Ty And Denise Gosnell On Achieving Personal And Professional Growth With Supportive Partners

 

Nobody gets through life unscathed. And a great support system can often make the challenges that come our way bearable. Who better to have that support from than from your life partner? Join Matt Kelly with Ty Gosnell and Denise Gosnell in a conversation about the significance of supportive partners to create balanced and empowered lives. In this episode, explore Ty and Denise’s personal and professional lives to gain insight into navigating family and career when the going gets tough. They also discuss some of the challenges women face in the business world and how they support the next generation through sports. Learn more from this conversation about the essential things that lead to fulfillment and success while providing support to your partner and vice versa.

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Ty And Denise Gosnell On Achieving Personal And Professional Growth With Supportive Partners

Our lives are healthier, more gratifying and fulfilled while we are in the comforts of sustained positive energy and support from the people we love. Receiving positive energy and support is the key element to us having the freedom to live our best lives. It’s safe to say we all face challenges. Nobody gets through life unscathed. Positive energy and support from loved ones are what allows us to overcome difficult times, dream big and excel in life.

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I want to welcome both of you, Ty and Denise. You are an incredible couple. You are recommended to me by Bill Haber, who is my partner in the show. I couldn’t be more excited to have you on the show. I will speak to you about all kinds of things with your relationship and the career paths that you have, the work you do with children and how you balance your lives together along with two different careers.

We are glad to be here, grateful and honored that you and Bill thought of us.

I did a little bit of looking around and it looks like you both went to East Tennessee State University. Is it safe to say that’s where you met?

You’ve got it.

That’s exactly where we met.

It feels like forever ago when we met. We are both from East Tennessee. He was getting his Master’s in Paleontology and I was getting my Master’s in Mathematics. Through a group of friends, it clicked. I will never forget starting with things that are different about us. Towards the end of your Master’s, I forget what you said.

I hated it. I was stuck in an osteology lab doing a bunch of work. She realized quickly that I was in there by myself for the majority of the day. She was like, “This doesn’t seem like something that you would want to do the rest of your life.” I was like, “I’m doing this.” I was trying to get into dental school at the time to get a Master’s so I would stay in school. They were paying for it so it was okay. About 1.5 years in, she was like, “This doesn’t seem to suit you that well.” I was like, “I would like to play golf and I want to teach for a living.” She was like, “Why don’t you go try?” That’s how it started with me even getting into the field that I’m in. She pushed me in that way to realize that it wasn’t something that I was loving to do.

Appreciating and supporting your partner are key elements in personal and career growth. Share on X

It’s different because we were in East Tennessee at the time. The first job that you had the chance to go get was in Charleston. That tour went from Charleston to Jacksonville to Chattanooga. We dated for five years because I went on to get my PhD in Machine Learning and Computer Science. We never lived in the same state but in 2020, we lived together in Chattanooga. When we were dating and engaged, we didn’t even live in the same city. Most of the time, not even the same state. We were independent people who love to support each other and whatever it is that we like to get into. That’s the biggest theme of what we do every day.

You did a little bit of it. Why don’t you introduce yourselves, what your studies are, what you do as a career now and your interests? If you have anything you want to promo or mention, please do.

I have run and own the Players Golf Academy of Charleston. We are out of RiverTowne Country Club. I teach golf. We have approximately around 220 people that come every week for lessons, whether it be in a group, individual and stuff like that. I have had to hire two other golf coaches during that time to help me support all of these people coming through every week. That’s my main job. I started an investment company for real estate. We are getting that off the ground and starting to roll. A couple of other adventures and things that I would like to pursue as we go forward, I haven’t got them off the ground yet but we are in talks. That’s where I am. I started teaching full-time in 2016 with six kids. Five years into it, we are up to 210 to 220 kids.

That’s incredible growth.

Bill was a part of that. He was helpful.

I have always been inspired by the style of game that you are bringing here to the Charleston area. The way I tell the story is that you are teaching it much more like how people learn basketball. If you are going to learn basketball, you get under the rim, aim for the corner and start with layups. You are playing that to golf.

