The Inventivity Pod

James Bates is bursting with creativity. A professor, sports broadcaster, and artist, Bates, a former college football player, “feels blessed” with three "dream jobs." As a child and through college, all he wanted to be was an NFL star, a desire nurtured by his football coach father. Though some scratch their heads at his change from the pigskin to the paintbrush, Bates says he wants to make other people happy through his art. He advises students to “take their work seriously, but not themselves.”

James Bates is bursting with creativity. A professor, sports broadcaster, and artist, Bates, a former college football player, “feels blessed” with three “dream jobs.” As a child and through college, all he wanted to be was an NFL star, a desire nurtured by his football coach father. Though some scratch their heads at his change from the pigskin to the paintbrush, Bates says he wants to make other people happy through his art. He advises students to “take their work seriously, but not themselves.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

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

James Di Virgilio: 0:37

What do you think of when you think of an artist, a football player? Probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. My guest today is James Bates, a national champion in college football whose creativity has flourished during and since his playing days, I’m James Di Virgilio, James Bass thanks for joining us.

James Bates: 0:54

I like that. Thanks, James. Good to be here.

James Di Virgilio: 0:58

I want to talk about not your football career. We’re going to tie football in, but about what now you’re more known for now anyway, you are a play by play broadcaster. You are also a teacher at the University of Florida teaching commentating, and you’re an artist and your art has a really unique style to it, especially your folk art. I want to know from the beginning, were you always drawn towards creative things? Did it take you awhile to figure this out? You were telling me before the show that your dad’s a football coach and he’s very much what you’d expect from a football coach. So creativity probably wasn’t something that came right to the top of your mind in that family, right?

James Bates: 1:31

Yeah. I mean, my dad coached a long, long time for just retired a few years ago, but my whole life, he was Coach, long time in the NFL and I loved sports and I love competing, but as much as anything I was always creating and I didn’t really take art classes other than the few that you take in elementary school and junior high, but I always loved them. And I guess I never really got that nudge because it was a football family. And so they knew that I liked to do that, but that’s just what James does is he, he’s over there drawing again. And you know, and I didn’t take any art classes at Florida, but I probably should have, because I sat in class drawing, I guess I got it from my mom. She was always kind of doing a craft or fixing something herself or prettying something up herself. I definitely didn’t get it from my dad, but it’s in me. And it really kind of came out and I realized a guy that I roomed with at Florida, Eric Kresser is his name, he was Danny Wuerffel’s backup. We were in the same freshman class. He was an art major. And my freshman year I wasn’t red shirted right away. He was. And so I’d go out of town and I’d come back and he’d have our dorm room and Yon hall, which is in the stadium just as dirty as can be, but he’d have it rearranged and decorated basically. And I realized, well, I can do stuff like this. It’s not just my mom. That would change my room around. You know, it’s like in a weird way that was an adult moment for me as a creative person that I can, like, I can do some of these things on my own. And so fast forward, right after we from Florida, I had taken a picture of a place where my wife and I got engaged up in Tennessee on the river, a little pigeon river up Gatlinburg area. And which is where I went to high school. I went to same high school as Dolly Parton in Severe County. And so I asked him if he would paint this painting for my wife for Christmas. And he said, yeah, yeah. And Christmas was getting closer and closer and Kresser man, he’s like, Oh man, I’m really busy, you know what? I’ll teach you how to build a canvas. You like to draw, you can do this. You can come over to my house and you can use my paints and I’ll teach you how to build this canvas . And so I did it and I knew while I was painting that, that this wasn’t going to be the last and about the same time, I was lucky enough to have a little part in the water boy with Adam Sandler. And right after that, the football gang that did that movie went and did a movie called “Any Given Sunday” down in South Florida with Al Pachino. And I was down there working on that. And I walked through a few art galleries, Lincoln square in Miami, and I was just blown away. And I just had to have big pieces like this in my house, but I could never afford big pieces like that in my house. So I had to find a way to do it myself. And so that’s kind of the next step of I’m just going to paint and I got to have pieces like this, and I realized in a hurry that for what I was after unfortunately oils and the Florida humidity, I don’t have the patience . And most of my early pieces were oil. And actually one of those early pieces, Billy Donovan and his wife, Christine bought one of my bigger pieces, but I switched over quickly to acrylics with my landscapes. A lot of the , the depth and the textures. I realized that I could kinda arrive at the same conclusion when it’s all said and done, but every now and then when I’m getting ready to go and spend a fall where I got to slam on the brakes in my studio a little bit, I’ll throw some oils on some canvas here and there it’s a little dry while I’m off working for a couple months, and then I can come back and kind of dig back down to it. Yeah. You know, you mentioned my class and we had our first day of school for this semester. It’s my sixth semester last Tuesday. And I feel like I’ve got three dream jobs. I’m a professor and I’m a broadcaster and I’m an artist. I just feel so blessed. I mean, that’s just the coolest thing in the world. I would have taken any one of those three and felt like I had just an incredible life, but to be able to do all three of them is it’s really special. And I really think that a , of the three that being a professor and being around these young men and women and just these minds, they’re so much fun and I do it for free. And you can cut that part out if , if they’re going to hear it over there , at journalism college. But yeah. Thanks for asking.

