The Inventivity Pod

Millions of people each year face natural coastal disasters, leaving them without water, and electric power.  A Wave Energy Converter named Platypus, using only oceanic wave motion can continuously generate enough electrical charge to operate a seawater desalinator that turns saltwater into clean drinking water, or it can provide sufficient power for heating, lighting, or other electrical items needed in emergency situations.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:37

Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host James Di Virgilio. Today we’ll be visiting with one of our Cade Prize inventors. He’s working on something very, very interesting. In fact, he’s created many different things I like to welcome to the show Mark Supal, chief technology officer at Engineering Technologies, LLC founded in January of 2019. Mark you’re working on something that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been done before. Very interesting concept. Tell us about it.

Mark Supal: 1:05

Thank you for the introduction. What the product is, it’s called Platypus and we named it Platypus because it has two arms that bounce up and down, kind of like a tail and a bill on a Platypus. And it bounces in ocean waves. Turns generators to produce electricity and the electricity can either be stored in batteries, right at the machine and use there, or it can be routed to the shore via a marine cable. And again, it’s for producing and harvesting ocean energy.

James Di Virgilio: 1:29

So is anyone working on or has anyone worked on anything like this before using the ocean waves to produce usable energy?

Mark Supal: 1:37

Many universities and big companies have tried to produce machines that generate megawatts of electrical energy. They’re very expensive and they haven’t necessarily been successful to sell electricity at a cost that makes sense, or is comparable to like wind or solar energy. What makes this product unique is that it’s very small in size. It was designed to be shipped and airdropped into emergency regions that suffer from coastal disasters, like the strike we recently had from hurricane Laura , where people might need water. And to produce this water, you need low scale power. So this machine produces the order of 50 Watts, which can power a decelerator to produce fresh drinking water, but what’s interesting is upon investigation. We found many companies that need things other than to sell a nation of water. They need to power all sorts of scientific buoys in the ocean.

James Di Virgilio: 2:25

So if I’m needing to power of buoy , I grabbed this Platypus. I drop it somewhere out in the ocean. I’m assuming it runs on solar power. And then it gives me an injunction with wave power. Is it just wave power? Tell me how I’m getting energy. And then how am I using the energy?

Mark Supal: 2:40

No, it uses strictly the ocean energy. So the waves bounce up and down. And the movement of the wave rotates a generator, which produces the electricity and it’s stored in the batteries are used directly at the buoy. So the Platypus can be tethered to the buoy, right to the buoy via cable, which within say five or six feet away. The other implementation of this Platypus is to actually incorporate it onto buoys. So I’m currently working with NOAA, which is our National Oceanic, Atmospheric Administration and a national data buoy center to come up with a plan to either incorporate the Platypus as part of the buoy or incorporate the Platypus underneath the buoy or to tether the Platypus to the buoy, to get the electricity from the Platyous, to the buoy, to drive all their equipment and all sorts of weather equipment and mapping equipment and other emergency equipment on the buoys that they use to monitor everything from again, weather to oil spills.

James Di Virgilio: 3:31

Okay. So this is like a power plant. As you mentioned, and previously solar power was something that was used out in the oceans. It could be used. I’m assuming at a decent level. I’ve seen these things before.

Mark Supal: 3:42

Yes.

James Di Virgilio: 3:42

But your solution would essentially never fail, right? Because the ocean is always in motion . So if it’s working correctly, it’s generating continuous power.

Mark Supal: 3:50

Yeah. So here’s what we found out. Currently solar power is being used. There were problems with solar power and believe it or not birds like to perch on solar panels. And when birds sit there, they, they drop their debris onto their panels and the panels get cluttered with the bird droppings. And it’s very expensive then to send a ship out there at $30,000 a day to wipe the solar panel clean that’s one issue, which was unusual, fine . And this is all this information came out of a whole interview process that I conducted from various people who use buoys. So you’ve got this avian falling . You also have low light conditions, anything above or below the 50th parallels is the sunlight is not intense enough to necessarily power buoys. So it becomes expensive to put many solar panels on buoys. You have to lay out a lot of redundant panels and it takes up a lot of valuable real estate on the buoy itself. Okay. Those were the two main concerns, the avian falling and substitute for low light conditions and the big market value for the Platypus is that it operates at nighttime in the dark. So you have buoys up in Alaska and certain times of the years, there is no light. So people are scrambling trying to figure out how to power buoys with an alternative to solar panels. But right now people are still using solar panels.

James Di Virgilio: 4:57

Interesting. So then you are the world’s first I presume of this type to generate power via this method for a buoy.

Mark Supal: 5:04

We’re the first to get to a product that’s commercially available that can be shipped very simply of the size of your arm span , say about six feet across and can be folded up into a box to be taken out to the ocean, to be used either with scientific equipment or to be used, perhaps even a sailor who wants to throw this thing over his vessel in order to produce fresh drinking water in the case that he’s marooned at sea.

James Di Virgilio: 5:27

All right . So we here at the Cade we love ideas. The Cade Prize obviously is honoring creative problem solving. It’s clearly evident that this is a very creative solution to a problem that most people were not even aware that we had. I’m hearing you mention things like you conducted interviews to learn what was going on, what needed to be done. But before the interviews, how did this idea even come about? How were you aware that there was a need for this?

Mark Supal: 5:49

This came out, really went out by the NRL, our National, Renewable Energy Laboratory. They have a contest for companies to produce again, fresh drinking water. After these coastal disasters, power outages, diesel generators become hazardous to airdrop fuels might not be available or difficult to get to. So the whole idea came out of a challenge that said, Hey, we need somebody to figure out how to create fresh drinking water. They left it up to companies to figure out how to do this. My thought was, well, if I’m going to be creating fresh drinking water, why not just create electricity because you can always already buy a commercially available desalinater, which is electrically powered. So if I can produce electricity, not only can I produce desalinated water, but I can power all sorts of emergency equipment, everything from radios to warming blankets, to emergency LED lighting and so forth and so on. So that was my plan. And that was the approach I took to go beyond desalination and just produce electricity, which can power, whatever the need may be.

James Di Virgilio: 6:45

Now, how would you power? I’m imagining I’m living in a coastal home. My power goes out. How would I use the Platypus to power items? You just mentioned in my home or radio.

Mark Supal: 6:54

This thing sits within two to 300 yards of the shore. And there’s a marine cable that unrolls toward the shore. And you can either use the DC power directly, the 12 volt DC power that it supplies, or you can convert or all sorts of DC, AC converters. That would power. Again, this is all small scale, power, 50 Watts. This is not going to power your house. This is a very unique product. It’s not designed to produce again, kilowatts or megawatts 50 Watts. This is for emergency type equipment, whether it be a desalinator or lighting, if you had to power led lighting at your home, that could happen. But as far as powering something like your air conditioning system, which draws maybe kilowatts, you’re not going to get that to happen.

James Di Virgilio: 7:32

So if I’m using this on a coastal home, and I know where the market is, where we’re going to go with the market, but is there a possible residential use for this? And let’s just stick with LED lighting, right? A storm hits we’re out of power for weeks. It’d be great to have some sort of lighting at night. That’s not candle light or a flashlight. How would this work though? How many Platypuses do we need to power a neighborhood’s worth of led lighting on the coast?

Mark Supal: 7:55

Right, Right. Well, this one is 50 Watts. This was meant again, to satisfy this need to power this desalinater. And our approach is to develop this thing into a larger Platypus that would produce something, unheard of say, a thousand Watts, or maybe even 2000 Watts, which you could use to power, maybe your home or part of our home or part of our community. So our approach is more incremental. Let’s solve this problem first at a very small scale, a 50 watt scale, and then step up to many companies have launched very expensive projects, trying to right on the onset, produce megawatts or kilowatts. And we’re saying, Hey, it’s a very difficult problem, obviously, to deal with the very harsh ocean environment. So we’re starting very small, figuring out all the different problems we’re going to run into in order to even produce something as little as 50 Watts and then go from there. So it would basically sit in the water, just like a turbine. A wind turbine sits into water. Many turbines already exist off the coast of like Lake Erie for instance. And they have cabling that runs on the ocean floor to a station and then to your home.

James Di Virgilio: 8:54

So who is the market for this who owns most of these buoys? Who are you trying to say, Hey, this is a need. We can fix this. We can solve your problem .

Mark Supal: 9:01

NOAA is the big outlet that we’re currently working with. They have a branch, which is then the National Data Buoy Center, which has over 300 boys just around the coast of the US. So this is the market that was uncovered after many interviews, which shocked me. And they’re looking for, believe it or not, for as little as 10 Watts, which seems ridiculous. 10 Watts is not a lot of power, but they have no way to power these buoys in this darkness. So they’re all over this idea. We’ve been meeting with them, trying to figure out those things you talk about. Well, how do you interface this thing with this existing buoy? Is it a tether? Is it a part of the buoy? Those are the things we’re currently working on.

James Di Virgilio: 9:34

If you’re able to find a way to make this stay. I imagine if you tether it, there’s a risk the tether breaks, right? If you make it a part of the buoy, it’s probably the best way to go. Of course, it could still break down. You have to service it, but I’m imagining you’re already improving significantly what they have. In fact, with hurricane Laura , I was reading just yesterday that when it came to storm surge and this shocked me, I’m like, how do we not know what the storm surge was? I know we have buoys out there. I live in Florida. There’s buoys all over the place. How is a buoy not actively monitoring where the storm surge is. And essentially there’s not very many buoys that are capable of reporting real time data. It sounds like with your solution, you would actually be able to provide real time data all over the place. I could imagine a buoy defense wall, so to speak. That’s giving forecasters a warning because you could have your Platypus is out in the Gulf of Mexico, out in the Atlantic Ocean out wherever. And it’s telling you at each grid mark. Hey, this storm surge is growing. Hey, this is where it’s worse. That would be actionable evidence to then more localize the forecast, right?

Mark Supal: 10:30

Absolutely. And even beyond forecasting, which will be a growing problem as climate changes. So we know that the number of buoys is going increase in the ocean. So that’s fact, but do we also know that power at sea is going to be something we need in the future. Right now, we already see electric vehicles and people are producing electric boats. So you can imagine a Platypus, so to speak gas station on electric station though, where you pull up recharge your jet ski or your electric boat and move on, or you can even imagine the stations for the whole group of people like the military and the scientific community who uses these underwater gliders, which stay under the ocean in stealthy missions , which don’t want to surface because they get detected. So we are imagining this Platypus as having underwater charging ports, whereby these gliders can pull up, fill up electrically, fill up and then go about their mission. So believe it or not the market for power at sea. It is tremendous.

