The Inventivity Pod

Alex De Quesada Sr. is the classic American success story. Unable to complete medical school in Castro’s Cuba, he moved to the U.S. “with $5” in his pocket and ended up at a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1965, he joined the team in Gainesville that invented Gatorade and was given the task of researching “everything in the library about sweat.”   Later in life, he helped found the LifeLink, a Tampa foundation that is one of the largest organ transplant institutions in the United States. Listen to guest host and fellow Cuban Randy Batista interview Dr. De Quesada in Radio Cade’s first Spanish-language episode.  

Alex De Quesada Sr. is the classic American success story. Unable to complete medical school in Castro’s Cuba, he moved to the U.S. “with $5” in his pocket and ended up at a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1965, he joined the team in Gainesville that invented Gatorade and was given the task of researching “everything in the library about sweat.”   Later in life, he helped found the LifeLink, a Tampa foundation that is one of the largest organ transplant institutions in the United States. Listen to guest host and fellow Cuban Randy Batista interview Dr. De Quesada in Radio Cade’s first Spanish-language episode.  

Our food is brought to us from ever-increasing distances, but is this best for us? Anna Prizzia, the Founder of Working Food, views food as an entire ecosystem that must be cared for from seed to plate, farmer to consumer.  Prizzia tells us why she set out to make food more local, creating a community utilizing collaboration, economic opportunity, education, and seed stewardship. 

Our food is brought to us from ever-increasing distances, but is this best for us? Anna Prizzia, the Founder of Working Food, views food as an entire ecosystem that must be cared for from seed to plate, farmer to consumer.  Prizzia tells us why she set out to make food more local, creating a community utilizing collaboration, economic opportunity, education, and seed stewardship. 

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.

James Di Virgilio: 0:39

Food. Where does it come from? Do you know where it’s coming from? Is it local? Is it coming from across the world? Today’s guest, Anna Prizzia, is someone who can help us solve that problem. It’s become obviously much more of a hot button issue and hot button topic. And today we’re going to dive in and explore, where does your food come from? From seed to the table who are the major players involved in those things? And how can we improve that process? Not only for health, but also for the community. For Radio Cade , I’m James Di Virgilio, my guest, Anna Prizzia the Director of Working Food. Anna , welcome to the show.

Anna Prizzia: 1:11

Thanks for having me.

James Di Virgilio: 1:12

So take us through this process when I was looking through working food and what it does and what it once was, there’s so many things you do. Kind of walk us through the overall mission and then problem that you’re solving in the community.

Anna Prizzia: 1:25

Sure. So working food is really seeking to sort of be a hub for local food systems, activities from seed to plate. So that’s why we have so many things going on. We’re really trying to take a comprehensive look at what’s going on with our food system and not be the solution to all the problems or trying to address every piece of the system, but to be a go to place for people, to connect with resources in the community on local food, and definitely try to tackle some of the big issues and challenges we have here early on, because in much of the country, people have really taken up local food and food security and things of that nature as a big part of the work they’re doing. And we found here in Florida and particularly in Alachua County, we’re still struggling with those issues, but more and more, we’re seeing local food nonprofits pop up and community organizations take it up. So we’re excited. And for us, we do a number of things. One is saving seeds, seeds are the literal foundation of our food systems. So we want to make sure that we’re protecting seeds that are adapted to our climate and our region and our tastes and our culture. And so we do that and then we provide those to our community. We also want to make sure people understand where their food comes from and how to cook food, why food is important to our bodies and to our culture. So we have lots of events and programs, and we do a youth garden in two different community centers on a weekly basis to connect students and kids, to gardening and food. And also for the fun that it is to be able to eat healthy and grow it yourself. And then we touch the economic side of things. So we actually incubate food entrepreneurs and we help those food entrepreneurs start businesses less by renting space from us by the hour and helping them navigate the regulatory pathways that you have to get through when you’re trying to do food. And then we touch the policy side and we actually work with local and city government and help them to think through what are the ways in which they could better support that big system I was just talking about. So literally from seed to plate from people eating it and having fun at events to entrepreneurs, cooking it and creating new businesses to how policy and the decisions that our leaders make actually impact our system. We’re really trying to touch every aspect.

James Di Virgilio: 3:30

There’s a full range of services you are providing. Let’s kind of take it back to the origin story. You’re sitting in a room, you’re having a conversation. You’re somewhere, what was the original problem you were seeking to solve?

Anna Prizzia: 3:43

Access to local food. Me and my friends actually were hanging out and we really wanted more healthy, locally grown food. We wanted to be able to connect with farmers and we had a hard time with that. Or you could go to the farmer’s market on Saturday and you could find a few growers, but I knew there was many more in Alachua County and not everyone had all the products that I wanted and needed. And I knew I should be able to find beef and goat milk and all kinds of other things that I wasn’t finding at the farmer’s market 10 or 15 years ago. So we started organizing. And at first we just started with chapter of a national nonprofit, slow food. And we did that for awhile . And the more we did and the more we got people connected to farmers and the more events we held, the more demand we had and the more people kept coming to us and asking us for ideas, resources, connections. And we realized that this was more than a hobby. This was more than something that we were going to do on nights and weekends. And so we started what was called Forage. And at the same time a fellow friend or group of friends were doing the same sort of thing around entrepreneurship and the food system. And they started coalescing around the fact that so many entrepreneurs wanted to start food business , but couldn’t afford to build a multi hundred thousand dollar kitchen that they were going to need and didn’t understand the navigating. And so they started a kitchen incubator called, Blue Oven Kitchens. And then about three or four years ago, we realized that it’s expensive to run a nonprofit. And if you want to be successful as a nonprofit, the best thing you can do is to find revenue generating streams so that you act like a real business. And don’t think of it as just this extractive sort of donor based process and also to be efficient with those overhead costs. So we merged and Blue Oven Kitchens and Forage joined forces to become Working Food.

James Di Virgilio: 5:19

Now I’m sure you had a lot of hurdles hearing your origin story going from this idea to now multiple ideas to now full suite of services, and then being a nonprofit, as you mentioned, which has interesting hurdles. Was there ever a thought process to be a, for-profit versus a nonprofit or what was the decision making that went into that once you decided to create those two entities into one?

Anna Prizzia: 5:39

Yeah, that’s a good question. We definitely have thought about the, for-profit. And I think we still think about, I mean, we’re still young, we’re kind of toddlers in this arena, I would say. And there’s still, I think, opportunity for us to grow a, for-profit arm that could bring revenue back to the organization, but really we’re mission driven and it’s mission first. So for us, we want to take the revenue we’re making and we want to reinvest it back in the community and find other ways and better ways that we can serve the community. So for us, it was a no brainer to be a nonprofit. Also it did give us access to unique sources of revenue, grants, and institutional revenue sources in partnerships with our city County, et cetera. And food is something that we should be investing in. It’s like housing and clothing and roads and transportation. It’s a critical resource that people need. It meets that foundational need, right? And so we’re seeing in other parts of the country, again, that our institutions are investing in those things. Like they do roads and housing. And so I felt that by creating a nonprofit, we could really show the ways in which our institutions could partner and invest more easily than we could in the private sector.

James Di Virgilio: 6:40

Okay Anna , why local food? It’s been a big push. Is this just a fad? Is there a scientific reason? Why is local food Something that we should really care about?

