Alan-Emtage-I-Share-Hope

Alan Emtage

Website

Facebook

Twitter

Mediapolis

“We are living in the century of change, but if future generations don’t remember us more with gratitude than the sorrow, we must achieve more than just a miracle with technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it and not just as it looked when we got through with it. I’m Allan Emtage, this is my favorite quote about hope. Hope is real and I Share Hope.” –Alan Emtage

Alan Emtage oversees programming and content management at Mediapolis. Before joining the company Emtage co-founded Bunyip Information Systems, Inc., where he created the Archie system, the Internet’s first search engine. Alan has chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs, URNs and URCs), as well as sitting on advisory boards for the National Science Foundation and other agencies.

Emtage lectures and speaks at conferences around the world on such topics as Internet information systems and the impact of the Internet on society. He is often called upon by the press for his technological expertise including interviews in the Wall Street Journal and the highly praised PBS series Life on the Internet. Emtage, a native of Barbados, holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from McGill University.



50 Alan Emtage – Searching for hope with the creator of the first internet search engine – #isharehope

“We are living in the century of change, but if future generations don’t remember us more with gratitude than the sorrow, we must achieve more than just a miracle with technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it and not just as it looked when we got through with it. I’m Allan Emtage, this is my favorite quote about hope. Hope is real and I Share Hope.” –Alan Emtage

Intro:

Welcome to I Share Hope! The podcast where world leaders share their real stories of hope and how you can use actionable hope to start changing your life today and now here’s your host, Chris Williams.

Chris Williams:

All right man, you know how this works. We ask 1000 people around the globe these five questions about hope and you’re from Barbados. Are you there now? Where are you at now?

Alan Emtage:

I am currently in Provincetown in Cape Cod.

Chris Williams:

Oh nice. It’s a beautiful place.

Alan Emtage:

Yes. I spend six months of the year here and six months in Barbados.

Chris Williams:

That’s great. So, questions, how these work, we’re looking to really just broadly reach a global market with the concept of hope and how to use hope and how to impact people’s lives in every sector. So, you’re obviously way deep into the technology world and somebody that has the roots that go way back there so I really, really do appreciate you taking the time and answering these for us.

Anybody who is searching for this from your vantage point or someone from Barbados or someone from the technology world, there are so many things that you’re going to have that really reach a certain population. If you think of it as every 8 million people on the planet would get one representative on the survey – that’s kind of how the math works out. So, you are the one for the 8 million IT people out there. How about that?

Alan Emtage:

I don’t know about that, but you should interview Elon Musk if you really want to do that.

Chris Williams:

I’ll definitely give it a try. Don’t worry. All right question one and you go wherever you w ant to on these answers and I appreciate, again, just any input you have. We have a lot to learn.

Question 1: What is your favorite quote about hope or your definition of hope?

Alan Emtage:

Well actually when I saw this, I was really wondering what I would use for that and then I realized that I have one that I use all the time because it’s the signature – people don’t tend to do this much anymore. It’s an old habit of mine, it’s to put a signature on the bottom of emails and it’s just a standard template that goes on the bottom of every email that I have. I thought, this is the one that resonates. Initially, it doesn’t necessarily sound like hope, but I’ll explain. The quote is actually from Lyndon B. Johnson and I first saw it on a visit to Bryce National Park which is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in the United States. It’s just spectacular and an inspiration to hope because it’s just so beautiful. I believe I saw it first on a plaque there and I thought it was from there, but I did a little research after Google, of course, and came up with the fact that it was actually first said when President Johnson, September 21st 1965 and he was opening the Assateague Island Seashore National Park. The quote is:

“We are living in the century of change, but if future generations don’t remember us more with gratitude than with sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it and not just as it looked when we got through with it.”

That really resonates with me even though I’m an atheist. There are other versions of the quote that says “the glimpse of the world as it was created”, but so on. For me that is a call for hope. It’s a call to say we don’t have to trash everything around us. We can live in a more hopeful way. We can live in a way that preserves both the technology – keep our technology developing and yet preserve the environment and this amazing world that we live in. It is a call to hope that we can achieve that. It may be not in itself a hopeful statement, but I think it’s a call for hope.