I run it off of a platform called Operation 36. Every kid or lady in our program starts from 25 yards off the green. They have to learn to shoot the score of 36. They have to get the ball in the hole so they learn how to chip and putt early. Learn the basics of grip and things like that. We start them close to the hole. As they master these skills and they shoot these scores, we back them up incrementally to 50 yards and they have to do it again. There’s always a goal in front of them, which has helped keep the kids or ladies engaged because they know that there’s another level above them so they can continue to practice and they are always striving for something new. It can get much interesting and a lot more fun for the kids as well.

That sounds like a great way to do it. You start to close, master that and all the way back to when you are driving. By then, you’ve got all the skills.

That’s what I always say, “If you make it all the way to your tee box and you are shooting 36, I don’t have to worry about you a whole lot.” We can do little things and move them around. You are not learning as much then. It’s understanding the game learning how to play more than learning a skill like how to grip the golf club or something like that.

From Ross Geller Paleontology in Friends to a golf whispering coach extraordinaire, it has been a journey that has been incredible to watch him build.

 

I can already see the support between the two of you.

That’s how we are.

You are proud of what he has done and you have been a part of it. The support that you give him and everything is amazing.

It takes two, there’s no doubt about it. I wouldn’t be where I am without her. That’s for sure.

Some of the other secret things that he didn’t mention were things like book author and debate solver. Matt, I brought that up into setting the stage for the other stuff that we have been doing in parallel. We met in grad school and I went on with an NSF fellowship and completed a PhD in Computer Science, focusing on Machine Learning at the University of Tennessee. That was early on when we were first dating before we’ve got married. Since then, we’ve got to Charleston, South Carolina to work at a tech startup. In my field, you can think of it as going to the big five, Google, Apple and Facebook. That wasn’t in the cards for me. I’m more of an entrepreneurial spirit.

We went to PokitDok. That’s how I met Bill Haber, the gentleman that you are doing this show with. I have been doing Silicon Valley tech startups ever since as part of my career. I’m the Chief Data Officer at a company called DataStax. It’s the company behind something called Apache Cassandra. If you are on your phone at any point in your day, I guarantee you that you are using us somewhere in the background of your phone. In addition to that, I released a book in 2020 during the pandemic, The Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data. It’s a specialty book on how to work with connected data across the world. I can only imagine from Ty’s perspective what it has been like always cheering me on and pushing me to go for the next big thing like how I gently pushed him into teaching golf and going to Charleston and Jacksonville.

If you look back into your childhood or even maybe as a young adult, can you pinpoint somebody influential in both of you becoming who you are now? You are do-gooders and motivated in your fields. Can you pinpoint something or someone that led you to be who you have developed into at this point?

Aside from allowing me to play golf, I started working at eleven years old at a golf course, hand-picking a driving range. The local pro there was nice enough. I was playing basketball for him at the rec center. He came to my dad and he was like, “I know he loves to play golf. If he wants to come to pick the range, we can allow him to play golf out there.” It was the only private course in my town. That jumped-started everything. My dad was a huge golfer and still is. When we get together, that’s what we do. My parents were always awesome. Mom is making sacrifices to drive me to the golf course at 6:30 AM so she could get to work when she needed to. I would get dropped off right about 7:00 AM and they would come to get me at 6:00 PM. Whatever time that they’ve got off work, they would come and grab me. Some nights it was 8:30 PM because they both worked a full-time job and everything like that.

When dad was off on the weekends, we played golf. During the week, I was playing golf. The best part was my parents never pushed me to do great things in golf. They just knew that I loved it and they kept supporting it and made sure that I was able to get to the golf course and do everything. From that side, Bob Dibble was the gentleman who gave me my first job to handpick the driving range at Link Hills Country Club. My parents were always there to support me to be able to make it happen and allow me to get to the golf course and play. That’s who influenced me the most.

As far as they say, you’ve got 200 and some odd kids in your program. What’s the age group from youngest to oldest?

The youngest child I have is 4 or 5. We do have two kids who are sixteen. We take them all the way through high school. The problem is with my program running after school, a lot of these kids, once they get to high school when they are playing team sports, makes it a little more difficult because they have to go to golf practice, baseball practice or whatever. This leads them up to high school, allowing them to prepare to play on that level.