Anna Prizzia: 6:49

There’s a lot of reasons, but for me personally, it’s about a couple things. One it’s about our local economy. We want a strong, resilient, local economy here. And food is a foundation of that. We have a big rural agricultural area and we should be supporting those farmers. They’re getting older and they’re , and we’re losing that land and that part of our character of our culture. And I don’t want to lose that. And I also want to make sure that those family farms can stay in business and it starts circulating dollars back in our own economy, too , right? Because we support our local restaurants. They reinvest, they buy things from other local businesses and that money circulates more. They say the average business, if you buy from a big box, you’d get like 19 cents on the dollar that gets reinvested in your community versus upwards of 51 to 60 cents reinvested on the dollar when you’re buying local. Another reason is because of food security. We are a global food system now, and I’m not going to give up my coffee or my chocolate. So I’m not saying the global food system is bad at all, but there is a real challenge with where our food comes from, how far it travels and the potential issues that come with that contamination. We’ve had many food safety issues and the global food system, regulation, trade agreements, all of those things impact our ability to feed ourselves. And so even just from a security standpoint, not individual food security, but community food security, being able to produce food here is a big deal because we know that we can feed ourselves in light of whatever happens globally. And then last but not least, it’s about community. To me, it’s about building relationships and meeting people and helping those that need food the most, and being able to make those decisions right here, where we can impact them versus giving up those decisions to large multinational corporations that we have no ability to control or interact with on a day to day basis.

James Di Virgilio: 8:30

Imagine Working Food, let’s say five years from now, what would be some things mission wise, vision wise, that you would want to see happening?

Anna Prizzia: 8:39

Yeah. I love this question. I would love to see us actually expanding the component of our business. That’s about helping our local farmers to make food more accessible and affordable. So by creating a large scale facility that could aggregate food from local farms, bring it in process. It, make it into value added products that we’re used to seeing on grocery shelves in volume so that we could serve our schools. We could serve UF’s dining halls. We could serve the hospitals. We could serve the jail. We could get that food in the hands of the places where people eat the majority of their meals. And that would also bring an economy of scale to our local food system that would allow everyday people to afford that food. And for it not to be this kind of like fancy trendy bougie thing that people think local food is, that’s my dream.

James Di Virgilio: 9:27

Now this is a problem that you mentioned so often it’s sort of a dream to have lower socioeconomic classes, being able to eat what you would consider to be local, organic, healthy sourced food. You want to mention, it tends to be much more expensive. So then you have a McDonald’s or you have something at that level. Is this a challenge you see in the local market? Is this something that you are also going to be able to address, as you just mentioned with Working Food? And if so, how come it’s taking so long to address this? What are some of the challenges to bring that price point down?

Anna Prizzia: 9:56

Well, I will say yes, I think it’s something we want to address. And I think that the economies of scale help, I think that there’s a real problem with our system though. I don’t want to create an economics lecture out of this, but we’ve externalized all the costs of our food . So when our grandparents were kids, they were spending upwards of 30% of their income on food. We now spend less than 10% of our income on food. That amount of money didn’t disappear. We just stopped taking into consideration all of those costs. And we started externalizing them to the environment by using more harmful chemicals or by utilizing our soil resources and water resources in ways that aren’t sustainable. We started externalizing that cost to people by not paying them fair wages and using migrant labor that doesn’t have to get workman’s comp or overtime. And we externalize those costs to our health. We started eating more processed foods. We started eating more salt, fat, sugar, and less healthy, fresh vegetables. And as a result, we’re trying to compare an Apple to a pineapple, kind of. It is important that people can affordably access food. But I think the question is more about the root causes of why people can’t afford to feed themselves healthily , not about food becoming cheaper. That becomes a question about wages that becomes a question about affordable housing. Like that becomes a bigger systemic question. So yes, Working Food wants to work really hard to make food as affordable and as accessible as possible. And I think we need to recognize that some of the problems around food and accessibility and calorie, dense foods being cheaper than nutrient dense foods has to do with a systemic, a global systems problem. And that we need to think about in bigger ways.

James Di Virgilio: 11:28

No, that’s good. That’s a big question I want, I want to probe it a little further. I I’ve had the chance to travel quite a bit in my life. And I’ve been to a lot of different countries where the food culture is very different than in the U.S. sometimes similar, if you’re comparing a country that gets brought up a lot like France, food wise to the U.S. are they facing similar challenges to what we’re facing? Or is that a much different food culture with local food and the lower socioeconomic classes having access to that food? I mean, what would be the prime difference between what you just mentioned is maybe you have a cost issue where Americans aren’t willing to, or able to afford the better food, but what is happening maybe in some other food economies?

Anna Prizzia: 12:09

So I don’t know enough about the French food economy in particular to sort of, I mean, I can pontificate on it, but I don’t know enough about it to talk about it really specifically. But I would say that the difference in much of the world where food culture tends to be focused around less refined foods, less processed foods, more whole foods, things, whole grains, whole vegetables, whole proteins, there is a completely different relationship with food, right? You have to remember that our relationship with food not only is tied to like global trade situation and large corporations taking over a much of our food system, but it’s also rooted in slavery. And so there’s a lot of cultural impacts around the relationships that we have with food. It’s really tied up in a lot of pretty complex issues. Not that that isn’t the case in parts of Europe, but there, I think there was many more family farms. There was many more local butcher shops and bakeries and things of that. That was the norm. Like you walked and you got your food daily and you don’t run to the grocery store and fill up a shopping cart and take it home and you have food for the whole week. You’d go every day on your way home from work and you stop at the local butcher and the local Baker . And so I think it’s a cultural thing as much as it’s an economic thing, but I would also say that there was less refined foods in those places. Like we sort of invented refined foods in a way, like we had the land grant universities and I work for IFAS full time. That’s my full time job. And I run the Field and Fork program and we work really hard at that institution to make sure that food is affordable and healthy and accessible. But in those instances, in doing that, I think when we first started those processes, some of making food really cheap and really accessible meant that all of a sudden we had all these excess calories and we started exploring what to do with them. And it became for corporations, not for the institutions , more about profitability and more about making the most money they could out of those calories, instead of about what is that going to do to impact our culture? What is it going to do to impact our health? What is it going to do to impact our economy? So, I think we, as a culture have invented in a way this sort of fast food. And as it starts to infiltrate other cultures, that’s becoming a real issue for them because they didn’t have it. Like we have it. And in the places where it’s coming, you see the same problems that we see, you see heart disease and diabetes being some of the top killers. You see cancers that have never been in those cultures before coming, you see disproportionate access to healthy food. I mean, you see all the same problems, but the majority of them were born right here in the United States.

James Di Virgilio: 14:25

Yeah. There definitely seems to be both correlation and causation when it comes to especially fast food restaurants going to overseas cultures. And then like you mentioned, you see this happen rather quickly. You mentioned that you worked for IFAS, so you had a day job, and then you mentioned this becoming a project and then becoming really a full time venture. So many entrepreneurship stories start just like that, whether it’s a labor of love or it’s an idea that you see, did you imagine yourself becoming an entrepreneur or was it something that you would say just sort of happened organically?

Anna Prizzia: 14:54

Um, I think it just sort of happened. I mean, I guess in an odd way, I’ve kind of always been an entrepreneur, even at UF. I’m sort of an entrepreneur in the middle of a bureaucracy. Like I started the office of sustainability in collaboration with the original director and then directed that office as a new project for UF. And then I started Field and Fork, which is a totally new program. It’s about four years old at UF. And so I think creativity creation is in my blood. It’s like a part of who I am and when I see a problem or a challenge, like I just want to solve it. And then I’m like a river running downstream . Like I just, when I hit a rock, I just go around and I just keep going until the problem is solved or till I’ve created something that I feel like at least as a tool and a resource for people to be able to solve their own problems or challenges, reach those opportunities that they want. So I guess in a way, yes, I’ve always thought of myself as an entrepreneur, but I never used that word. It was never a word that I assigned to myself until this community started embracing entrepreneurship in a really strong way. And we started seeing incubators and accelerators and I started to see what entrepreneurship was about and what creativity and innovation was about. And then I was like, Oh yeah, that’s me. Like, I identify with that community. And that’s really when I took on that moniker, if you will.

