The Inventivity Pod

Gainesville, Florida, home to the Cade Museum, is a university town famous for being the home of nine members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Thanks to technology to harness their creativity, a fresh crop of Gainesville musicians are using their music to bring comfort and joy during troubled times. This is the story of 25 musicians with Gainesville connections, collectively known as Band Together, and their collaboration on a music video that has brought relief to thousands of music lovers and ordinary people during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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: 0:38

For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio. The mission of the Cade includes not only technology, but also arts. And within that, especially music. Past entrepreneurs and scientists who have been guest on this show where musicians, including Robert Cade himself. Today, we are joined by three musicians, Bob McPeak, Rob Rothschild , and Chris DeMakes. They’re here to tell us about the technology and the creativity behind the collaborative made at home music videos that certainly are proliferating in the age of COVID-19. They’re part of the amazing tradition of Gainesville, Florida music, a university city that is part of the story of Tom petty and the Heartbreakers, the Eagles Bo Diddley, Stephen Sills, the Motels, Less Than Jake, Sister Hazel, River, Phoenix, Against Me, Minnie Riperton, and many more. 25 musicians from Gainesville recently joined together, calling their band, Band Together, to make a music video of a song called “On the Other Side”, which has been generating quite a bit of attention. Welcome to the show Bob, Rob Rothschild, and Chris DeMakes

Bob McPeak: 1:43

Hi. Great to be here. Thank you, James.

James Di Virgilio: 1:45

Now, Bob, you started this project Band Together, and you’re also an example of someone who is both scientist and musician.

Bob McPeak: 1:52

That’s right. Although a lot of people who know me as a musician don’t know that I am a social scientist. I received a PhD from Ohio state university in social psychology way back in 1976.

James Di Virgilio: 2:06

And how did you wind up getting into music, social psychology to music, or do those two overlap? It seems sort of like a leap?

Bob McPeak: 2:12

It is an unusual combination, I think, although certainly not unprecedented. Uh , I started playing guitar when I was 14 and I got hooked on it and played in bands all the way through college. But at the end of my third year of graduate school, I was picked by the psychology department to go to this place in Greensboro, North Carolina called the Center for Creative Leadership. And one of the things I did while I was there was to take a career workshop from the vice president of the Center for Creative Leadership, whose name is David Campbell. He was a really remarkable guy. You may have heard of the Strong Campbell Vocational Interest Blank, which is a psychometric instrument that’s supposed to help you determine a career choice. And he did a career workshop and we went through all these exercises and every exercise that we did told me that what I really wanted to do was make music. And I took that to heart, but I was so far along that I went ahead and finished my PhD, but didn’t pursue a job. Instead, I moved with a friend, actually my, a musician that I was playing music with, whose name is Rick Kesner. And at the end of 1976 in November, he and I moved to Gainesville. I’d never been to Gainesville, but it seemed like a really cool place from what I knew about it. And he had been there and spoke highly of it and removed here. And we had a business plan, which was to play music and to start a used record store. And that became Hide and Seek Records shortly after moving here and not too much longer after that, I cobbled together whatever recording equipment I could afford at the time in built a studio in the house that I was living in. And that was the beginning of Mirror Image Studios.

James Di Virgilio: 3:52

So you go from having a PhD, to starting a recording studio. What did your family and friends think about that ?

Bob McPeak: 4:01

Uh, at that point, my mother was no longer alive. I’m not sure what she would have thought. My dad was a pretty laid back, do what you want kind of guy. He’d never really pressured me. And he seemed okay with it. If he had objections to it, he didn’t voice them. My friends, at least the ones in the psychology department and wondered if I had lost my mind. And to be honest, there were times when I had my own moments of doubt, but then I would go back to the studio and I would get involved in some kind of a recording project or a song that would just move me to tears or touch my heart or make me feel happy. And though I really enjoyed psychology. I enjoyed the research component of it. I never really got that kind of an emotional reaction to anything from psychology quite to that extent or quite that consistently.

James Di Virgilio: 4:53

There’s so much of your story that I feel like is echoed through all of the people I’ve interviewed on Radio Cade . And there’s a boldness that it takes to follow what you’re truly interested in. And in your case, I think you have two things you’re obviously very interested in it . It sounds like you’ve done both of those now having a recording studio, especially one that was really one of the only ones in Gainesville at the time, had to have lent itself with you working with some very interesting people. What are some of the projects and who are some of the artists you’ve worked with?

Bob McPeak: 5:20

Yeah, it was a long, long climb from being a pretty ill-equipped studio to becoming one of the better equipped studios in the region. So early on the first person that I worked with who’s gone on to any kind of major success or recognition would probably be a guy named J.D. Foster, who was the studio bass player in the early eighties and left town, moved to Los Angeles and took up playing bass for Dwight Yoakam and had a lot of success with that and now is a successful producer working out of Chicago. And he was one of the people I recruited to play on, “On the Other Side”, on the song, he played bass on it. I missed the Tom petty era. He was gone a couple of years by the time I got here, but I did have an opportunity to work with Bernie Leaden, one of the Eagles later on when he produced the project that the studio , uh, I recorded River Phoenix’s band, I recorded Bo Diddley in the nineties, Less Than Jake, Chris DeMakes is here from that band to talk to us. And he was also part of the band together project, a Sister Hazel in the 1990s, there was a kind of a golden era there in the 1990s when there were several bands that were signed out of Gainesville.

James Di Virgilio: 6:29

So let’s talk about this current project today. You’ve worked on a lot of projects. You’ve done a lot of things in your life. COVID-19 hits. The world gets up ended, and you have this idea for Band Together. How did the idea come to you and why did you choose to pursue it?

Bob McPeak: 6:44

Well, last summer I decided it was time for me now to really concentrate on my own music. I had such an education in songwriting and production by then in such a wide experience of seeing great people worked on the process and seeing the mistakes that other people made. So I retired from Heartwood and refurbish the studio in my house and set about writing songs. And I was keeping my ears open as I do to just what people say or I’ll hear something on the radio that is a catch phrase . And that’s sort of the nugget that forms the idea for a song. And then eventually slowly, sometimes more quickly, other times the whole thing kind of coalesces and the song takes form in the melody and the chords and the words. This one came together pretty quickly. And I heard a lot of people saying, well, I’ll see you on the other side. And that just seemed like a hopeful phrase. And I was in the mood to have some hope as I think everyone was. So I set about recording and I recorded it and I said, well, you know, that was fun. And there it is, there’s me playing all the guitars and me doing all the vocals. And on the other hand, I know all these amazing musicians that I’ve worked with. Why not see if they’re interested in making a love letter from Gainesville to the community of Gainesville, to the people who are out there, the healthcare workers and the frontline workers who are delivering packages to us or other things that put them in the path of potential exposure in danger. So I put out the word and send it out to, I don’t know, 30, 40, 50 people that I thought might be interested in . I thought would be great contributors in to my delight and surprise. Many, many of them said, yes, this all star cast, which believe me is much better than I would have been able to do on my own. The parts they gave me were so thoughtful or aware that this was going to be one component in a bigger picture and the tracks I got, even though they weren’t necessarily hearing the other players because they’re only working with the little guitar and vocal track that I gave them and they would leave space for other people. So then I had to put all this stuff together and they would send me their digital files and I would drop them onto the track and listen to them and I would go, wow, that is so cool, I would have never thought of anything that brilliant or that would have that kind of texture. So I have Michael Ward Bergman . Who’s just a brilliant accordion player. Who’s collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma and lots of other really amazing musicians. And it’s just a virtuoso of the accordion. Um , my friend David Beatty, who , who helped with the conception and the production of the song plays, there’s a thing called a bowed psaltery , which is this triangular instrument that you play with a horse hair bow, as well as the standard instruments, like an electric guitar. So we end up with Nancy Luca , who I think a lot of people in Gainesville know is a great lead guitar player who is from Gainesville, but now lives in California playing this guitar solo at the emotional peak of the song. And she comes in blazing with this guitar and then throws it to the accordion player. So he ended up going electric guitar to accordion, which violates some kind of rock-n-roll rule somewhere. But that’s my favorite moment. I think on the whole video, it’s just really cool.

James Di Virgilio: 9:56

So you put together this project where you have all of these creative artists working together, they send the files to you. You then put that together and you create both a video and an audio track. And then you have this completed project. The , “On the Other Side”, by a group that came together, thus Band Together, how proud were you when it was done?

Bob McPeak: 10:17

I think much of the credit goes to the players and the singers. And that includes people that are frankly, above my pay grade. Ken Block from Sister Hazel, Chris DeMakes from Less Than Jake, Ritchie Stanno, who’s off making albums with people like Tony Levin and Omar Hakim. He’s just a really brilliant guitar player. Jacob Lawson, a really fabulous violin player, who by the way, as the violinist on the Cade theme , I’m doing disservice cause I’m not mentioning every one of the 25 musicians, but the people who participated in this are all just fantastic people in wonderful musicians. And so I’m proud that they would have enough respect for me and for the community of Gainesville that they would have chosen to participate in this.

James Di Virgilio: 11:03

And one of artists is here with us on the podcast today. Chris DeMakes from Less Than Jake. Chris, tell us about meeting Bob and your early days of Less Than Jake.

Chris DeMakes: 11:13

Well, I had heard the name Bob McPeak . My uncle went to UF from 83 to 87 and he had recorded a demo for his college band and Bob was running Mirror Image out of his house at that time. So I remember having the Mirror Image cassette and it said recorded by Bob McPeak and I get to Gainesville in 91 to go to college, attend UF and would have been about four years later, we went to record our first record Pez Cor in 1995 and lo and behold, we get to the studio and there’s the man, the myth, the legend himself, Bob McPeak . And he engineered in essentially produce that first record, cause we certainly didn’t know what the hell we were doing.

James Di Virgilio: 11:49

Yeah, what’s it like to produce your first record? Take us back there for a second and put yourself back in that 1995 mindset you’re breaking into the scene. You’re going to record a record. What did you know about recording a record? What were your thoughts or ideas?

Chris DeMakes: 12:02

I mean, it was kind of like when you see TV shows and they’re recording a band, it’s, everyone’s set up in one room, the singer doesn’t even have a mic stand he’s just singing into a microphone and there’s an engineer in the other room recording the band and that’s how everyone thinks you record, right? So we get in the studio and we’re thinking, Oh, this is going to be like a live show, put up some mics . And someone’s going to record us in the other room and magically, we’re going to have a recording and we were green. We didn’t know anything. So we get in there. And the only direction that we had were people like Bob them we’d recorded prior to Bob, the terms of a pro studio, Mirror Image was the first setting of that nature that we were ever in. So it was great. It was exciting. We were young, stupid and crazy. Bob can attest, I mean, we were for lack of a better word, we called ourselves punk rockers, the blue hair and the tattoos and the drinking and doing other things that you do in Gainesville and being young and silly. And Bob had to put up with our crap.

James Di Virgilio: 12:54

And what did it feel like? Or what was it like when your first album comes out and all of the sudden Less Than Jake becomes a name people know.