This is touches dear to my heart because the rule of this show has to do with parents being able to communicate properly, respect and give each other the avenue to have their own individual lives that each of them wants to live while coming together and having a great unity. That flows down within the household to the children because when you’ve got happy parents, then the kids can feel that. They can resonate off of that, which seems you are doing an incredible job with a whole lot of the youth. There’s nothing more admirable and important than us taking care of our youth and getting them off on the right foot.

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It’s humbling, that would be the best way to put that many parents trust me with their kids. That’s a big trust thing for them.

From the outside, because I’m on the outside of the program helping where I can, some of the things that are next level that you don’t get from a lot of coaches, there are two things when it comes to Ty’s style. This is what he does. The first thing is that he’s not afraid to put boundaries and call kids out when they walk across a line. He has established expectations for how they are to behave, supposed to practice and how they show up when they are representing the professional game that he’s trying to teach them. He makes sure that they follow them. It’s nice to see someone not scared to hold lines with the next generation. My second and most favorite thing and I don’t know all the words, he has themes that he talks about with these kids every week.

I took this from a podcast from a different guy. He was a professional and he’s always like, “What is integrity?” They always respond back, “To do the right thing when no one is looking.” The next thing is, “Are you a leader?” When they say yes, I would ask them, “What does it mean to be a leader?” They always say, “I think for myself,” and then I would say, “Do you believe in yourself?” They always say, “I do.” Those are my three things. To have those three principles or pillars to my program, and to make sure that the kids understand where we are and what we expect of them has been a huge benefit. I adopted this where they say every week, “I found it,” and I was like, “That’s perfect.” Every kid needs to hear that. They need to know that they are a leader and that they can believe in themselves because nobody else will if you don’t.

I was curious to hear what you have on that side of the table with the kids. What you have laid out and what you are doing is awesome. I’m glad you adopted something along those lines. To make it into a college situation or a pro, only a handful do that but you are also giving these kids a foundation for life and whatever direction they end up going. Whatever they choose to do, they are always going to remember your academy because you gave them these three pillars to live off of. An incredible experience. That’s wonderful. Denise, I found something where you are the Founder and President 2013 of a group called Systers: Women in EECS @ UTK. I’m sure the readers would love to know what that is all about.

The mission of Systers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is to recruit, mentor and retain women and other underrepresented minority groups in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UT. That’s the EECS, the UTK. At the end of the day, it is about awareness. Within the computer science industry and tech industry as a whole, I’m sure no one is going to deny anymore that it’s a dominated industry by a certain demographic. There are a lot of fascinating work out there to promote and be aware that there are different types of people and different ways that people think. It was a fantastic group that we founded.

I also had the extreme privilege to work with Sheryl Sandberg from Lean In with that organization. In 2012, when Sheryl Sandberg was the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, she published a book called Lean In. Trying to give a little bit of a roadmap to younger professionals, students or people coming out of academia on what it’s like to work in tech, especially for females. In that book, they had such an amazing reception of it that they wanted to start a new thing called Lean In on Campuses. At the University of Tennessee, I had pitched and received funding to teach a class there. We read the book and we studied it every week. I had reached out to Sheryl and I honestly forgot how I’ve got in contact with her. Maybe it was a cold email. I do these things. I don’t have a lot of fear. I just went for it.

She had found out about our program. It was grassroots, the first program that was doing this around the country. They had us come out to a big conference in Phoenix, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. When they launched their second book called Lean In for Graduates, we had ghostwritten one of the chapters in there on what we were doing at the University of Tennessee. I along with Rachel Thomas did a presentation there to launch this new initiative. Being a part of that level of stage and starting to network with that crew of brilliantly-minded women in business has been incredible. That was all during my PhD when I was working at UT.

You are in contact with Hashemian.

We had a local businessman, Hashemian. He donated $10,000 to start the group and they are still involved. It has been going every year ever since even though I’m no longer at the university. I’m most proud of that group.

 

You have already built a legacy for yourself there at the school. You are just getting started, I can tell.