James Di Virgilio: 11:21

I’m imagining James Bond. He uses an underwater device, I think in a couple of films that are like that. But what’s interesting. Mark is you’re talking about solving a problem, and obviously we’ve spoke with countless inventors on this very podcast, and that’s how it always starts solve one problem. And then you ask yourself, is your solution scalable? I think obviously you’ve proven that your solution is eminently scalable and to a far distant future, depending on how things go and where we go, but harnessing the power of the ocean certainly seems like a brilliant idea. Now, having a brilliant idea and getting your idea funded are two different things. How have you been able to fund so far the Platypus? How have you built prototypes? What have you been able to do to actually make this idea a reality?

Mark Supal: 11:59

Well, so I happen to be very handy and my parents were blue collar, but my dad was a plumber. So I’m very familiar with assembly and using pipes . So the way this product is made, out of a PVC pipe and it comes in all sorts of diameters. So I started with one inch pipe and the motors you can buy come in all sorts of diameters and you can scale a product up or down quite easily. And it all fits together within a shell of PVC pipe. So the funding actually came from me, my personal funds. And we’re talking about very small units units that are producing on an order of say 10 Watts of power. So to build one of these things may be unordered five, $600, but I’m able to buy all the parts. I’m not custom manufacturing, any parts, everything I’m buying is off the shelf, pieces of pipe are being glued together and believe it or not today, you can find almost any component you might need, whether it be a special sized fitting, or whether it be a certain board to take some unusual wave form and converted into DC electricity. So it’s not all that difficult to fund of course, to go to this next step. I’m looking for funding. And this is where the Cade Prize came along. They’re offering a wonderful chance for companies who are inventing new products to fund their ideas.

James Di Virgilio: 13:04

And that’s a great pitch because that leads right into my next question. But it also talks about organizations like the Cade , right? Who support innovation, new venture capital. Basically you need money to fund ideas, right? You have an idea. Your idea is good. And now if I drop an order for 300 of these onto your lap, you have to find a way to make those right. You have to raise the money to construct them. And a lot of times that’s lost. I think in the idea generation process amongst the listening public is how do you actually make one of these? And then here you are going around. I imagine that you’re applying to a variety of different innovative awards, and you use this grant money or this money, one in prize money to then create either more prototypes or to build more product for you. How far away do you think you are from actually having this be in the water as a usable purchasable product on a large enough scale where there’s a couple of hundred of these in the ocean.

Mark Supal: 13:51

I would say about a year and a half, not only are your client to the Cade Prize, but also we’re writing a proposal through the National Science Foundation. They offer startup companies a chance to do research in science and produce products. So there are a number of other avenues that we’re following to fund our products, but to do this again, because it is such a harsh environment we are using specialized materials, stainless steels, Naval brass, and so forth. But obviously when you get something out there , there are going to be failures and you’re going to have to correct and build a product that’s reliable. So I don’t see this product being released for about another year and a half. We are currently talking to and trying to strategize with NOAA to get one of these things on one of their buoys , either on or tethered to one of their buoys is say the next year. So , uh, even at that, you got to remember what that harsh environment you’re dealing with. There are going to be all sorts of issues that crop up. This thing has moving parts. You have Marine life. That’s going to grow on these parts. You have weather conditions that may distort the parts. You have boats that may collide with this thing as it is. When you talk to people who just buoys out there and the ocean, there are all sorts of issues with everything from boats, collided with the buoys to vandalism.

James Di Virgilio: 14:57

It’s a lot of wisdom there. And what you said, Mark so much of creating a new product is to in fact, anticipate all the things that not can go wrong, but will go wrong because you think, Hey , I’ve got this solution. This is going to work just like, I think it will. But inevitably there are so many unseen things that will occur that you’re going to have to work on improving . And clearly we’re hearing through your process, that there’s a lifetime of experience here. When it comes to creating something, taking something to a marketplace, anticipating what needs to be done. Those are all things that of course are going to help the Platypus succeed. Now, Engineering Technologies, doesn’t just make the Platypus it’s drive from what I understand, Mark, and you can tell us more about it is to use clean energy items to improve the world around us. Now you’re working on a couple of other things as well at the same time. What else are you producing or developing right now?

Mark Supal: 15:44

Oh , if I come from education and we need to educate not only students, but adults about how to sort plastics, how to deal with trash. So what we , uh, created and actually are, have already released it’s available on both the app store and on Google play. It’s called the E- bin, E hyphen bin. It’s an app that encourages people to recycle and the way it works, you scan a little sticker on a bottle, the QR code, they call them, you scan the QR code on the item that you might be tossing out. And it identifies the type of material it is. And it says, Hey, you need to put that in Bin, ABC or D. So we’re encouraging kids to sort plastics and metals and glasses, and then dispose of those in a proper way. So that’s one product. We have so many different things, but the other one, believe it or not, and it’s a toilet seat let’s that cleans itself in today’s world, where people are afraid of viruses and so forth. This particular s eat has a mechanical arm that wipes the unusual shape on a bowl, the surface of the bowl, and basically disinfects that. So y ou may sit on that thing and not be concerned about picking up a disease or a virus.

James Di Virgilio: 16:43

So many creative things. What , what comes to mind for me when it comes to clean energy. And this is perhaps a devil’s advocate question. Most of the time, they don’t work. Not because they don’t actually work, but they don’t work in a marketplace because they’re not as efficient to use. Whether it be, Hey, we can use a fossil fuel or we can use something else. Or it tends to be a solution that is too expensive or too slow or not ubiquitous. The things you’re working on. Don’t seem to suffer from maybe some of the same problems that you would have from, like you mentioned, these larger scale, very ambitious. Let’s switch the world over to an electric car in the year, 2005. If we’re not ready yet, how much in your thought process goes into that? Hey, is this too soon to be released?

Mark Supal: 17:25

The key is to find a customer like you alluded to earlier here, you really need to interview and listen to the people who may buy this product. I did work in a research environment and unfortunately too many times researchers create wonderful things, but there’s no market for them. Nobody wants them. So the key is to actually do your market research homework first and see who your customer might be. Otherwise you might produce something fantastic. No one really cares about how the technology works. They just care that it might solve a problem or a headache for them.

James Di Virgilio: 17:54

Yeah. So well said, yeah, that’s it. That’s key. That’s one Oh one. But oftentimes, as you said, that’s lost in Gainesville, Florida. We have become one of the largest incubator cities in the country. We produce more business ideas and almost anywhere else. And that’s something I find myself frequently saying is your idea has to serve a market need. And this is gonna be one step further. And this surprises people, the reason an idea marketplace works so well, is it is the most efficient, you mentioned there’s products or there’s ideas we can create that are really neat. But society in an idea, marketplace will fund the ones that are most important that are most pressing right now. And that’s actually a good thing. That’s what you need. Of course, you could have humans spending time creating all sorts of things, but if it helps one person, whereas they could have created something that helps hundreds of thousands of people, you’d certainly rather have that be the latter . And that’s something you mentioned. Well, one of the easiest ways to figure that out is to go find out what are some market needs? Who is my customer? How many products would they need? Is this a high level need for them? Or is this way down their list of things they would want? Those are all really, really wise things to look at . And Mark yourself. Interesting background. Obviously you are both a very accomplished educator giving a lot of your time to teaching. You’ve won a variety awards for those things. You’re also a professional engineer. And now in your retirement, you’re creating a company to design products, a lot of fascinating stuff you mentioned to me before the podcast, something that I wanted to talk about, which is this idea that you really learned how to present your ideas from teaching.

Mark Supal: 19:17

Right? Unfortunately, a lot of times teachers aren’t given a lot of credit in their profession, but what I found, I actually moved from industry into teaching, which I thought was wonderful because I was able to bring a lot of cool things to kids that were actually valuable skills that they might need on job. But on the flip side, as the teacher, I developed the ability to present, which is difficult coming out of say a four year degree in engineering to go up in front of a group and talk about something tactical. So after many, many years of teaching, he thinking to myself, well , I need to get back with a company. And now that I have a better set of skills, presentation skills, I think that I would be able to move quite easily through the company and promote ideas better. What I’m trying to say is that to teaching you learn how to present information and by presenting information, people understand your ideas and can make decisions, corporate decisions I’d say so. Yeah, I think not only did I learn from the kids, but also I learned how to present in a way that people can understand what you’re saying.

James Di Virgilio: 20:07

That sounds like a great takeaway. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or one now is to hone your communication skills. If you understand the technology behind what you’re creating, but you’re unable to get your friends who are lay person. So to speak, to understand what you’re doing, it’s not going to motivate a marketplace and that’s something you can practice and a skill you can develop, which you mentioned, teaching is exactly that, right? Take an idea. That’s new to people, make it accessible, have them grab onto it, have them get inspired by it. That’s, that’s very, very powerful stuff. Now, last but not least. I want to talk about something you brought up as well in our pre show, which is very interesting. One of your first inventions happened a long time ago in the 1980s. And it was something called a Hydro Built. You can Google this on your own hydro belt, Supal, it’ll pop right up. You’ll see images of Mark himself wearing this belt. Now this was an interesting idea. You told me this product sold out. It was actually very successful, right ? But unfortunately it’s life sort of ended there. You still have these, you still use them. What is a hydro belt ? And tell us a little bit more about it. It’s just an interesting, innovative story.