James Di Virgilio: 5:25

Hearing your story. I’m hearing a lot of , of being very true to yourself. Was there any opposition when you were telling your parents or telling your wife or telling your friends , say , I want to pursue art? Was there any James, what are you doing? Football players don’t pursue art or did Eric catch flak painting and doing things in college? Was this an outside the norm thing for you? Or were you always pretty much saying I want to pursue this thing and you were supported in doing so.

James Bates: 5:48

Yes, yes, yes. And yes. Still you’ll have people that can’t believe that this linebacker is an artist . Huh, what? And you know, my dad, he still just doesn’t understand it and he wants to and he tries to, but here’s an example yesterday on the phone and again, this is the kind of the house that I grew up in you got to love it, like , but I was like, what are you doing, James? I’m just running all these pieces up, we’re doing this popup show, my buddy Byron at Corteroids have an art show tonight. And he was like, well, your football is getting ready to start are you doing some reading on them ? And I’m like, yeah , yeah, I’m doing okay. But he can’t help himself, bless his heart. He doesn’t know, well, how are the acrylics drying or, you know, or like what medium using now. And so, yeah, I get that. And I get that as you can imagine from football fans, but it’s also appealing to people that have a little bit of a love for art. And I think that the people that do come around and kind of enjoy some of the stories that I tell with the text in my art and in the folk art pieces, I get a sense almost that they appreciate it even more. And I can tell when they appreciate it, just because go Gators. And when they just are truly heartfelt, kind of like blown away and in my piece moves them. And there’s no better feeling in the world than people who will call and, and ask for a commission, send me a message. Hey, my wife for Christmas or our anniversary or something for our home. Just the fact that I can from scratch create something that they feel will make their house better and happier and give it that kind of energy. I’m goose pimply, right? Like right now, like I just, that’s awesome. That’s just so special. And I’ll do that. Even if it’s making a little something for my neighbor, when I’m 90, that I know that they’ll like , I will always want to create and want to make people happy. In that sense.

James Di Virgilio: 7:34

We talk a lot on this podcast on Radio Cade about solving a problem. And so a lot of times we’ll ask an entrepreneur, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve. And how are you solving that? I think what you just said is very interesting with art. The problem , so to speak is more of somebody wants something beautiful to look at or something to talk about or a memory to keep with them. And as an artist, you are creating an original piece. Something that cannot be reproduced is not mass manufactured when you’re creating your pieces, especially when you started out, were you making art for yourself? And you were saying, I’m not making this because people may like this, I’m making this for me. And then it’s so happened that people liked it? Or were you making something that you were hoping people would like?