Chris Williams:

I think that’s a great definition and a great call for hope. It doesn’t have to be a definition, but a focus and a target to hope. Great idea. Great quote.

Question 2: Who has shared the most hope with you? If that’s where you’re going with hope, who’s been that giver of hope for you?

Alan Emtage:

I think the person that probably inspired me most for hope was somebody who I knew since I was born. She passed away several years ago, which is my mother’s aunt. My mother’s mother died when she was six years old and she had three sisters. My mother had three sisters at the time and they were left motherless. Her father’s sisters basically took over helping raise the four kids. They were very intelligent women, they were very powerful women and they had this – I don’t think anybody planned this, but each one of them took one of the kids as their primary focus. They were a bunch of mothers basically, you know, surrogate mothers and each one had their own mother. The one that my mother had, her name was Constance, we called her Auntie Connie and she was a teacher, a head mistress, a principal. Head mistress in the British way of saying. She was the person that would wake me up at 5:00 in the morning to see the comets. She was the person that would sit down and listen with me as we listen to science programs on BBC World or take me to the fish market and point out things about the fish. We actually had a turtle, a sea turtle, a pet sea turtle believe it or not.

Chris Williams:

That is so not fair man. We’re stuck with like box turtles and mud sliders.

Alan Emtage:

Yes. We had a sea turtle, but my mother’s sister discovered it when it hatched. They caught this baby sea turtle and they raised it. It was that kind of environment which was very much about education in a fun way, but also looking with a very positive stand on life. The world was out there full of amazing wonders and you should try to see these things and experience these things and it really colored my view of – I love traveling, I’ve traveled since I was a kid. I just came back from a 12-country tour which was amazing. It has really colored how I approached the world because everything…I call myself a new experience junkie and that’s pretty much what I am. I’ll pretty much try anything, almost anything.

She was probably the most hopeful person that influenced me in my life.

Chris Williams:

Good answer. Sounds like a great family. It’s really cool the way they structured all that and got around you all as kids. Wow. All right, so question three then. You know, you’ve done a lot, you’ve been successful, you know a lot of people and been a lot of places.

Question 3: Where do you say, you know, there was a time back there where I needed hope or had to use hope in a very practical way because maybe life hasn’t always been as nice as it looks for you now. Kind of take us back and paint the picture. What’s going on back there?

Alan Emtage:

I think the point where hope was most needed in my life was when I was a teenager. When I was probably 13, 14, 15, 16 – something like that and living in Barbados which is a small, conservative, not radically so, but a small town, you know, 280,000 people and relatively small and coming to terms with the fact that I was there and coming to terms with the fact that this was not something that was acceptable in the context that we’re talking 30 years ago of the society not being able to express that. It’s very isolating. There’s not a lot of people you can talk to about it. I finally did when I was about 17, I came out to first, my cousin, and she was fantastic and she was very, very supportive and so on. I think that was probably the point which – and I think it’s true for a lot of gay teenagers even now, even 30 years later particularly in non-western countries and particularly if you’re in Russia these days or if you’re in the Middle East or if you’re in Africa. It’s not just a matter of being lonely. It’s a matter of, in some cases, life or death and in some cases you literally have your life at risk if people discover that you’re gay.

So, I’m very much – although I never made one of the videos, I’m very much a believer in the It Gets Better Campaign that they ran a few years ago. At least as it applies to the west, you know? I wish it were more hopeful in other parts of the world and hopefully things will get better. In a lot of those places, it can get a lot worse. If you’re a young gay man or woman in Uganda, life’s rough. In Russia, I have friends in Russia and it’s rough. I think these kids, I do wish hope for them, that they can see hope, that they can see a future because even now the rates of suicide of teenage, young, gay people is still several times larger than their straight years. That would be a thing. It hasn’t finished. What I went through, people are still going through and a lot worse.

