[Music]
[Music]
when I was seven years old I was told
that I was going blind and that’s
because I failed the kindergarten eye
chart which basically started this
year-and-a-half hunt to figure out what
the hell had happened to my eyesight and
I ended up in a doctor’s office with my
mom who’s sitting somewhere here and
we’re sitting there with the doctor the
doctor walks in and says that I have a
condition called Stargardt’s disease
Stargardt’s disease is a juvenile form
of macular degeneration where you lose
your center vision over time but you
keep your peripheral vision a little bit
like the way we would see this
Ted logo right here and the doctor
looked at my mother looked at me and
said sons gonna lose his eyesight take
him home teach him Braille and give him
a magnifier and five years later I had
the exact same conversation with the
same doctor but you know it actually
wasn’t such a sad day because my parents
grabbed me they say enough of this let’s
go have some fun we went got a bunch of
ice cream went to the video store rented
homeward bound great classic movie I
remember thinking I wanted to actually
lose my eyes at every single day it was
one of the best days we ever had our
actual experience was slightly different
I got Air Bud two golden receiver
fantastic film but our parents actually
sat us down and they told us a piece of
advice at that time they said maybe
you’re not gonna have the best eyes but
you were given more brains instead and
to this day I don’t think that’s true
but it is a fantastic lie to tell to a
little kid
but what we all – but actually a few
months ago I got to ask my parents again
what they meant by that cuz we’ve grown
up with that those words in our head and
what they told me was amazing they told
us that visual impairment never was
going to be an excuse in our lives and
that it was never going to dictate our
lives so when I was in my first day of
first grade I’m standing at the
chalkboard about two feet away because I
promised my mother that morning that if
I couldn’t see something on the board I
would get up out of my seat and go to
the board to see it and I remember doing
that and then turning around and feeling
all the eyes of the class on me and
thinking maybe for the first time you
know I was a little bit different and I
sat down at my desk and really dreaded
having to go do that again and I
remember thinking that that promise that
I made my mother wasn’t exactly so
simple that day at lunch you know kids
would come up and they would say can you
see and I would defensively say yes and
then there’s this one little jerk this
guy Mike Mike White that came up to me
and he said well if you can see how many
fingers am i holding up and I actually
couldn’t see it and I remember thinking
at that moment something was wrong as an
aside after living with this question my
entire life for some reason everybody
always holds up two fingers so it’s
actually a pretty easy question to
answer and for the next eight years this
happened we were two feet from a
chalkboard and two inches from a
textbook but on my first day of high
school I didn’t want to be the blind kid
anymore so I sat at the very back of the
room and on that day my teacher dr.
folow tells me that calls on me Brian
can you please do this problem and mind
you I’ve been visually impaired for
years now so I developed an entire skill
set on how to trick my
teachers into telling me what was on the
board so I could appear sighted to
everyone else in the room
well my first strategy always ambiguity
what problem exactly dr. Fulham and that
didn’t work so I went with what numbers
exactly are we talking about up there
lots going on and so he looks at me and
just says these not a problem I’ve been
through this before and the second
strategy was play dumb because at that
time for me being blind was worse than
being dumb
so I’m sorry dr. folow I just don’t know
how to do it
and he looks back at me and says why
it’s simple division and then my third
strategy which I didn’t really get a
chance to use it works better when
you’re reading in a circle you wait till
it gets to about three kids from you and
then you kindly excuse yourself to the
bathroom but that day none of my
strategies worked and as my head fell
slowly to the desk I did admit to dr.