Chris DeMakes: 13:03

It was incredible. I mean, I remember being in Mirror Image in the main room and Bob throwing up a rough mix of the first track on our record, it was called “Liquor Store” and it was written about Gator Beverage in Gainesville. And I was blown away because I finally heard ourselves, albeit we were still very raw and still learning our instruments and learning how to sing. And this is before pro tools. We were cutting everything to tape, but I remember hearing it back and I felt I’m like, wow, there’s something here. It was put together better and sonically, it sounded better than our previous recordings. And it wasn’t very long after that Rock104 had a locals only radio show. It might’ve just been called locals only or something like that. And I was pulling out of park 16th, which is no longer there anymore. It was apartment complex where I live for years down on 16th and 13th, by Steak and Shake and I was got in my car and I was pulling out of the complex and turn Rock104 on and there , the song came on. It was the first time I ever heard us on the radio. Like total mind blown, like a month prior. I heard the rough mix, the Vader’s go up at Mirror Image that Bob did and a month or two later, I’m driving in my car and I hear it on the radio. And it was just like for a 20 year old kid, I, at that point I had made it. I could have quit at that point. For real. I felt like I made it like I’m on the radio. Are you kidding me? It was awesome.

James Di Virgilio: 14:14

Yeah. That just seemed so incredible. Actually hearing you tell the story is great. I can feel the scene and how that must feel to get that notoriety and all of a sudden, like the fruits of all your labor, right? All your love, all your creativity gets played and then people can hear it. And I’m sure your friends thought that was probably the greatest thing ever, right?

Chris DeMakes: 14:29

Yeah. Our friends that loved us and then there’s backlash. Cause it was like, you got played on Rock104 because we came from this punk rock thing where like, you couldn’t be on the radio. You were a sellout and all this other nonsense that I never bought into. But it was funny because you gotta remember back in 95, there was no satellite radio. There was no internet. If you got played on the radio, like it was a big deal. If you got on, that was a huge deal. Those were your two outlets to get known besides print, promotion, magazines and such. So, and it was “Liquor Store” was that same song. I was speaking of hearing that on the radio, as I was pulling out of the car , I just, I lost my mind. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And it was from that moment that things really started to snowball with us. We had a record that sonically sounded good, more so than sonically sounded good. There was an energy captured and that’s Testament to Bob. Because again, we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. We just went in and we had this raw unbridled energy, kinetic, and crazy, frenetic. And we would go out and play these shows. And we were playing outside of Florida now and people were showing up and going crazy. And somehow Bob was able to harness that energy and we put Pezcore out the fans absolutely ate it up and loved it.

James Di Virgilio: 15:34

That’s an amazing story of early, early success. I love origin stories, whether it’s a movie or real life and yours is certainly great, especially being from Gainesville. So let’s fast forward to now, how did you get involved in Band Together? And what was your side of the technology like? This is a project that requires, as you just mentioned, right? Modern use of technology versus the mid nineties where you had to be someplace physically to do anything.

Chris DeMakes: 15:57

Oh yeah. This was 95. Bob would still be waiting for the first person to write them back. Snail mail in this project would have taken 10 years. It’s absolutely amazing what you’re able to do these days from your own remote location and studios . So Bob had contacted me pre-Coronavirus and all this stuff. He wanted to collaborate on some stuff. I think he’s trying to put together a solo record and Bob and I’ve always kept in touch over the years, but I said, sure, I’d love, love to write with you. And he sent me a couple of pieces of things. And then he hit me up and mentioned this project and asked if I would be a part of it. And I told him , absolutely I’m all in. And then he had sent the track over at some point and it kind of sat in my inbox for maybe a week or two. And then I saw a post online . Bob said, Hey, we’re going to wrap this up. If you haven’t gotten your parts into this, that , and that I had a kind of an Oh crap moment. And I was over in North Carolina visiting my mom and dad and I called Bob and I said, Bob, I don’t want you to think I’m not into this. I want to do it . I want to do. And he says, Oh, okay, well, here’s the lines I want you to sing. And I got home the next day and I tracked it in my home studio. I have a studio. I work in logic pro. So yeah, I sang my lines that Bob wanted me to sing and send it back to him. And then Bob said, I want you to do a video. I said, okay, I can do that. But I haven’t had a haircut in like three months. I looked terrible. So I’m gonna wear a hat in the video. I think I’m the only person with a hat. So , uh, did did the video. And I think the thing came out great.

James Di Virgilio: 17:15

That’s really a fascinating tale of what can be accomplished really not a long time ago, right? 25 years ago, you come onto the scene and then today you’re able to record something by yourself, in a home studio, with the equipment, sync it up to others and get this fascinating results . Chris, thanks so much for taking some time to join your part of Band Together, as well as tell your story. It’s obviously great to have you as a contributor to a project such as this. And we look forward to seeing what happens in the future as it certainly seems like there’s a reason to believe that projects like these would continue even in a post-Covid world.

Chris DeMakes: 17:48

Yeah, I think so. I think that this is kind of really, it’s done a number on a lot of people. I know I’ve gotten a lot of projects and different things done. It’s made me look within and figure out other things to do while I have downtime from being on the road cause our band is still touring act that’s out there six, seven, eight months out of the year so, I think these projects you’ll be seeing these for a long time to come.

James Di Virgilio: 18:08

So let’s introduce Rob Rothschild now who played drums and percussion on the Band Together track recorded some of the vocalists and edited the video together. So you’ve done a lot on this project. Rob, tell us a little bit about your history. Are you from Gainesville? Are you full time musician? What’s the background? What brought you to where you are today?

Rob Rothschild: 18:26

Well, it’s a long and sorted tale. My career in this world began as the guy in all the bands that I played with who could not only carry the gear, but who could figure out how to use it. And that soon led me into the recording business. And when I lived in New York city back in the seventies at the height of the punk rock movement, I worked at Do Art Film Labs in the sound department. And I got introduced to the whole motion picture sound world. And I did just about everything you could do in the post production world for audio, for films. And I also got involved in the shooting, some of the punk rock bands back then. So I got to shoot video and record Divo and , and Debbie Harry and deepen the scene. So it was really quite a baptism for me, but I got the Gainesville in the early eighties and I met Bob pretty early on. And since then, I’ve just , just been a joy for me to work with him on a variety of different projects, including back in the day when Mirror Images was in his house, as Chris was talking about. And just whenever I get a chance to work with Bob, it’s a joy and I’m just really privileged to do that. And so when he called me about this project “On the Other Side” and said, you know, he’s going to put together a variety of musicians to play the song I was all in.

James Di Virgilio: 19:34

Now , Rob, in the eighties, you mentioned coming to Gainesville. So what was the technological scene music wise like in Gainesville, in the 1980s?

Rob Rothschild: 19:43

Well, for live sound, people were carting around these giant speakers and these heavy mixing boards. And for recording, there was just a few studios in town and the main one was Mirror Image Studios, Bob’s studio. And I was a little bit less involved in the recording business back then, I was still doing some field recording for motion picture stuff, but you know, it was primitive back in the day there you had tape and razorblades and you had to worry about all kinds of things that were mechanical rather than digital wasn’t even invented them practically. And of course now, if nobody has a piece of tape anywhere.

James Di Virgilio: 20:15

Do you view those days as the romantic days, there was a quality of them that you don’t have today or is today’s environment much better?

Rob Rothschild: 20:23

Well, I’ve done a lot of recording back in the early days with just tape and a couple of tape recorders. And you know, that’s how the Beatles did it. They just had a four track machine for a lot of what they did. And so there’s something to be said for the spontaneity and fearlessness that’s required when you have very limited tools or painter with a limited pallet has to get creative and a band with a limited set of tools has to get creative. So I think that there was some really magic moments created based on that need. But now we have unlimited technical resources just about, I mean, if you can think of it, you can do it. Bob’s famous for fixing everyone’s performances. Now, we didn’t have that back in the day. You got to play until you got it right. And now I don’t think we’re losing any creativity, but we certainly can be much more methodical now. And we can fix things that we did that we couldn’t have fixed back in the day. So if you played your part now you could come back two months later and go, you know, I’m going to tweak one little thing and that would have been almost impossible back when there was tape and razorblades.

James Di Virgilio: 21:23

That’s a really interesting thought in my mind actually goes to being a kid playing Nintendo, you couldn’t save your game, playing Nintendo. You had to beat the entire game in one take, or you were sort of dead and nowadays, right? You have like a million saved points in a way, that’s kind of what you’re saying is we have all these technological abilities to fix alter, edit change, get the perfect sound. It’s that’s interesting. It forces a different take. So with this Band Together project, what was the goal? The idea gets created. What is trying to be accomplished with a project such as this at a time, such as this?

Rob Rothschild: 21:53

Well, initially we want it to be able to put something out that would give people a moment of respite and joy in a pretty tough time period. And our challenge was to do that in a way that was shareable everywhere. So we had to have video. And on my end, what I had to do is take all this contributed video and turn it into something that would tell the story of how hard it is and how hard it can be to be a frontline worker and how much joy we can as musicians, how much we can share. And that should be our mission. That’s what we do. We want to make people feel better.

James Di Virgilio: 22:29

So you bring together 25 great musicians. You make a video, you want people to feel better. How do you get it out to them? What was the primary way to get people to see this or hear this or view this?

Rob Rothschild: 22:40

Well, we connected with someone in town who has a channel, a video channel that’s called Music GMV and decided to post the video on their YouTube channel because they already have a bit of a following. And their mission was to share Gainesville based music, but the real way to do it in this day and age. And I remember Chris mentioned there was no internet back when his band had to do things. Uh, we just hoped that everyone would share it on Facebook in a big way, Instagram too. And that’s how one goes Pardon the pun viral these days is to have people like and share your work. So it’s very decentralized.

James Di Virgilio: 23:16

And how has the response been? How successful was the social media share with a friend vitality ?

Rob Rothschild: 23:21

Well, for a little effort that we put out here, I think we’re getting close to 12,000 views on YouTube. So that’s a metric that we like to look at, but really the real measure is what people have said to us and how they’ve expressed themselves after they’ve seen it. Some people said it brought them to tears and some people said that this changed their outlook for a moment in a dark time. And those are the real that we love to Read. We’re not trying to measure the smiles. We just would like to make some smiles.

James Di Virgilio: 23:50

Yeah. I was thinking in my mind that views shouldn’t be the main metric in this situation, if you’re trying to bring about healing and restoration, the goal really is feedback and have people taking what you want from this and I’m sure that all of you feel really good about having people say, Hey, this really was a restorative thing for me. You know, it felt good. It brought joy to my life. Obviously I think we, as humans are realizing, there’s so many things in our lives that maybe we took for granted that mean a lot to us and certainly music has tremendous healing power and community power. And then those that can produce it are going to be able to bring that to us. Whether it’s been online concerts or viewings or a variety of other things that are there. And so certainly hats off to you and others who are creative, take your time and put these things together to give people these responses. Have there been any responses in general you can recall that have just really sort of taken you over the edge, just have really moved you?

Rob Rothschild: 24:42

Sure. Several things have been written that really tugged at my heart strings. And they were usually about how we transformed a moment for someone who was really feeling bad or brought them to tears, or they said this was an amazing experience. And I’ll tell you that you can imagine that I have watched this video probably more than anyone in the world, because how many times did I have to look at it to edit it, but I still go back and play it. And it still gets me not because the video is so great, but because the feeling of all the musicians, the music, the song that Bob wrote is just so fantastic and so beautiful. And everyone’s contribution is so heartfelt that it just works. And that’s a rare piece of business to encounter when you’re not in a live performance, but you’re watching a video of us. And so I’m pretty proud of that.