Chris Williams:

Yes they are and that’s really sad discrimination. So, growing up then 30 years ago, the world was a different place on those issues, so different. You’re right, it still is in a lot of places in the world. Your cousin accepted you, did your family, mom, dad, grandparents and schoolmates, wow, lots at stake there, you know?

Alan Emtage:

I made it a point to leave Barbados to go to college, to go to the university because I wanted to lose myself in a larger environment where not everybody knew who you were and you weren’t just basically the representative of your mother and father, you know, the small version of your mother and father. I ended up in McGill University in Montreal and McGill literally physically sits at the center of the city and it has a huge campus in the middle of the city. It’s a large cosmopolitan, French-speaking, bilingual city and I’ve encountered friends. The first two people that I met in class are still two of my best friends from 30 years ago. One of them of was just visiting me here in Provincetown and it allowed me to be myself and it gave me the strength to be able to go back home and give the news to my parents. I told my sister before that, she was fine. My father, when I first came out my father said to me “You are my son and I love you and if this is what makes you happy, have a good time…” remember this was also in the middle of the AIDS crisis, this was 1985 so their big concern was that I would take care of myself because that was the height of the hysteria.

I think it was tough for them from that point of view. I’m just coming to terms with that, you know, parents have a vision of what they expect you – what your life is going to be like and going to your wedding and the grandchildren. I was kind of “stop” which nowadays doesn’t seem that big a deal because many people can get married and have kids and so on and so forth. But again, 30 years ago, this is not a vision, this is not a path that most people envision. But you know, my family is fantastic. There was never any question of rejection. You only see that as the child in hindsight. You always imagine what the worst possible scenario can be and try to prepare for that rather than the best scenario – from that point of view I tend be a bit of a realist rather than an optimist, but yes…

Chris Williams:

I understand. Great story. With the background you have, got a great definition of hope and a great quote towards hope, an aunt who just invested so well in you and a story that you’ve lived through and come out more hopeful –

Question 4: How are you sharing hope today? What are you doing around your world?

Alan Emtage:

Well, one of the things I do every day and this is kind of a mixed bag because it’s not all going to be hopeful, but I think most of it is hopeful. It’s that I tend to use Facebook as a blog. I publish anywhere between 10 and 15 stories that I discover on the web and it can be anything. It can be politics, it can be religion, it can be science – there’s a lot of science stuff, computer stuff, pretty much anything, anything that catches my interest. So I have probably, I don’t know, I don’t know what the totals are, probably about 2000 people I guess that between friends and followers and people on Twitter and that kind stuff because I echo the same stuff that I post on Facebook onto Twitter. Sort of daily, it can be some video with a kitty cat doing something stupid and it could be serious stuff as well.

I’ve just started to wrap up, queue up the stuff for tomorrow and one of the things is going to be on torture, but it’s actually a hopeful story on torture. Today, the United States Senate passed an amendment, 78-21, which bans torture – which is amazing. It shouldn’t need to be done, but the fact that the 78 senators that are willing – in an environment of fear that we have been living in now for 15 years, that they stand up there and clearly strong criticism of the 21 that voted against it.

In a nutshell, I try to explore the world around us. A lot of it is about – I have certain things that I keep coming back to. The robot revolution is one of the ones that I talk about all the time. The massive change in automation that are happening right now and a lot of people don’t realize just how fundamentally changed our society is going to be by these technology developments and people have a very bad track record of foreseeing what and how rapidly technology increases. We are on an upward curve and it’s an exponential curve and we keep trying to extrapolate from our history what the future is going to be like and you can’t do that when things are increasing exponentially. We really have no idea with the changes that are about to hit us. I’m not talking 20 or 30 years, I’m talking 5 years, I’m talking 3 years. This stuff is going to radically shift, reconfigure all of society in ways that we have barely the inklings of what was the matter.