Mark Supal: 21:06

So I was an avid triathlete in back in the infancy of the sport. This event wasn’t monitored very closely and I was out there . Swimming in an event is raining. I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to drown out here. I can’t even figure out where the shoreline is, but he didn’t make it back here I am today. So I said, there needs to be a product for safety. So what I invented was a very thin reusable swim belt . You wear it around your waist has the CO2 cartridge. You yank a cord and it inflates to give you the 15 pounds, which is equivalent to a life vest . And basically you can save yourself in an emergency because during these events, there may be thousands of swimmers around you. You may be kicked, you may cramp up. And if that happens, you can drown . And unfortunately, over the years and those eighties, those early eighties, people were drowning. So this hydro belt, it’s a emergency swim belt. And I sold it to triathlete swimmers. I sold all the products I had. And what was interesting about that product, even though it was being advertised in a triathlete magazine, there are all sorts of other people who were asking for it like Cessna pilots who needed to have a product that they could throw on the back of their plane in order to fly over the great lakes and people kayaking needed it. And then I had a lot of interesting calls from pool companies. Believe it or not in the state of Florida, they needed a product for their employees to wear . When they worked around pools, a safety product and event that one of these people falls into pool. They don’t swim, they drown. So this product was a way to save yourself in event of an emergency in the water. I sold all the products I had. The big problem with that particular product was getting liability insurance, the liability insurance, the premium alone on that product was under order of, you know , 60 to $90,000 a year. And I wasn’t in a position to front that much money. And here I am a young engineer. I didn’t understand all the possibilities to meet with investors, to perhaps fund this. And I did continue selling them, sold all the products I had, even though I didn’t have insurance. And you know, one way to protect myself by the way was to incorporate. And then after they all sold out, I ended up keeping five because I still do triathlons and I need to wear this thing, but it’s something that I need to resurrect the company that was manufacturing, the injection molded parts for me, went out of business and all the tooling was lost. And here it is now some 35, 40 years later as a retiree. I am , I think to myself, I need to resurrect this thing because there’s an even bigger need for it. Now with all the new water sports that have been invented besides triathlons, which still go on, they have long distance swimming. They have now kiteboarding, they have this , uh , paddleboarding and all these things require you to be able to move your arms and legs freely the hydro belt and need to resurrect a product and get that thing back out there. Because it’s really a wonderful thing for anybody from a child up to an adult who is into water or near the water or onto water.

James Di Virgilio: 23:38

Well, if you’re interested in the hydro belt, you can certainly contact Mark Supal. He is the chief technology officer at Engineering Technologies, LLC, creator of a bunch of interesting things. You can visit his website. You can get in touch with Mark. You can connect with him on LinkedIn. He is also right now a finalist for the Cade Prize, which of course does reward inventors like Mark creative problem solvers. Mark. It’s been wonderful having you on the program today. Thank you so much for being with us.

Mark Supal: 24:05

Oh, well thank you for the opportunity here . And I hope that we can solve this problem by, like I said, there are so many problems that even the lay person can tackle. People don’t realize how simple it is to invent and just be very perseverant in your ability to actually to make something and put it together. It’s not that difficult to do so I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

Outro: 24:26

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida . This podcast episodes host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinists, Jacob Lawson .

A big problem for most prosthetics is they don’t send sensory information back to the brain. Until now. Dr. Ranu Jung and her team at Florida International University (FIU) have developed a device that restores the sense of touch and hand grasp when someone is using their prosthetic hands. This technology could eventually be applied to other non-functioning parts of the body. A finalist for the 2020 Cade Prize for Innovation, Dr. Jung is head of the Biomedical Engineering Department at FIU, and the holder of multiple patents. Dr. Jung, who immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1983, credits the “can-do” spirit of her parents for her persistence and sense of discovery.   

Adam Kinsey is the founder of Verigo, a technology that uses smart sensors to track and monitor fresh produce during its journey from farm to truck to warehouse to store to table.  New technology like RFID chips has gotten dramatically cheaper, making the business model viable. A former engineer at Texas Instruments, Adam saw a new communications platform there that he knew could be adapted for fresh produce supply chains. A year later, no one else had adapted the technology, so Adam jumped in. “It was boldness or stupidity,” he says, that motivated him to enter a market he knew nothing about. *This episode was originally released on October 16, 2019.*

Adam Kinsey is the founder of Verigo, a technology that uses smart sensors to track and monitor fresh produce during its journey from farm to truck to warehouse to store to table.  New technology like RFID chips has gotten dramatically cheaper, making the business model viable. A former engineer at Texas Instruments, Adam saw a new communications platform there that he knew could be adapted for fresh produce supply chains. A year later, no one else had adapted the technology, so Adam jumped in. “It was boldness or stupidity,” he says, that motivated him to enter a market he knew nothing about. *This episode was originally released on October 16, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade and podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:36Can the internet get me some fresh strawberries? Apparently, yes. If you can track them and integrate the information into global supply chains here to tell me how that works is Adam Kinsey. The founder of Verigo a company that does just that. Welcome Radio Cade, Adam.

Adam Kinsey: 0:49Thank you, Richard. Thanks for having me.

Richard Miles: 0:51So Adam, most of our listeners probably know or have heard about the internet of things, but in case we’ve got some late adopters out there among our listeners. Tell me in general, what is the internet of things? And you can describe for me what Verigo’s technology is.

Adam Kinsey: 1:07The internet of things is a buzzword that spawned probably 15, 20 years ago. Now it’s the idea that we have complex systems in the world, whether it’s a building and that building has an HVAC system and a water system and all of the systems in that building historically, you’d have to have a technician go and look at each system one by one to manage that building IOT says, let’s put sensors on each of those sub systems. Let’s put wireless communications on them and let that building talk to you. IOT and related to buildings would be a smart building system, but it also can be applied to things that are in motion. So our specific areas, perishable supply chain, when you’re shipping thousands of truckload, shipping containers, aircraft loaded with pallets of cargo, same type of problems of important, valuable products that are in motion, and you need to be able to manage them in that supply chain. And so IOT in the supply chain is let’s put smart sensors and communications on each of those packages for each of those shipments and let them collect intelligence about themselves and talk to you while they’re in motion. So you can effectively manage the entire supply chain and all the products in it.

Richard Miles: 2:16And so what has made that easier right, is a couple of breakthroughs in technology. And it used to be early computer age days, but the idea of putting some sort of physical sensor on a machine part right away was probably overwhelmed by cost considerations and ability of that sensor to talk to other sensors and so on what has happened that has made the ability for things to talk to other things cheaper, faster, more reliable.

Adam Kinsey: 2:41What has caused the internet of things, quote, unquote, to grow so rapidly has been the development of new technologies like RFID, come on the scene that now makes it possible to make something smart for something on the order of pennies. Instead of having sort of a dollars.

Richard Miles: 2:54And for those who don’t know RFID, right? Have this are like tiny little chips that can be physically put on a piece of clothing, a pallet of fruit or anything. And essentially we’ll then talk to a sensor nearby. Right?

Adam Kinsey: 3:07The basic concept of RFID is we’re all used to seeing a barcode on each product we buy, but a barcode requires you to look at it and you have to have line of sight to it, to identify it. RFID says let’s take that barcode and let’s turn it into a tiny little chip that’s size of a few grains of rice that is wireless. And now I can read that from meters or even hundreds of meters away.

Richard Miles: 3:27And cheap as well right? I mean, cheap to manufacture cheap, to attach to whatever you’re trying to track. Okay, let’s drill down now Verigo specifically. Where did you get the idea? Is this somebody else’s idea? And then how does it work? What system existed before to track produce? Obviously people have been tracking produce for awhile, but what came before and how does this change the game?

Adam Kinsey: 3:48This is not a new idea, right? Tracking produce has been around. So then it’s the novelty of this idea is really in this implementation and which technology we use and how we did it. So let’s walk into history a bit. It has been since probably the year, 2000 become more and more standard to monitor trucks. So if truck is driving down the road, that truck is talking to headquarters and they can see where it is and see kind of what the status is of that truck. The challenge of that is if you’re shipping a lettuce from a farm in California to a grocery store in Florida, that lettuce is actually on quite a few different trucks, so great. You can see truck one carrying that lettuce. And then later on you can see truck two carrying that lettuce. And then later on you can see truck three, but you actually can’t ever see the lettuce or what happened to it along the way.

Richard Miles: 4:33And some spots has been stored in the warehouse for hours or days.

Adam Kinsey: 4:37Yeah. Often it stays. So where the inception of my idea came from I, when I was an undergraduate, I volunteered for a joint project with the UF Packaging department and UF Electrical Engineering department and they were working with fresh seafood suppliers, struggling with the same challenges. How do we get fresh seafood to market? And they were using a number of technologies to look at how do we reduce the waste, trying to get fresh seafood in from Chile. Actually, what they were working on doing was instead of monitoring at the truck level, can we now for the first time monitor the actual units of product, let’s move that level of granularity down to the individual unit of product. And that really had not been done before. It’s really challenging to move from monitoring 40,000 pounds of product to now monitoring a much greater volume of things like having all of the pallets and the supply chain talk to you. It’s a major technical challenge make that feasible at the right price point and to be able to handle all that data reliably. So the innovation that led to Verigo was really simple. It wasn’t our innovation. It was, I was working at Texas instruments in Dallas, in 2011, and I saw the release of this new wireless protocol. It really wasn’t necessarily designed in itself for the supply chain, but it had a number of characteristics that made it perfect for this exact application for monitoring salmon. And so I came back and started PhD, UF and I was expecting a number of companies, see this new communications platform and use it to help solve this problem. And a year later, no one had, so I said, well, I had done my own research otherwise and decided to build a system to accomplish this goal, using this new communications platform.

Richard Miles: 6:11Now at this point, Adam, did you know anything about supply chains? Cause you were trained primarily as an engineer, right?

Adam Kinsey: 6:17That’s correct.

Richard Miles: 6:18Electrical engineer. Right? So supply chains is a whole other sort of science, right? Even it’s a fairly sophisticated, complicated science. What gave you the idea to plunge into an area in which I’m sure at least one person said you don’t know what you’re doing or maybe more, I don’t know.

Adam Kinsey: 6:33I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Um, but I felt that in working on that one project, I had gotten to see some firsthand exposure to this place. And I’d gone into warehouses, I’d talked to truck drivers, I’d gotten some,

Richard Miles: 6:43This is at TI Texas Instruments?

Adam Kinsey: 6:45Um no this is actually with University of Florida with that resource project. Okay. So I had gotten a brief taste of the supply chain and what it looked like. I would say it was simply boldness and or stupidity that caused me to go and make the decision to enter this industry that I really honestly didn’t know much about, but I learned along the way trial by fire.

Richard Miles: 7:04So let’s talk about that. Some, because it’s a fairly common story that we hear on Radio Cade and other places through the Cade Prize and so on. And it’s a story of an idea. That’s a good idea. And it’s a workable idea. So the idea has to sort of improve at some level and then the transition from that to the marketplace. Right? And so what happens a lot is the original inventor or the technical person thinks, well, I’ve got a good idea and it works. It’s basically going to sell itself. And then they discovered doesn’t sell itself. What were some of the early surprises as you thought? Okay, I have a great concept. I think it’s going to work. The market’s going to love this idea. What were some of the challenges moving from that stage to where you eventually ended up? It became widely adopted in relatively short period of time. So tell us what that was for Verigo.