I was a swim coach for a while as well. I coached swimming for about 8 to 10 years. I took over a program when I was seventeen years old and was their head coach. I quickly made all of the mistakes of running a business and an organization when you don’t scale yourself. You want to do everything on your own and you are not good at delegating. When you are a late teen trying to run a business, I don’t think you are going to get it all right.

It’s because of that opportunity when I was coaching, I learned so quickly how valuable it is to set up your program to be taken over by somebody else. It has nothing to do with your skillset. It has everything to do with growing and keeping whatever it is you are passionate about alive. I bring that up here because that’s what I made sure we did with Systers right off the bat was to ensure that other women and funding were always going to be available to keep that growing and it’s still going. I can’t believe it. Thanks for bringing that out, Matt. I haven’t thought about that in a while.

That’s a cool project that you started and it’s wonderful that it’s still going. This show came around a bit because my wife and I own this company CatTongue Grips and she is our CEO. We are a women-owned business. We have gone to WeBank conferences and that kind of thing. I started learning about some of the challenges that women have in the business world in a lot of different industries. I’m wondering, were there experiences that you came across? What opened your eyes to the fact that, “I can probably help better the environment for women?” Women get further along as they deserve. I know from my experience in working for over 24 years in real estate side by side with women, competing against women, we are all equal when it comes to business and in the working world.

I was so upset when I’ve got out of that bubble to CatTongue Grips and ended up going to these conferences and learning about all these different industries and challenges out there. That’s why I’m on this mission of trying to get the word out and doing what I can to bring to the surface different stories from different people, where both the husband and wife are career-oriented, hardworking and what’s going on in their world. We can all talk about it for the betterment of the next generation. Denise, what was it that happened in your life that you came across that got you thinking, “I’m going to start something up here and I’m going to promote these women and help them out?”

I have a similar experience to you where there was this moment when I came out of the bubble. I saw the massive amount of disproportionate opportunity. Through allyship and helping to free others to be able to do what they want has become part of my life’s journey. Going back to the bubble much like you, Matt, I grew up with a mom and dad who had traditionally flipped gender roles. l had no idea until I was getting a PhD in Computer Science that women were less represented in work. Not necessarily in work but starkly in the tech industry. My mom was a total rock star. She led negotiations for rates for all of ALCO in North America. She was awesome.

You don’t negotiate with her. When you do negotiations with her, she’s going to win and you will take it and you are like, “I’m thankful for what it got.”

We grew up with my dad taking us to school, packing lunches, coming to PTA meetings and volunteering at school. My mom was just being her awesome self at work every day. This was in Tennessee in the ‘90s so it was not only an interesting location but a different time to be living like that. I went into computer science and all of a sudden, found myself out of this bubble that I had grown up in. As soon as someone pointed it out to me, I couldn’t unsee it. It lit a fire to make sure that everyone else can open up a door that I might have already opened. I live my day-to-day life at work with a little bit bigger cadence than every day.

If I’m going to open a door because of some groundbreaking work I do in tech, I need to leave it open, reach back and bring someone else of the underrepresented group along with me. For example, so many of my colleagues at DataStax are like, “Can you take some time and talk to my daughter? Can you tell her what your journey was? She’s getting ready to go into college and doesn’t know what to do. She graduated college and is scared.” I do everything I can anytime a colleague asks me to mentor their daughters or anyone else to always ask them to take that phone call.

You have helped mentor some of my players, too.

One of his players was getting ready to go off into college and wanted to have a level set on the college mentality of playing sports.

She was big into nutrition for performance. Even now, when she’s hiking or whatever it was that we were doing, different ways. Weirdly enough, it was something that came from East Tennessee State that’s a popular dietary program that we helped get her on so she could perform at her highest as well. She has been a mentor to so many people well outside of her field and she doesn’t even know.

To us, it’s about what we would call in tech a positive-sum development. I’m going to reach over and help out his female athletes because I’ve got experience competing on the college level. I’ve got friends who went to the Olympics. We have connections to help out his athletes. If our business economy of what Ty and I do, every day is always reaching out and trying to lift somebody else that is going to positively lift the communities around us. That’s how we like to live our days.