folow I’d admit to my class and I admit
to myself that I couldn’t do the problem
because I couldn’t see it and that my
strategy of hiding and avoidance was
only creating shame around my visual
impairment and then I realized that
nothing could feel worse than that
moment so we had to adopt a brand new
strategy we had to embrace visual
impairment and do what my parents told
me thank god you’re over there and that
we were never going to let it dictate
our lives and so when I was 16
that meant Brian and I stealing our
parents car and the
at least that’s what I’m claiming was
the reason that we were sitting at home
in the summer of 2002 and my parents
were gone we had the car we had the keys
we had enough vision to see the road not
enough vision to see everything on it so
I got into the driver’s seat and I put
Brian in the passenger seat and gave him
a pair of binoculars but and there was a
pool about five miles away that we
wanted to go to we drove very nervously
that five miles and we did make it to
the pool and it’s funny because I don’t
really remember why I was so important
to go to the pool that day and I
actually don’t even really remember the
ride back which I’m sure was just as
treacherous but what did kind of stand
out to me is that for the first time we
I was on my schedule in a way that I had
never expected to be that I had an
independence to something that was sort
of completely ruled out for me as small
as it was and it kind of suggested to me
at that time that some rules could be
bent and other rules could be broken and
Brad doesn’t get enough credit here I
had my eyes closed the entire time of
all him but we didn’t kill ourselves in
any car accidents so we got into college
and when I got to university of virginia
like many students I signed up for
Spanish as my language credit and I was
terrible at it just awful like no bueno
idea at all and so like any diligent
college student I buckled down and
petitioned the University of Virginia to
allow Braille as the language instead of
Spanish I’d been taking it since I was
like seven years old so next thing I
know I’m sitting in front of a panel of
three Dean’s arguing the efficacies of
visual impairment verse hearing
impairment as it relates to Braille and
American Sign Language I was a bit in
over my head and ultimately turns out
that Braille is considered a
not a language and they said please go
back to Spanish class adios
that’s a free one buy it in that moment
all I was really trying to do was just
leverage my strength which was from
visual impairment learning Braille and
so when I finally got into the working
world I want I tried to do the same
thing so what am i best at and it was
strangers because with our vision we
can’t recognize who anybody is so if we
treat them like friends until we can
figure that out but it can be a rough
five minutes but what happened was I
thought well sales is making strangers
friends and it was shocking to me
because when I started working people
were so afraid to go up to somebody or
make a call but for me it was the same
thing as just going to the office that
morning everybody was just a stranger
until I got to chat with them and I
started to realize that maybe visual
impairment was giving me a couple more
gifts than I’d ever given it credit for
and while Brian was using his golden
sails mouth I was working in business
development for an investment company
boring and it actually was really boring
but what we were doing we were both in
New York and we’re hanging out one day
and we get very very excited about this
kid his name is yannick du way and the
reason we were so fascinated with him is
he was actually born nearly blind grew
up reading Braille and now his eyesight
is restored and the reason for that is
because of a brand new gene therapy that
is going to be approved for his
condition he was an early patient this
coming January and when we looked into
it we realized that this cure actually
started with a small charitable gift to
a researcher that gave that project a
chance to succeed and when you looked a
little further you realize with all the
medical advancements going on there are
actually hundreds of researchers in the
same situation
of them could use that one charitable
gift to give their life-changing project
that exact same chance so one day Brad
and I are walking around New York and we
stop into Bloomingdale’s to do a little
bit of shopping and I don’t know if
you’re any of you are aware of this but
when you’re visually impaired in you go
shopping it is an absolute nightmare you
can’t see sizes you can’t see labels you
can’t see prices colors are a huge issue
so we take the five-year-old approach we
just run around and run it always does
that it’s not necessary for the talk but
shirt not you shirt not you so and what
we do is when we ultimately come across
something we like under our hand we then
do all the investigation to figure out
exactly what it is so 45 minutes later
Brad and I both walk out and as we are
pulling out what we purchased we’ve
realized we got the exact same shirt and
we laughed about that for a minute cause
it was hilarious by what we’ve booked
then we realized it was because we’d
actually both loved the touch in the
feel of it and then like a light bulb in
a cartoon we realized this could be our
way to give back
we could make amazing clothing and then
donate 100% of the profits back to those
researchers who just needed a chance to
cure blindness
we’ll take it later that feels good so
that’s when we started our clothing
project two blind brothers and we really
wanted to start it with all those grand
lofty ideals that we had we were going
to give back to the research we were
going to be out in front of vision
impairment bringing awareness to the
cause we were gonna create clothing that
reflected the values that we cared about
the problem was when we started that
nobody else cared about it at all so we
we made about a thousand shirts and
spent the first month just begging good
friends to buy them this is actually a
lot harder than you would think but we
but we at that same time we made a video
video on our story and our mission and
we put it out on Facebook and that night
when we put it out we went to bed and we
woke up and there were all these