James Di Virgilio: 16:02

Yeah . That’s a beautiful way. Relate to look at it, unpack that term because at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is problem solving and innovation and improvement only comes through creativity because by definition, creativity is something new, it’s something different. And that’s what has to be done to improve something in a market marketplace , something in the community, which of course Working Food is looking to solve. Now in your childhood, you came from the North Carolina, Virginia area. You moved to Florida later on. You had mentioned before the show that you really had thought or dreamed of being a writer. Tell me about the process of moving through your life and maybe moving from writer to where you are now to IFAS to what was that process like? Because again, so often what we think we may want to be is not exactly what we become, but there tends to be some core elements that maybe have your dream of being a writer that you probably do feel like are at play still in your life today.

Anna Prizzia: 16:51

Yeah. I think that I saw being a writer as an Avenue to creativity and an Avenue to be able to tell stories and to help people connect with ideas. And it wasn’t until I got older and went to college and started to see the breadth of opportunities and the ways in which you can connect people to ideas and create influence, and build things. I guess I thought once upon a time that you would write your ideas on paper and then somebody else would take those ideas. And then if they thought they were good, then they would build them. But it took being, I guess, really starting to realize that I could manifest destiny, you know, that I could be the one to build those things. I think that idea that actually really happened in high school. I started to do a Marine biology program and they didn’t have a program for freshmen. They only had a program for juniors and seniors and I really wanted to do it. And so I went to the director of the program and sat down and told him that I thought he should start a program for freshmen because then he would have a four year program and it would align better with the school year. I like made up this whole story about why he should have this. And he said, okay. And I was their first freshmen . And I was like, what? I can just talk myself into something like, I can just make my case the same way I could in writing, but then not just publish it and hope somebody reads it, but I could sit in someone’s office and literally sit down with them and explain it to them. And they might listen. I was sold. I was like, okay, this is the rest of my life. So then I started getting more into biology and I’ve always been passionate about natural resources and the environment and social justice. I’m from a do good hippy family. So I learned very early on to care for my world and to care for people. But that’s when I really realized that I cared about being a change maker .

James Di Virgilio: 18:22

And when the course of your daily life, you get an ability to be a change maker in all of these food related ventures, but also in individual’s lives through the incubator component that you have. What is some advice or wisdom you tend to find yourself commonly passing on to people that are attempting to solve problems in the food industry?

Anna Prizzia: 18:41

I guess probably, in this is one of those things where you’re better at giving advice and following advice, but is to start small and to really focus and to learn to say no, because it’s easy to want to do everything. It’s easy to want to be all things to all people. And that quickly gets bigger than you can handle. So that’s one of the things that I think we say the other is, and this is kind of weird, cause it’s sort of a contradiction, but as to dream big is to not just think about like, I want to sell this at the farmer’s market, but like where do you really want to be? Like, do you see yourself on people’s tables at home? Do you see yourself on grocery store shelves? Do your see your product on restaurant plates? Like where do you vision being? And so that we’re building your business and you’re building your business now to be successful as big as you want to get and not just having to keep rebuilding and rethinking, but planning for the longterm .

James Di Virgilio: 19:36

And so you’ve got this vision, I’m excited about an idea. I come to you, I have this big dream. How then do I get from little step? Like you mentioned, to big dream using feedback. That seems to be a big thing with entrepreneurs is you’re going to get feedback. Whether the market tells you, we don’t want your service, whether the vendors tell you this isn’t good enough, how important is it to utilize feedback , uh, when creating a new service or a new product or a new kitchen or whatever the case may be, how important is it to listen to that and to fine tune that, to continue to grow, to get to your vision?

Anna Prizzia: 20:08

Yeah, that’s huge. That’s one of the biggest things that I think can cause entrepreneurs to fail, particularly in food, because food is a fickle business. Trends, change people’s tastes change, and chefs really drive a lot of that creativity and innovation. And so paying attention to trends and feedback are probably the two most important things you can do to make sure you stay on your game. And when it comes to feedback, I think sometimes in this culture in particular, and I don’t know why it is because I don’t see it so much in other entrepreneurship cultures that I’ve seen, people don’t want to spend money on marketing. It’s like they think that everything that they do is going to bring them revenue and trying to help people understand that creative investment in giving away your product will, can yield in big ways and partnering and collaborating with groups that are doing events or with breweries that are having something or whatever it might be to get your product in front of people. And to get that valuable feedback, it’s like free market research. It’s not marketing. Like if they could think about it in a way that would allow them to better invest in themselves. I think that’s a huge piece for sure.

James Di Virgilio: 21:12

Yeah. It’s a great answer and a great piece of insight that at the end of the day, any entrepreneur, any problem you’re trying to solve is best solved between the problem solver and the end user. And if you can get feedback directly from the end user, you’re going to go places. Oftentimes, as you mentioned, we’ll sit in a silo as an entrepreneur and think this is a good idea. This will work and we’re not doing all we can to get it out in the hands of the people that will utilize it or use it because at the end of the day, if it’s great to us, but not great to anyone else, we’re not going to solve anyone’s problems. And like you mentioned, I think a lot of that is putting yourself out there and letting people experience whatever it is you have created. And any entrepreneur will tell another one, do that as fast as you can, right. Get your prototype out there, get your thing into market, see what’s going on. And that tends to be something I think we see we’ll Anna . This has been a wonderful chat. I think there’s plenty more we could talk about when it comes to food. I mean , we could talk for a long time, but we’ll have to close this up for today. You are Anna Prizzia, the director of Working Food as well as a full time employee at IFAS. you have very , very busy life busy play . Thank you for taking time to join us. And for Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio.

Anna Prizzia: 22:13

Thank you.

Outro: 22:15

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

Lasers aren’t just for sci-fi movies, it turns out they can be used for the treatment of tumors and ultra-fast communications networks. Michael Bass, a professor at the University of Central Florida, is the holder of 34 patents and a 2019 inductee in the Florida Inventors’ Hall of Fame. Bass invented ways to use lasers to treat bleeding in the gastrointestinal system, detect nanoparticles associated with tumors, and amplify light in fiberoptic cables. 

Lasers aren’t just for sci-fi movies, it turns out they can be used for the treatment of tumors and ultra-fast communications networks. Michael Bass, a professor at the University of Central Florida, is the holder of 34 patents and a 2019 inductee in the Florida Inventors’ Hall of Fame. Bass invented ways to use lasers to treat bleeding in the gastrointestinal system, detect nanoparticles associated with tumors, and amplify light in fiberoptic cables. 

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: 0:38

Lasers. No scifi movie can do without them, but it turns out they’re good for lots of other things, including the treatment of tumors and advanced communications networks. Welcome to Radio Cade . I’m your host Richard Miles recording at the University of South Florida in partnership with our Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, as well as USF today. My guest is Michael Bass, professor Ameritas at the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He is also the holder of 34 U.S. patents as well as a 2019 inductee into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame. Welcome to show Michael and congratulations.

Michael Bass: 1:11

Oh, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Richard Miles: 1:14

So we usually start out the show explaining the inventors technology, but you’ve got 34 patents. So I’m sort of at a loss where to begin here, but why don’t we start with a very basic definition of lasers and the types of things they can be use for, and then we’ll move from there and to specific applications that are contained in some of your patents.

Michael Bass: 1:32

Sure. First, a laser is a device that produces a lot of light. It also produces it with very special properties so that you can focus it very carefully and you can select from a variety of lasers to be able to look at different kinds of effects, some effects depend on frequency or wavelength of the laser. Some activities you want to do require shorter pulses. We now have lasers that run continuously and yet other lasers that make pulses as short as 10 to the minus 15 seconds.