Adam Kinsey: 7:50So we started out with a very grand vision, which was, I saw an incredible amount of waste in the supply chain and wanting to prevent about 40% of the food that is thrown away. So in today’s fresh produce supply chain, about 10% of all fresh produce is thrown away before it even has a chance to be sold. So that’s after it leaves the farm between that point and now enters the supply chain between there and it being put on a shelf in Publix for you to buy 10% of it goes to waste in some ways that’s fantastic. That means 90% of the stuff coming in comes out, which is better than it’s ever been in history, but it’s still a huge opportunity to prevent waste $30 billion of fresh food waste in the world today that could be prevented. And about 50% of that can be prevented through systems like ours. So we started out with that huge idea and you can’t start with an idea that big in a reasonable amount of time. So a year and a half is enough time to build a product that worked and to get out and get that first taste of implementing it. Those first trial customers to put it in practice in the supply chain. And we learned this was too big as a first step. And so there were some hard conversations and we said, what we have to do is start smaller, narrow the scope of what we’re trying to do. We can still take the same technology platform, but let’s just pick one facet of it for one type of product and solve that for us.

Richard Miles: 9:14So allow me to ask some before that, did you look at the entire produce market and say we’re going to solve all these problems? Is that when you say that your scope is too big?

Adam Kinsey: 9:22Yeah. The scope that was too big it was, we were trying to monitor all the way from the farmer’s field to the in grocery stores and the retailer. If you’re monitoring that entire process, you’re actually monitoring the process of usually three different companies. Okay. So there’s three different entities that would have to adopt the platform, use it and work together.

Richard Miles: 9:40Three different deals, all three that have to happen at the same time.

Adam Kinsey: 9:44Okay. And that’s not feasible as a place to start. Right. So as a place to start, we’d narrowed our focus and said, let’s look at that last part of the supply chain. And in fact, let’s find those companies that have very valuable and very perishable products where they already have some monitoring in place, but they want a better solution. And so that’s where we started.

Richard Miles: 10:04And sorry I heard you describing earlier the system that existed before Verigo was essentially some guy in a warehouse with a clipboard. Right. But it shipment would come in and whatever it is, lettuce, tomato, salmon, and to sort of eyeball and like, yeah, that looks fine. And it doesn’t look fine when you went to these companies, that’s what they had or was they had a few things better than that?

Adam Kinsey: 10:23When you’re looking at the problem of food waste, it’s that quality inspector at the warehouse receiving dock who is performing the job, that visual inspection, the physical inspection of some sample of that load, that guides that decision making process of, can I accept this load? Can I bring this lettuce into my warehouse and then continue to ship it along? How long can I store it in my warehouse? And can I ship this another 2000 miles? Those three questions ultimately are all being answered by that guy doing that inspection. There are also wired monitoring technologies. Each truck comes in and hopefully it’s going to have a recording thermometer in it that if they choose, they can take it out of the truck, bring it over to their computer and then see what the temperatures were in that truck, retrieving that recording thermometer and downloading that data was somewhat unwieldy process. So most guys just didn’t do it. Those things were ignored, but that was an existing market that we were able to go into and find those companies using those recording devices and say, you’re paying for these things. And everyone in practices ignoring them by one that is much easier to use. And that provides the information much quicker. So the guy on the warehouse actually wants to use it right, and upgrade to our technology. And so that was our first entrance into the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 11:31Let’s talk a little bit about other applications of the underlying technology like this tracking. Are there other applications out there? I remember reading, I think it was with clothing. The costs had gotten so low. There’s not feasible to track individual sweaters or blouses, not, not for shipping, but for inventory. Right? How many do you have in your store? Are there things out there that are being developed that are going to transform dramatically improve the efficiency in other industries in the same general description of tracking?

Adam Kinsey: 11:57That wireless communications protocol that I got so excited about. And that was one of the first tech advances that was an enabling technology to do what we did. That progression hasn’t stopped right? There are now even newer and better wireless communication protocols that are going to make it possible to monitor even far more, just to narrow it down and clarify what we focused on, where those products, where you need to know more than just that they are there. We were actually instrumenting there’s temperatures, humidity, accelerometer type sensors that were going into that shipment. So you could record what was its temperature, what humidity was exposed to, was it dropped what kind of vibration did it experience. And so it could not only tell you that it was there like a shirt is an inventory, right? It could tell you what its current condition is. What’s the health of that product. And so we focused on things that were perishable and that were reasonably high value. And today there’s some really exciting technologies. Let’s list a couple of them, long range, wireless technologies like LoRa and Sigfox or two of them. And then even with 5G is coming the next cell phone vertical, there are some incredible things coming down the pike that are going to make it even easier for all of those products in the world in supply chains, to be smart and to be providing real time intelligence to the operators of the supply chain.

Richard Miles: 13:12Because in theory, if that infrastructure exists to capture the signal that they’re admitting, right, they could be anywhere, almost any condition in it and sending out the information. Whereas now it would depend on infrastructure and that factory or the company that’s receiving it to pull that information for RFID chips are,

Adam Kinsey: 13:29Exactly.The big challenge has been, we have great infrastructure for cell phones are everywhere. The problem is can you afford to put a cell phone on a pallet of lettuce? So what they’re doing now is releasing technologies that are going to be on every cell tower in the world. And they’re going to be incredibly cheap. Now they’re lowering that cost and lowering that barrier so that now the pellet of lettuce can afford to talk to you.

Richard Miles: 13:54All right. This is part of the show. Now Adam, where we talk a little bit about you, tell us a little bit about yourself, your childhood, or sort of pre academic life. What sort of shaped you or what, what didn’t shape you.

Adam Kinsey: 14:05So yeah, I was a son of an air force pilot. So we moved around quite a bit to have moved quite a bit as a child, I think makes you a little bit more self sufficient and self-reliant was it beneficial characteristic to have when coming into being an entrepreneur, being willing to accept risk and new things and take chances. As a child I would say I had a wide variety of interests. There was one passion that has was and still is aviation. I love aircraft in all forms. And as a kid, I was always designing, building and flying model airplanes. So that was my biggest hobby as a child. And it turns out to build Muller planes. They have all sorts of electronics in them. You’re playing with motors and soldering wires and working with all electronics and the radios, transmitters and receivers to make them fly. And eventually it started to become fascinated with how do all those work and wanting to learn more about that technology that made it possible for me to have my hobby and fly those airplanes around the sky. So that was the catalyst for me to get into electrical and electronics engineering.

Richard Miles: 14:55Did you consider being a pilot at all? Following in your father’s footsteps?

Adam Kinsey: 14:58I certainly did. Yeah. And actually I finally fulfilled that goal last year, private pilot’s license. So I now finally am a pilot, but I did consider it, but I loved building things too much. The quintessential engineer, the folks that are always tinkering and building. And I enjoyed that too much.

Richard Miles: 15:13Were you a good student in school? Do you remember doing well and things like math and science?

Adam Kinsey: 15:18Pretty good student at math and science and was a pretty good student. Just barely good enough to go to the university of Florida.

Richard Miles: 15:24Okay. And this is now your opportunities for dispense a little bit of the wisdom. What sort of advice would you give to someone maybe just graduating from college now? Are there things you wish you had known when you were say 21, 22 that you know, now that would have been mighty useful a few years ago?

Adam Kinsey: 15:41Hindsight is always 2020, of course. And so you never know really what you’re getting into. And to be honest, if I had known, I probably would not have taken this path. Right? But that doesn’t mean it was the wrong choice and I’m very happy that I took this path and I started this company and had a chance to sell it to a publicly traded company and see our solution adopted around the world. I mean, there’s just, it’s an incredible blessing to get, to be a part of that and to experience that. As far as what I wish I would have known it wouldn’t have changed the decisions that I made. I don’t think I would say the first thing you have to believe in yourself and you have to know that this goal can be accomplished, but there also needs to be a pragmatic side of you that says it’s also possible that situation’s totally outside of my control could cause me to not accomplish this goal. If that comes to fruition, you’re not destroyed. There’s a lot of entrepreneurs that struggle when things don’t go their way, it can lead down a very dark road. Just think it’s very important before starting any company or entrepreneurial venture is know that the goal absolutely is achievable, but even if I fail or don’t achieve that goal, this is something I want to have done anyway, this is the right thing to do. I believe that this product needs to exist or this problem needs to be solved, but accomplishing the goal is certainly not a given. And you need to go in with that understanding and be okay with it either way. The biggest learning that I had in this process was the scope and scale of this problem. You know, I was 21 years old when I started this company. So it was very young and very inexperienced still am, frankly, there are certain dynamics of problems that you want to solve. The technology never solves the problem. It can be the key factor that makes it possible for that problem to be solved. But ultimately the industry has to adopt a solution. The customer has to want to change their behaviors, use the technology, to enable them to change the behaviors and get the outcome and dealing with industrial companies and dealing with regulated industries. The pace of change can be very slow and slow and the rate of adoption can be really slow. And it’s not that they won’t adopt it. You’re wrong in your assumption that this problem needs to be solved in this can do it. It’s just, it was normal and average for our sales cycle to be one year from the time we were introduced to a client to first sale and in the worst case, it was three years. So that’s how it works. That’s not wrong for a startup.

Richard Miles: 17:56An entrepreneur in which you, you measure things in like five minute increments, right? It’s like talking to someone who lives in dog years. You know, you’re making decisions every single day.

Adam Kinsey: 18:07It’s important going into your startup venture to understand that industry you’re going into, we did not at the time. We adjusted, we found other kinds of clients. We were nimble. If you can accept those sorts of things upfront and include them into your plan, you can take a few less jogs along your path.

Richard Miles: 18:24It’s the search for a balance because on one hand, as an entrepreneur, you have to be flexible. You have to pivot, you have to listen to the market. You have to listen to investors. You have to listen to your board and so on. But on the other hand, there is a component which you need to really stand firm and hold onto that original insight, original idea. And the problem is as an entrepreneur is where is that dividing line? Where’s that balanced? So I think you can’t totally surrender, right? As you’ve probably discovered to what the market even tells you or what a investors tell you, do this, do that. But in the end of the hand, your dad, pretty soon, if you don’t adapt and flexible and so on.

Adam Kinsey: 18:58And what you can do is take the big vision and break it down into a much smaller goal that is not accomplishing maybe the bigger, longer term goal, but it is certainly a step in that direction. So it might be a step slightly off the path or the original path, but it’s still getting ya towards the end goal. And so those pivots absolutely have to happen. And we did them as well. You do have to be nimble while always keeping your eye on where am I trying to end up.