James Di Virgilio: 25:27

And it’s just a wonderful thing. I think Bob and Rob, I’m sure you’d both echo this. When you reach a point in your lives where you can do something like this to give back when you’re in a position to be a giver for those that need to receive something, as we’ve all been on both sides. And then this project “On the Other Side” by Band Together is something we’re finally going to play here on the podcast. We spent an entire podcast talking about it, but it’s also in video format. Where can we find this on video?

Rob Rothschild: 25:54

Probably the easiest way to do it would be to get on YouTube and type in either “On the Other Side” or music GNV in the search box for YouTube music GNV, that’s the channel we’re on. And you’ll see that video pop up right away and let’s hop in and take a listen now. And then afterwards, hopefully watch the video as well.

Music Intro: 26:14

[ Instruments ]

“On the Other Side” by Band Together Lyrics: 26:54

“The mornings are much darker since the clocks were set ahead The dawn is lost to shadow and I should be home in bed. But I wander through this quiet world, adrift in isolation Looking for a ray of hope in a desperate situation But I’ll be waiting with both arms open wide We’ll be stronger, grateful we survived When our mettle has been tested and our tolerances tried I’ll see you on the other side You went to war without a shield, the generals left you there The first line of defenders, disarmed and unprepared And you rush through busy, crowded wards with poison in the hallways And risk your life while we pretend that life’s the same as always We’ll all be waiting with both arms open wide You’ll be stronger, grateful to survive Let’s put aside our anger, reach across the great divide I’ll see you on the other side, I’ll see you on the other side Will we recognize each other behind the mask, beneath the glove? If we can’t hold one another, can we still hold on to love? For all the lives we sacrificed at the altar to our pride I’ll see you on the other side.”

James Di Virgilio: 31:37

And that’s “On the Other Side” by Band Together. And that’s the song written by Bob McPeak produced by Bob, Rob Rothschild , David Beatty, and featuring the talents of 25 of Gainesville’s finest musicians. Thank you so much for being on Radio Cade today.

Bob McPeak: 31:52

Thank you, James.

James Di Virgilio: 31:53

We certainly enjoyed getting a chance to hear your story and hear this collaboration. For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio.

Outro: 32:00

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 a Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Nina Kraus, a professor of communication sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, has done a lot of research on the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development.  She explains the “musician’s advantage,” which includes better reading skills, and how music training can be a tool to improve the performance of students from low socio-economic backgrounds.  

James Clement conducts research into anti-aging technologies. He has studied people over 110 years of age and has found a strong genetic connection to their super long lives.  Yet, periodic environmental signals such as fasting and certain dietary supplements will prompt human cells to effectively cleanse themselves and recycle materials for energy. This causes cells, and thus bodies, to live longer. *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2019.*

James Clement conducts research into anti-aging technologies. He has studied people over 110 years of age and has found a strong genetic connection to their super long lives.  Yet, periodic environmental signals such as fasting and certain dietary supplements will prompt human cells to effectively cleanse themselves and recycle materials for energy. This causes cells, and thus bodies, to live longer. *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a 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: 0:39

I’m going to live forever as a song from the musical fame, and if only that were true, but it turns out we can slow down some of the effects of aging and here to join me in my time machine thought capsule is, James Clemett, the CEO of Better Humans, a company that conducts research into longevity, disease prevention, and general human enhancement. Welcome to Radio Cade, James.

James Clemett: 1:00

Thank you, glad to be here.

Richard Miles: 1:01

So James, I’m not going to make you sing any songs from any hip musicals, probably to your relief, but I would like to have you start out by defining for us what anti-aging technologies are and what they actually do. And I’m going to ask my very first follow on question. Does this mean that we can live longer? Or does it mean we aren’t afflicted by the normal conditions that apply to aging people?

James Clemett: 1:23

So the answer is yes to both of those things. We actually have longer living healthier people amongst us right now. I spent the last 10 years studying supercentenarians, and have met many women and men 106 , seven, eight years and older, all the way up to Morano in Italy who’s 117 who are still cogent, living by themselves, often cooking their own food, and cleaning their own homes. One gentleman at 109 had just driven from the Tucson area to Denver in a sports car for his daughter’s 80 something of birthday, a remarkable a feat for any elderly person, but at 109, amazing. So my initial quest was to figure out how these people live so long, how they do so in really great shape, and then to see what can we learn from that and apply to the rest of us who aren’t so lucky.

Richard Miles: 2:17

So James, I’ll just ask a kind of a nerdy social science question. It sounds like there are enough supercentenarians so people not just a hundred, but a hundred what?

James Clemett: 2:25

110.

Richard Miles: 2:26

Okay. Are there enough of that population to study and make valid conclusions that study this?

James Clemett: 2:32

That’s sort of debatable. Okay. So my mentor, George Church, one of the top geneticists in the United States, he’s at Harvard Medical School, he believes that you can discover rare phenotypes from even in of one . So a single person compared to everyone else’s genetics, you can tease out what the differences might be. And certainly in a small family, brothers and sisters and mom and dad, et cetera, that haven’t don’t have a similar phenotype. Then you have an even better group to compare. So a mother and a son let’s say who have protection against diabetes and can seemingly eat pure sugar and their blood sugar doesn’t rise at all, and in that same family are two type two diabetics. Like that’s a perfect scenario, tt’s actually one that I’m currently studying. But uh, other people, Craig Venter being on the other side of that coin and I’ve had meetings with him about this issue believes you need thousands, maybe tens of thousands of subjects, and unfortunately, the number of people who at any one given time are documented supercentenarians in the world is about 60. And the turnover unfortunately is pretty fast. Um , so in five years there’s basically a completely new group of 60 people, but that’s still a small number when you’re trying to tease out genetic variables, but we’ve actually been seeing some success in this. There are several scientists that spend their life focused on this and doing it near Barselli at Albert Einstein Medical School. Uh , Tom Pearls at Boston College are two of the leading experts in this field. And I based a lot of the work in my study on their past work.

Richard Miles: 4:11

So this is something I think a topic that is fascinating to most people, you know, looking at these 110 plus people, and you read an interview with someone like this and you read of one characteristic or one habit they have and go, aha, there we go, you know, they drank whiskey every morning or such and such. How much of when you interview, you study these people, how much do you take into account their sort of environmental habits versus their genetic makeup?

James Clemett: 4:34

Well, I came into this from the genetic side. So I had been on the board of directors of one of the first direct to consumer genetic testing companies, co-founded by George Church. George is a genetics professor, so we got together to start this study back in 2010, specifically, to look at the genetics. And even at that time, researchers from Europe had pretty much said that when it comes to supercentenarians, their ability to share this genetic information with family members, such as siblings, was 17 times higher than non-supercentenarians. So for example, a change in the genes that increase your chances of breast cancer, for example, is just a small order of magnitude, so it’s maybe a 30% increase. Here, we’re talking about a 1700 times increase percent increase. So 17 times greater chance of being a centenarian, if you have a close relative, who’s a supercentenarian. So it’s an amazing genetic advantage and we wanted to specifically focus on that. However, more relevant to your point is, in meeting the approximately 60 people of this age group that I did over a multiyear period. I can tell you that they come from Southern States, African-Americans whose parents were slaves. They come from recent Jewish immigrants, came to America, fleeing the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and became 110 year olds here. And I don’t think that it is an environmental issue. We’ve tried to talk to them about their diets, not just at 110, but what do they recall eating when they were growing up, et cetera, and of course these people born at the turn of the century between the 18 hundreds and the 19 hundreds, they weren’t eating McDonald’s and other fast foods, they didn’t have the luxury of these fantastically stocked grocery stores. So primarily they were doing what my grandparents did. I grew up on a farm and my grandparents lived right across the street from us and had a huge garden that they not only lived from in the summer, but then they canned all the vegetables for the winter and they had their own livestock. So they took that to a shop and had it butchered. And that’s what they ate from as well. This is the same thing you see in both blue zones and with these supercentenarians while they were growing up is that they ate very natural foods.

Richard Miles: 7:00

If I understand correctly, your research has identified what’s going on at the cellular level and that relationship to aging. If you could walk me through a little bit, what you found dealing with inflammation with zombie cells, what do you think you’ve found is going on at the cellular level with regard to aging or coming up with therapeutic anti-aging medicines? For instance.

James Clemett: 7:20

One of the things I did around 2013, I spent a year just looking at metabolism and how it’s tied into calorie restriction, the ketogenic diet, fasting, et cetera, and about 500 papers into that, I started connecting dots. And the dots all seem to lead to an intracellular pathway called M-TOUR. It’s a relatively new discovery from the 1970s based on bacterium that was found in the soil at Easter Island. And basically this complex that’s inside all of our somatic cells. So every cell that has a nucleus tells us whether the conditions are right environmental conditions for that cell to go through cell division and to produce proteins. And so, if any of these environmental conditions don’t meet the case, it stops that process and goes into recycling it’s existing proteins and organelles on pretty much a dysfunctional basis, meaning it will take misfolded proteins and high R O S reactive oxygen species producing mitochondria. Those are the bad mitochondria that are producing a lot of free radicals as they make the ATP that energizes the cell and through a process called autophagy. It will surround these with a membrane, bring them to the lysosome, which is filled with acid, and then dissolve these proteins and organelles back to their basic compounds to be recycled in the cell. So, it’s a very conserved process that goes all the way back to bacterium to allow the cell to survive hardship like a drought, food scarcity, not enough oxygen in the environment, different environmental triggers. But in humans, it very much tells the cell when it’s time to repair itself and when it’s time to make more of itself. This is at the heart of almost every anti-aging intervention we know of, including a lots of nutraceuticals. So a mega three Glucosomine ECG T , which is the extract from green tea, curcumin, lots of these things, suppress inventory and turn on autophagy and like most things in life, you don’t want it all one way or the other. So you can’t say, gee, I’ve read all these things that say fasting is really beneficial. I’m just going to fast for the rest of my life. I’m not going to eat anything that should be really beneficial, right? So instead you have to cycle these things back and forth. And whether it’s following how we evolved, which was there were droughts, there were winters, there were ice ages, all kinds of things which impeded our ability to supply ourselves with all the nutrients and oxygen and everything it needs. Humans we’re constantly going back and forth between feast and famine on a daily basis even.

Richard Miles: 10:11

So stress, no stress, stress, no stress. And that’s, yes , kind of what keeps the cell healthy, or at least keeps it from doing bad things.

James Clemett: 10:18

Well, it’s more that organisms have evolved to utilize these challenges. So by getting rid of the misfolded proteins and dysfunctional organelles that are inside the cells, it actually turned out that the cells would live longer, and in better health and that’s the organism as a whole would live longer. So, we interrupt that process at our own peril. And unfortunately, from about the mid 1800s on, we’ve made so many advancements in agriculture and industrial agriculture, producing food products, preserving them with refrigeration for example, being able to ship things all over the world, both because of shipping in airplanes, but also the logistics we have capable of now of just-in-time produce at any grocery store practically in the Western world. We basically find ourselves with no famine ever in the Western world here , foods that didn’t even exist in human history or have been modified through human effort. So if you look at old photographs, even Renaissance paintings of fruit, they don’t look much like our fruit now they’re really small, they were not really that great tasting. This is one of the reasons for example, apples were made into cider. Nobody ate an apple before the genetics were changed by human.

Richard Miles: 11:36

47 different varieties right?