Richard Miles: 2:05

Wow. Okay. So there’s a lot of power there and a lot of utility and you have managed to figure out a number of different ways in which is sort of harness the power of lasers to do different things that I think people wouldn’t ordinarily think of. And I think one of the cool things about talking about inventions is not just the inventions themselves, but how did the inventor think of them? So let’s start out with one that I’ve heard you talk about, and that is using lasers to treat bleeding in the gastrointestinal system. How did you come up with that idea? What led you to that particular use?

Michael Bass: 2:37

All inventions begin with a question in this case, the question was raised to me by two people who are gastroenterologists at the university of Southern California Medical School. They had been using fiber optic endoscopes and could see pathologies bleeding and ulcers in the gastrointestinal system. And the comment both made was it’s very frustrating. We can’t do anything about it.

Richard Miles: 3:03

They can see it, but they couldn’t do anything.

Michael Bass: 3:04

They could see it and they couldn’t do anything. And they were very frustrated. So the question was, what could they do to treat these problems inside the gastrointestinal system? So my suggestion was, as it turned out, invention was to use a separate fiber optic to transmit laser light into the GI system with endoscopic control so that you could aim it at the bleeding site, turn on the laser and cauterize the bleeding lasers had been used to cauterize bleeding prior to this, but not with the fiber optic and internally into the body. When this patent was written, the patent attorney included the expression, introduced into the patient through openings, natural or manmade. Now that was brilliant because the last three words or manmade made our patent a predecessor or a precursor to all of laparoscopic surgery.

Richard Miles: 4:00

Wow, okay. I hope you’d kept that patent attorney on the payroll.

Michael Bass: 4:03

I should hope so.

Richard Miles: 4:05

Just out of curiosity, you said this started with a question from these two doctors, how did they come to you or you to them? Was this a professional meeting or was this just by luck?

Michael Bass: 4:14

Actually, they came to see me. I had not yet been at USC for more than two months. It was about the last part of the second month I was there. I had no equipment. I had no lab. I just got there and they were at the USC medical school and there must have been an announcement of the new faculty or the new people. And they came by, they literally knocked on my door and came in and sat down and we started to talk and their frustration was very clear. They didn’t know what to do once they saw these bleeding sites, once the idea was put out and we tested it and tried it out and we actually got permission to try it with human subjects. And it was phenomenal that we could stop the bleeding, the patients would get healthy again. And it was just great. It was a very exciting time.

Richard Miles: 5:00

Is this now widely used procedure? Is fairly common or is it still unusual?

Michael Bass: 5:04

Well, as far as I know, it’s pretty wide use several companies, manufacturer, laser devices with fiber optic connections to be used by gastroenterologists one company that made it was in Germany, Messerschmitt which of course was a strange name to associate with medical equipment but there it was.

Richard Miles: 5:24

So I imagine this procedure has saved a lot of money and probably a lot of literal pain. Right? What was the standard of care before that they would see the bleeding and then they’d have to go back later and operate or would they just not stop the bleeding?

Michael Bass: 5:37

Well, they had to eventually stop the bleeding or you would bleed out cause with serious bleeds the treatment prior to this. And prior to the later knowledge of bacterial cause for stomach ulcers, that was not clear prior to what I did with the fiber optic. And the laser was treatment with antacids, treatment with reducing different kinds of foods, staying away from alcohol, reduce smoking a lot of things,

Richard Miles: 6:03

None of which turns out to be terribly effective.

Michael Bass: 6:05

And if they were, it took a long time for them to take effect with the laser quarter he treatment, it took the time it took to have an endoscopy, which is maybe a half hour.

Richard Miles: 6:14

Wow . So a tremendous leap forward and the ability to treat those conditions.

Michael Bass: 6:17

Right. You could begin to heal almost immediately.

Richard Miles: 6:20

Okay . Let’s move on to one of the second applications that you have discovered, and that is using nanoparticles that emit visible light for the treatment of tumors. If I understand basically illuminates the tumor, is that sort of the concept involved or do I have that wrong?

Michael Bass: 6:34

You have it a little bit confused. Quite literally, I met Sudipta Seal on the crosswalk, going to the student union at UCF and knew that he was looking for help with a problem that he had. And I asked him what was the problem? And he said, sirium oxide nanoparticles have an effect on the radiation treatment of various tumors. The problem that everyone had was they didn’t know what was going on because the nanoparticles were too small to be seen to be located. You didn’t know where they were. So I suggested standing there on the crosswalk, going to the student union and get my lunch. I said, well, you add certain rare earth elements and you can then put a little bit of light on these nanoparticles and they will light up and emit visible light. So you can see them. Well, three days later, his associate showed up in my office with little vials of Sirium oxide, nanoparticles that had been doped and sure enough, they lit up just like I said, they would. And one thing led to another. We learned that these particles in some kinds of tumors go around the cells and in other kinds of tumors, they go into the cell. This again, proves that cancer is more than one disease. And the power of these doped nanoparticles is that you can find them and you can start to understand what they do.

Richard Miles: 7:55

So does this aid then in the early detection, can you pick these up faster than other conventional means of detecting tumors?

Michael Bass: 8:01

I can’t say that’s not something I’m familiar with. I just know that this kind of nanoparticle serves a special purpose in the radiation treatment. These particles may help the radiation destroy the cancer cells , or they may protect the normal cells that was not known which way it was until we had nanoparticles you could see.

Richard Miles: 8:19

It’s made the treatment, I guess, more effective.

Michael Bass: 8:21

You can locate them. And so you now know what to do,

Richard Miles: 8:24

Right. So I’m guessing Michael, you must be an easy person to talk to because in both these stories, people have sought you out and asked you questions and you’ve given them pretty good responses.

Michael Bass: 8:34

Well, as I say, all invention and all creativity starts with asking a question and I’ve been very fortunate to be around people who had the kinds of questions that I could answer. And usually together we would find the solutions.

Richard Miles: 8:48

Hey , let’s talk about a third application that I heard you explained . And then after you explain , you said , well, none of you probably understood my explanation, but it has to do with fiber amplifier and its role in communications. Tell us what that means.

Michael Bass: 9:01

Okay Currently, all the communications that you do, whether it’s by cell phone or by landline is carried at one point or another on a fiber optic system. Those fiber optics have almost reached their capacity to carry information between telephone calls, which are minimal, but computer to computer image downloads, graphic downloads, video downloads, are burdening the system to where it’s almost completely saturated. You can’t do much more. So in the future, what people are considering is sending different information streams on different patterns of light inside the fiber. Now, the problem is that every now and again, you have to amplify the light so it can continue traveling down the next fiber. And the problem was how do you make an amplifier that exactly reproduces that pattern of light from one fiber to the next? And it was answering that question that led to the invention of these kinds of amplifiers. There are fiber amplifiers that can precisely reproduce the pattern.

Richard Miles: 10:05

And so what is this going to do for communications networks? Is this gonna make them faster, more powerful, all of the above?

Michael Bass: 10:11

All of the above. When it’s introduced, then it hasn’t happened yet, but it will. It will add to the capacity of existing systems, very substantial amounts of ability to carry more information. Now, the issues that I just described of carrying more information is a rather remarkable thing. It’s not long ago before there were fiber optic communications. You didn’t bother. You didn’t even think about doing such a thing. Can I tell a little story?

Richard Miles: 10:38

Yeah sure, absolutely.

Michael Bass: 10:38

In 1980, two miracles took place. Now they say, what the heck is he talking about? Well, one miracle was that the United States hockey team beat the Soviet union in hockey. The second miracle was that those Olympics were transmitted on the first fiber optic communication system.