A human body performs with fuel, and that fuel needs to be the same regardless of your gender. Share on X

It always goes deeper than the person that you are talking to in front of you or you are working with. If that person is feeling great about themselves, they are learning and know in their heart that they can accomplish anything in this world, as they go through their daily life, that’s going to resonate with others. It’s going to come out even if it’s not verbal, just that body language. What they have is their persona. It comes across in a positive light, it can help other people and it goes that way. It’s like that starfish thing, where you see a whole ton of starfish on the beach and one person is like, “I’ve got to throw this one back.” Someone is like, “That doesn’t help anything. We are throwing one back.” The truth is it helps a ton. Anything that you do resonates positively along the line for everybody else that’s around.

That’s why I love the work that I get to do. When you think of tech, Apple and Google, it seems like this big black box of, “What the heck goes on at those companies?” At the core of what you described, Matt, of helping other people out is how the tech industry works. We call it open source development. The idea is that if I’m going to solve a problem that’s going to make someone else’s life easier, I’m going to give it to you as well. I love working in the open-source community in tech. It’s not how all of the techs are run so it’s a niche area of how tech can function. Working in open source and having the mentality of contributing and helping is cool.

Switching gears because both of you have mentioned college sports and being active in that, there’s something that came up that I was shaking my head out like, “I can’t believe this.” I was excited to see about the changes in the NBA with women becoming coaches and referees. At the Super Bowl, in 2020, we had a couple of different women that were coaching for the first time ever, a woman referee on the field. She could do her job adequately because there were no controversies on any call and the game went off smoothly. She probably could have done that ten years earlier but never had the opportunity or other women even. There are huge advances and that was cool to see that all be played out. I love the balance of men and women working together in every environment. It’s a more positive experience for everyone.

The women’s NCAA basketball tournament comes around. I see on the news, one of the players giving a video to a newscaster that got national recognition. It’s about how men show up to their facility and they’ve got enormous weight rooms, all the quality food and everything you could imagine, the women show up and they’ve got an empty ballroom with nothing in it, as far as weights for them. The food is completely different that I fell out of my chair. At this show, we share everything, men and women from the beginning of time. We go to school, play sports as kids and play in the streets together. We do everything together. In college, we study in the same classrooms. Everything goes along. Where do the wheels come off that these women go to a tournament to go play at the highest level representing their schools, their families and everybody and there is such a difference in the setup when they show up for their tournament?

It’s something difficult as a female athlete. It’s hard for me to watch but I have also been in that system. When I think about things like this, I have two schools of thought that I rely on, the first of, which is to understand the system, and then the second of, which is to keep dreaming and push for it to be better. As relates to this scenario, my advice to anyone reading is to know that in the locker room, food funding comes from how much that event has budgeted. An events budget comes from where things are purchased AKA go watch more female sports.

If we have more people tuning in online or anywhere that you can stream a female sport, they are data-driven. I’m a Chief Data Officer, it’s what I do. I count things. If you are an ESPN CDO, you are going to have metrics watching and that funding of events is controlled based on how popular they are. Understand the system. Don’t hate on it but now use it. Watch more female sports and that’s how you can start to support them. Make a change now.

On the other hand, you’ve got to keep dreaming. There’s no reason that we should say capitalism is an excuse for there to be such a disparity, especially at this level. Awareness like this, bringing it up on a podcast and pointing out that a human body performs with fuel and that fuel needs to be the same regardless of your gender, that’s something that seems so simple. Once enough people hear it, it’s going to be a way to force change socially. Those are the two schools of thought that I think about, using the system and then also, using social pressure to make changes. I saw that and it is shocking to see how different the female athlete’s support is from the male athlete’s support.