James Clemett: 11:38

Yes, yes. And they’re filled with sugar and really delicious to eat. Unlike what was made in the 1700s, for example, and our founding fathers drank this low alcohol ale and cider, primarily because you didn’t have clean water.

Richard Miles: 11:51

Right, right.

James Clemett: 11:52

And to those products, they get boiled and then fermented, and those two processes is very protective against bacteria and other funk that would contaminate water and was found in groundwater. But we forget all this history and we forget how humans evolved. And we look at this abundance that we have now is just being normal and thinking that we just snack all day sitting at our desks, getting up only maybe to go to lunch that we’re not going to have any ill effects and I think this is one of the things I’ve seen from both studying the supercentenarians, looking at the people who live in the so-called blue zones or health oases and studying the intracellular mechanisms that I think are being triggered by those people who live in these areas and follow these different lifestyles that allows them to live so long and so healthy is that this inter autophagy coin, so to speak, with one on one side and one on the other is really one of the fundamental anti-aging principles that we know now.

Richard Miles: 12:50

One of my theories about how this has gotten worse is whenever you get a package at home, with too much candy you got like, I know what I’ll do, I’ll bring it to work. Right? And so I place these to work in DC, I would never eat candy at home, but my golly theres a bowl of snickers there, and every time you go get a cup of coffee, you’re going to stop at least once and get a tootsie roll.

James Clemett: 13:06

Yeah. And if you’re in a large office, I previously had a career as an international tax lawyer and a park Avenue firm. You can end up in a big enough organization that there’s a birthday or two every day.

Richard Miles: 13:17

Oh sure every day yeah, every day.

James Clemett: 13:18

There’s always cake there.

Richard Miles: 13:18

Yeah you never have to bring your lunch right, there is something. Um , James, let’s talk a little bit about the business or the commercialization aspect of the technologies that you’re working on. People like movie stars and celebrities have always been dabbling in anti-aging processes for a long time have had access to all the latest treatments, some of which are probably work and some are quacks, but you want to actually make some of these technologies more available to just regular folk , lower costs. What does that look like? You have a company already, or are there companies that are getting these things to market? And I presume they’re what drugs? Or there’s some sort of treatments that are reasonable costs and that will eventually become a mass market type of phenomenon.

James Clemett: 13:57

Your first point, anti-aging up until very recently has been mostly cosmetic. So it’s been basically tricking the outside world based on your skin and your muscle tone and things like that, that you were still

Richard Miles: 14:09

A facelift ain’t making you any younger, right?

James Clemett: 14:11

You are still exactly, but certainly in the last 10 years, and now five years, we’ve seen just an exponential increase in our knowledge regarding anti-aging therapies. Uh, I started studying in 2008 and 2009, looking at where I thought the most impact was going to be, and it was, and I still think in kind of a combination of two things, STEM cells and genetic therapy and my unfulfilled dream so far is to combine those two. So taking your autologist STEM cells, taking them out of your body, genetically improving them. So let’s say you’ve got an allele, like I have for increased risk of diabetes. Let’s change that and then expand and put those STEM cells back into you so that you now have better genetic code then you started off with. So that’s where I’m ultimately headed in my own research, but there’s lots of scientists now working in anti-aging. I’ve seen a tremendous change where I would talk to scientists and they would say, Oh, I’m totally on board with this, but I can’t tell anyone. And I was actually at a scientist presentation at Harvard, I think it was five or six years ago when he said I just got tenure, and now I can tell this entire audience that my sole focus in life is slowing down aging. And he said, I had to wait till I got tenure to do that, but that’s no longer the case. And now there’s anti-aging companies, you’ve got Google with Calico, HLI, which is something Craig Venter is associated with Human Longevity, Inc. Set up by Brian Johnson , Ajax with Mike West, Unity Biotech, lots of companies that are all looking at anti-aging therapeutics that will directly intervene in some aspect of aging in order to reverse damage that’s already been done or prevented from happening. And I’m very much involved in this, currently, doing human clinical trials in areas where it involves nutraceuticals or things that don’t necessarily have commercial value. So better humans. The organization that I founded and operate through is a nonprofit and we’re entirely subsidized by a small number of donors. We have a pretty good budget. It’s worked up over the years. So I started off with a very small lab in Los Angeles. I moved to Gainesville and I’ve been building a much larger lab and we’re hiring local PhDs and bringing in PhDs with various specialties from outside the U.S. And I’m particularly focused on taking anti-aging therapies that are not going to be commercialized because either they’re based on information that can’t be patented or they are involving already generic drugs and or nutraceuticals. So for example, the Mayo clinic researcher Jim’s Kirkland came up with a combination of drugs, one a chemotherapy adjunct called it’s hot nib and another, a nutraceutical called Quercitin, which working together do a great job of killing off these senescent zombie cells. So these are cells that are stopped in their life cycle process. So instead of replicating, they go into this senescent or acquiescent cycle where they no longer replicate and they become dysfunctional and they actually produce pro-inflammatory cytokines. So those are proteins that basically tell cells and their near environment, I have some sort of problem you should send over immune cells and either get rid of me or send other anti-inflammatories. And if I’m being challenged by a virus or a bacteria, kill them off, but these are cells that probably haven’t been attacked by a virus or a bacteria, but for other reasons, usually genetic damage just haven’t been able to complete their normal cell cycle. And they get stuck in this for a really long period of time. And as they build up and it’s believed that elderly people might have as much as 10 or 12% of their entire bodily cells are senescent. And these are producing these pro-inflammatory cytokines. You end up with individuals with very high levels of what’s called chronic systemic inflammation. And their body is constantly in a fight or flight situation where they’re trying to deal with an invader that doesn’t exist. And so their organs receive all these pro-inflammatory proteins and basically stopped functioning as well. So there’s drugs that kill off these cells, right? And your body restores new healthy cells in their place. So it’s at least theoretically a really great therapy. The Mayo clinic was the first to highlight this and to say that they believed that it would work for certain pathologies like, osteoarthritis and pulmonary fibrosis. I had talked to the researcher at a conference to find out when they were gonna launch a clinical trial and he wasn’t sure. So I decided to get an IRB. That’s a institutional Review Board. They basically look at clinical trials and determine whether or not this is ethical in terms of the risk versus the potential benefit to medicine. And I got approval for a protocol to treat people with, inaudible and inaudible is a generic drug, persantine is an over the counter and nutraceutical you can buy, and we did a year long study giving 30 patients who had osteoarthritis and two who had pulmonary fibrosis in addition to osteoarthritis, these compounds only three times and saw absolutely amazing results.

Richard Miles: 19:25

So we’re talking about, in one case, a generic drug that’s already available and an over the counter, what was the second component?

James Clemett: 19:30

Nutraceutical.

Richard Miles: 19:30

Nutraceutical. Which is basically a supplement from either the plant or animal.

James Clemett: 19:36

Correct . It’s a flavonoid, which comes from plants.

Richard Miles: 19:38

Okay. So that sounds very promising. I’ve already decided we’re going to schedule our followup podcast 55 years from now when I will just have made it as a supercentenarians, and we’ll see how this goes. James, in the time remaining, I’d like to ask you a little bit about yourself from listening to you talk, it sounds like you’ve been a scientist your entire career, but that’s in fact not true. You did hint already that you’re international tax lawyer, and then before that you actually started out in politics, right. Or a version of politics, let’s go back before pre-professional you were from Missouri or were you raised on a farm or where were you raised?

James Clemett: 20:11

I was raised on a farm, my parents themselves were not farmers, but they built a house on my grandparents farm and my dad was an electrician, my mom was a nurse. I have one sister a year older than I am. I was born in 55, and so, I recall seeing John at Kennedy’s, who we choose to go to the moon speech, for me, the entire Gemini, Mercury, Apollo missions were just meant for a kid.

Richard Miles: 20:36

Right.

James Clemett: 20:36

I was just absolutely infatuated with rocketry and space and astronomy and all this stuff. In high school, I was torn between opposition to the Vietnam war politically, and I would say most of my high school teachers who were luckily fairly young and liberal, versus my interest in science, and so I ended up going to college to study both of those. The science in the field of psychology through neurophysiology, and I was really lucky and I got an internship with a neurophysiologist at a nearby medical school and got published in science as a coauthor on a paper when I was a junior in college, which is a really big deal and I was very fortunate for that. But my other major was political science, and I helped politicians, mostly Democrats in Missouri get office. I ended up immediately after college working for the president pro-term of the Missouri Senate, helping him prepare for a gubernatorial election, and in that process decided I would go to law school. Again, really fortunate to get accepted to University of California Hastings Law School. I went there and pretty much right away was dissuaded by people who had sort of gone the route I’d looked at of international government as a career choice. Those who had done that basically talked me out of it. So I ended up becoming an international business and tax lawyer getting a job in Hawaii and helping mostly Asians from Japan and Hong Kong, which was still British at that time, invest in the United States and then went to NYU, got an advanced law degree in international tax planning, ended up working in New York City for a few more years, and then just decided to become a business person, and I sort of took my love of molecular biology and became a brew master opened up a brew pub at a college campus.

Richard Miles: 22:24

Bullet proof logics.

James Clemett: 22:26

Uh , yeah, I went from one bar to another and then just followed many entrepreneurial interests. But when I was turning 50, my parents were turning seventies. My dad had had open heart surgery and I was really starting to comprehend what aging was going to do to them, and decided that rather than being a dilettante and just standing by the sidelines and reading other people’s books and taking their advice, I would get into the field myself .

Richard Miles: 22:52

That’s amazing career arc. I got to say, James, I just want to know who’s going to play you in the movie. Right? You trained as a scientist, you went into politics, you became a lawyer, and then back into science, and in nature where people are starting to think about retiring, you’re plunging back into a pretty challenging field. I mean, this is not just some hobby, right?

James Clemett: 23:09

That’s right. In the past 10 years, I’ve read over 18,000 scientific papers. And , um , I feel like I’ve made up for the fact that I didn’t specialize in college, in biology, that I didn’t become a doctor or a PhD. And I spend most of my time going back and forth between reading new papers , talking to other scientists and thinking about my own experiments and where we’ll go from there. So the , the purpose of the lab is to basically back up some of the clinical trial work that we’re doing with being able to use a mass spectrometer, to analyze proteins in people’s blood, to do gene expression and DNA sequencing in our lab as well. So I’m really pleased that I have this ability. I absolutely love what I’m doing, I wake up every day, really excited to do one more thing, to try and slow down aging, and I kind of use my now nearly 90 year old parents as my inspiration and sort of guidance that we need this because I see so many people in their seventies and eighties that are suffering. And I recall meeting these hundred and nine, hundred and ten, year old people, they were doing just great.

Richard Miles: 24:13

Well I would think that’s inspiration itself right? For you to say, hey mom, dad, you got to live another 20 years for even making it to my study. Right?

James Clemett: 24:19

Right. Absolutely. And I think there’s something referred to by Aubrey DeGrey as longevity, escape velocity, and it basically means that as science provides us with better and better understanding, we will develop therapies that will just give you like one more year’s worth or two more years worth of healthy lifespan, and I think in the very near future, we’re going to get to the point where this happens more quickly than one year,

Richard Miles: 24:44

Right.

James Clemett: 24:44

So that we actually gain life span as time goes by, instead of it decreases as we age.

Richard Miles: 24:51

James, one final question, if you could go back and talk to your 21 or 22 year old self coming out of college, and you’ve got these two distinctly different interests, what do you wish you knew then that you know now, anything?