Richard Miles: 10:56

Wow, I didn’t know that.

Michael Bass: 10:58

Since then, there are now over 2 billion kilometers of fibers in the ground or under the oceans. And it’s insufficient. The demands that humanity has put on communicating has made those fibers, as I said before, almost completely in use. So more capacity as to come either by putting in more fibers, which is very expensive or finding out how to use the existing fibers more effectively, which is where our amplifier comes in.

Richard Miles: 11:26

I see. Okay . We talk a lot on this show about unfortunately, good ideas don’t sell themselves. There is a process after which brilliant people like you think of a good idea before it gets into the hands of either individuals or companies or institutions to make use of it. And that generally known as commercialization and a lot of inventors try to set up their own companies, find investors. In other words, do that extra mile to get their idea out there. And others work hand in hand, particularly at universities with technology transfer offices to take care a lot of that heavy lifting you’ve I think I had experienced in sort of both models to some degree or another. Tell us what that’s like in terms of, okay, you’ve got an idea. You’ve tested it. You’ve proved it. It clearly has some sort of commercial application. What happens after that?

Michael Bass: 12:12

In most cases, university, people like myself, work through the technology transfer office and that’s where much of my inventions have become commercial. One story though, that tells you how sometimes it happens in ways you can’t expect. We meaning myself and professor Chow. We had organized a group of students and ourselves to study how to most efficiently cool bars of diode lasers. Now, why are we interested in bars of diode lasers? Because they can produce a lot of power. The problem is you have to get the light from the diode laser bar out in some form that you can then use. So while looking at how you would cool them, they had the life flat on a surface, but the light was coming out parallel to the surface. So you couldn’t get at it. And what I came up with together with Louis Chow in this group, we invented a little prism that could be used to turn the light perpendicular to the surface, and then you have all of it and you can focus. It collimated do whatever you want. In the group of people. There was a young man named Dan Rini . Dan realized he was mostly interested in the cooling process, but as he finished his PhD, he had started his own company called Rini Technologies. It was growing in the UCF incubator and he took license to this invention of this little prison. He then licensed that licensed sub-licensed it to a much larger company that makes high power lasers. And apparently they are making these little prisms, including them in their devices, whatever the actual system is. And it’s been a very successful connection. The connection was that Dan knew about what we did. He was in the room when we described these prisms and he realized that it had potential. So he worked with the incubator, which is run in large part by the University Technology Transfer Office. And one thing led to another and they connected.

Richard Miles: 14:13

When you’re working on solving a particular problem or coming up with a solution, how much, if at all, do you think about the potential market applications downstream? Are you just trying to solve that one problem? Like the colleague on the bridge on your way to lunch, or are you already starting to feel like, you know, I think this would be really good for this or that application

Michael Bass: 14:32

It doesn’t work like that. The question that comes along is how do you solve a particular problem? Usually a technological or a scientific problem. And from it might come a device or an item or a technique that might be called invention. That could be patented. I’ve got 34 patents, but I have almost 200 refereed papers. And more than that in the way of invited talks and so on. So the patents grow out of things that you do, that you don’t plan to invent something at first, as one of the speakers yesterday said he loved to create and invent things. That’s great, but you don’t begin your work thinking of inventing something. You start to answer a question in the process of answering the question. You may come up with something that’s invented .

Richard Miles: 15:18

Have there been any surprises in the technologies that you’ve developed in terms of it looks like it’s going to one market application and then ends up in a totally different place.

Michael Bass: 15:27

I wish I could answer that one. It’s a tough question, but let me give you one example, okay. Let’s go back to the laser fiber optic treatment from gastrointestinal bleeding. One day, I got a call from the gastroenterologist who was using the stuff that I’d put together for him. He said , you got to come down here and witness this. Well, later that afternoon, a six or seven year old hemophiliac boy came in with his parents. He had lost one of his teeth and the bleeding hadn’t stopped no matter what anyone else did, conventionally, the bleeding didn’t stop. Well when we turned on the laser, it smelled terrible and the boy he didn’t want to do anymore. So we proceeded to give him a quarter. For each time we turned on the laser and $2 and 50 cents later, the bleeding was stopped and he went home and whatever life haemophiliacs would have, he could have, but at least he wasn’t going to die because he was bleeding when his tooth came out. So there are always other things that happen . Something invented for gastrointestinal bleeding was used for that. Other people have now used that same material, the same laser fiber optic system to treat hemorrhoids, to treat other, such things and using a fiber optic with laser light coming through. It is a nice way of putting a laser scalpel in the hands of a surgeon. So it has its expansion in ways that we didn’t think about, we didn’t plan those.

Richard Miles: 16:50

Michael. Now we’re going to talk about you and you grew up in the Bronx, right ? Right. What was it like to live in New York city as a kid?

Michael Bass: 16:56

It was actually wonderful. The ability to get on a subway and half an hour later, be at the Museum of Natural History or the Hayden Planetarium and do that from when I was maybe eight or nine years old with no thought about anything. It was a different time. In fact, when I tell my daughter in law about making such trips as a kid, she thinks my parents were abusing me by letting me do it on my own at that young age. But everyone did in New York City was a place with tremendous excitement in it about if you will, science, I went to Stuyvesant High School, which is an extraordinarily selective school. You must pass a certain exam with a grade higher than a certain amount. And then they might take you in or they might not, but you have to achieve that. And while at Stuyvesant, which was in Manhattan still is I went to an exhibit at the, a United Nations of atoms for peace, and I saw a cloud chamber in operation. And that was fascinating. And it made me think that I wanted to study physics living somewhere else. I might not have seen that cloud chamber. Okay. To give you an idea of what I enjoyed most about living in New York.

Richard Miles: 18:03

So when you got into this high school, the high performing selective high school, right? You were saying that among the people, most surprised for your parents, because when you were younger, were you not a standout student? Or why were they surprised?

Michael Bass: 18:15

Yeah, actually it was a little earlier when I was in elementary school through sixth grade, I was a very average, maybe even a little below average student because I was bored witless. I had no idea that it made any difference to my future. If my handwriting was perfect, man , I’m lefthanded . So that makes it even more strange. But when I was selected for what in New York is called or was called the rapid advance, where you went in to seventh and ninth grade, you skipped eighth grade, you took three years in two, and then you are a year younger than everyone, but you could do this. When I was selected for that, my parents were the most surprised people that I can imagine. They didn’t think that I had that kind of capability. And so that was kind of a kickstart to my future of using my mind and doing things like this, studying physics.

Richard Miles: 19:01

Were either of your parents, scientists or researchers?

Michael Bass: 19:04

No, neither was, I had an uncle who was a civil engineer and that’s about as close as we got, but no, my father and mother probably never went beyond high school. He was a realtor and she eventually, when I was going to high school, she started to work as a legal secretary.

Richard Miles: 19:19

Any siblings that went into scientific fields?

Michael Bass: 19:21

No, my sister finished high school and was glad to be done with education. She was nine years older than me and had different ideas in mind.