Richard Miles: 19:23Had a great conversation, thank you very much for coming on Radio Cade, wish you the best of luck. Hope to have you back on here with your latest and greatest invention. I’m sure at your age, you still got plenty of good ideas left and it’s been a great conversation.

Adam Kinsey: 19:36It’s been great to be here.Thank you so much, Richard.

Richard Miles: 19:37I’m Richard Miles

Outro: 19:40Radio Cade, would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Diabetes sometimes leads to loss of vision. What if there were a simple screening device to find out who is at risk? Dr. Lloyd Hildebrand, a Canadian ophthalmologist and founder of two start-up companies, invented a hand-held device that in minutes measures the eye’s electrical waves to detect patients who may be suffering from diabetic retinopathy. Hildebrand talks about the challenges in moving from academia to the start-up world. “It was hard to get somebody that understood what we were doing to fund the company and run it,” Hildebrand said, “so I drew the short straw.”

How does the brain change itself, and can those changes be passed on to the next generation? ‘Yes’ and ‘yes’ according to Dr. Bryan Kolb, a neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge, author of a classic neuropsychology textbook and a recipient of Canada’s highest civilian honor.   Listen in to learn about brain plasticity as well as epigenetics, the science of how genes flip on and off and can be inherited in their new state. 

How does the brain change itself, and can those changes be passed on to the next generation? ‘Yes’ and ‘yes’ according to Dr. Bryan Kolb, a neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge, author of a classic neuropsychology textbook and a recipient of Canada’s highest civilian honor.   Listen in to learn about brain plasticity as well as epigenetics, the science of how genes flip on and off and can be inherited in their new state. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Brain plasticity, and epigenetics. What do those terms mean? And why do they matter? I’m your host Richard Miles, and I’m very pleased to welcome a very distinguished guest, Dr. Bryan Kolb neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, the author of numerous books and articles on neuropsychology and the recipient of the order of Canada, Canada’s highest, Civilian honor. Welcome to Radio Cade Bryan.

Bryan Kolb: 0:59

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 1:01

Bryan. I read somewhere that your groundbreaking textbook Fundamentals of Neuropsychology, is the most stolen book in England. What is up with that?

Bryan Kolb: 1:08

Well, apparently it’s true. It’s stolen form libraries that obviously doesn’t happen in Canada or the U.S. People buy the book. We had a heck of a time getting it published in the late 1970s, because nobody believed there was such a field and it turns out there is and the book did very well.

Richard Miles: 1:24

For an author obviously an author would like to get paid on the sales, but to have your book stolen probably better than your book being dropped off at used bookstores. But let’s talk about that. The book itself was very important because it was pathbreaking breaking . It’s published in , I think in 1980. And you talked about brain plasticity, not just that, but that was one of the fundamental things. And basically your definition, I believe is the ability of the brain to reorganize its structure, function and connections in response to experiences. So why don’t you sort of walk our listeners through, what does that mean? How can we think about brain plasticity in a useful way?

Bryan Kolb: 2:01

If you imagine being born into the world, the brain has no idea what world its going to be, could be in Alaska? It could be at the equator. You could be in Africa. And so the brain biologically needs to be able to change itself, to adapt to the environment that it’s in. That’s sort of the background as to why evolution would have done this. It’s not just true of us. It’s true in worms. So all animals have this capacity to change their brain response to the environment that they find themselves in. And of course, if your listeners would learn anything from this discussion today, we have to change their brains. Somehow distorted material, the brain has to change. It’s just not magic.

Richard Miles: 2:39

So If I understand this correctly and we’re not stuck with the brain were born with right? Basically from the minute we’re born, the brain is constantly reshaping itself. Give me a magnitude of the degree to what we’re talking about. Is it just a little bit that the brain sort of prunes a few neurons here and there and adds , or how dramatic is it? Say we take a , a new born and we look at them when they’re one year old or five years old or 12 years old, what kind of changes have occurred in the interim in terms of the brain changing itself?

Bryan Kolb: 3:11

So they, the changes are not small there quite dramatic. So when we’re born, we have twice as many neurons as we’re going to need. Twice as many as we have now, which seems a little odd. And then over the next couple of years, we make connections at an enormous rate. And we ended up with far more connections than we need. And so around age two, we start getting rid of them. And depending on which part of the brain we’re looking at, it’s going to begin around to other regions. The higher levels of cognition is later. Let’s say, we’re starting to lose the frontal connections and neurons around age five. We will lose half of them and at the beginning of adolescents or puberty the rate we lose them at is remarkable. It’s about a hundred thousand connections per second. It’s a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand. So if you think about 13 year old girls, they are not the easiest group to deal with because their brain is changing so fast. The kids of course are inventing themselves at that age. They’re becoming who they’re going to be. And what that means is they’re creating the brain of the environment that they’re headed into. So if you look at a one year old, the one year old still doesn’t really know what the environment’s going to be certainly is growing connections. The neurons aren’t being born or not many, any longer. And then as the child begins to adapt to the environment that it’s in, whatever that happens to be, then it starts to change. So if you think about language, if you imagine a child who’s born in a house, or a home that speaks Japanese or Korean, they’re not going to hear the sounds L or R. But they can discriminate those sounds when they’re six months old, but as time goes on, they start losing the ability to make those sound discriminations . And so as an adult, they have this difficulty discriminating, L and R. Similarly, if we’re born in a house that speaks English, there are sounds that other languages that we simply cannot discriminate once we’re adults, because we lose that ability. So the brain is getting rid of things it’s not going to use, getting rid of connections that are not necessary. Now, one question you could ask is what happens if you don’t get rid of these connections? What happens if you keep them all? And the answer is cognitive disabilities. So children who do not lose a lot of these connections, cognitively are impaired. So we historically would have called them retarded. We don’t any longer, but that’s basically what it is.

Richard Miles: 5:34

I remember watching one of your talks. And you talked about language and it was somewhat similar to when you buy like a new Apple product that’s sold all over the world and you see it installing the files. It installs with all sorts of Russian and Japanese and Portuguese, I guess, to make your keyboard compatible or something like that. Is that sort of what we’re talking about, that a newborn has basically all of this software loaded to do lots of different things, but based on the environment, they’re not going to need all that. And what I found was fascinating is that it’s counterintuitive that that loaded up brain, I guess, is somewhat of a disadvantage and that you want to sort of prune or make it more efficient. Is that more or less accurate?

Bryan Kolb: 6:14

That’s a wonderful analogy. Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’m going to use that in the future. Yeah. That’s, it’s fully loaded, ready to go, but it’s not efficient. And so if we can make things more efficient, then we’re going to have a greater cognitive capacity.

Richard Miles: 6:29

Well, good. I’m glad I got the analogy, right . I’ve had guests where I rolled out an analogy and they, and they said , no, that’s completely wrong. Okay. Well, I clearly didn’t understand the concept. So we’ve described plasticity the ability of the brain to change itself. And you’ve also done a lot on something called epigenetics. So before we go into the implications, all this, certainly from an educational perspective, why don’t you also define what epigenetics is? So that way we can talk it both in the same conversation.

Bryan Kolb: 6:57

Sure. So if you look at any cell in the body, it has the same DNA. So cells that make your skin and your bones, your eyes, your brain all have the same DNA, yet the cells are different. And so the question is, why are they different? Well, they’re different because different genes are turned on and different genes are turned off. So the idea of epigenetics is that gene expression, the turning on or turning off of genes is regulated by experience, by things that are going on around us. And those things could be inside us or those things could be outside of us. So the idea is that if you’re going to change the brain, if you’re going to have plastic changes, the changes are going to result from changes in the activity of genes. This activity of genes is affected by experience. And so the idea of epigenetics is that we have a certain experience that might be a stressful event. It might be a wonderful event, might be a drug who knows what it is, but those things will change the expression of genes, which changes creation of proteins, manufacturer proteins and so on in the body or in grand (inaudible).

Richard Miles: 7:59

So this is really a revolutionary insight because I think prior to this, you’ve had this debate for centuries about nature versus nurture, right? What you’re born with, what you inherit as part of your genes and then your environment and all of your experiences, whether that’s the way you were raised or the way you’re educated or whatever happens to you that shapes you. But this seems to imply that it’s not just a mix of those two, they’re actually together in the form that your experiences can make you well, why don’t you explain it particularly with the role of the father, which that’s really, really fascinating that these changes occur even before somebody essentially is conceived.

Bryan Kolb: 8:38

That’s right in fact, it’s paradoxical. It seems at first that the father could have a bigger influence on the gene expression of the offspring than the mom. But it’s related to the fact that the changes in gene expression can be transmitted by the sperm. So the idea here is that if you take the father, who’s had some sort of stressful event, maybe was a soldier in Iraq or something, just a horrible experience. That’s going to change the gene expression in the sperm of the dad, which as a result is going to change the way in which the developing brain or his offspring is going to progress. It’s true that the mom has also evolved but her eggs don’t change. So the eggs that she is born with that will eventually be used to create babies. They don’t change. They’re not changed by experiences, but the sperm is, cause the sperm dies every 40 days or so when you create new sperm. And so that new sperm is being affected by the experiences that the dad has had. That means that the same dad could have a different kind of gene expression transmitted to different children, depending on the experiences that they’ve had in the previous two or three months or maybe longer. So that’s the idea there, and these changes can cross generations or can be shown in the grandchildren. Maybe the great grandchildren who knows defect gets much smaller over time. So if you have your daughter or your son and they have experiences too, and so it’s going to affect change expression. And so the influence of that event, that the father had pre conceptually to you, is going to start decreasing, but nonetheless, there is a footprint of it there. If you go back to this idea that epigenetics, if you remember, there was a scientist called Lamarck. Lamarck believed there was, that genes could learn essentially that learning, could it be transmitted from generation to generation. And people thought decided this was crazy. It’s not like that. Well, it turns out he was correct. He didn’t know the mechanism, but in fact it looks like that’s, what’s actually happening. So you’re right. Nature and nurture are working together, back and forth, back and forth.

Richard Miles: 10:38

So just so I understand this correctly, Bryan, I can’t change my own DNA. I’m stuck with my DNA and not all genes can switch on or off. Right. You’re only talking about a certain subset of genes or do all, all genes, have the ability to essentially be turned on or turned off.

