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When you have a guest host like Mark Nair, hang on! Mark and I talk about my primary runs for the Texas House, SBOE, about Panhandle Twenty/20, and much more! While he wanted me to entitle this episode "The Burning Pants of Democracy," I stuck with a less flashy title. Thanks for guest-hosting, Mark!

Mark Nair is the chair of Business Systems and Emerging Technology at Amarillo College where he teaches economics and technology. He has spent more than 20 years building digital platforms that handle digital content, rights management, and digital distribution. He has an extensive patent portfolio on a variety of innovative technologies. As president of Redigi, Inc, he built the world’s first used digital marketplace with blockchain and crypto tokens and currencies. He is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors, a founding business mentor for the Texas Tech Innovation Hub, and a National Science Foundation iCorp mentor.

He has worked closely with large retailers, including Walmart, to develop digital marketing strategies for in-store promotions and events including the first generation Walmart.com website. He has built retail custom CD and DVD burning kiosks, in-store ringtone distribution stations, music and book promotional stations, digital signage displays, and back-end massively scalable content management systems, the world’s largest book scanning and AI analysis of indexes and meta-content.

He has also produced one of the Internet’s earliest and largest live streaming events for Nick Lachey and 98 Degrees, as well as producing innovative digital marketing campaigns for Willie Nelson, Stephen King, and many other well-known artists. He’s worked with Thomas Dolby and Headspace Labs on the design of early polyphonic ringtones.

He has also worked with Nokia in Helsinki on content for their early digital smartphone prototypes as well as with Phillips Electronics in Eindhoven on smart audio waveform interpretation for digital compression and has worked with Quanta in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, China to designing a new type of e-book reader based on dynamic LCD light sensitive displays.

Mark has his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from Texas A&M University and attended law school at the University of Texas School of Law.

He has been a member of the San Antonio Arts and Grants Commission, a board member of the Don Harrington Discovery Center, Wildcat Bluff Nature Center, Big

Brothers Big Sisters, the Amarillo Adult Literacy Council, Panhandle Twenty/20, Haven Health Clinics, the Amarillo Little Theatre, and Mariposa Eco Village.

He’s been invited to speak for a variety of panels and institutions including: the National Association of Broadcasters, QuickTime Live, the Consumer Electronics Show, Texas Tech University, Rice University. He has spoken about music and interactivity at the South by Southwest conference, postmodern literature and art at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the abstraction of modern American literature and science at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and quantum mechanics at the Hong Kong science museum.

He currently lives in Texas with his wife and three children. He enjoys languages and speaks German and Mandarin, as well as English.