Richard Miles: 19:30

So I’m sure Michael, at this point in your career, you are probably routinely asked to mentor, or you’re asked for advice from everyone from college students to grad students, to PhD candidates. I’m curious, what sort of questions do you get? Are they all highly specific? Do I go to this college or that college? Or do you get more life advice type of questions? What do I do with my life? What should I study? And then what are your,

Michael Bass: 19:53

There are several, I’ll give you a story again. A couple of years back, a friend of mine was invited to speak at boys state in Tallahassee. And he asked me to come along because it was a long drive. He wanted someone with him and I would be able to speak a little bit. So when I given my little talk about the laser fiber optic GI bleeding treatment, because that’s something he could relate to easily, I finished and perhaps 200 of these boys came over and stood around. They asking questions about where they should go to school. What should they study? And reason I tell this story is that there’s a real need out there amongst the young people for guidance as to why would you want to go into technology? Well, the future is greater than the past. A small statistic. That makes a big difference of all the engineers and scientists in the world that ever existed more than 90% of them are alive today, which is why the squeal of technology’s speeding up today. Today we have telephones that we carry around in our pockets that have more computing capability than the whole world had in the 1960s. Now that’s a remarkable change in things and that kind of technological change is coming more and more quickly in all fields of endeavor. So when I do talk to students about that, I talk to them about the vast opportunities that exist. And I don’t try to aim them at a particular subject, whether it’s biology or physics or chemistry, or what have you, that’s their choice to make. But to realize that technology is a major, major player in the human experience is something I try to communicate. While at UCF, I created a course called the culture of science, which dealt with all the subjects of how science came about, how it affected the society around it and how society affected it. And it’s something that most students never hear about. And I did this course and I taught it for undergraduates. I taught it for honors classes. I taught it for graduate students, the responses. I wish I’d known that before I started. So it’s a very happy thing to have been able to do that for all those students,

Richard Miles: 22:06

The Culture Science sounds like a great program for the Cade Museum. So we would love to have you maybe come up and give a talk about that, because that’s one of the things we try to do at the museum is trying to get people to think creatively about the tools of science, because to us , that is the predicate of invention, right? I mean, if data by itself, isn’t going to get you in invention. It has to be a way of thinking about the data that gets you to do something useful.

Michael Bass: 22:30

Thank you. Yeah, that is effectively what the Culture of Science is. It’s the way of going from fundamental, basic subject to actually something, a thing that works and helps people and does something. And sometimes the thing that is developed gets used improperly, as we can all imagine things happening, but if you’re not aware of these issues, you’re not going to function well in our future society.

Richard Miles: 22:55

Mike, I want to thank you very much for being on Radio Cade today. I feel bad. We only got through at most three of your 34 patents. So we’re going to have to do another six or seven installments of this show, but fascinating background, fascinating way of looking at your own profession. And thank you very much for joining us.

Michael Bass: 23:10

It’s been my pleasure. I enjoyed it.

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

Animator Chance Glasco is famous for his work on video games, most notably the Call of Duty Franchise. His newest venture, Doghead Simulations, is using Virtual Reality to replace and improve conference calls, video calls, and screen sharing. Imagine being worlds apart, yet able to meet together face to face, sharing data and information in real-time, through a virtual reality environment that works across a variety of platforms and operating systems. 

Animator Chance Glasco is famous for his work on video games, most notably the Call of Duty Franchise. His newest venture, Doghead Simulations, is using Virtual Reality to replace and improve conference calls, video calls, and screen sharing. Imagine being worlds apart, yet able to meet together face to face, sharing data and information in real-time, through a virtual reality environment that works across a variety of platforms and operating systems. 

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

I’m James de Virgilio in for Richard Miles . And today I get a chance to talk with a rather famous, and I heard you said this in a podcast Chance, a famous, but maybe not famous on the street, developer who’s now doing some really interesting things. His name is Chance Glasco. He’s sitting down with me here at the Cade Museum, and we’re going to talk about a couple of things today, a Chance. Let me give you your bio. You’re the Co-founder of Infinity War, that’s what you’re famous for, which produced Call of Duty and the really good Call of Duty games. I think it’s important to say in there , and then you are now the Co – founder since 2016 of Doghead Simulations. And we’re going to spend quite a bit of time talking about this today. What, first of all, why start Doghead? You were in Brazil for a while . You had kind of given yourself a little mental space. Why come back with this project?

Chance Glasco: 1:25

So after , um, 13 years of Call of Duty, 15 years of the game industry, I was just burned out. As you probably heard. The game industry is a lot of hours, a lot of crunching late nights. Yeah. They feed you, but you’re there 12 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, and whatnot, it just kind of takes a toll on you. And you, you know, at a certain point, doesn’t matter how much someone pays you. If you can’t enjoy your life, what does it matter? Right. And so I guess I kind of pulled like a Dave Chappelle in a sense , right. I just kind of left the country and went to another place, which was Brazil , uh, lived there for , uh , overall, I close to three years, about two years in Rio and then , uh, six months or so, and , um , San Paulo and , uh , yeah , just enjoyed it and just kind of relaxed, recovered, and started working on a VR project remotely with a buddy of mine, Albert Perez, who’s another Co – founder of Doghead. He was in Seattle, I was in Rio and we were working on this game called Bear Tinder. And it was actually a , um, animal bartending game. You’re in virtual reality, you’re a bear. And then animals come in and they order drinks and you actually reach behind you, grab the bottle, you know, and grab everything, start mixing stuff, get points, serve them. And eventually ended up with just this crazy drunk animal bar. So like, why am I not doing a drunk animal game now? Well, investors, would probably be the correct answer, right? You’re a money guy. So, you know, like if someone came to you, with the background of Call of Duty is like, Hey, I’ve got this great idea. You can get drunk with a goat and a chinchilla in VR, or, Hey, I’ve got this idea that can revolutionize communication education. Like the investors are going to go with the second choice, most likely.

James Di Virgilio: 2:55

That’s for sure. So you were working on something very creative and fun.

Chance Glasco: 2:58

Yeah, something as far as from Call of Duty as I can get basically.

James Di Virgilio: 3:02

And now it’s morphed into something a little more serious, a little bit more professional, more buttoned up maybe?

Chance Glasco: 3:06

So, the segue from that was , uh , we were collaborating and I think we were initially using Skype and, you know , um, Skype is not, I don’t know how Skype managed to get worse over the years, but we were very frustrated and it wasn’t just the software itself. It’s just that we had I had five megabit down internet, you know, I was like two streets from a favela. It was not like this, you know , broadband one gigabit experience I was having , um , you know , uh, there’s a lot less bandwidth used if we did this in VR. Cause the video uses a lot of bandwidth. But in, in VR, if you’re in a social situation while we’re sending audio, just like you would on a video conference call. But instead of saying video, we’re sending the XYZ coordinates of your hands and your head. Cause that’s all being tracked. And then applying that to an avatar. And so not only did it solve our bandwidth issues, it was just a much better experience for conferencing remotely. You get in there and in good VR, actually, most of you are now , uh, we’ve gotten to the point where you’ve experienced presence. It’s a sense of actually being somewhere, you put this thing on your head, your subconscious mind buys into it. Your conscious mind knows you’re in VR, right? And so we were like, wow. Or I feel like I’m here with you. Like we’re hanging out in VR. You feel their presence, social presence enters the equation. Once you network other people in there. And they’re like, well, now that we’re hanging out and we’re talking, wouldn’t it be cool if we could like, you know, maybe bring up a PDF or think of a 3D model that we’re working on for the game or something. Um, and so the tool that was fixing our collaboration issues ended up being a product kind of classic story.

James Di Virgilio: 4:35

That is a classic story . That’s what I was thinking. As I heard you say, this is, so you just try to solve a problem you had with your Co-founder and then you stumbled upon what is now the primary development piece for, for your studio. The first thing that came to mind for me was what you just said is have done VR before. I have a hard time having my subconscious buy into it. I recognize him in a , in an environment that seems a little bit blurry or it seems a little bit weird and I’m doing things in there. But to hear you say that it’s tracking movements that you actually felt like you were able to read the mannerisms of your Co – founders seems amazing. It seems to transformational. Are you finding that the marketplace desire or something like this for a video conferencing solution? Or is this a hard , a high hurdle to overcome?