notifications on our phone wake up the
next morning and I checked the first
notification it was from a co-worker of
mine it’s a text message and it just
read dude just saw you on the Internet
Wow
which actually terrified me because I
didn’t know what he was talking about
some inappropriate photos somewhere but
just haven’t found it yet they they’re
still looking but our video had started
the spread and a few million view views
on that video later people were buying
the shirts people were talking about the
cause and we were starting to get this
awareness around that time we actually
found a group called the Dallas
lighthouse for the blind we contracted
with them to set up manufacturing so
that our clothes would be made by the
blind and the visually impaired
so we were rocking and rolling and then
we started to get some interesting media
inquiries that started help spread
awareness about the cause let us get out
there talk about the mission and then on
January 4th of this year we had the
sincere pleasure to sit down with this
woman Ellen DeGeneres
and let me tell you that was one of the
single greatest days of a younger
brother’s life years of torment I get to
make fun of him on national television
are you kidding me
but that was an incredible day but we
actually started to receive messages
like these and we had the good fortune
of actually getting on the phone with
this mother and daughter and we realized
that we had the opportunity that we all
dream of to go back in time and tell a
younger version of ourself a little
piece of advice and this girl wanted to
quit playing soccer because she wasn’t
that she couldn’t see the ball she had
actually made the team she was just
really am scared that she would
embarrass herself in front of all of her
friends and pride and I spent about 45
minutes just telling all the times that
we’d embarrassed ourselves and just had
a fantastic time just laughing with them
in two weeks later we actually got
another message from the same woman that
her daughter had started playing soccer
again and in that moment we realized
that not only were we gonna be able to
make shirts and give money to charity
but we were actually going to get to
join people on their success journeys
through visual impairment so that’s our
story and when we think back to 25 years
ago when we’re in that doctor’s office
it’s essentially the roughest news you
think you could get but the big ire and
the irony is that vision impairment has
actually given more to us than it’s
taken away it’s forced us to learn real
skills how to deal with strangers how to
take on social pressure stand up in
front of people it’s taught us mindsets
like how to think creatively about a
problem how to just be a little bit more
resilient to rejection it’s given us the
gift of this project and everything that
comes with it the community that
research the excitement the families
your greatest challenge is your greatest
gift we wouldn’t be standing here
without ours thank you thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
when I was seven years old I was told
that I was going blind and that’s
because I failed the kindergarten eye
chart which basically started this
year-and-a-half hunt to figure out what
the hell had happened to my eyesight and
I ended up in a doctor’s office with my
mom who’s sitting somewhere here and
we’re sitting there with the doctor the
doctor walks in and says that I have a
condition called Stargardt’s disease
Stargardt’s disease is a juvenile form
of macular degeneration where you lose
your center vision over time but you
keep your peripheral vision a little bit
like the way we would see this
Ted logo right here and the doctor
looked at my mother looked at me and
said sons gonna lose his eyesight take
him home teach him Braille and give him
a magnifier and five years later I had
the exact same conversation with the
same doctor but you know it actually
wasn’t such a sad day because my parents
grabbed me they say enough of this let’s
go have some fun we went got a bunch of
ice cream went to the video store rented
homeward bound great classic movie I
remember thinking I wanted to actually
lose my eyes at every single day it was
one of the best days we ever had our
actual experience was slightly different
I got Air Bud two golden receiver
fantastic film but our parents actually
sat us down and they told us a piece of
advice at that time they said maybe
you’re not gonna have the best eyes but
you were given more brains instead and
to this day I don’t think that’s true
but it is a fantastic lie to tell to a
little kid
but what we all – but actually a few
months ago I got to ask my parents again
what they meant by that cuz we’ve grown
up with that those words in our head and
what they told me was amazing they told
us that visual impairment never was
going to be an excuse in our lives and
that it was never going to dictate our
lives so when I was in my first day of
first grade I’m standing at the
chalkboard about two feet away because I
promised my mother that morning that if
I couldn’t see something on the board I
would get up out of my seat and go to
the board to see it and I remember doing
that and then turning around and feeling
all the eyes of the class on me and
thinking maybe for the first time you
know I was a little bit different and I
sat down at my desk and really dreaded
having to go do that again and I
remember thinking that that promise that
I made my mother wasn’t exactly so
simple that day at lunch you know kids
would come up and they would say can you
see and I would defensively say yes and
then there’s this one little jerk this
guy Mike Mike White that came up to me
and he said well if you can see how many
fingers am i holding up and I actually
couldn’t see it and I remember thinking
at that moment something was wrong as an
aside after living with this question my
entire life for some reason everybody
always holds up two fingers so it’s
actually a pretty easy question to
answer and for the next eight years this
happened we were two feet from a
chalkboard and two inches from a
textbook but on my first day of high
school I didn’t want to be the blind kid
anymore so I sat at the very back of the
room and on that day my teacher dr.