My thoughts on college versus pro sports are that in the pro sports realm, it’s 1,000% business. There are people investing money in the pros and everything else. Whatever the sport can generate is then what can be given back and pay for the athletes and that’s the payment and all that stuff. On a college level to me is an experience. You are raising children to get ready for the real world. When you’ve got an athlete that’s a male or a woman that is training their asses off for that school, playing at the highest level, wearing the jersey and representing that school, I don’t care about what the sport generates income-wise and how many people watch this or that. That money needs to be allocated equally so that these kids, regardless of man or woman, when they graduate from that school, have had an incredible experience all the way through. They do feel that everybody is equal 100% of the time while they are in the classroom, if they play intramural sports or if they are playing on the NCAA Division I team.

 

This is what’s going to send them out into the world with the mentality. I looked at that and I thought to myself, “Every single one of those women that had that experience has now had a tainted thought process about what the future looks like for them. Can I achieve everything? Is the world open to me like people say when this is the type of treatment we are getting here at the NCAA level in our college experience?” Spread it out equally. Let every single kid flourish to the absolute max and not worrying about dollars at a college level.

As you are pushing towards that in the NCAA, they are making a lot of money off of these kids that aren’t getting paid to do this job that they are in. People come to me and they are like, “They are getting an education.” I always respond back to them with, “Pay those coaches in education and see how long they stay.” These kids are putting in 40 hours a week. They can say that it’s always a limited amount of time. If you are only doing the twenty hours a week that they say that is allocated for sports for these kids, women or men that are in college, it doesn’t matter, they wouldn’t be there.

They are spending way more hours than that. It’s almost like a job and then they can’t go get a job. They are handcuffed that way. They don’t have money, a lot of times, you are paying these coaches, you are paying the people that are running that specific program, the NCAA in general. They are making tons and tons of money off the backs of these kids, and then to turn around and see them give them a ballroom with one stack of weights. It doesn’t make sense to me. The NCAA is profiting on both. They wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t profiting. It’s frustrating to see that the men are getting the top-of-the-line stuff, women turn around and you see that and you are like, “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The discrepancy was outrageous. It wasn’t even close on a college-level, national exposure. This is what they do.

It was all Division I athletes, too. It wasn’t DIII that don’t get money or don’t get scholarships to play. That’s what they are there for.

They recruited these kids to come and play. They are putting them through a tremendous amount of training to represent the school at the highest level. When they qualify to play in the prestigious tournament that is the NCAA tournament, they show up and this is what they walk into. It makes everybody’s life a lot harder. These women, rightfully so, have got this in their minds now. This is the difference between men and women and this was done by the NCAA.

Wouldn’t it be versus dollars for these colleges? Wouldn’t it be a lot more productive and representative of raising these kids when it’s equal for everybody? When you get out of college, then it’s time for the business world. These gals, in their minds, can accomplish anything. They have had all of the experiences, training and mindset stuff that this is an equal playing field when they get into the world and we are going to work on making that a little bit more of an equal playing field also. That’s what we are doing. I was shocked when I saw that story on the NCAA.

Matt, it’s bad. To me, I see those things and I want to understand where those decisions got made. How many committees did that get passed through and people didn’t even think about it? It’s another push not only for that equality with the athletes but it’s a moment to realize that a diverse board makes better decisions. I can only imagine how a few women or members of diverse communities were not involved in any part of that decision-making.

It would be interesting to see that or men with their heads in the sand. It was a complete failure and utter disgrace. I’m glad we’ve got that out. It popped into my mind when you were talking about NCAA sports.

Matt, it completely reiterates how important it is to hold doors open for other people. Now that we have seen this door being shut on the female athletes, we’ve got to keep our foot out there and keep it open to make lunch and the environment for the Division I athletes at the NCAA March Madness, regardless of gender, whatever it takes to make that equal needs to keep going. I’m glad we are highlighting this.

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You guys hike the Appalachian Trail quite a bit over there in your neck of the woods. You get outdoors. Denise, I learned that you’ve raised some money to help kids enjoy that type of activity. Can you talk about that a little bit?

I grew up in East Tennessee. I love the great outdoors. I have spent a lot of time during 2020 and the beginning of 2021 hiking on behalf of the Make-A-Wish Foundation specifically in South Carolina. It was empowering to work with a local organization and see my neighbor’s children who are going through some of the most horrific experiences you could imagine a child has to go through. To see them get help and do that through being outside and creating awareness was a real honor to get to be a part of that.