Chance Glasco: 5:16

I mean, this is something that the market demands, but they don’t know they demand it yet or they do. They just don’t know what it is. They just know that they don’t like video conferencing. But think about like, like Henry Ford, I don’t know exact quote, but something like, “If I would ask people what they wanted , they would’ve said a faster horse.” People like , Oh , want better video conferencing. This isn’t very good. You don’t like video conferencing, not because, Oh , it’s pixelated or you don’t like, because you’re not there with them. It doesn’t matter how good you make video conferencing. You’re still looking at a set of boxes on a screen. And that screen might fill , you know, 30% of your field of view . And then you’re like, well, who’s talking, I don’t know all this people. Let me look at, Oh, that person’s mouth is moving while the audio is coming out. Okay. So I guess they’re talking right. Well in VR, if like, let’s say this was Rumi , right? This is our software we’ve met we’re in this environment. This is the 3D rendering. If I’m looking off to the right and I hear you talk, I’m going to hear you out. I’m sorry if I’m looking to the right. Uh , and I hear you talk, I’m going to turn my head left because I heard you out of my left ear. I know you’re to the left of me. Right. That’s natural. That’s what we’re used to experiencing. It doesn’t happen via conferencing. You’re just scanning like this little boxed area of who’s talking, right. Body language. You don’t really get that in , um , in video conferencing. Um, yeah, you can see like their upper body, but there’s no depth. You don’t get everything below that. And it just doesn’t really translate. And so when you’re in VR, people typically will just kind of circle up if they’re in a group, just like you would in real life, like a semicircular circle. When they’re talking, I can see multiple people this way, this person talks, I can turn my head left. You know? So it’s just, we’re basically, we’ve recreated that in person experience using VR.

James Di Virgilio: 6:49

It’s , it’s a couple of interesting things. One, you just mentioned that sort of circle, which I think whenever I come out of a movie, people tend to form a circle and you discuss the movie, like it’s the natural human. This is how, and you’re seeing people naturally in the VR world where they could go anywhere they want, right. They can take their avatar and turn away from you, but they don’t, they’re actually forming the same social formation you’d form in the flesh.

Chance Glasco: 7:12

You’re utilizing 3D space. Video conferencing, it’s just a 2D panel in front of you, you know? And so when you utilize 3D space, you can do more of it .

James Di Virgilio: 7:20

I think one of the most interesting things that I, that I read that you had , um, you had said, and I think this is totally true, is when you put the VR headset on, you’re not distracted and with video conferencing or conference calls, I think anyone listening to this podcast knows that you’re on mute or you’re typing an email or you’re browsing the internet and you’re half listening, but the VR set is fully immersive. So you’re actually in the space with the person, much like you would be one on one.

Chance Glasco: 7:45

Yeah. There was actually a study from source enter call that I realized that 70% of people in video conferencing are doing something completely different. And at least one of the things , and it was emailing, it was texting, it was playing games, going into the bathroom, like all kinds of stuff. Right? So when you’re in VR and a hundred percent of your reality is being rendered. It’s not like AR where you’re rendering, you know , 3D over the real world. You’re completely blocked out to the real world. And so, and you had headphones and you’ve got headphones on. Right? And so, because of that, you know, you’re not, if I reached in and grab my phone, and get my phone out I’m not going to see my arm. I’m not going to see my hand. I’ll see my 3D avatar hand, but I’m not going to have a phone in it because that’s in the real world. Right? So it’s just a much better way to focus. And especially when with school, like if you think about online school, I don’t know if you’ve done any online classes, but people don’t have like memories. They don’t reminisce about online school. Hey, remember that time I typed that funny joke and hit enter, and then you type ha ha ha ha. And hit enter. Hell yeah. That was hilarious. Like you never have you ever , never have conversations about the online school, but what if you’re in a , what if your friends is what Harvard is doing? Harvard is using our software to teach Egyptology to Harvard students. And , um, I , uh , university in China. So you have Chinese students and Harvard students in a Egyptian pyramid, a 3D model and different pyramid with the PhD in Egyptology teaching them. They’re gonna remember that. They’re not going to remember the video of the guy talking and the text chat, you know?

James Di Virgilio: 9:13

Yeah. You’re absolutely right. I took a lot of online courses at the University of Florida. And then just remember maybe a weird thing the professor did, but there’s no collaborative field.

Chance Glasco: 9:22

It’s kinda de-humanized.

James Di Virgilio: 9:23

Yeah. It is. It’s a guy on a screen talking that’s that’s fascinating. So they actually feel this. So Harvard is , is presumably one of your?

Chance Glasco: 9:31

Yeah, Harvard, Full Sail University, Michigan, I’m sorry. University of Michigan, Wolverines? Yeah. I don’t sometimes there’s like, you know , it was like Florida State can say let’s just rearrange state’s names and the word state into five different colleges and expect you to remember their names.

James Di Virgilio: 9:48

So, so your technology is potentially changing the landscape of video conferencing and allowing for an immersive, almost realistic experience anywhere across the world?

Chance Glasco: 9:56

Yeah. I wouldn’t say, I said replacing rather than changing, you know , it’s like for instance, we had, you know, we have the first to telegram right? Then like a phone call and then we had , um, you know, audio conferencing and video conferencing. But for the history of human beings, we’ve been communicating from a very complex exchange of facial expressions, body language. Um, there’s all these little details that come together. And when we’re having a conversation , uh , my little shots of either serotonin and dopamine are coming from your little micro reactions in your face, you’re nodding your head, these things. So we’ve basically for the sake of convenience , um, you know, over pretty much during your , um, your lifetime in my lifetime have stripped away all of those human aspects of communication for the sake of convenience. Right? And so what we can do with the VR technology is we can actually rehumanize social media, you know, where we’ve got your body language , um, the new headsets , uh, the new Vive Pro Eye has eye tracking and that’ll probably be a standard feature in the future for most headsets. So now we have like how you’re moving and what exactly like what exactly you’re looking at. You know, just having one to one eye movement in VR , I have an avatar that’s the eyes are moving, how the real person’s moving. That adds emotion that has empathy. And so we’re kind of fooling your brain in a sense to feel. I mean , I don’t know if fooling is the right word where we’re just transferring more of those human aspects into your digital environment. So to give a sense of empathy.

James Di Virgilio: 11:16

Now, is anyone else doing this? Is this is this patent protected and how, where are we in that ?

Chance Glasco: 11:21

I mean, you can’t, you know, you can’t really patent protect the idea of people being networked in VR, you know , and that in itself is not necessarily a completely unique idea. I mean, we’ve had network games for awhile , but most of the companies that have are known are focusing more on the social, social aspect, not this, like we’re a private invite kind of system like Slack, right? You’re going to get to create a team and you invite people via email. Um , you’ve got other companies that are more of like an AOL chat room. I’m like in the early days we were just going in there and you’re talking to people I’m just more focused on some entertainment. And we realized there was a , a gap of like, Hey, what if you want to be productive? What if you want to get drunk together and actually be productive rather than just be like, Hey, where are you from? You know, that stuff, you can do that in Rumi, but you have to be invited to that team to speak to someone.

James Di Virgilio: 12:05

And Rumi is the name? The actual application?

Chance Glasco: 12:08

Yeah. Are you MII? Um , in Doghead Simulations is our company name dogheadsimulations.com is our website. But if you, I recommend if you’re gonna get Rumi, get it off of steam because there’s an auto updater. If not, you can go to our website and get it. And it’s free. It’s free up to five users. And so pretty much any small project can use it without paying anything.

James Di Virgilio: 12:28

And this works on a wide variety of VR headsets and it also works on non-VR.