James Clemett: 25:03

So I’m a big sci-fi fan, and this idea of going back and telling yourself something never seems to work out in those stories. I think I would have preferred a lifetime in science rather than other areas. I’m basically a humanist at heart. So I deeply care about human beings and their ability to act. At the time, I thought politics was my way to help society and humans, but I think I’m more personally predisposed to figuring things out and that science is a perfect fit for me.

Richard Miles: 25:35

James has been fascinating interview and I’ve already got the studio booked for a 2074 for our followup interview to talk about.

James Clemett: 25:43

I hope we’re both here too to do that.

Richard Miles: 25:44

Exactly, but thank you very much for joining me today on Radio Cade.

James Clemett: 25:48

Thanks very much.

Richard Miles: 25:48

I am Richard Miles.

Outro: 25:49

Radio Cade, would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Jist 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.

Big public infrastructure projects used to be synonymous with corruption, including bid rigging. Super-smart professors Jim McClave and Tom Rothrock figured out a way to detect bidding irregularities and catch cheaters. As a kid, Jim loved solving puzzles and did well at school, but suffered from bad “comportment” according to his teachers.  Tom, a farm boy from Missouri, went to a one-room schoolhouse in a town of 100. “Not a lot of education took place” so he struggled in school, but “math came easy” to him.  In 1977, Jim and Tom formed a business called InfoTech and have been collaborating ever since. *This episode was originally released on February 13, 2019.*

Big public infrastructure projects used to be synonymous with corruption, including bid rigging. Super-smart professors Jim McClave and Tom Rothrock figured out a way to detect bidding irregularities and catch cheaters. As a kid, Jim loved solving puzzles and did well at school, but suffered from bad “comportment” according to his teachers.  Tom, a farm boy from Missouri, went to a one-room schoolhouse in a town of 100. “Not a lot of education took place” so he struggled in school, but “math came easy” to him.  In 1977, Jim and Tom formed a business called InfoTech and have been collaborating ever since. *This episode was originally released on February 13, 2019.*

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

It’s all rigged. Or is it? Specifically, how does one go about detecting bid rigging? Here to help us understand, are Jim McClave and Tom Rothrock, the inventors and developers of computerized tools to see who is cheating and who is not. Welcome to the show, Jim and Tom.

Jim McClave: 0:54

Thank you.

Tom Rothrock: 0:55

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 0:55

So let’s start out, Jim, I’m going to ask you what , uh, what exactly is the technology , uh, that you have developed and are using, explain it to me who really doesn’t know that much. I took one college statistics class, so I kind of know , uh , but not really. So to assume that our listeners don’t have a deep background in statistics.

Jim McClave: 1:16

Fair enough. Um, our invention consists of , uh, software computerized techniques, statistical techniques that looks for patterns or trends to suggest that companies may not be playing fairly, that they may be rigging bids when they submit prices to government agencies to do work for them. So it’s, it’s basically software that makes the difference, shows a difference between competition and lack of competition.

Richard Miles: 1:46

So typically, if a government agency or public entity puts out a project to bid, they’re going to get all these bid documents. And so the , the concept here is that all those bid documents get fed into a program. And then the program looks for anomalies or, you know, is there, is there a parameter range for each one of those numbers? And that’s how it essentially works. Is it more sophisticated?

Jim McClave: 2:10

It’s a little more sophisticated in that . If you’re going to look for trends, you really need historical data. -Okay. So rather than just looking at today’s bids, we’re looking at maybe five or even 10 years worth of bids. And again , um , I try as hard as they might, if companies are cheating, it doesn’t look like competition. So there are patterns that show up, sometimes they’re trying to hide it, but -I see, we figured out ways that that look , uh, around the corners and into the nooks and crannies and find , uh , these patterns that suggest bid rigging.

Richard Miles: 2:43

Um , so I saw a great phrase, I think one of your company documents about administering statistical justice. Uh , who came up with that? That’s a great phrase.

Jim McClave: 2:52

Uh , it was probably one of our PR people, Tom and I tend not to brag about what we do. We just do it.

Richard Miles: 3:00

Give that guy a raise, cause I mean, I like it, statistical justice.

Jim McClave: 3:02

I like it too .

Richard Miles: 3:03

Um , and so Jim, you started the company in 1977, Tom, you joined a few years later, but , um, uh , Jim, what gave you the idea? Uh, you were , you were a research, you’re professor , um, and so that’s always an interesting transition. I find from academia into the business world. Did, y’all wake up one day in 1977 and I’m sick and tired of being a professor. I’m going to, I’m going to start a business or how did it work?

Jim McClave: 3:28

Uh , actually I loved teaching , um, and , uh, I got the chance from our department chairman in statistics to do some consulting. And I really liked that because it was basically teaching and the university encouraged us to do it, but we had to keep records. And that’s the sole reason I founded , uh , Infotech. As far as getting into our invention in the business, when today you should ask Tom because it started with him.

Richard Miles: 3:52

So Tom , uh , who found who? Did, did Jim come looking for you or did you hear what he was doing and decide to get involved?

Tom Rothrock: 3:58

After I finished my PhD I had several consulting opportunities with the Florida Attorney General’s Office. They were interested in looking at public procurement in the state of Florida to determine if they were getting good prices on things that they were procuring. And they collected a lot of data and wanted me to analyze that data for them, but they also wanted to use the University of Florida’s computer system since it was freely available to them. And one of the people working in the anti-trust unit, it had Jim for a class and raved about how good he was and asked me if I would be willing to partner with him on this project. And so I came down here on one rainy February night, and he met me at the airport and that started our relationship that has lasted now 41 years.

Richard Miles: 4:44

So did you have that core insight from the beginning that , um, or , or was it suggested to you by the, uh , what office was it in the Florida state government ?

Tom Rothrock: 4:55

It was the anti-trust general of the Attorney General’s Office.

Richard Miles: 4:59

So did they already suspect that bid rigging was going on? I mean, it’s not exactly a new thing, right? Been around for centuries, but did they already think that there was a path of statistical analysis path to find it? Or are you the ones that sort of said we…

Tom Rothrock: 5:13

They weren’t sure. They weren’t sure, okay. The connection there is, you know, I did my PhD dissertation in Missouri, at the University of Missouri on statistical methods to detect bid rigging. That was the topic of my thesis and one of the, my student friends there took a job at the Attorney General’s Office, and he sort of sold them on the idea that they ought to be looking because it is fairly prevalent. And so they decided to bring me in as a consultant to help them identify areas where there might be problems in bid rigging on what they were procuring.

Richard Miles: 5:51

Wow. That’s , uh , usually it’s, you know , professors helping students and now in this case, a student helped a professor, right? Sort of by -yes recommending…um , uh, okay, we’re going to talk about Infotech as a company a little bit later on. Um, but first I’d sorta like to hear about your background. It’s always fascinating to me, sort of what, what are the early influences in careers and , and eventually , um, you know, your inventions. So, Jim, let’s start with you. Are you, are you from Florida? Are you from the South? Uh, where’d your parents , uh, end up in and what were some of your early influences?

Jim McClave: 6:24

I , uh , no, I’m not from the South. I grew up in Eastern Ohio , uh, right across the river from Pittsburgh, a steel town. Um, and , uh , mom and dad , uh , grew up there as well. They were high school sweethearts. Um, so , uh , my early days were , uh, in a pretty tough area. I had a love from the beginning for science and math. My dad was an entrepreneur, so I think, I loved solving puzzles. That was my big deal as a kid. Uh, I remember they would buy me these books of puzzles and, and so I think that sort of , sort of launched me on the, on the path that I ended up on.

Richard Miles: 7:04

And were you a good student, Jim? I mean..?

Jim McClave: 7:06

I was, back then the report cards had two sides to it. One had the grades and the other had comportment and, and on the grade side, I was always great on the compartment side there were always some U’s for unsatisfactory. I was a little talkative, I think, and too much energy.

Richard Miles: 7:23

And so did your parents just focus on the grade side or did they immediately flip it over to the comportment side?

Jim McClave: 7:29

They, they, they encouraged changing those U’s to S’s, but I think they were happy with the grades.

Richard Miles: 7:34

And Tom, how about you? Where, where did you grow up and what were you like as a kid?

Tom Rothrock: 7:38

I grew up on a farm about 50 miles West of St. Louis on a 300 acre farm run by my uncles. And I lived right next to the farm with my grandparents and my mom who was divorced , uh, you know , working and, she would drive into St. Louis every day, so I’d be there with my grandparents and my uncles. And they sort of taught me a lot about working on a farm. I did a lot of chores and activities like that, and sort of the one hallmark there is that town had a population about 100 and they had one school with one teacher for eight grades. So I went to a one room school house and as a result, I wasn’t a very good student , uh , because not much education really took place in that environment. So I struggled a bit when my mom remarried, we moved to St. Louis and I struggled a bit started getting acclimated to , uh, you know, real education and the school environment.

Richard Miles: 8:34

So , um, both of you went into a field that is , uh, you have to understand numbers, not just understand that it’s sort of really , uh , like the whole process. Do you remember at a point anywhere as , uh , in middle school, high school college, in which you just, there’s something about numbers that fascinated you? And the reason I ask is , uh , we have a daughter who’s an actuary and she just, she likes doing things like taxes or balancing a checkbook or things like that. It just sort of calms her down. I’m sort of the same way, by the way. Do you remember that sort of just feeling comfortable around numbers? So at any point, growing up?

Jim McClave: 9:11

What I remember most is that math came easy and I loved it. I loved the puzzle-solving part of , of math problems. And , um, so I think, you know, it’s just always part of my DNA, right, for right from the beginning , uh, from the time that teachers was, hold up those cards with the two plus ones on it and , uh , uh, you know, to advanced calculus , uh , it just was something that was always , uh , uh, uh, I was fascinating to me.

Tom Rothrock: 9:38

As I mentioned, I sort of struggled with my , uh , education, but like Jim math came easy to me. And so I wound up in college , uh , choosing math as my major, because it was probably the easiest subject for me to do. I had enjoyed the analytical reasoning and problem-solving that goes along with the mathematics.

Richard Miles: 9:56

So now we’re going to fast forward to you’re, you’re now involved with , uh , one of the most successful companies in , in the Gainesville, certainly, and certainly in the region. And you started out very small, tiny company, really just sort of you, Jim and then I presume a handful of employees. And now you’re a fairly large employer. Um, tell us a little bit, what has that transition been like for you as a manager and a leader? What are you essentially the same guy in terms of those skillsets ? Or have you developed them in a, in a deliberate fashion, knowing that you’re, you know , responsible for a lot more people?

Jim McClave: 10:34

I don’t know . I would call it deliberate fashion. It certainly has evolved because it’s had to , uh , you’re right. We started actually, when I found it Infotech, it was my wife and I, so it was strictly a family business. She did the books and I did the consulting , uh , and it stayed when Tom joined us, we were still very small and both of us for whatever reason, had the concept of a family culture , uh , with our company. And we’ve really tried to foster that , uh , throughout we’re all in this together, we treat each other, right. We treat our customers as part of our extended family. And so I think the transition that part of the transition that’s been most challenging is maintaining that culture. Uh , as you grow from five to ten to a hundred now to 250 employees. Uh, but we have fought hard to do that. Um, the people that come to us that might be very bright, but don’t fit in that culture don’t we find don’t last long. So now when we’re doing interviewing, we make sure that there’s a culture fit. So I think that’s been the biggest challenge.