I think it’s going to be a rough transition. I think the potential for it being really good on the other side is high, I hope, but I think we’re in for a lot of disruption. That will be what people make of it – some people will do well, some people will not, but I think it’s going to be nothing compared to what our grandparents…Think of the changes that our grandparents saw, you know, World War II then the moon shot and then computers, television, the Concorde, all of this kind of stuff. When you think what comes next makes that pale in comparison. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

Chris Williams:

It’s exciting. It’s also a little scary, but all together, yes…That’s a great, well-thought through and simple way to share hope. I haven’t heard anybody say it the way you said it. You just gave a Facebook example of being intentional about what you’re searching for, what you’re engaged in, where your interests are personally and then sharing those things to help people look forward and be involved in issues and be involved in what’s coming or what they can do. It doesn’t take long to find something that’s forward thinking and getting people motivated the right way and just share it on social media.

A lot of people think, oh I have to go out and volunteer 10 hours a week or give this, but there are simple ways to share. That’s a great idea.

Alan Emtage:

Absolutely. The amazing thing is, I have a core group of probably 10 or 15 people who daily respond to the things that I post and I encourage discussion. All of my posts are public, so anybody can follow me on Facebook.

Chris Williams:

So Facebook and Twitter handles, let me have them. What are they?

Alan Emtage:

Facebook is Alan.Emtage and Twitter is AlanEmtage (one word).

Chris Williams:

Okay so it’s Alan.Emtage for Facebook and @AlanEmtage for Twitter.

Question 5: Simple ways that I can begin sharing hope today? So, I’m not well-known, I didn’t create a search engine that helped billions of people, I haven’t done some of those things but for me and the other listeners in 40+ countries now, how can we start sharing hope or grow in hope today?

Alan Emtage:

One of the very interesting piece of research that has come out over the last couple of years and had been replicated is that emotions spread through social network that people you don’t even know, right , because you don’t know them directly – they’re friends of friends. This is a third level, you know, up to three people away. They can affect your mood. We’re social animals. At the end of the day, I keep telling people, we’re all chimpanzees. We’re social animals, our entire psyche is built around socialization and living in groups and cooperating and all that kind of stuff. What they’ve found is good moods and bad moods both transmit through social networks. You can choose to be – I’m not saying that people who are depressed or anxious or whatever choose to be that way – that is not what I’m saying. I’m saying that you can if you are in a good enough place, if you create an inner emotional light. If you are lucky enough to make that a positive emotional experience, that affects not only the people that are directly around you, but their friends and their friends as well.

Realize that you have a much stronger influence particularly if you are a leader, particularly if you are one of those people who has the group of friends who is the one that organizes people and get the dinners together or organizes the vacations. If you are one of those people, your personal mood transmits through your entire social network. It doesn’t mean that you have to join a volunteer group, I mean great, if you want to go help puppies, go help puppies. I think puppies are wonderful, but if you can do it on a personal level and affect – if you have 15 friends and each one of them has 15 friends and each one of them have 15 friends, you’re pretty soon talking about a couple hundred of people.

You can do that. You can be the center of hope, optimism, of positive thinking. I’m not telling you to run around with flowers in your hair and sing Kumbaya all the time. I’m just saying try, where possible, to take the positive side of things. It’s very easy to fall into the negative side of it.

Chris Williams:

You’re right. It is easy to fall into it. Great point, we’re really impacting three generations of conversation in your social network. If it’s your gossip circle at work or in your neighborhood or at school or if it’s your social network on Twitter, it goes three conversations past you. You’re right.

Alan Emtage:

The internet social networks can amplify that a thousand fold. You can take – I don’t know if you saw it, but there was this silly series of pictures, I went around with this husky the other day where the owner, the woman pretended to fill the bowl and the sequence and the husky – I mean I burst out laughing. I posted it when I first saw it and I think it’s been shared 50 times.

Chris Williams:

It’s huge.

Alan Emtage:

It’s huge and everybody has seen this now and it brings a smile to your face. All it is, is four little pictures of a dog. We’re of course projecting on that dog our own emotional thing, but it’s hysterical, right?

Chris Williams:

Yes.

Alan Emtage:

If you can bring a smile to somebody’s face even in the smallest way like that, you’ve done something good. That’s not bad.