We started a few sections but I started at the beginning, Springer Mountain in Georgia. I have walked through all of Georgia and I’m at mile 371 on the Appalachian Trail. I’m making money or raising awareness on the trail for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and finding ways to create wishes for these kids. An average wish before the pandemic was about $7,500. A team of mine raised about $8,000, which was great to raise one wish. The whole organization I participated in within the spring of 2021 raised almost $350,000 for these kids. I’m heading back out on the trail because my husband doesn’t mind. I’m picking up where I left off at 371 and I’m heading North to Damascus. I will be out in June 2021. If any of your readers are around the area, I’ve got about 150 miles I will be covering to keep this flame going.

How often do you go and for how long?

Normally, she was gone 3 to 4 days depending on long weekends and stuff like that. She’s about to do two weeks.

This one is going to be a two-week journey. There are a ton of men and women out there on the trail who will go for a full six months. Maybe one day, we have always talked about how we have alternative approaches. We are armchair parenting now. We don’t have kids yet. I do understand that we have these ideas and they may change. If it’s in the books or the cards for us, we would love to have an alternative education opportunity where we would take our family and hike the whole trail to teach them about logistics, planning and immunity.

Helping one another, learning how to troubleshoot and problem solve. A bunch of different things that you don’t tend to find in a textbook all the time.

Living through experience.

The trail for us has been a beautiful community to find, especially during the pandemic. Also, to refine that community connection that you have with other people. If I’m going to do something, I always want to make sure that we do it and lift up others. That’s also why when I found the Trailblaze Challenge with Make-A-Wish I said, “We are going to do all these things together.”

There’s another example, Ty supporting Denise 100% and heading out for two weeks to do this. She appreciates that. She’s going to do it regardless but it sure are a lot more fun and satisfying when you know that your partner is like, “This is your passion. This is something you want to do. I’m here to support you regardless of what it is.”

I’m not going to hold her back. That wouldn’t work anyway. If you want to go do it, go do it. I will be there. I have done parts of it. I have done some sections with her, not tons but a couple. I always have a great time. When you are out there, you meet amazing people. She can speak more to that because she’s met so many of these people through hiking or doing whatever they do. It’s awesome, fun and free. You don’t have your cell phone blowing up all the time. You get yourself back into the present. For her, being on this sabbatical and everything like that, it’s a perfect time for her to get out there and clear everything up and go walk. More power to her.

You are maybe wanting to avoid 20-mile days and not showering for two weeks.

It’s not the showering part. It’s 20 miles. She always has an itinerary. I don’t do well with an itinerary. She and her brother when we go on trips are just sitting there going, “I will be up at 6:00.”

We’ve got things to do.

We’ve got to drive across the country. We’ve got to do it in two days.

 

The theme here is that when it comes to adventure, we step in and not down.

You are doing it in a mindset where you are bringing people with you. Both of you are always thinking about the next generation, “I’m enjoying this. I know this is positive in my life. How can I pass this along?”

It’s hard to think of that being a different thought process because it’s how we do our days. It’s weird. We are always thinking about how to bring that compassion to someone else.

For us, it’s having fun. We call this fun. We would love for you to be a part of it, show you how to do it, help you do it or whatever it may be. It’s more about fun on our end and it’s like, “We can help everybody to do so.”

I can’t thank Bill enough. I will personally call him and thank him for introducing us. What you brought to the table for us is amazing. I know our readers are going to get a ton out of this. You guys are incredibly intelligent, active, do-gooders. You’ve got it all.

Right back at you, Matt. You are as well. It has been amazing.

Thank you. I greatly appreciate the kind words there. There’s one question I always wrap up with. I was doing some homework for this show and learning about some different things and stats I found out from the Smithsonian that within our country, there are about 400 statues prominently placed of women from over the years and 5,000 men. I thought that was quite a discrepancy where I know that these statues are something people like to read the plaques. When they do, they learn about the individual and their accomplishments. That needs to get balanced up.

