Hello dear friends of many emails and many years,

It is great to hear from you again!^[1]

It has been about 25 years I am guessing since we began talking about the meaning and value of life. In one of our early broadcasts in 1994 [Editor’s note: A television series, Small Business School, aired nationwide on PBS-TV and Voice of America around the world], Hattie encouraged everybody to get a website and email address at YourCompanyName.com and email at YourName@YourCompany.com. “Open your business 24-hours a day, 365-days a year, all around the world.”

We said, “You’ve got to be 24/7-365-global.”

In 1995 I asked one of our sponsors, IBM, to start a search function for the blossoming web using their AS/400, a large database machine, to compete with DEC’s AltaVista^[2]. I was told, “Be careful, Bruce; the web may just be a fad.” My response, “No, it’s a paradigm shift.”

We started streaming our television show, Small Business School, in 1999 when one of our sponsors, Tim Forbes said, “What are you doing? Only porn sites are streaming video.” 

IBM always had more firepower than they knew. They still do.

Fast forward to 2008 and enough was enough. We went around the world to thank CCTV-9 in Beijing and Dubai Business Channel for rebroadcasting the show. We then bought our first home and decided to call it quits with television. Over 300 unique episodes, it was a good run. In 2011, Hattie started writing about death-and-dying with dignity-and-grace. She wrote two books and created a new web presence — https://authorhattiebryant.com — while I went back to researching basic questions in physics and mathematics — https://81018.com — knowing that this would be the last phase of our life.

The world has become a cesspool of bad ideas. Our “leadership” is fascinated with the bizarre and extreme; without context, the kids don’t stand a chance.

So what do we do? Get back to the basics? That’s not compelling enough. Redefine the basics? That’s what everybody thinks they’re doing. We’ve got to go even deeper yet. If it is not going to trigger a paradigm shift, it’s probably too late. That conditional expression is our undying optimism that the good-and-true will triumph.

Now, what do you think?

Thanks.

Warmly,

Bruce

[1] Correspondence. As we all know, getting old is problematic. To help mitigate a bit of it, I post many of my letters so I can remember to whom I have said what. Those doing basic research need the publicity anyway! So, this note will get added to over 500 other people with whom I have corresponded since 2016 as my memory of things past. is not quite as vivid as it had been.

[2] A search engine called “AltaVista.” The first indexing tool on the web was AltaVista. It was done by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and defined a new category called SEARCH on the totally-emergent, most-nascent web. Here’s a link to that story.

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