Chris Williams:

That’s a great point. All right, so man, good advice, simple, simple advice and a great story for so many people around the globe who are growing up in a place or in a way that may not be quite the norm that the rest of their culture might think it should be. You’ve given a great example of how to live through that and how to make it something hopeful. I love your quote. I just wish I could meet your aunt and tell her thank you for sharing hope with you, so you share hope with us.

So you’ve got so much going on in Facebook and Twitter, your website and all the things you’re doing. So again, Facebook is Alan.Emtage and Twitter is @AlanEmtage and website – give me some more professional places where we can go.

Alan Emtage:

Website, I’ve been bad, I haven’t updated it recently.

Chris Williams:

Of all people who should have an up-to-date website, right?

Alan Emtage:

What is it? The –

Chris Williams:

The cobbler’s kids have no shoes?

Alan Emtage:

Yes. I am alanemtage.com. It is a collection of my photographs. I do a lot of landscape photography, so you can go on there and see a bunch of my photographs.

Chris Williams:

Would you email me a collection of maybe your top three, five, 10 or whatever because I’d love to have a little slide show on the show notes at isharehope.com. Your show notes and all this will be there. I’ll have all the links to Alan’s info and maybe even a little slide show that can show off some of that talent.

Alan Emtage:

I’ll tell you what, there’s a Facebook album that’s open. At one point I was doing photo of the day thing and they have a lot of the…It depends on what quality you need them at, but that will be a great start. You can pick them up and put that right there.

Chris Williams:

That’s really great. Well, it’s been great. I can’t thank you enough, Alan Emtage, wonderful conversation. Keep doing what you’re doing and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Alan Emtage:

Cool. No problem. Where are you Chris?

Chris Williams:

Memphis, Tennessee right now.

Alan Emtage:

Okay. Is that where you live?

Chris Williams:

Yes. I live here and kind of business is based here. A couple of entrepreneurial ventures that we started and that gives me enough freedom and time to catch up with people like you and actually get to be the lucky guy who gets to talk.

Alan Emtage:

You don’t sound like you’re from there.

Chris Williams:

I know. Everybody tells me that. My family was born and raised in Florida, so I think I got that kind of snowbird-ish mix in there. All right my friend, enjoy your afternoon. Thank you.

Alan Emtage:

Thank you. Take care Chris.

Chris Williams:

Bye.

Alan Emtage:

Bye.

You’ve just listened to I Share Hope. If you’re ready to make a change, head to our website at isharehope.com and claim your free copy of the Top Ten Actions of Hope from World Leaders to use hope in your own life. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.

Alan Emtage:

Can you tell me something? What’s the background on this? What’s the source of it?

Chris Williams:

Here’s how this works, so I was just recovering from an abusive past, abusive dad and going through counselling, finding myself suicidal about 10 years ago and has struggled with that since I was an early teen. I had no idea what was causing me to just not be able to function at work and family is starting to melt down and all the stuff going on, my wife finally convinced me to go to counselling. Within like 5 minutes of just starting at the beginning and “tell me your story” like a counsellor would say, the guy is like, okay stop right there.

Not that everything is about your past and you can’t blame everything on somebody who hurt you in the past, but it set me on a journey of regaining my heart and the hardest part of that for me has not been breaking cycles of addiction or trying to work through Tennessee toward suicide or whatever. The hardest part has been regaining hope and just finding a reason that it actually matters. And so, that has been the hardest thing long-term. For me it was a journey of finding people I could reference and say, now that person’s come through something tough so I probably can too. Then, as I started collecting these stories, people started saying you need to share these with somebody else. Long story short, it turned into actually recording them and then pushing them out via podcast. It’s as simple as that. This is as complicated as it gets.

Alan Emtage:

Okay, cool.

Chris Williams:

Really simple, but people like you have been so gracious to share your time and hope with me and now just thousands of others. I’m amazed that people are out there needing hope like I am. I thought I was the only one for a while there.

Most people that are on this thing reference some sort of religious belief, meaning a faith in God of some sort. Not many people come it from an atheistic standpoint. I think that’s really fascinating. So as an atheist, you have hope and a lot of people with a religious background, no matter what religion they come from say an atheist can’t have hope. Just explain that. You really do have hope.