folow tells me that calls on me Brian
can you please do this problem and mind
you I’ve been visually impaired for
years now so I developed an entire skill
set on how to trick my
teachers into telling me what was on the
board so I could appear sighted to
everyone else in the room
well my first strategy always ambiguity
what problem exactly dr. Fulham and that
didn’t work so I went with what numbers
exactly are we talking about up there
lots going on and so he looks at me and
just says these not a problem I’ve been
through this before and the second
strategy was play dumb because at that
time for me being blind was worse than
being dumb
so I’m sorry dr. folow I just don’t know
how to do it
and he looks back at me and says why
it’s simple division and then my third
strategy which I didn’t really get a
chance to use it works better when
you’re reading in a circle you wait till
it gets to about three kids from you and
then you kindly excuse yourself to the
bathroom but that day none of my
strategies worked and as my head fell
slowly to the desk I did admit to dr.
folow I’d admit to my class and I admit
to myself that I couldn’t do the problem
because I couldn’t see it and that my
strategy of hiding and avoidance was
only creating shame around my visual
impairment and then I realized that
nothing could feel worse than that
moment so we had to adopt a brand new
strategy we had to embrace visual
impairment and do what my parents told
me thank god you’re over there and that
we were never going to let it dictate
our lives and so when I was 16
that meant Brian and I stealing our
parents car and the
at least that’s what I’m claiming was
the reason that we were sitting at home
in the summer of 2002 and my parents
were gone we had the car we had the keys
we had enough vision to see the road not
enough vision to see everything on it so
I got into the driver’s seat and I put
Brian in the passenger seat and gave him
a pair of binoculars but and there was a
pool about five miles away that we
wanted to go to we drove very nervously
that five miles and we did make it to
the pool and it’s funny because I don’t
really remember why I was so important
to go to the pool that day and I
actually don’t even really remember the
ride back which I’m sure was just as
treacherous but what did kind of stand
out to me is that for the first time we
I was on my schedule in a way that I had
never expected to be that I had an
independence to something that was sort
of completely ruled out for me as small
as it was and it kind of suggested to me
at that time that some rules could be
bent and other rules could be broken and
Brad doesn’t get enough credit here I
had my eyes closed the entire time of
all him but we didn’t kill ourselves in
any car accidents so we got into college
and when I got to university of virginia
like many students I signed up for
Spanish as my language credit and I was
terrible at it just awful like no bueno
idea at all and so like any diligent
college student I buckled down and
petitioned the University of Virginia to
allow Braille as the language instead of
Spanish I’d been taking it since I was
like seven years old so next thing I
know I’m sitting in front of a panel of
three Dean’s arguing the efficacies of
visual impairment verse hearing
impairment as it relates to Braille and
American Sign Language I was a bit in
over my head and ultimately turns out
that Braille is considered a
not a language and they said please go
back to Spanish class adios
that’s a free one buy it in that moment
all I was really trying to do was just
leverage my strength which was from
visual impairment learning Braille and
so when I finally got into the working
world I want I tried to do the same
thing so what am i best at and it was
strangers because with our vision we
can’t recognize who anybody is so if we
treat them like friends until we can
figure that out but it can be a rough
five minutes but what happened was I
thought well sales is making strangers
friends and it was shocking to me
because when I started working people
were so afraid to go up to somebody or
make a call but for me it was the same
thing as just going to the office that
morning everybody was just a stranger
until I got to chat with them and I
started to realize that maybe visual
impairment was giving me a couple more
gifts than I’d ever given it credit for
and while Brian was using his golden
sails mouth I was working in business
development for an investment company
boring and it actually was really boring
but what we were doing we were both in
New York and we’re hanging out one day
and we get very very excited about this
kid his name is yannick du way and the
reason we were so fascinated with him is
he was actually born nearly blind grew
up reading Braille and now his eyesight
is restored and the reason for that is
because of a brand new gene therapy that
is going to be approved for his
condition he was an early patient this
coming January and when we looked into
it we realized that this cure actually
started with a small charitable gift to
a researcher that gave that project a
chance to succeed and when you looked a
little further you realize with all the
medical advancements going on there are
