coast of Florida. He met me up there and we worked the booth together.

[00:42:05] And basically what we did was we set up like a Geek Squad in the exhibitor hall for low vision and blind. And we focused just on Microsoft Tech. Our booth was slammed. It was open three days and every day there was like, there was points where we were taking like groups of like four or five people at once going, hey, I'm gonna talk about X, Y, Z, who wants to hear?

[00:42:30] And they would all kind of crowd in and we'd talk about it. And then you'd move that group outta the way and another group would come in. It was constantly busy. I remember some of the stories where we were taking, Microsoft released the Surface Adaptive Kit.

[00:42:44] I've got one sitting here. I've got one on my laptop keyboard, but it's a whole new mindset around bump dots for low vision. What we did was my own team that I work on, our marketing team that I don't work on, and then another group. All of these product teams started giving me money like a month before July to go buy stuff.

[00:43:04] So I showed up with 50 or 60 surface adaptive kits, 50 or 60 Microsoft mice that were Bluetooth capable, that have buttons that we could program to the magnifier and what we did was, these people coming up, I would explain the tools to them and I'm like, hey, do you have your laptop? And they're like, oh yeah, it's right here.

[00:43:21] And they'd grab it outta their backpack. We'd set it up on our table, I'd take the stickers out and we'd start placing 'em. I'm like, do you like this key? Okay, yeah. Put it on your, cause I have mine on the period key. So I know it's hard for me to see the difference between the comma and the period cuz they're both really tiny.

[00:43:37] I put one on the period, so I know the opposite one is the comma. It just helps me type faster when I'm on my laptop. We were setting up these Surface Adaptive Kits on people's laptops, and then we would program the mouse to it. We would go to the software settings, we'd download the tools.

[00:43:51] We'd basically set all this up for 'em, show 'em how to use it, and multiple people at our booth, they were just crying, going, I've never been able to see my screen sitting back. They were never able to sit back and use assistive technology like Microsoft Magnifier to zoom in. We showed 'em how to use it and what was even cooler is we didn't go there trying to resell these mice or sell the Surface Adaptive Kit. Those product teams that donated all that money for us to buy the kits, gave it to us so that we could give it away.

[00:44:22] After they got themselves back together emotionally, they were just like, this is so cool. How do I get this mouse? How do I get a surface adaptive kit? Can I buy it? Can you link me to it? I'm like, no, you can just take this one. Oh no, I have to pay for it. Like, I can't just take this.

[00:44:35] I'm like, Yeah, you can. You just put, close your laptop, put it back in your bag, and you go to the next booth. And they were just blown away that we were like given out assistive tech and helping them program it and walking them through. We talked about the accessibility reminder add in. I showed it to a bunch of people.

[00:44:52] One gentleman uses Zoom text on his machine, but his machine wasn't powerful enough to support Zoom text. So it would chug and slow it down a little bit. And sometimes Excel and Office, like his whole machine would crash when he was in the middle of a Excel or Word project and he wouldn't have the work save, so he'd have to start back over and it was low vision tools that were crashing the machine. So we had to work through that. He walked up talking to me about this and I said, what do you need from accessibility? Like, what, what do you need? And he goes, I need contrast and I need magnification. And I said, I can do both of those right now with Windows 11.

[00:45:28] So we got 'em on Windows 11. We turned on the new high contrast theme where it's nice and neon perfect, so you could see it. Everything was very good contrast, very, uh, bold colors. Then we turned on the Microsoft Magnifier, program the mouse to his laptop, set up the Surface Adaptive Kit so he could see the buttons, um, set everything up.

[00:45:47] He emailed me a couple weeks after the conference saying, my life is completely different. Stuff's not crashing. I can operate and he goes, the craziest thing is I didn't pay anything for any of this. It was all included already, like the mouse we gave them and the adaptive kit we gave them. But the contrast themes and Magnifier those are windows products that are inside Microsoft Windows.

[00:46:08] It's already in the product and it's free. It's hard to get assistive technology if your local vocational rehab office won't pay for it. You have to do with what you got. And if anybody has Windows, you have narrator, you have Magnifier, you have high contrast, you have tools already available that can get the job done enough to where you can start making some impact.

[00:46:28] Katherine: And if people were struggling to get that set up, is that something they could reach out to you for?

[00:46:34] Matt: A hundred percent. Yep. I put my email address on here. I'm on LinkedIn. Just look me up on LinkedIn. Look me up on Twitter.

[00:46:40] One guy had an interview at a big company and he didn't know how to build a PowerPoint. He goes, I know how to build it, but I don't know how to build it with low vision. I can't see my screen. So what we needed to do was show him all the shortcut keys to add a slide, to add content, to make stuff and we worked together.