Richard Miles: 11:39

And I imagine you, you probably have a low turnover. It sounds like a lot of employees stay for quite a long time.

Jim McClave: 11:44

We’ve we recently had, I guess it’s been a year or two now, a lunch where , uh, anybody that had 30 years in , uh , and it filled the room. It was just amazing, so, yes, we’ve got, we’ve got some now they’re above 35 and we’re only 40 years old. So a very low transition, turnover rate.

Richard Miles: 12:02

Yeah. That’s, that’s amazing. Um, Tom, every company has highs and lows , uh, sort of big successes where you hit it out of the park and others, not so much. Uh , would you willing to share with our listeners? I know that you’ve had some big successes in terms of detecting very large amounts of cheating and bids for the state of Florida and maybe others. So tell us a little bit about those, but also , uh , moments where you thought maybe , uh, you know, joining Jim and his endeavor was a bad idea.

Tom Rothrock: 12:35

Well, I wouldn’t say that I ever thought that , uh , but in the early years it was a struggle as I think most companies and startups certainly experienced a challenge the first few years, as they’re getting started in establishing a presence in the marketplace, getting steady customers that they can depend on. And, you know, we were the same way. You’re right. We had a couple of big successes fairly early on. Uh, I was also professor at UF , uh, visiting from Wisconsin , uh, working with Jim. And we got hired by the Florida Attorney General’s Office to investigate the highway construction industry, because there was information that in other states there were problems with bid rigging activity going on. There, there was no evidence of it, but they knew that we had the techniques, they could analyze the bidding data and point them in the right direction. And we did that very successfully and they recovered over $30 million in a few years based on our analysis. And what that did is it really launched us because at that point, other states were having similar problems. And so we wound up having to commit a lot of resources to working in that area. So that was a big success and really got the foundation and it was enough that I left the university to do this full time and kept wanting to think about going back, but Infotech kept growing and yeah, and now I look back 40 years later and here I am, but a , a failure happened probably about three years later , uh, because we were successful in developing this software and these programs. So we thought we could develop some other programs that would compliment this and offer them in the commercial marketplace. So we staffed up with a team of programmers and a team of marketers, and that costs us money and it really drained our resources. And it turned out that even though we had excellent products, there just wasn’t a market there for those products. Which was a very important lesson for us is that no matter how good your product is, if you don’t have a market, you’re not going to be successful. And that almost caused us to go under.

Richard Miles: 14:37

That is very interesting. A recent guest on our show, Randy Scott, who you may know , um, said , uh, one thing that he finds talking to other entrepreneurs, particularly researchers, is the first thing you have to do is fall out of love with science and figure out what the market is. Because I think to your point, you know, it sounds like you had a great product, but the market wasn’t there. And so it doesn’t matter how great the product is -exactly the right, to buy it. Yeah. That brings up an interesting question. You know, so you, you develop the original sort of proprietary software back in the late seventies. Obviously, the world has changed a lot in terms of , uh, information, technology and software , um, has competition increased? Are there other companies out there or software’s sort of come close to what you’re doing? Or do you still have something that is , is hard for others to replicate?

Jim McClave: 15:32

We certainly have, the product has, has evolved over the years of techniques have evolved. Uh , as I was saying early on like , uh, those that are out there trying to cheat , uh , sort of, know, now all there are certain trends that we better not have. So , uh, it, it’s , it’s an evolutionary. Um, I, to be honest, I don’t think there are others that are, that are doing quite what we’re doing. I mean, there are people that are consultants in this, in the, in the business, but in terms of having the software to the point where we’ve got it, and as Tom will tell you, it’s , it’s grown well beyond just the bid rigging software, it’s construction management software. So we’ve certainly learned that you’ve got to evolve, you’ve got to keep, you got to be creative. You got to keep going. You can’t stand in one place because then you will be passed.

Richard Miles: 16:20

Right. Um, so I assume that your business is much broader than just Florida now, right? I mean, who are your clients? Are all over the country, all over the world or?

Tom Rothrock: 16:29

All over the country. -Okay. Yeah. We, one of the things we did back in the mid-eighties when we were having the challenges is we were approached by AASHTO, which is the American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials. And they’re an umbrella agency for all state departments of transportation. And they were interested in our software because they wanted to promote better procurement across the country. And so we agreed at that time to provide our software to them and they licensed the software out to the states. So right now we’re serving about approximately 40 state departments of transportation with this bid rigging software. And , and it’s unique, uh , there are other companies back in the eighties that tried to develop what we did, but they just weren’t successful in getting it right. And so we don’t really have any competition that I’m aware of for that type of software. But the interesting thing is Jim said earlier, it requires a lot of data to analyze where does that data come from other systems within the agency ? So what we started doing in the mid-eighties was helping agencies build those other systems to feed –

Richard Miles: 17:34

To capture all that data,

Tom Rothrock: 17:34

To capture the data. And that’s, so we now have a full suite of construction management software all the way from the planning stages of a project, through the completion of construction. It lives within our software. And we also capture all of the bidding data, all the vendor information, the suppliers, the subcontractors, the materials, everything that goes into a job winds up in the database for us to be able to analyze.

Richard Miles: 17:59

So you have a very rich, sort of broad, and deep database where.

Tom Rothrock: 18:03

We certainly do.

Richard Miles: 18:04

Are there, are you scouting other opportunities for potential applications of this database?

Tom Rothrock: 18:10

Well, one of the things,

Richard Miles: 18:11

You tell me, you’d have to kill me. Right? Cause I sell it to your competitors right?

Jim McClave: 18:15

It actually, one of the surprises, as far as our evolution to me has concerned, we , we early on did highways, as Tom said, and Florida and, you know, I knew after that, that there was a lot of cheating that was going on in that industry. But I wondered, you know, is it widespread? What has in the consulting side of our business, which is what I basically run, we’ve found just about every industry that we’ve looked at. Not that there’s all cheaters, but there are pockets of cheating. So I think what the way we’ve evolved is we’re well beyond just applying it to two highways.

Richard Miles: 18:53

Ah , all right . We’ve , we’ve come to the part of this show where it’s your chance to be sort of philosopher Kings here. Uh , you know, you’ve got, you’ve got more than 40 years of experience , um, coming out of academia, building starting a small business and building it to a very successful business. Jim, let’s start with you. What, what advice would you give to any entrepreneur who’s starting out, but also specifically to academics who have a great idea, and they say, I want to make a go of this in the market. Uh, you know, are there are , let’s say, are there three things that they absolutely should do? And, and are there three things or any number of things they should definitely not do?

Jim McClave: 19:31

Well, as far as what they should do, is it that there will be a certain level of anxiety overcome that fear, go for it. Uh, I could go on with trite expressions , um, but, but, you know, chase your dream. Assume that your idea is really a good one, it may not be. Uh , and , and that’s sort of the other side of this expect the fact that there will be, you can call them failures or dead ends , uh , along the way, but chase your dream to go . If you love just being teaching and doing research, that’s fine. But if you’ve got an idea , uh, let’s expand on it.

Richard Miles: 20:05

Uh , so Tom , when you joined , uh, you were already well into your academic career , um, and you said you were approaching 40, right? When you joined the company. So this is, you’re 38, so , uh, if you had failed, you couldn’t have just gone and slept on your mom’s couch, right? You had a family by then and kids, it’s a bit of a risk for you, which I think describes a lot of academics that sort of nearing the height of their careers. And then they decided to sort of give up their day jobs, so to speak. And what was that like for you? Uh, and then is that something you would advise if you saw yourself today in the form of a professor, would you tell him yep do it?

Tom Rothrock: 20:44

That’s a good question. Uh, I know my wife certainly wasn’t thrilled when I told her that I was going to leave teaching,

Richard Miles: 20:51

We’ll have them on the next podcast.

Tom Rothrock: 20:55

To go start doing this. I think one of the keys is you can’t be risk-adverse. And I guess from my upbringing and the different life experiences I had, I was always willing to sort of take a chance on an idea and see it through. And I always had enough confidence in what I could do that if it didn’t work out, I felt that I would have opportunities to go back to teaching and I love teaching, but even when I started teaching back in 1970, I said, there’s going to come a point in time when I want to get out of the university academic environment and try something on my own. And you know, when I met Jim and the stars sort of aligned, and I said, this is the opportunity I want to try. And if it works great, if it doesn’t, that’s fine too.

Richard Miles: 21:40

Are you often asked to speak about your experiences or do you have people sort of knocking on your door, asking for advice in terms of, do I start a company or not, or, or do you just not have time to do that?

Jim McClave: 21:51

I certainly would be glad to talk to folks. And now we’re 250 and we’ve got this PR department that’s pushing us to do the kind of thing we’re doing today. So I have a feeling we’ll be doing more of it, and I like doing it because again, to the extent we can share experiences that would help someone else go along a similar path and take the, take the chances as Tom just said, I think we both like , uh, like, like doing this. Yeah.

Tom Rothrock: 22:18

I know I’ve had some interaction with the innovation hub and back when David Day and Jane Muir were there, they invited me to come down and meet with some of the startup companies and talk to some of the young entrepreneurs and share some of the experiences, the good and the bad that we had and how we got started and how we stabilized as a company. So I guess, yes, it is exciting to talk to people who have these ideas and want to try something and try to help them along that path to become successful.

Richard Miles: 22:44

And I know Infotech as a company has been very supportive of the innovation economy in , in Florida and particularly in Gainesville, but I’ll also broadly in the state, you know, sort of supporting that , uh, those young entrepreneurs and young inventors and so on. And it’s been a tremendous support, but I want to thank both of you for coming on the show today, Jim and Tom , um, wish you the best of luck as , uh , watching Infotech’s continued success and , um, and hoping you will dispense that, that wisdom and experience. Uh, cause I know there are a lot of folks in town here who really benefit.

Jim McClave: 23:16

Thanks very much.

Tom Rothrock: 23:17

Thank you, we really enjoyed it.

Richard Miles: 23:18

I’m Richard Miles, thank you for joining us for another episode of Radio Cade , please come back next week for another interview with an inventor or entrepreneurial.

Outro: 23:28

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support, Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor 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.

What can we learn from the brain about learning itself? Based on the latest findings of neuroscience about how the brain learns best, Noel Foy offers training to teachers, parents, students, athletes, and coaches. For instance, improving executive function helps master impulsive behavior and reduce anxiety, both valuable traits for students and athletes. Noel also talks about how her son’s experience with concussions influenced her journey from school teacher to “neuro-educator."  

“Creativity is finding unity in what appears to be diversity,” says Dr. Kenneth Heilman. Author of  Creativity and the Brain, Heilman, a distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, explains where creativity may reside in the brain, how it differs from raw intelligence, and how creative people actually think. Heilman has been fascinated by creativity since childhood. Almost killed by meningitis as an infant in 1938, he was saved  by a doctor who had heard of a new treatment and tried it on Heilman. “Creativity has reduced a huge amount of suffering,” Heilman says.

“Creativity is finding unity in what appears to be diversity,” says Dr. Kenneth Heilman. Author of  Creativity and the Brain, Heilman, a distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, explains where creativity may reside in the brain, how it differs from raw intelligence, and how creative people actually think. Heilman has been fascinated by creativity since childhood. Almost killed by meningitis as an infant in 1938, he was saved  by a doctor who had heard of a new treatment and tried it on Heilman. “Creativity has reduced a huge amount of suffering,” Heilman says.