Bryan Kolb: 10:55

I don’t know the answer to that, but my guess is that most of the ability to be turned on or turned off. But I imagine some can’t. Good question.

Richard Miles: 11:03

You talked about the example of PTSD from someone in Iraq or war zone. I assume that also goes the other direction. For instance, if I inherited the DNA of being a very good baseball player, for instance, and then I became a great baseball player, I hit the major leagues, the likelihood, then that say my kids would inherit , that ability are now much greater, right? Because I’ve done that gene for pitching or catching or whatever I’ll ask you. Does that explain why you often see sports stars? You know, fathers and sons who are in the major leagues, whether it’s baseball or hockey or football at a rate that would be implausible, unless there’s some sort of genetic connection, right?

Bryan Kolb: 11:42

Correct. We should make it clear that there’s not a gene we’re talking about multiple genes. Nothing is, it’s usually aging, the odd diseases for the most part. That’s not the case, but yeah, that would be why you get somebody like Gordie Howe and his three sons, all playing pro hockey at the same time.

Richard Miles: 11:58

I always felt a little bit, sorry for maybe the one kid that didn’t get it. Right? Like there’s no Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. And I think their father was a famous quarterback as well. Right. But there’s one son that doesn’t have it. So I’ve always wondered what his Thanksgiving dinner is like at those households. Okay. So Bryan, I think I’ve got it. And I hope our listeners have got it that basically brain plasticity brain can and does change itself a lot, but there are certain windows, right? So it’s not like a continuous process that every year your brain either grows a certain number of neurons or loses them. There are windows in which that’s sort of concentrated and that your research and other people’s have found has a tremendous influence on particular education. And then everything that sort of flows from good or bad education, a lot of life outcomes are going to stem from whether you were well-educated or did well in school or , or not. So why don’t you talk a little bit about what research has shown is the correlation between those windows of brain development and future outcomes?

Bryan Kolb: 13:00

Well, the earliest window obviously is the prenatal window, but the first one to three years is a window of a lot of change. Then a period it’s not quite as soon, but it’s not changing as much until the onset of puberty. And then we have this period in adolescence of huge change. Now we used to think that the brain was pretty much finished developing by about age 18, but it’s not. And so it continues on into the third decade. And so we’re looking at changes going up to say 30, 32, depending on whether you’re a man or a woman. If you ask people who are say over 40 or 50, when they became who they are, most people would say somewhere around 30, clearly there are changes that when we look back on. We can see what are going on for a long time. Then we have a reduction in plasticity, but mercifully it doesn’t stop. So that even at my age, I’m 72, I can still learn things. I don’t learn them as quickly as my grandchildren unfortunately, but I can still learn things. The brain is still plastic . However, there are disorders which the plasticity really does decline like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and other demanding diseases where we now see that the brain really isn’t changing very easily. But for most people the changes can continue on into senescence, but at a very much, much slower rate, for sure. So we have these two windows one shortly after birth and the other one in early adolescence in particular. The second one’s really important because we’re worrying about kids experimenting with drugs when they’re 13, 14, when the brain is really changing. One of the things that Terry Robinson and I discovered about 20 years ago was that every psychoactive drug that you take actually produces permanent changes in the structure of neurons. And those changes that occur with kids who are experiencing with drugs have different consequences than they do with you, or me, particularly cannabis is a worry investigating the effects of cannabis at age 13, 14, 15, the effects can actually be dramatic in the twenties with respect to mental health and so on. So that’s a big worry about plasticity. There’s something that’s pathological. I just want to throw one other thing in here. That is, if you have an idea and you can remember the idea, it means that you changed your own brain, but that idea has changed the brain, which is you think about it quite remarkable, but that’s the only way you can remember it.

Richard Miles: 15:20

One of the things we talk about at the Cade Museum, particularly with regards to education is the value of interactive experience that a lot of inventors, a lot of entrepreneurs often don’t do well, or haven’t done well on a classic school system. They have sort of different experiences and what I found fascinating, about one of the things that I saw you talk about was the language development skills in the first 18 months of life. And that it’s not enough to be simply exposed, to say a large vocabulary passively. You really have to get in the rhythm of being able to have a conversation in a given take away. And that has profound differences or profound outcomes on how somebody does later in life. So can you explain how exactly that works and what the research shows about those differences?

Bryan Kolb: 16:08

You know , one of the metaphors we use here is serve and return. So the idea is that if you are passively listening to the language, whether it’s on TV or the radio or whatever artist in the background, you’re not actually actively engaged socially with the center of that information, but you need to be. So if I say something to you and your child, and then you respond, that’s the serve and return idea. There’s a really nice experiment, trying to teach kids. I believe it was Japanese, but it was not English, English, speaking kids. And they either saw this woman trying to teach them on TV. Or she was in the TV, the old kind of TVs , where there was a big Catholic retreat . So she’s actually there see woman , but she can actually serve and return with the kids in the one case and in the other she can’t. And I guess which kids learn Japanese, the ones who actually have the personal interaction. So the social support, the social interaction is really critical to the plastic changes in the brain.

Richard Miles: 17:05

So I guess one question really is we’re recording this and then, you know, the middle of 2020 in the midst of the 19 sort of lockdown , what that means for education and schooling. Is there anything to suggest that a serve and return as you call it style online is just as effective or less effective than face to face? Because obviously there’s a whole bunch of other types of communication that go on between people face to face the visual cues and facial cues does a lot of that get lost during an online experience or the fact that you can actually talk to and be taught from somebody online. Is that good enough?

Bryan Kolb: 17:41

It’s a really good question. And I’m sure there are people studying that as a professor who is going to have to be online. These students their not going to be on my screen. I won’t be able to see them. That’s impossible on Zoom to do that. And so are they going to get the same education? I doubt that, but if it’s two people as you and I are an hour on screen, I suspect that we’re going to get a lot of the serve and return affects whether children can be engaged in the same way as empirical question that I’m sure that many developmental psychologists are studying right now. It’s , it’s a really, really good question.

Richard Miles: 18:15

One of the things I really want to ask you about is it seems like the most important window. If I understand your research correctly is that sort of first 18 months were certainly the absence of direct communication with an infant is really disastrous. And I think it’s from those remaining or some studies and other studies have just shown. It’s just terrible, but there are these other windows later on where you’ve got a window of learning, I guess, let me give you three scenarios and give me your reaction to these three scenarios in terms of what does the research say? If anything, about practical decisions as people trying to sort out scenario number one would be you have a 12 year old and you’re trying to decide, do I have them study music or do sports number two you’re 18 years old. And do you study chemistry or you study history and then number three late in life, you’re , let’s say 56. And should you learn French on Duolingo or just drink Bordeaux all day. Very specific nature. The third scenario it’s asking for a friend, what can you tell us about brain plasticity at those other stages, adolescence early adulthood, and then middle age ?

Bryan Kolb: 19:22

Well, one of the most important things that children can do using your, I think it was age 12, piano lessons versus sports is music has a profound influence on how we age. So basically it’s like learning a foreign language. So we know that people who have musical training prior to say age 20 age, better incidence of dementia is much lower. And so on later in life music engages the entire grid. It’s a difficult decision will be, not be in sports because you need the exercise, exercise increases the blood flow into the brain. So you’d want to do both in a sense, but it’s not impossible chemistry versus history. The person in the 20th, the brain is more likely to change in positive ways. If you’re doing things that are interesting, if you’re not engaged, if I’m taking chemistry and I hate it, which was true, but let’s imagine it was, I’m not going to learn it and they’re not going to remember it. So you may be that I was fascinated with European history and I got really engaged in that. So I think it the amount of engagement that’s going to make a difference to how plastic the brain will be. In terms of the 56 year old. I’ve been playing the guitar for over 50 years. When I bought a banjo in 1988 , I never learned to play it. And so I decided this year to learn to play it. And my wife got a new piano. And so she’s taking out the piano. She took piano lessons as a child for 8 or 10 years. And then once she went to vet school and she never play it again, we’ve carted this bloody piano from place to place. So I keeps saying nobody plays it. So now she has luckily a new piano, a little baby grant . She’s taking piano lessons again, she’s close to my age. So we’re both learning to play these instruments. And now we’re playing duets together. It’s really not the Banjo, or the piano, the guitar. It’s really a lot of fun, but the brain clearly can change in the older person. I have to say, the Bordeaux helps make it fun.

Richard Miles: 21:13

Well, I have another banjo story, not quite as successful. My wife gave me a banjo about 15 years ago, hoping that I would learn how to play it. I did try to learn, but it turns out we had a friend who really was quite good. And we decided just to give the banjo to him because the, some benefit for humanity would be much better fee on the banjo and not me, but he actually answered the question. I was about to ask how much research has been done, particularly on people in their later years, let’s say 50 or 60 above those who choose to do something new or resurrect something that they used to know how to do well, versus those who don’t. Are there different outcomes in terms of health or cognitive disability? Or what do we know about that stage?

Bryan Kolb: 21:52

Yes, there seems to be. And music is one of the ones that looks like really beneficial later in life. You can buy all these games and so on that are supposed to improve your cognition and later life there’s absolutely zero evidence that, that really generalizes to anything music is one thing that does, probably the only other thing that has as big an effect would be learning a new language, which is like learning music and exercise and the exercise again, because of the increased blood flow in the brain and elsewhere in the body. But those three would probably be the most beneficial ones.

Richard Miles: 22:22

One of the insights is it . If you do choose to do something later in life, it sounds like it should be something new, right? Rather than doubling down on a skill that you already have and you decide, well, I’m already a good musician. I’m going to be a better musician or I’m a really good whatever I ski well, or I’m going to do better at it. Does that not challenge the brain as much as if you take up something, even an elementary level that you really don’t know how to do, let’s say learn Chinese or learn to play an instrument that you’ve never picked up before. Is that better exercise or better stimulation for the brain at that age?

Bryan Kolb: 22:55

I would think so. As long as you’re engaged with it and not frustrated by it, you will do to some extent obviously, but one of my colleagues was saying, well, he’s been playing the guitar for so long and he plays the same music over and over again. I said, you really need to play new music, brother . It’s a different style of music or different materials playing the same songs over and over again, really , isn’t engaging the brain very much. It’s just a motor skill. It’s , it’s a program that comes out and it’s not really changing anything.

Richard Miles: 23:21

Bryan, I always like to ask guests about their background, sort of what influences them. And since we are talking about brain plasticity and education and new experiences, can you tell us a little bit about your growing up, your father worked in the oil industry, right. And your mother was a dancer for a while professional dancer. What was it like growing up? What do you remember your early influences and when do you feel your brain changing? Let’s go with that.