[00:46:58] I've got four different people from Microsoft that came together on this phone call, helped him create the PowerPoint. Then he presented that PowerPoint for his interview at this company, ended up getting offered the position, and then after that, then he told the employer about his eyesight so that he could get accommodations.

[00:47:16] But he didn't go into that interview saying it. I met him at that Foundation Fighting Blindness conference. We got to talking about what we could do and it's just those kind of moments that you work through. I mean it, I'm more than happy to jump in, help people get up to speed on technology and be able to collaborate and make impact and do anything they wanna do in their lives with technology.

[00:47:39] Katherine: There are a lot of people with disabilities who end up being unemployed, and I have heard the argument that it's because employers don't provide accommodations or won't hire or won't interview people with disabilities. But in listening to this conversation, I'm also curious how many people just aren't able to interview without disclosing and aren't interested in disclosing or are afraid to disclose.

[00:48:06] But if they knew about the technology you're talking about, might be able to at least get through the interview and then say, hey, this is my disability and these are the accommodations I need. I'm just curious if that's a blocker.

[00:48:18] Matt: I 100% believe that. It's a fixed mindset of saying, I don't wanna disclose this because I'm afraid that they're just gonna stonewall me for the position if they know that they have to invest money in me, right outta the gate with accommodations to buy me JAWs to buy me zoom text, to buy me a mouse of keyboard, a large monitor, like whatever accommodations I need to get the job done.

[00:48:38] One thing at Microsoft, we do inclusive hiring. There's specific roles that they want people to have a disability. They're asking for it in a way that if I have a developer and the developer's blind, I know out of the box, whatever that developer's gonna build is gonna be accessible because they're building it with accessibility in mind to focus on those tools.

[00:49:00] At Microsoft anyway, I don't know about LinkedIn where you're at or like other big corporations out there. I'm sure other corporations are doing the same thing cuz all these big enterprises are trying to move in this direction of being inclusive and I mean, it's, it's amazing.

[00:49:13] And as an employer, you want someone that has to think outta the box. Like, that's your dream employee. Hey, you're presented with this really crappy situation at work. How do you solve it? And if you correlate that to someone with a disability, they do that every single day. So they're a master at crappy situations and finding a solution. From an employment perspective, like you want people with disabilities because they're masters at finding solutions when there is no solutions out there.

[00:49:43] It's like a perfect recipe. If employers change their mindset and start adopting that new look and feel to it, we're gonna have a whole thing change.

[00:49:51] Katherine: And to really facilitate that change, as you mentioned it is employers seeking to be inclusive.

[00:49:57] This October, 2022, we have National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and the theme is equity includes disability. We have all these equity initiatives. You have to include people with disabilities. It's not just about gender and race. And so hopefully employers can wrap that into their inclusion efforts as well.

[00:50:19] Then on the flip side, it's also encouraging people who are advocates or people with disabilities to take more action and get more involved. Some people are already heavily involved, but if you're not, rise up rather than roll over, as you were saying before.

[00:50:34] Matt: Yep.

[00:50:35] Katherine: You have that mantra. Where does that come from?

[00:50:38] Matt: I don't even know if I heard it anywhere. I don't know if it's trademarked already, but if it isn't, I should do it. I've heard that from quite a few people, but it's just a mindset around, you can literally roll over or you can rise up.

[00:50:50] I mean, you get diagnosed. It sucks. I'm right there with you. I've talked to mothers and fathers that have a young grade school child that got diagnosed with Stargardt's. I met some at that Foundation Fighting Blindness conference. We had one night, we had rooms where there was like 40 people in this room.

[00:51:09] They all had Stargardt's. Some were 70 years old and some were 10 years old. It ranged everybody in the room and everybody's mindset, those older folks that have walked with this for a while, were sharing their wisdom and saying, hey, your life's not over. Like you have to adapt. You have to learn, but you can still do the things you want to do.

[00:51:30] We had people at that conference that were Olympians. We had a skateboarder. We had all sorts of people that were shattering the world with disabilities and saying, no, dude, I don't care. I can do this. That rise up mentality of saying, hey, don't let one thing like block you for the rest of your life.

[00:51:47] Cuz there's so many gifts and so many things that people have just born in nature, that they have this gift of speaking or singing or like photographic memories or they're designers, they paint and they make cool things. You see it all the time. People with different abilities that are being able to tap into something.

[00:52:10] Just because they got out of that victim mindset of saying, hey, I got diagnosed. I can't do anything. I'm just gonna shut down. The minute you let that take over, it'll basically just consume you. If you can break out of it and look, find a task, find a goal that you're gonna chase that rise up mentality of just chasing things.