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

Creativity in the brain, where can it be found? How does it differ from intelligence? And what are creative people like? I’m your host Richard Miles, today, My guest is Dr. Kenneth Heilman, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Florida and author of surprise, a book called “Creativity and the Brain”. Welcome to Radio Cade Ken.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 0:56

Thank you for inviting me.

Richard Miles: 0:58

So Ken, like many of our guests on this show, you spent your career in Florida, but you were born in Brooklyn. So, the first thing I gotta ask is, Dodgers or Yankees? Let’s get that out of the way first.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 1:09

Brooklyn Dodgers. But when they moved to LA, I stopped being a professional sports fan.

Richard Miles: 1:16

So you didn’t switch to another team? You just gave up entirely on sports?

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 1:19

Well, you know, here was a team that was tremendously supportive and actually started integration with Jackie Robinson and what happened because they offered him a free stadium in the park and Patriot, the hell with the fans that have been watching him for all these years, we’re going to LA and I said, look, I don’t move for businesses.The hell with this I’m not watching this anymore.

Richard Miles: 1:42

And that was a precursor of things, the calmest teams to abandon their cities, to go to other markets and so on during the expansion years. Okay. Well, now that we’ve got that most important question out of the way, let’s sort of dive straight into our topic. As you know, Phoebe and I, have always been interested in the neuroscience of creativity and I think the first time we met, probably about 2010, it was to get your ideas and some other folks at the University of Florida, we’re planning a big exhibit on the neuroscience of creativity. And so we needed to get smart, and we knew that you were one of the folks to talk to. So creativity is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot and sometimes it’s defined in different ways. So why don’t I start by asking you to define creativity from your point of view, and then how does it differ from intelligence? But let’s start with that.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 2:25

Okay. First of all, when I was in high school, I took a public speaking course, I got to seen it, but your teachings are remember, is thought by definitions and tell people how important it is. So we’ll start with the definitions. It depends where you look up creativity for different definitions. If you go to websites, for example, it says productive and mall by originality. So according to them, if I sat down in front of a word processor and randomly hit keys for days and days and days, it would be creative because it would be original. Nobody probably would hit the same keys and if I did it long enough, it would be productive, but you wouldn’t feel this would be creative. I think the best definition, but the same complete by Banowsky who said, creativity is fine in unity in what appears to be diversity. The only problem with this definition it is no mention of originality or productivity. So I think in the book and during lectures, when I define creativity is the ability to discover, understand, develop and express in a systematic fashion, novel, orderly relationships said , in other words, finding the thread that unites. Now, a lot of people in other definitions state, it must have value, and I never understood why they put it in and sure, great artists, and you never sell your painting and it burns or something. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t creative. Even now. It has no value. So value, I’m not sure really defines it . It defines it and far as business people, but not as far as people who produced creative products. Now let me tell you about the second part. If you look at my yearbook at high school, all the way back then he says Ken Heilman wants to do medical research. And what happened when I was a little boy, I looked down at my arm and I noticed I had a scar right near the front on the top and I asked my mother, what is that mom? She said, oh, when you were an infant, you came down with meningococcal meningitis. And this was 1938 or 1939, and the doctor said we have no cure for it. He’s going to die. It turns out this doctor actually had an appointment that Columbia University and you were working on a new drug called sulfur drugs . And he actually lifted some out of the laboratory poets and my house did a cut down. That’s what the scar was for, gave it to me, and here it’s 79, 80 years later and I’m still here. And that really brought to mind how important creativity is. You inclined have suffered with diseases and so many other problems and when you think about all the wonderful things that we’ve done, when used appropriately, creativity has reduced a huge amount of suffering . So that’s why it’s always been a very important topic to me.

Richard Miles: 5:31

So can you write it? Creativity is closely linked to raw intelligence, but it’s not quite the same thing? Is that correct?

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 5:38

Well, let me talk about intelligence and creativity. Okay. First of all, let me start by saying in general, when I’ve written about this, I talk about three major steps in the creative process. The first one is preparation, and that’s learning all the skills and knowledge that you need to be creative. The second one, I call creative innovation and that’s coming up with the creative ideas. And the third stage of course is production. Now I’m not going to discuss that at all, because that depends upon the domain of creativity. But what about IQ Willem , as you probably know, okay. With IQ, when initially it was early on used people call people who have IQ over 130, 140 geniuses. And genius implies that you’re tremendously creative. And it turns out there was a psychologist, I think at Stanford, whose name was Terman . And what Termin did was gave all the students and around San Francisco and all that area an IQ test that he developed called the Stanford Benet. And then he followed all these people along and it turns out some were very successful, some or just usual, but there were no Nobel prize winners that was in his genius class, but it turns out that there was two Nobel prize winners whose IQs were too low to be in term as geniuses that reached and got the Nobel prize. So one was Shockley who invented the transistor and you know what that’s meant to our world . And another one was Alvarez who helped develop the radar. They both won Nobel prizes, but they didn’t have IQs high enough to be included in terms of geniuses. So in general, people found out that later on, there was not a direct relationship between intelligence and creativity. And in general, a lot of people who’ve written about this say, you just need to be intelligent enough to learn the skills and knowledge in the creative domain that you’re doing. People have a cutoff of about 110 or 120 , but there is no direct relationship.

Richard Miles: 7:53

So it’s more of a threshold factor, right? That once you reach that threshold of somewhere between 110 and 120, there’s not a correlation that the smarter you are, the more creative you are.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 8:02

No Relationship. Now, it turns out that special talents are important. They’re very, very important. But of course, the IQ test doesn’t test special talents. So way back in the 1700s, there was a philosopher, Gall, who was actually the founder of phrenology, but Gall had two very important postulates. One postulate was that different parts of the brain perform different actions. And the second postulate was the better developed this module was, or this specific form better develop better at work. Now, what happened was Gall, was aware that our skull grew depends upon brain growth, so we said, oh, if we measured the skull, maybe we can tell about people and what they are capable of doing. The problem with that is it became a pseudoscience and all these people were making all these crazy suggestions, but it turns out a neurologist in France in the mid- 1800s, Paul Roca, heard a student of Gall’s talking about the importance for the frontal lobes and speech and he had a patient in the hospital who had a stroke sometime before was actually dying of, I think, tetanus and the patient had trouble speaking. He could understand, but he couldn’t get out the speech. The patient died and sure enough, he had a lesion in his frontal lobe. And then, in the second paper, Paul Broca examined eight people who had problems with speech from strokes, all eight of them, they were right-handed and all eight of them had left hemisphere strokes. So that provided a positive finding that really in some way, supported Gall’s, hypothesis. And we know that the left hemisphere understands speech. One of my mentors or Norman, Geschwind looked at a huge amount of people’s brains at the auditory cortex in the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. And he found that the auditory cortex was actually bigger in most people in the left hemisphere, but even with great geniuses, sometimes their brains are different, but this hasn’t really been evaluated today.

Richard Miles: 10:16

I just wanted to interject or ask a question about the role of the left hemisphere and at least the theory and how that contributes to creativity. Cause I remember in your book, which came out in 2010, it came out. I remember you described a number of what to me were surprising associations with higher creativity, including, for instance, being lefthanded, epilepsy, having dyslexia, being slow, and learning to speak, mental illness. And if I understood correctly, the general theory sort of connecting those was a suppression of, or damage to the left hemisphere actually allowed the right hemisphere of the brain more license, I guess and that may contribute to creativity.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 10:57

You’re jumping ahead a little bit. Okay. There have been studies for example, by Miller who’s out in San Francisco, he looked at some people who had a degenerative disease, which mainly occurred in her left hemisphere and their artistic skills actually became enhanced and what was interesting, there hasn’t been a lot of research looking at the true geniuses, but one of the interesting stories about Einstein’s brain, it turns out that Einstein said it would be okay if they took his brain out and they examined it. And he was in Princeton, New Jersey, and there was a pathologist whose name was Thomas Harvey. So Harvey took the brain out and after it was fixated, he took a knife and he cut it into small blocks, 240 little blocks, and sent it all around the world to different people. And he said, well, tell me why he was a genius. People said, wait a minute, you gave me this little block of brain, how can I do anything? Well, the only thing that Harvey did was good was he actually photographed Einstein’s brain after he took it out. And what was really interesting is that on the left hemisphere, there’s a big, big, Valley called Sylvian fissure . It’s a big Fissure and it separates the frontal lobe from the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe from the temporal lobe. And what was really interesting about Einstein’s brain is that his Sylvian fissure can go all the way back and it didn’t actually go into the prior lobe . On the left side, it stopped really, really early. And after seeing that people said, oh, that’s why he was a genius because he didn’t have these big a soul . So I go into his prior lobe and dividing up his neural networks. Well, it turns out that one of the things we know about evolution is that the more GRI and salsa you have, it means the more cortex you have, okay. And that’s not a sign of superiority, it’s a sign that something is wrong. And if you look at his history, that part of the brain is very important for language I’m his parents for them to the pediatrician when he was about three years old, because he was not talking. And the other thing that was really interesting about Einstein’s brain, if you look at it, is that his right pro lobe was huge. Now, in addition, Arnstein was also probably dyslexic again, that parietal lobes’ important. So the question comes up that his less evolved left temporal low , allow his right to actually be superior. And it turns out when you read all the Weinstein’s works about himself, he said he always used spatial reasoning. And could it be that he was such a genius because again, his left hemisphere did not develop, but his right hemisphere really alone . Now, what’s really important. Also, as we’re going to talk about the frontal lobes are very important for divergent thinking. And it turns out, as I mentioned, Einstein had a huge, huge right frontal lobe.

Richard Miles: 14:20

Ken, when we talk about divergent and convergent thinking for listeners who aren’t exactly sure what we mean by that, convergent thinking is when there’s one or a couple of right answers and you’re honing in on that right answer to a given problem and divergent thinking is when there could be a range of different types of solutions to a problem. One sort of looking in the other one sorta looking out.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 14:41

Let me talk a little bit about that because the very first step in innovation to creative process is disengagement. What do I mean by disengagement? You have say, hey, this doesn’t explain your work, this is not the truth. And maybe one of the best examples of this is Copernicus who said , hey, wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense that will all revolving around the earth. Okay, It has to be other possibilities. Could it be that we’re revolving around Mars? or the sun? And then after he disengaged from that, he went ahead and used divergent thinking other possibilities, and he came up with a concept, hey, it’s the sun. We’re revolving around the sun. So the first step in creativity is first of all, disengagement, I don’t believe that’s the way done. Maybe as a better explanation. No one’s ever painted this one. No one’s ever written music. Hey, here’s a good novel no one’s ever written about. So you disengage from what has been done and then from there, you do divergent thinking saying, hey, what are the alternatives? What are the possibilities? Now it turns out from the neurological perspective, one of my mentors, Derek Denny Brown, brain neurologist said that all animals can do two things. They can approach or they can avoid and he said, this is even true of humans. He said it turns out that the frontal lobes are the disengage void organ and the temporal and parietal lobes and several or more for approach. And we know that when people damage their frontal lobes , what they do is they separate. In other words, they can’t disengage. So if we give them a test where they have to organize cards in a certain way called the Wisconsin card sorting , once they get one successful one, that’s it they’ll keep on repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, something we call the separation. And one of the things that we use to look at divergent thinking is something we call the alternative uses test. What you say to the person, okay, I’m going to give you an object and what I want you to do is give me the different things that you can do with this object. But the more different it is, the more points you get. So for example, I give somebody a word, the brick, if they say, Oh, you use it to build houses, to build fireplaces, you get maybe a point for each of those. If you say, Oh, you know, you’ve been using it as a doorstop or a bookend you get two points. If you say, Oh, you know, what you can do is take it in the bathtub with you and after your bath, you can use it to rub off your calluses you get three points. So your idea is that’s a test of divergent thinking, but creativity. So a lot of tests of creativity are one that’s used a lot is called a Torrance test. Where they have both verbal and visual-spatial test of divergent thinking. But as I said, this is only the first sub-stage of innovation. Now, a very important thing about innovation and creativity is curiosity and risk-taking. And that’s very, very, very important. And the reason why so many people get into creative occupations is because to them, it’s very rewarding. So you go back and you go through history and you look at artists , composers, whenever even scientists and what happened was financially, they did terribly, but they wanted to create because it gave them great joy. And the best example is Galileo, who proved Copernicus thing. You know, what the Pope did to him? Prisoner the rest of his life.