Bryan Kolb: 23:47

I’m not sure I felt it changing, but I grew up in Calgary and yeah, my dad was in oil business. He liked to say that he went to the University of Turner Valley and people would , oh yeah I’ve heard of that. Well, Turner Valley was the first big oil field in Canada and he was a rough neck prior to the war. And so he never actually went to university because there was no money. He did extremely well in school. He still had his high school marks and he liked to compare those mine . And I didn’t shine compared to his, my mom was a dancer and she would spend a lot of time sort of dancing around the house. I remember, but she was a house flyer . The thing that I kept hearing was you’re going to be the first person in a family to go to university, which I was. And when I went, I didn’t know what the university really was just more school. And I thought, well, maybe I’ll be a lawyer not realizing what lawyers do, well it sounded okay. As I was finishing my first degree, one of my professors asked me what I was going to do. And I said , I had no idea. And he says , well, why don’t you go to graduate school? I didn’t , you know what that was? So he explained it and he says, come with me. He was the Associate Dean of graduate service. He said, fill this form out. And so I did, and I was accepted at the University of Calgary to do master’s work. And I did it in what, at that time, basically it was in animal behavior that I was studying since I’m pretty dumb in 2020, but the learning ability of squirrels and chipmunks and rats and so on comparing them. My mother was convinced this wasn’t my father, particularly this wasn’t going to be a career. So I had become interested in the fact that these animals were so different. Behaviorally had to be related to their brain . So decided to sort of look doing neuroscience, what we now call neuroscience . It didn’t really exist. Then handed off to Penn State and worked with somebody who was one of the leaders in the field, particularly with respect to the frontal lobe , did my PhD with him. Then I went to University of Western Ontario to do a neurophysiology for two years. And then I went to the Montreal Neurological Institute to study humans with brain injuries, surgically induced brain injuries, which was going back to my PhD kind of stuff. And that’s when I discovered neuropsychology and went, you know, there must be a book on this and I would talk to the graduate students and other postdocs and everybody agreed there wasn’t a book. And there was no such course. So I decided to design a course. And when I moved back to Alberta people in the Mcgill that I was nuts to leave Mcgill and go to this little, very new University (inaudible), but it was not far from where I’d grown up. And I just thought, I want to go home to the mountains. I decided, you know, we really need to write a book. Now I was 28 and you know , 28 year olds don’t start fields. They don’t start writing books in the field, but I didn’t know that. And so I convinced my new colleague in which I had to do it with me. So we wrote this book and the rest was history. We were just finishing the eighth edition, which I think will be the last one, 40 years later. So that’s sort of the nutshell of the educational history.

Richard Miles: 26:40

So you were 28 when you wrote the book, meaning your brain wasn’t quite done being developed. So that’s probably right . We wrote the book, right? Bryan is, cause you didn’t know any better, but as you said, one final question, you’ve been a pioneer in this field of neuropsychology . What is sort of the next chapter, which does the field look like now? What are your grad students or your young postdoc fellows? What are they working on? Can you give us a sort of sneak peek of what sort of research we might see coming or being published in the next decade or two?

Bryan Kolb: 27:08

Sure. So the biggest change in behavioral neuroscience has been the advances in noninvasive imaging. So MRI functional MRI and all the various variations of this. So historically in order to understand how the human brain work, we studied lab animals and we induced and we still do induce injuries in these animals and then see what happens. We measured electrophysiology and so on, but we couldn’t really do to any noninvasive way. I remember when I was at the MNI in 1975, the first CT scan in Canada was installed and the radiologists were going crazy over this cause they could actually see through the skull. In hindsight, it was pretty crappy because it was new, but now it’s fabulous. The MRI can really make a difference to how we study the brain and functional magnetic resonance energy means that we can see the brain in action online. We can see the blood flow moving one place to another as we’re doing things. And so this has really made a difference. So that’s one big difference going to where I think students are going. One of the things we’re doing is we’re trying to do grand rounds presentation to the pediatric neurologist at the University of Calgary children’s hospital. It was mostly on animal work and they wanted me to come and see the kids in intensive care. And I said, well, what’s the standard of care? What do you do with these kids? And basically they said, well, we cool them down for 24 or 48 hours to reduce the inflammation. And then we hand them to the parents and say, good luck. We can do a lot better than that. We can make a program up is based on our animal studies, trying to work with these kids. So tactile stimulation is huge. So tactile stimulation or animal studies, we’ve shown that tactile stimulation produces profound changes in brain. We can really reverse or reduce the effects of early brain injury , the effects of drugs, all kinds of stuff with tactile circulation. So we have a program that just kinda got messed up a bit with COVID, but we’ll resume doing that. We have another program that students are really interested in applications to indigenous communities, where the early experiences are often not very good. The information about brain plasticity is absent for the moms and the dads. They don’t realize that this serve and return is so crucial to language development and cognitive development. So I think there’ll be more and more of this kind of activity. And I think the use of animals is going to go down in large ways. We can use far fewer animals by using imaging techniques in the animals as well. So these are the changes that we’re going to see. And of course this is flows in humans with noninvasive imaging but one of the things we have to remember is that when you’re looking at the noninvasive imaging, the whole brain seems to be involved in everything, but when you damage the brain, it doesn’t look that way. So we still have to keep studying patients to try and get some sense of what the crucial regions are for particular kinds of coordinating activities.

Richard Miles: 30:06

Bryan, that is tremendous research that you’ve done and what you’ve sketched out of what’s coming. And the implications I think are really just enormous across, not just the field of education, but a whole bunch of different fields and will impact a lot of the research that’s going on and the application I want to thank you very much for joining me on the show today and stay safe up there in Calgary and hope we can have you back on the show at some point.

Bryan Kolb: 30:27

Thank you it’s been fun.

Outro: 30:30

Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinists , Jacob Lawson.

In 1999, Chris Malachowsky was on the team at NVIDIA that invented the Graphics Processing Unit, an invention that transformed the consumer electronics industry. The GPU is now used by video games and virtually all social media platforms. The son of a doctor, Chris started out as pre-med but switched to engineering and got hired by Hewlett Packard. “I never felt we were at risk,” Chris says of his early start-up days.  But he cautions early entrepreneurs, “don’t do it for the money or the glory. It’s too hard.” (Mild profanity) *This episode was originally released on November 20, 2019.*

In 1999, Chris Malachowsky was on the team at NVIDIA that invented the Graphics Processing Unit, an invention that transformed the consumer electronics industry. The GPU is now used by video games and virtually all social media platforms. The son of a doctor, Chris started out as pre-med but switched to engineering and got hired by Hewlett Packard. “I never felt we were at risk,” Chris says of his early start-up days.  But he cautions early entrepreneurs, “don’t do it for the money or the glory. It’s too hard.” (Mild profanity) *This episode was originally released on November 20, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro (00:01): 

Inventors and their inventions, welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. 

James Di Virgilio (00:39): 

For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio. Our guest today is a 2019 Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, inductee, University of Florida alumnus, and co founder of NVIDIA. His name is Chris Malachowsky. Chris went on to found a fortune 1000 company that invented the Graphics Processing Unit, which for me was a large part of my life and had a big introduction to video games. But that unit did much larger things than that. It’s now used by Facebook, Twitter, Google, super computers, a whole host of other things. And in fact, Chris and his cofounders transformed the visual computing industry by creating a consumer oriented 3D graphics market. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m looking forward to hearing about your story. As we spoke off air, your story is like so many other inventors and entrepreneurs stories and that it does not move in a straight predictable line. Tell us how your story began. 

Chris Malachowsky (01:34): 

Well, I was a kid about to get in trouble in New Jersey and, uh, wanted to graduate early, before I succumb to the wildly ways with my friends and knew I wanted to get out of New Jersey. It was middle of winter it’s slushy, it’s cold, it’s dreary. And my father was a physician. My parents and their friends all assumed I was to be a doctor. I like carpentry and cabinet making and, and thought that was the path I wanted, but didn’t really think I needed to make up my mind. So what I did decide was warm and green was the criteria for school. If they had a medical school and a building construction school, I could decide later, let me just get on with my life, get out of New Jersey. And so I applied to Tulane, they had a really pretty lawn and sunny scene on the cover of their catalog thought that was attractive. They had a medical school on a building construction school done, I flied, and got in. My parents were a little gas that I wasn’t giving myself more options and that maybe I should at least see the school. So my older brother was given my parents’ car and him and I drove off to Tulane. And after being there for a couple of days, I really didn’t think that was going to work out for me. I was going to get myself in some serious trouble in the French Quarter. So on the way home I was dismayed because I did not give myself any options. I stopped, to see a cousin who was going to University of Florida. I spent a couple of days there and really did like it. And it also had the same characteristics of building construction school and a medical school. And I decided this is cool. So I picked up an application and on the way, driving home to New Jersey, I filled it out, mailed it in, got in. And I guess the rest is history that brought me to that Florida. 

James Di Virgilio (03:07): 

Now tell me about your experience in college and then how your life became what it became, because I’m going to love, I know before I even hear what you’re going to say, how life is so much more unplanned than we ever think. And I’m looking forward to hearing how those dots connect. 