Chance Glasco: 12:32

So we worked with work on pretty much every PC and Mac made in the last five years for non-VR mode. Uh, we support every major PC, VR headset, you know, the vibe, the Oculus, everything that’s steam, VR, everything, windows, all the windows headsets. And we also support the Oculus Go and the newest head site , which the museum just purchased a bunch of was Oculus Quest. And that’s what I’m really recommending for people right now. It’s not the most high fidelity headset because you’re, you’re not tethered to a PC. It’s basically a cell phone processor that’s in there, but it’s, there’s no wires and it’s easy to use. You put it on. It goes, it’s an amazing experience for $399. You didn’t pick them at best buy once they’re in stock again. But that’s the one that I think is really going to break through. It just came out like two weeks ago, maybe three. It’s a really, I think take VR into the mainstream.

James Di Virgilio: 13:16

A couple of years from now, if we look back on this conversation and this time period, what would you like to see Doghead Simulations accomplish?

Chance Glasco: 13:22

Yeah. There’s a lot of things I’d like to see. For instance, you could , you know, you can record your screen and have a video of a meeting, but imagine if we actually recorded your position in space, your body language, what you’re doing, all the audio, you could actually revisit a VR meeting almost like the time machine. You go into that environment. And all the avatars are playing back exactly what people were doing, what they’re saying, what they’re interacting with. And that’s cool because I imagine like, Oh, I missed that meeting, you know, last month, let me just go back into it. It’s exactly the same experience they would have with exception that if you talk to these people who quote unquote, they’re not going to respond because they’re basically recordings at this point.

James Di Virgilio: 13:57

That’s amazing. I’m really looking forward to using the technology I played around on your website. And I know beforehand, as we, as we wrap up the show, we want to talk a little bit about your background. You and I both had played some baseball and I heard on a different podcast. You talked about wanting to be a baseball player or an astronaut. And instead you wound up going down this path of developing, you know, one of the most famous games of all time, one of the most popular games of all time. And now you’re working on this. I know that no one’s success path is linear. It’s not a , it’s not a bottle rocket of success, not a rock show success. Tell me a little bit about what it was like for you coming through these different dreams you had and realities you had and going to Full Sail and kind of, what did that look like? What does your picture look like? What’s the story of Chance?

Chance Glasco: 14:38

I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I ended up well, it’s complicated. Technically I was kidnapped to Florida and missing for several years. But that’s a whole other podcast, but I ended up staying in Florida in the end. Um, and , uh, I went to Full Sail University. I , um, I’m a graduate of Satellite Beach High School, a class of 99′ of Satellite Beach , uh, spent most of my childhood in Brevard County , uh, Titusville, Cocoa and, you know, Indian Harbor all at that area. And then , um, I find out about Full Sail. I was like, Oh, this is a really cool school. It’s different. So I went of there, checked it out, I was like, I definitely didn’t go here. Didn’t have any money. Took about 40 grand in loans out to cover living expenses and school and all that stuff. I graduated 15, 16 months later, get an internship working at 2015 on Medal of Honor Allied Assault. And then that was successful that we didn’t like we work for. So 22 of those 30 people left, we started Infinity War and had to create a franchise that would compete with Medal of Honor, which we ended up calling Call of Duty. So that’s a , and then that kind of segues into what we talked about earlier is 13 years of that. But the success thing it’s like, it kind of just creeps up. You know, it’s like after when a Call of Duty one came out, no one heard of the franchise, cause it didn’t exist before they just need some Medal of Honor people made a new game. And so that was ended up like at first, not very popular, but because the reviews were so high people started buying it and they just hadn’t heard of it. And then multiplayer kind of made it stick and then Call of Duty two ee had Microsoft ask us to make a launch title for the Xbox 360. So that doubled our sales because we’re now on two systems PC and in 360 and then Cod Four broke us into like basically we’re up there with a Halo and GTA when it comes to sales and then buy Call of Duty, Modern Warfare two. It was, we were beating an Avatar, the box office, you know, so we went from, you know, one of the top three game franchises to , uh , biggest grossing entertainment franchise in probably that decade or somthing so.

James Di Virgilio: 16:28

Which is just simply amazing. And here you are with me at the Cade Museum having a conversation and what you’ve had, like you said, many of these conversations, and one last question for you, Chance, if you could go back and tell your, your first entrepreneurial self, so you leave the company you’re working for, you start a infinity , what would you give yourself as a word of wisdom? What would you say, Hey, you’re going to have all the success and things are gonna happen to you, but you kind of anchor to this. What would you tell your previous self?

Chance Glasco: 16:53

It sounds really good. Seemingly really good opportunities come along , um, and be careful with it , what your , your choices are. You know, it’s kind of like, you know, someone gets offered, what they think is like a really good record deal. They’re like, Oh wow, we got a record deal or whatever. And then they realize , you know, two years down the road that they were kind of blinded by the fact that there is a record deal and thought, you know, it’s magic or something and made some bad decisions. Maybe, maybe they should have waited for a different record company. Right? I don’t know that’s too cryptic, but?

James Di Virgilio: 17:21

Maybe patience with not every opportunity.

Chance Glasco: 17:25

Patience, yeah like sometimes when you get some amazing opportunity, that’s the first of many amazing ones and that’s not even the best one, but there are times where you do have to take that. I guess sometimes you look back and say, I should have done that.

James Di Virgilio: 17:35

Sure. And there’s no, there’s no, I think your story illustrates what so many others illustrate. Is there’s no perfect path. You can’t make every right decision.

Chance Glasco: 17:42

Yeah, yeah. Something that I think will resonate with you when I talk to students a lot, like when I do a lot of talks at Full Sail or universities is especially as I’m talking to usually game developers, people that are like that, you know, a lot of people don’t realize that if, if they’re not active, if they’re not exercising and eating healthy that their brain is not going to function like it should, you know, they’re going to like, Oh, I got to put down another Coca-Cola for my brain. It’d be home , you know, functioning. Right? And so something that I got really into when I was like, it was 2010, I got really into Brazilian jujitsu from watching MMA. And so I would end up going to the lunchtime to train. And it’s like, as a game developer, you’re behind a computer, you’re basically not moving for, you know , 10 hours a day or so. And so you kind of have to balance that with an extreme opposite. And so for me, I found that when I was putting myself in a situation where basically someone’s trying to choke me or break my arm or something, not quiet , you know, you , you know, that’s not going to happen, but you’re trying to get someone trying to put you to that point. Right? That it was so opposite to what I was used to, that it was like, this it’s extremely good balance. Like , yeah, I could have just gone out and gone running, but it wasn’t different enough from sitting in front of a computer. I needed something to really push me . And so also jujitsu, it’s very, it’s creative, it’s very technical. There’s a lot of problem solving. It’s not just brainless and I’m not, you know , attacking other martial arts, like just, you know , striking tons and tons of times over and over repetition. There’s a lot of variety within it. So , uh, that’s, that’s kept me kind of sane through that sitting in front of a computer. And so anyone that even like for me, I grew up a computer nerd, you know, I was programming when I was 14, I was a dork. I was kind of like, you know, into theater and like, you know, not athletic person at all, I still am not. But even if you’re not like find something to balance that desk life, because it’ll, it’ll make you a happier person and it’ll prove your life and other ways too.

James Di Virgilio: 19:27

I think that’s why it’s Harvard did a study talking about the different things our brains need each day. And one of them is exercise and others music. But especially if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re spending so much time on one task , it’s essential that your brain gets other space to do things. And something like jujitsu, is deep. You can go very far into that. You can lose yourself into that. And that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s wise , he is Chance Glasgow. He is the Co-founder of Doghead Simulations. I’ve had so much fun spending some time with you today on behalf of Radio Cade on behalf of Richard Miles, who’s not here doing the interview today. I’m James Di Virgilio. I look forward to talking with you next time.

Chance Glasco: 20:01

Thank you guys.

Outro: 20:04

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.

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