Alan Emtage:

Oh my god. For me those things aren’t connected at all. I mean I find religion fascinating, but I’m not a believer. For me, I look at the universe with wonder. I look at the universe with awe and there is nothing more awe inspiring for me than to lie on my back on a warm summer’s night and to look into a dark sky and think that every one of those things, that point of light is a star with maybe planets and other beings. As far as the eye can see, as far as we can see back, the billions and trillions of galaxies and stars and it just amazes me and fills me with wonder.

Wonder is a form of hope. I mean wonder is – if you can be awed by that kind of stuff, you are looking at there saying, good Lord, what can I find? What an amazing things. The earth alone is an amazing thing. Do you imagine what a thousand of them would be?

Chris Williams:

Yes. Awesome. That’s great. Okay then, you’ve got Barbados. Wow really? You’re from vacation land? Did you grow up surfing or did you grow up in a regular house?

Alan Emtage:

No. I spent a lot of time – well a lot of my buddies surf. I preferred boogie boarding than long boards. So, I did, yes, but I just sleep on the beach and get up early in the morning and go on in the water when the surf is up and that kind of stuff. Yes, I did all that stuff. It’s a wonderful place to grow up. It’s safe and it had a great education system and everybody knows everybody else. It’s a wonderful place to grow up and if I had kids, I’d want them to grow up there as well. I had a particular set of circumstances that made it isolating for me, but for a lot of people that’s not the case.

Chris Williams:

Robots, so great comments there. I’m fascinated by that direction as well. Coolest concept or idea you see out there on the future. If you just say, wow, that’s something fun, what’s out there?

Alan Emtage:

There’s so many things. The thing that really gets me going and even though it’s been superseded subsequently, but I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of IBM for Watson. Watson was the thing that won Jeopardy.

Chris Williams:

The Jeopardy thing, yes.

Alan Emtage:

They’re now applying it to all kinds of fields and medicine and that kind of stuff. The idea that you could have a computer program that is “smart enough” that you could feed it all the information that you ever knew about a disease and that in the future, it’s not quite there yet, but in the future it can then sit down and really go through 2000 medical papers and tell you what the best…Invent new treatments and invent cures for diseases and invent in a way that no one human being ever could because we could never absorb that amount of information. That kind of artificial intelligence is just all inspiring.

Chris Williams:

It is. That’s a great point. Twelve country tour, what was your favorite spot? Just pick one. It’s hard to do. The world’s an amazing place.

Alan Emtage:

It’s got to be Barcelona. It’s got to be Barcelona. It was an amazing trip in its whole through in its own right. It’s all documented on Facebook. Barcelona, oh it’s just – it’s the perfect city as far as I’m concerned. Perfect. It’s everything that I would want in a place to live – this place has it. The food, the people, the art, the architecture.

Chris Williams:

You know, Adriano Dos Santos was a guest on the program a couple of months ago. He’s a professional boxer, one of the best in Brazil. Anyway, he’s travelled all over the world and almost over 40 countries I think and he mentioned Barcelona as one of his top three.

Alan Emtage:

I think I went to about 80 countries yet, but I’m there.

Chris Williams:

Wow that’s awesome.

Alan Emtage:

Actually this trip may have brought me to 80. I haven’t gone back in computers.

Chris Williams:

That’s a good-looking passport right there. If you just need to pop something in your ear buds and get your brain and gear and have some fun, what are you going to listen to? Favorite track, favorite album, what you got?

Alan Emtage:

There’s a song from last year. Oh god there’s so many of these. There’s a song from last year that really always puts a smile on my face. It’s called No Place I’d Rather Be. I don’t know if you remember that one.

Chris Williams:

No Place I’d Rather Be.

Alan Emtage:

Yes. It’s featuring a particular singer, so let me get it right. It’s a song by Clean Bandit and the artist is Jess Glynne, the featured singer. It’s on YouTube and it’s called No Place I’d Rather Be. It talks about this woman talking about the fact that there’s no place she’d rather be. No matter where she is, she is with her partner. There’s no other place she’d rather be and there’s something just happy and joyful about the song.