[00:52:28] You're gonna lose on some, but you're gonna succeed on some, and that's what you just gotta roll with. I had a college professor say mistakes are cheaper than college. And that's lived with me forever.

[00:52:37] Katherine: I love that phrase. Mistakes are cheaper than college.

[00:52:40] If someone was diagnosed with Stargardt's, is there a first action step that you would give them or is the action step literally go do something?

[00:52:50] Matt: Um, the first action step, what I would do is plug in to your community because like I said, for years I got diagnosed and had no idea about community, had no idea about support groups, had no id, nothing.

[00:53:04] It was basically me, my family, and us on an island of this new Stargardt's island. And being able to plug into one thing that the Foundation Fighting Blindness is really leaning into lately is not just being, uh, a leader in pharmaceutical trials and clinical trials, but also creating communities around the world and around the country to basically, build community for people to thrive together.

[00:53:32] That's the first step. What I would do is if you recently got diagnosed, find someone, a doctor in your town that does genetic testing. The genetic testing, if you get it done from the Foundation Fighting Blindness, it's free.

[00:53:44] They will hook you up with a thing called the My Retina tracker, which gets you plugged into all the pharmaceutical clinical trials that are happening with your disability, with your with Stargardt's. I get emails that says, hey, X pharmaceutical companies starting a new trial, X day, click here to register.

[00:54:01] But that's the first step. If you're recently diagnosed, plug into your community, go to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, find a local group if it's a big city. If you don't have one, email me on here and I'll help you find one cuz there's chapters all over the United States. So you just basically plug into that and then just start getting around like-minded people that are all walking with that same thing.

[00:54:23] And once you do that, it's like adding gasoline to a campfire. I mean, it's just gonna start roaring because now it's not just you on an island, it's you and another 30 people in this group that are all behind you and ready to kick down doors with you.

[00:54:37] Katherine: It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave with listeners?

[00:54:44] Matt: I guess if I left one thing, it would be if you're recently diagnosed or know someone diagnosed, become an ally for it. Become an accessibility ally. Work on your documents. If you work at a company or a corporation, be a voice, like create like a center of excellence team inside your company and say, hey, I wanna lead the accessibility thing. I don't know how, I don't know what I'm doing, but I want to try it. Um, so just lean in, start to become a voice because once you create that space, you have no idea how many employees in the company actually are not disclosing their disability because they don't want to.

[00:55:20] But once they feel like there's a pocket where they can sit and they can disclose it, that's where things start to pick up steam at Microsoft. It's been over the past five years, it's been just like a hockey stick straight up of innovation and all sorts of stuff because people feel free to talk.

[00:55:38] It's creating this culture to just drive people to create awesome things. So that'd be my advice is just to, if you're not directly impacted, become an ally and, uh, and reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

[00:55:52] Katherine: Yeah, and I hope people can be courageous in that manner. I think we spoke a little bit to how you've been courageous in your own journey. LinkedIn just released new position titles on LinkedIn. So if you're searching for jobs there, there are titles that are related to accessibility. If you have a company, start using those titles and open up positions for people to come in and advocate for accessibility, lead accessibility within your own company.

[00:56:19] I think that's something that everybody needs is someone who is the POC for accessibility at that company. I'm excited to see the growth as we move forward. And obviously people can reach out to you. We'll include your email in the show notes. They can find you on LinkedIn. Is there anywhere else that they can find you?

[00:56:37] Matt: Twitter, email, LinkedIn are the best spots. Um, I'm also on Discord. If anybody uses Discord there's a place, if you're a Windows admin, there's a place called Win Admins, um, that's on there as well. I monitor the accessibility channel. So if you're in a company and you're supporting accessibility, that accessibility channel in that Win Admins Discord server, that's all we do is talk about accessibility. If I can jump in and help you get your organization to kick the tires on stuff reach out.

[00:57:05] Katherine: So many resources. Matt, this has been so rich. Now there's no excuse not to because you've outlined everything. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me and to everyone who's been listening, thank you for joining us on the Opportunity Made Podcast.

[00:57:21] It's always such a pleasure to gather with good friends and share new ways that we can create opportunities for others in the world. So please reach out to Matt. Please reach out to myself. Just by you being part of our audience tells me that you are someone who likes to create new opportunities. So if you have a story to share or know of someone who was once stuck in an area of life and has now moved on to something incredible, please reach out on social media @OpportunityMade or at www.opportunitymade.com.

[00:57:56] You can find us on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and tell me your story there. Thank you so much, Matt.

[00:58:05] Matt: You bet. Thank you for having me. Have a great day, everybody.

[00:58:08] Katherine: Serve widely, give greatly and take care of y'all.

[00:58:12]