actually hundreds of researchers in the
same situation
of them could use that one charitable
gift to give their life-changing project
that exact same chance so one day Brad
and I are walking around New York and we
stop into Bloomingdale’s to do a little
bit of shopping and I don’t know if
you’re any of you are aware of this but
when you’re visually impaired in you go
shopping it is an absolute nightmare you
can’t see sizes you can’t see labels you
can’t see prices colors are a huge issue
so we take the five-year-old approach we
just run around and run it always does
that it’s not necessary for the talk but
shirt not you shirt not you so and what
we do is when we ultimately come across
something we like under our hand we then
do all the investigation to figure out
exactly what it is so 45 minutes later
Brad and I both walk out and as we are
pulling out what we purchased we’ve
realized we got the exact same shirt and
we laughed about that for a minute cause
it was hilarious by what we’ve booked
then we realized it was because we’d
actually both loved the touch in the
feel of it and then like a light bulb in
a cartoon we realized this could be our
way to give back
we could make amazing clothing and then
donate 100% of the profits back to those
researchers who just needed a chance to
cure blindness
we’ll take it later that feels good so
that’s when we started our clothing
project two blind brothers and we really
wanted to start it with all those grand
lofty ideals that we had we were going
to give back to the research we were
going to be out in front of vision
impairment bringing awareness to the
cause we were gonna create clothing that
reflected the values that we cared about
the problem was when we started that
nobody else cared about it at all so we
we made about a thousand shirts and
spent the first month just begging good
friends to buy them this is actually a
lot harder than you would think but we
but we at that same time we made a video
video on our story and our mission and
we put it out on Facebook and that night
when we put it out we went to bed and we
woke up and there were all these
notifications on our phone wake up the
next morning and I checked the first
notification it was from a co-worker of
mine it’s a text message and it just
read dude just saw you on the Internet
Wow
which actually terrified me because I
didn’t know what he was talking about
some inappropriate photos somewhere but
just haven’t found it yet they they’re
still looking but our video had started
the spread and a few million view views
on that video later people were buying
the shirts people were talking about the
cause and we were starting to get this
awareness around that time we actually
found a group called the Dallas
lighthouse for the blind we contracted
with them to set up manufacturing so
that our clothes would be made by the
blind and the visually impaired
so we were rocking and rolling and then
we started to get some interesting media
inquiries that started help spread
awareness about the cause let us get out
there talk about the mission and then on
January 4th of this year we had the
sincere pleasure to sit down with this
woman Ellen DeGeneres
and let me tell you that was one of the
single greatest days of a younger
brother’s life years of torment I get to
make fun of him on national television
are you kidding me
but that was an incredible day but we
actually started to receive messages
like these and we had the good fortune
of actually getting on the phone with
this mother and daughter and we realized
that we had the opportunity that we all
dream of to go back in time and tell a
younger version of ourself a little
piece of advice and this girl wanted to
quit playing soccer because she wasn’t
that she couldn’t see the ball she had
actually made the team she was just
really am scared that she would
embarrass herself in front of all of her
friends and pride and I spent about 45
minutes just telling all the times that
we’d embarrassed ourselves and just had
a fantastic time just laughing with them
in two weeks later we actually got
another message from the same woman that
her daughter had started playing soccer
again and in that moment we realized
that not only were we gonna be able to
make shirts and give money to charity
but we were actually going to get to
join people on their success journeys
through visual impairment so that’s our
story and when we think back to 25 years
ago when we’re in that doctor’s office
it’s essentially the roughest news you
think you could get but the big ire and
the irony is that vision impairment has
actually given more to us than it’s
taken away it’s forced us to learn real
skills how to deal with strangers how to
take on social pressure stand up in
front of people it’s taught us mindsets
like how to think creatively about a
problem how to just be a little bit more
resilient to rejection it’s given us the
gift of this project and everything that
comes with it the community that
research the excitement the families
your greatest challenge is your greatest
gift we wouldn’t be standing here
without ours thank you thank you
[Applause]
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