Support from loved ones is what allows us to overcome difficult times, dream big, and excel in life. Share on X

For anybody of any age going up to read about these individuals that have had the honor of a statue, there have to be more women for people to come across and read about what they have done and their contributions. That’s going to help all of us get on the same page going forward. I will ask each of you to take a turn. Who would you say deserves a statue prominently located, a woman from any period of time and why?

You’ve got a glimpse of my answer because this person has already been influential in my life. Someone somewhere needs to put a statue of Grace Hopper. I googled for it and there might already be one or one might be being built. I’m surprised there’s not one of her. Grace Hopper is considered one of the founding computer scientists. She was the United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers on a computer called the Harvard Mark I. She got her PhD from Yale. She’s a rock star. She has this massive list of accomplishments. Matt, have you ever heard of the term computer bug?

No.

If you are using an app and you touch a button and the app shuts down, it’s probably because there’s something wrong with the software. The people in the tech community call that a bug. Grace Hopper’s team is attributed unofficially not to the coining of the term but to being the story where the term came from. They were working with this Harvard Mark I computer back when you had punch cards for writing computer programming. A moth got stuck in this computer and caused it to stop working. They didn’t coin the term themselves in that group. Grace didn’t but she is the story told when talking about computer software and bugs. She’s one of the best female computer scientists that have ever walked this Earth.

What a great story you shared with all of us of how the term bug correlates to computers and how it got started. That’s awesome.

For mine, I would pick Babe Zaharias. Most people would know her from her golfing career. She won ten LPGA Majors during her time. She was an incredible athlete. She was the first lady to ever play in a men’s event before Annika, Michelle Wie and a couple of other ladies who have done that in more recent years. She did this many years ago. She did all of this after 1932 when she was in the Olympics and won two gold medals and a silver medal. She had many multiple careers, mainly in track and field is what she won her medals in. She turned to golf and became one of the most dominant players in the game. On top of that, she helped found and start the LPGA. On the golf side, I would love to have a statue of her probably somewhere in Pinehurst since it is the cradle of golf. She deserves to be there.

She started the Women’s Professional Golf Tour.

After her Olympic career.

How is there not a statue of her? That is amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you, Ty and Denise. It has been an incredible time. I’m glad we were able to speak. This is going to help a lot of people. You guys are amazing. I appreciate it. You are a ton of fun. Hopefully, I get to meet you one day. That would be awesome.

I love this show. I’m super honored to get the opportunity to speak on it. Thank you so much, Matt.

You are welcome. Have a great rest of the day.

You do the same.

Good luck out there on the Trail, Denise.

Thanks, Matt.

Take it easy.

Important Links:

• Ty Gosnell – Facebook
• Denise Gosnell
• Operation 36
• PokitDok
• DataStax
• The Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data
• Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
• Lean In for Graduates
• Systers: Women in EECS @ UTK
• Lean In
• Lean In
• CatTongue Grips

About Denise Gosnell

As Chief Data Officer of DataStax, Dr. Denise Koessler Gosnell applies her versatile experiences to enable more informed decisions with data. Dr. Gosnell joined DataStax in 2017 to create and lead the Global Graph Practice, a team that builds some of the largest distributed graph applications in the world.

Dr. Gosnell’s career centers on her passion for examining, applying, and advocating for the applications of graph data. She has patented, built, published, and spoken on dozens of topics related to graph theory, graph algorithms, graph databases, and applications of graph data across all industry verticals.

Prior to her role with DataStax, Gosnell worked in the healthcare industry, where she contributed to software solutions for permissioned blockchains, machine learning applications of graph analytics, and data science. Dr. Gosnell earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee as an NSF Fellow. Her research coined the concept “social fingerprinting” by applying graph algorithms to predict user identity from social media interactions.

About Ty Gosnell

Ty is the founder and owner of the Player’s Golf Academy, and his program has been selected two times as a Top 50 Op36 facility worldwide.

Ty has two main goals for his program:

1. to build a program with the best teachers to give every player the best chance to meet and exceed their goals, and
2. cultivate an environment where junior golfers can practice and play together.

Ty’s coaching has been greatly influenced by Bradly Hughes, Charlie King, David Lee, along with many others.

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