Richard Miles: 18:36

Yeah.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 18:36

And it turns out they finally forgave him about 40 years ago because he showed that the sun was in the center of the universe. Now it turns out that there’s a place deep in brain called the ventral striatum. And in animals, if you stimulate that, the animal will keep on doing whatever it was doing. It’s very rewarding. And that whole system is reward system. And it’s also hooked up to the frontal lobe. And it turns out that excitability of that system is very important for the drive and motivation. It turns out that, that system was also abnormal in people who use drugs. And that’s why actually, you see your very high rate of drug abuse in people who do creative. So let me go to the third part of innovation. So we have to disengage and say, hey, it has to be better answer to divergent thinking in saying , hey, what is the possibilities create ? The next one, and the critical element is finding the thread that unites and William James was really one of the founders of current psychology and said the thread that unites unheard of, combinations of elements and subtle associations and spearmint, another famous person who said creative ideas result from the combination of ideas that have been previously isolated. And perhaps the best example is Einstein’s E equals MC squared. Prior to that time, they were isolated. So it’s very important in the creative mode that the neurons in the brain and these modules that we’re talking about, that they communicate with each other. And there’s some evidence that that’s true. So one of the great experiments showing about this communication was done by a neurosurgeon, Joe Bogan. And we talked about that the right hemisphere is important for visual-spatial and the left for verbal and we had an epileptic’s whose seizures can be controlled, so they spread from one hemisphere to the other. So they were going to cut the connection between the two hemispheres, the corpus callosum. So the seizures couldn’t go from one side to the other side, but Bogan was curious whether or not this would interfere with creativity. So they gave people the inkblot test and the inkblot tests , as you know, just has inkblots and you tell people, hey, what does this look like? And then you could judge the creativity. People like me say that looks like a moth that looks like a bat and a lot of people come up with very creative ideas. So he tested these people and then after the collosum was cut, they retested them. And the creativity was actually gone. Why? Because the visual system could not communicate with the verbal system makes sense?

Richard Miles: 21:31

These various parts of the brain have to be constantly swapping information with each other.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 21:35

And in fact, when you record from the brain, the brain waves, when people are in a creative mode, their brainwaves actually go ahead and have a certain type of coherence, like they’re all communicating with each other. So in general, one of the things we ask is how do we increase our networks? Well, one of the great stories about chemistry is about tequila. They knew benzene had six carbons, but they didn’t know how it was organized. So he was drowsy and off to sleep. When you imagine or dream about a snake, biting its own tail in gear , Hey, it’s a ring, but it turns out if you look at almost all great creative ideas, people were almost always in a state of relaxation. Isaac Newton, when he came up with calculus and he came up with the laws of gravity, there was an epidemic almost like ours , but I think it was a little bit worse and they closed up Cambridge university. It was a plague, and so, he went up to his mother’s farm and now we have plenty of time and he sat under the apple tree and thought about these problems and came up with these ideas. When he went back to Cambridge, after it was over, they gave all kinds of administrative jobs because she was so successful with the ideas, he didn’t come up with much after that. Einstein came up with most of his theories late at night, in the patent office, when it was very, very quiet. Even when you think about when you get a great idea, you yell Eureka! Well, it was Archimedes who came up with that idea, the concept of buoyancy and what was he doing? He was taking a bath, another relaxing thing. The person who actually improves the nerves theory of the brain was a spanish physician, Raymond Ecohall, and he wrote a book actually, about creativity, which is an interesting book. In the book he says, if a solution fails to appear yet, we feel success is around the corner, just try resting for awhile . Now, another thing that we know about creativity is actually that one of the most creative types of people are people who have depression and bipolar disorder tend to be very, very creative. And so we thought what’s going on here about sleep, relaxation, depression, all those kinds of things. Well, it turns out they’re all similar in that in our brain, we have a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine. And when you get norepinephrine what happens is your attention goes externally rather than internally. So for example, if you were a child and you were sitting in the back of your class, just dreaming, daydreaming all the time the teacher you would say, hey, take your son or daughter to the doctor and get em some medicine. They give medicines like Dexedrine. They increase no norepinephrine. What do people do then? They attend to the teacher, they don’t go into their own mind . If you’re going to be creative, guess what you have to do. What do depressant people do almost all day long? Go into their own mind . So we actually wanted to test that theory. I did this with a fellow David B. We gave normal participants, anagram tests . You take words and you mix up the letters and you see how long it takes them to get the word. And some of them, we gave a medication called Propranolol, it blocks norepinephrine . One of the bad side effects, it turns out, if people take it too long, is depression. And it turns out when we gave these people Propranolol, this beta blocker of norepinephrine, guess what? They performed much better. Then with another fellow George Gotcebing. We know that when we treated epileptics, we found that one of the ways of doing it is by simulating one of the cranial nerves called the Vegas nerve. And what the Vegas nerve does is actually increase the output of norepinephrine in the brain. And it’s interesting because now they also use it to treat depression and we gave creativity tests while we’re stimulating. And we weren’t stimulating and low and behold, what do we find out? That when we are stimulating him your creativity went down. So in general, it’s important to go ahead and be in a very relaxed state.

Richard Miles: 26:07

It sounds like in general, there’s this obviously complex interplay between left and right hemisphere and various areas of the brain. But if I had to sum it up, it seems to me in your book, a part of what you do is say that these various conditions in left hemisphere, whether they’re through an accident of birth, or an injury, or a certain mental state, we’re in the inclination to search for that conversion type of thinking and free up, the more divergent type of thinking that may occur elsewhere in the brain. Who , for instance, like I’d signed that the example you gave of him being delayed in his speaking clearly didn’t make him not a creative person. It may been just the opposite.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 26:44

This is important that when people get head injuries, the place that they injure most likely is the, frontal lobes and the connections. And the frontal lobes are the critical thing, both for divergent thinking and for motivation to continue working and to actually produce the creative object or thought or whatever it might be. So, no , that’s not generally true. There have been cases where people did get injured. Strokes, dementia that didn’t enhance the creativity, but remember in those people, they paid a price, they were disabled. So yes, in certain unusual cases, brain damage can enhance it. But in most people interferes with every stage, the first stage, the preparation it interferes with that, it interferes with divergent thinking and it also interferes with convergent thinking.

Richard Miles: 27:36

Ken, if we could come back to the question earlier, how much of this is hardwired? And you’re basically born with this ability to do that creative type of thinking at a high level and how much of it could be taught in schools or taught in workplaces and people could sort of make themselves be more creative in general?

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 27:53

No, you’re asking a very, very important question that’s going on for centuries and centuries. In general, both are important. Nature is important. Brain development is important and nurture is important. And those two things have to go together. So for example, there’s the famous story in Romania. The leader during communist times wanted to increase the population. So we encouraged people to have more and more children and they couldn’t afford the children, so they put them into these units. They fed them, but they didn’t play with them, and they didn’t hug them. Guess what’s happened to these kids. They were all mentally impaired because they need that stimulation to have the brain growth. And this is true throughout life. So it’s not purely nature because nurture helps develop the brain. And that’s been shown, you need a combination of both, but I think it is very, very important growing up to be a stimulator as possible and to do as many new and novel things that possibly you can. One of the things that really troubles me about our educational system is that in general, they downplay the opportunity for children to be creative. So who are the first teachers they fire when you have economic problems?

Richard Miles: 29:12

The music teacher and those folks, right?

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 29:14

The music teacher and the art teacher, And in general, how do they gauge how well somebody does, they gauge it by their knowledge. There’s no tests that they give em that really looks at their creativity. And none of the teachers in school talk about even how do we enhance this creativity? And it’s really a shame because it turns out there was a book written by Richard Florida, and in his book, he says something very, very, important which is coming to be true in the future. The success of different nations, societies is not going to be based on people’s labor, like labor in factories, and so forth. It’s going to be primarily based on creativity. America has been very, very fortunate because it was a country of immigration. And the people who came here said, Hey, wait, I don’t like what things are going on here, there must be a better way. And therefore, America has been a very creative country. My grandmother, who was a Jewish grew up in Belarus, was pregnant with my mother and she told her husband, I don’t want to bring my kids up here. It can be spiteful and treated badly, I want to go to America. And it turns out that America allows people to become very creative. But we need to really force that in our school systems and we’re not doing it. And we’re doing everything the opposite way. So for example, in medicine now, how did they decide how valuable you are? By how many relative value units. So I’ll just tell you the story about me very briefly. I see patients with cognitive disorders and usually, in my afternoon clinic, I would see about four patients, but I was teaching medical students. And most of these patients were sent by other neurologists because they couldn’t figure out what was going on with these patients. And if you go into pub med and type my name, you’ll see how many reports there are about unusual patients. I got a letter from an administrator at The University of Florida that said, you come to clinic at 12:30, you don’t leave clinic until past six o’clock, and you’ll only see four new patients. It wasn’t really his fault, that is the mentality now. So even medicine, if you see something interesting, something that’s different that you want to really look at and examine you can’t do it. So, and so many domains were interfering in the schools and medical schools were interfering with really the growth of creativity. Which takes time, rest and patience.

Richard Miles: 31:56

We’ll Ken, thank you very much. We’re about out of time, but that’s been a fascinating discussion about the relationship of creativity and the brain. And I’m thankful that somebody invented the internet and zoom and laptops, those creative folks made this conversation possible. So thank you to that wider community who makes these conversations as possible, but thank you very much for joining us today on Radio Cade.

Dr. Kenneth Heilman: 32:17

Thank you for inviting me and for all the wonderful work you all are doing in enhancing creativity to Bob Cade is so wonderful. Finding out about the museum is something that’s looking at attempting to enhance creativity. Thank you so much.

Richard Miles: 32:32

Well, thanks for coming on Ken, appreciate it.

Outro: 32:34

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

“I remember early in my career,” says Gary Miller, “attending orthopedic conferences just listening to the surgeons talking to each other.  You build a vocabulary of what they’re talking about.”  Miller is the co-founder of Exactech, a Florida company which develops and manufactures orthopedic implants, and the holder of 14 US patents.   He talks with James Di Virgilio about his first invention, the innovative process, and the need for inventors and end-users to speak a common language.