Chris Malachowsky (03:22): 

Yeah. So at Florida, you didn’t really have to declare a major. So I started off doing all the normal general ed stuff with an idea that I was premed. And I remember going to see the premed advisor who was very clear. And I went with one of my roommates. This is maybe as a sophomore and the guy looks me square in the eye and says, so who have you helped lately? I said excuse me, it’s just, you want to be a doctor? I mean, come on, everybody wants to be a doctor, a lawyer what’s this about? He says, don’t even tell me your father was a doctor or a lawyer. And the other kid’s father was a lawyer. My father was a doctor. He says, you know, what discipline are you going to choose? And I said, well, I was thinking of engineering. And my roommate said, you’re not gonna make that. I mean, you just might as well go home. We walked out of that advisor’s office and I’m like crying. My roommate’s like he’s talking about me. And it turned out, it was really just a challenge. And fast forward, three years later, whatever I’m graduating, I’m getting ready to graduate. I’m going to take the medical school entrance exam, which was in like May and graduations like June or maybe was April, May something along those lines. And you’re supposed to study very hard and be very rested because after the morning sessions, that all day thing after the morning session, your grade is supposed to drop considerably in the second half. You’re exhausted. You’re tired. So I remember going to the Shands teaching hospital in Gainesville and I take the first part of the test and I’d stayed over one of the quarter breaks to study. And I had a lot to remember, cause I had electrical engineering as the way I was getting into a medical school. You had to pick something. And I got an A in that section of physics, it sounded like, why not? Didn’t really have any love for it, but apparently I was good at it. So I’m laying on the picnic table in the Florida sun, trying to relax between the morning session and the afternoon session. And I started thinking of my father the obstetrician who would work for five days straight, come home for an hour. Somebody would go into labor, he’d leave. And I’m thinking, is that really what I want for my, I never even thought about it. It was, doctor was just a thing you hero is like, if I finished this test, I actually might have to be one. And I was thinking, no, I think I’d rather figure out what all the engineering stuff was about. I’ve been introduced to computers and electronics, and I only took introduction to cause everything else was chemistries and things aimed at biology and stuff for the medical school. So I thought, no, I actually want to learn more about that. So I changed my mind, took the rest of the test. I thought it was easy. There was no pressure. It didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t count. I remember buying a six pack and driving home to the house we were living in and I called my parents and I said, mom, dad, I got good news and bad news. Well, what’s the good news son. Well, I thought the test was actually really easy. It was made out to be much harder than I actually experienced. That’s what I think I probably did pretty well. Well, what’s the news. Well, I don’t want to be a doctor anymore. And my mother without hesitation about half a second. Good. You never read directions anyway. We thought you were doing it just for your father. I said, well, okay then. So I ended up abandoning my medical school hopes or plans got a job with Hewlett Packard in a manufacturing role. Actually, I don’t even remember the role yet, but I went off to California to Hewlett Packard. I’d been transferred twice. What I ended up in was a manufacturing role. I don’t even remember what it was I accepted. And it turned out for a kid that had only introduction to, as a background. It gave me a chance to sort of figure out what engineering was about and to learn why things work and how you make more than one of something, which turns out to be a very valuable thing for an engineer, not just make the one offs, but build a product that could be produced reliably and tested and repaired and to solve somebody’s problem. So that manufacturing background, I excelled at it and did well and got invited to join the R&D lab at Hewlett Packard and worked on microprocessor design. And I leveraged that into well, as that was coming into a close talking about serendipity. In the meantime I had married my wife who was from Gainesville and we were living in California. We didn’t have any kids yet. While I was at Hewlett Packard, I got my masters at a local college there and we thought, well, maybe it’s time to move before we have kids and get settled down. I went and interviewed at HP labs in Bristol England and was thinking about moving there. And I didn’t want to be paid as a British citizen. I wanted to be paid as an American abroad. The only one at that lab being paid like that was the division manager. So they weren’t really interested in, in my negotiating a better package. And so then we thought, well, maybe we’ll move to North Carolina. My wife was from Florida, North Florida. I was from central Jersey, coastal New Jersey and Raleigh and North Carolina tech belt. There was halfway between maybe that’s what we should do. And looking at doing that. I practiced interviewing at a local company, which turned out to be sun Microsystems and they had an interest in building some computer graphics. And I realized one being in North Carolina, wasn’t going to help me. It was still a six hour drive to New Jersey or six hour drive to Florida. And it was a six hour flight from California. So in six hours I was going to get home, whichever home we wanted to go to. So I ended up joining sun to work on computer graphics with a gentleman Curtis Curtis. And I did that for six and a half years. We ended up building a graphics accelerator at graphics chips that accelerated the graphics of the sun workstation, which was aimed at professional users and people in the industry happened to be the first windowing system and windows three, one came out from Microsoft and created a consumer window in the system. So I was getting some experience with that. So at sun we learned, I learned the trade of computer graphics. Curtis was the graphics architect. I was the principle chip designer and we made use of a local firm in California that did our CIF manufacturing. And I met the third founder of NVIDIA. So Curtis and I, and this gentleman from a company called LSI logic, decided that we could take what we knew about this professional workstation and apply it to the consumer space because three D graphics was such a compelling medium for telling stories, for communicating, obviously for games, but there really wasn’t much gaming at the time, the Wolfenstein and the like were early games, but they didn’t make use of any acceleration. They just used the programers skill to get the most out of just a generic PC. We came in with a product aim to provide a level of acceleration that will allow the game writer to target something much more powerful. And we brought this workstation technology and style of acceleration to the consumer PC. And it was a great idea. Problem was that we didn’t sell to the game writers. We had to sell to Dell. We had to sell to micron and gateway and, and these other PC manufacturers. So why we created some really great technology. It was a really pretty shitty product and it didn’t help our customer win in their business. And before we ran out of money, we made that recognition and decided, what are we in business for it to succeed or to create cool technology? And we decided, no, we actually wanted to create something. So we went back modified what we did to be in line with how a Dell or micron would win. They had to win PC magazine editor’s choice award. And that means you had to be the facet. You had to be the best at whatever PC mag measured. We could do 3D graphics, but we couldn’t do it at the expense of what they measured, which was 2D graphics. So we ended up building world’s fastest, 2D graphics with 3D and that launched us out of the doldrums and started our ascension to a real company. And these days I know I’m proud to say, I think we’re one of the most important technology companies in the world we’re powering devices from your cell phone and laptops to the world’s fastest, super computers. And we’re at the heart of AI and autonomous vehicles. And it’s been quite a ride. 

James Di Virgilio (10:39): 

That’s an amazing thing. I think what’s really unique about your story is it sounds like if I would have asked your 21 year old self, would you see yourself as an entrepreneur or an inventor or even the word creative, maybe those were three things that you probably would not have applied to yourself. 

Chris Malachowsky (10:55): 

No, and it’s, it’s kind of funny off the three founders of NVIDIA. Two of them had an aspiration to start something. I actually didn’t. But when the opportunity came, I felt like I had nothing to lose. Yeah. We went without salaries for, you know, six months. But, uh, it was a well paid well-respected engineer. And if it didn’t work out, I’d go get another job. We were in an environment where experienced talented engineers or were hireable. I never felt we were real risk. So for me it was like, well, why not? I should want this. Let me give it a try. And it ended up working out quite well. I’m glad I took the leap. 

James Di Virgilio (11:25): 

Yeah. And it’s great to hear you also echo something that I’ve heard countless other entrepreneurs say, which is, you’ll almost never hear someone say that risk was too great. I was worried or I was afraid. It’s something along the lines of what you just mentioned. I looked at the opportunity and I thought, well, whatever happens, this will work out. I’ll find a way to make something of it. 

Chris Malachowsky (11:41): 

I wasn’t worried my family wasn’t going to eat or the kids weren’t going to get shoes next week. But it seemed like something worth trying. I would say this to somebody contemplating, don’t do it for the money. Don’t do it for the glory. Don’t do it for the headlines. The press do it because it’s a passion because it’s too hard. It’s too consuming. It’s too all encompassing to make it work. You can imagine the way you said you’ll be tested. The ways you’ll be pulled and yanked. And the likelihood is it doesn’t work out. I mean, you just got to acknowledge that upfront and not be disappointed, but not let that deter you. If it’s something that’s important to you. And if it’s something that accomplishing will be satisfying in whatever way, then I think it’s worth doing and you’ve got to go into it. Head on. 

James Di Virgilio (12:20): 

Yeah. I think that’s really solid. And you echo another common theme. That’s there is. If you really believe in what you’re doing, if you’re creating something, if you’re crafting something, the failures are learning points and opportunities versus crushing blows. If success is your goal, failure then becomes this measuring stick. That you’re further from it. When you’re building something, it’s just, okay, now we know that’s not great. And in your story, you actually have that exactly moment. 

Chris Malachowsky (12:44): 

I can tell you every major juncture of improvement, profitability, stock, price, market share all was on the heels of some disastrous failure, easy to hang your head in shame and walk away from. And I’m proud of the folks that we have at NVIDIA. I mean, adversity brings out the best of people. If they’re the right people and you just say, Hey, what can we learn from here? How can we be better? How can we make this? Never reflect us again, and each one of them has been a big learning curve. And a matter of fact, when we introduced our first product, the one I described as good technology, but a shitty product. There were something like 35 companies competing with us because we would sell to a board manufacturer and they came and told us they selected us over 35 others. We ended up doing a corporate partnership, but it probably costs us $15 million to develop that first product. And it went into a non-market and if everybody else did this, there was a half a billion dollars being spent to keep us from succeeding in a non-market. And the reality is if we hadn’t failed because we were the first ones out the gate, we hadn’t failed. We had the advantage of being brought into and saying, we can’t buy your product because it doesn’t help us win. You can’t buy your product because it’s not the best at this. We had the wherewithal to say, Oh, well, we built the wrong product. We were full of ourselves looking to their customer that doesn’t help them. And so almost going out of business and internalizing the lessons, made us a better company. And each one of the junctures along our path to here 25 years later is based on some failure that the right people with the right mindset found a way to leverage into strength. 

James Di Virgilio (14:12): 

And when the idea is bigger than our pride than our current knowledge, so that you can make those pivots that you have done. And that’s such an essential, obviously I can tell a piece, not only in your professional life, but I can tell in your personal life that that’s something that you hang your hat on. And I think that’s a truism for not only the most successful creators and innovators, but also people to recognize that, Hey, I don’t know everything. And when something hits the wall here, I can adjust and learn and change, or I can just keep pushing ignorantly into something that’s not going to. 

Chris Malachowsky (14:40): 

It’s also, there’s another lesson here. Surround yourself with the smartest people, be the dumbest one in the room. That’ll help you. They may not be this comfortable because your ego isn’t being stroked and not everybody’s looking to you for every answer, but that makes you more adept and more nimble. And when the pieces fall to the right collection of people, we’ll find a way to reassemble them into something better. You’re not a lone wolf. Cog in the wheel, you got to build the right wheel. 

James Di Virgilio (15:04): 

He is Chris Malachowsky co founder of NVIDIA and a 2019 inductee into the Florida inventors hall of fame. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. I certainly hope this is part one of a part, two series of conversations between you and I for Radio Cade. I’m, James Di Virgilio. 

Outro (15:22): 

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating inventor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcast and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. 

Beloved by corporate HR departments and government agencies alike, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator measures personality types. Betsy Styron, board chairman of the Myers-Brigg Foundation, explains how the assessment works and what it should and shouldn’t be used for.  An introvert herself, Betsy powers through a great interview. *This episode was originally released on July 11, 2019.*