James Bates: 8:14

It’s a really good question. And it’s something that I meet resistance from my wife, because we gotta be realistic. And, you know, I can’t just sit up there and just my house is, it’s like my gallery and it makes me happy. And I still, I sold a couple pieces last night and it hurts and I that’s what you have to do. And I always, the one thing that I guess in my mind kind of makes it like a little , okay, well , send me a picture of its new home, but I like to paint big and it gets tough when it’s time to ship or when it’s time to lug them around to all these art shows and whatever. And Tina, my wife is always like, are you sure you want to do it that big? Are you sure you want to do that? That guy not too long ago, commissioned me to do a painting of his daughter. And Tina’s like, she’s not gonna like her legs. And I’m like, well, I just got to kind of be me. And fortunately I have a lot of people that want commissions, but sometimes I have to be me so much to where I have to just say, no, I can’t this month because I’ve sold most of my landscapes and I just can’t not have any landscapes around here. So the month of March, I’m doing landscapes and it feels really good. And this whole cycle of, Oh, now I’m itching to do a piece on Spurrier because I thought of a quote that he used to say to us and stuff like that. And so I fight with that a lot because I like to paint whether it’s a landscape or whether it’s a painting of Danny Wuerffel or Brett Farve or Tim Tebow or anybody, I like to kind of get a quick feel on just certain features. And then I try not to go back to it because I feel like there are a lot of people out there that can paint realistic, close to realistic, very beautiful pieces that are almost like a picture, but I want it to be as much from me and the way my mind sees it and wants it to look on this canvas as they really do look. And a lot of the artists that I’ve followed around that same time back to when I did that first painting for my wife and these galleries down in Miami. I also realized that I really liked text in art. I really like to see a lot of words. Besky Yacht is my all time favorite in a he’s the perfect blend of all of the above, because he’s got the text, he’s pop culture. He’s big with the hip hop scene at that time when it was just coming up. And I didn’t even realize, like I’m such a big hip hop fan from way back in the day. I didn’t even realize until recently how much they rolled together. It goes without saying, I mean , the B-boy culture, the hip hop, the, the street art, the graffiti, it was there, but just to kind of link the two, it makes me feel like my two missions that nobody else really cares about is loving graffiti and loving rap. They have come together. So like, at least for me, it makes me feel a little bit better, you know, but it’s not something that I can sit there and tell my wife that she really will listen to that long. You know, it’s just one of those things . And so Howard Finster is another artist, but he’s more of a folk artist has passed away from Summerville , Georgia, just South of Chattanooga. The quick story, he was a Baptist minister and didn’t do any art ever his whole life. He was he’d fix bikes and whatnot, odd jobs around town, just get some carrying around money being able to live. And he says that in a drop of paint on the sidewalk, an angel appeared to him and said that God wanted him to spread his word through folk art because nobody was listening to his sermons. And so he took a dollar bill out and painted a painting of George Washington right there. And from that day on, that’s what he did. And he’s really probably one of the more well known folk artists that there ever was and ever will be. But he did things for Coca Cola and the Olympics and, Oh, well , we was on the talking heads cover and galleries all over the world, but he would always include scripture. And it’s really interesting. He would paint what he saw as angels on earth. People like Hank Williams, Henry Ford, Martin Luther King, Mickey Mouse. And he would paint them with angels floating all around them. And it , as much as anything it was because they brought joy to the earth doing God’s work like that. And so there’s this sort of pop culture tie in with him too. But he saw people that made people smile, made people happy, made people dance. He saw them as angels on earth. And I just think that’s amazing. And his style of not really caring altogether that he was spot on. It’s truly like an outsider artist, a folk artist style, and kind of learning about him, finding out about him early on, kind of made me not so scared of not measuring the width of the nose or something like that. So it all kind of just lined up just right in the fact that I can create once my football season’s over with the broadcasting is just , uh , it’s the coolest thing ever. And the producers that I work with during the football season, when I’m out calling these games, we’ll do a little segments called B8sy Paints. And if we’re in the coaches meetings on Friday, if we get some story from a coach and like, Oh my gosh, that’s a great story. Well, let me animate it. And so I’ll animate it and we’ll do like a little segment during the show. And so that’s always fun. So I get to tie them altogether.

James Di Virgilio: 13:01

That’s so interesting and also fascinating at the same time to watch all your spheres of life bubble up into one. But what comes to mind for me is, and almost everyone’s story, there’s a story of, of hardship or difficulty. And thus far as an, as an outsider, your story almost seems like you try something and it works. You try something and it works. You try something and it works. Have there been moments in your life when you’ve had an idea and inspiration, a vision and you, and you started to do it or went with it and all you were getting was difficulty?

James Bates: 13:27

Well, maybe a little bit with my style in broadcasting, I think early on, which was my world for the longest time. I mean, that’s how I was going to pay the bills for the rest of my life. And that’s what I majored in back then when I was coming up, it was the grizzled voice, the buttoned up suit, you know, and these great, great broadcasters. That’s all you really got. And there wasn’t a million channels out there where you had all these different people and these different personalities. So there was some resistance when I would come rolling in and I just really enjoy making people smile, whether it’s with my art or , or making people laugh, you know, it’s basically the same thing. So sometimes I , I can’t help myself. Like I, you know, I probably shouldn’t here, I probably shouldn’t here b lah b lah. And I just like spit it out. And, a nd so not everybody loved that. And that’s one thing I think that in my life that I’ve been most proud of too, is that I j ust k ind o f stuck with who I was. And eventually people saw that his style he’s great hosting these studio shows. He’s quick and basically the way I tell my students is you’re w riting. You’re always writing. You should take more writing classes because we’re always writing a nd on the fly and being quick and Hey, such and such, take us to break, you know, just in the middle of class and y ou g otta be on your toes, but add some flavor to it. And the flavor that I added, wasn’t always what my dad and his coaching buddies would have always thought that i t was the proper way to take it to break or whatever. So I’m kind of proud to have met that resistance, but kind of stuck it out and found a place for me. It’s it’s like we were talking about before we went on, there are a lot of names out there that are a lot more attractive in the football world than J ames Bates. You know, I’m very proud of my football career. I was an all SEC linebacker and w on a bunch of rings at Florida. And my senior year, we won a national championship, but no real NFL career to speak of. And all of these guys that retire every year from the NFL long careers and they know their ball, but you’ve got to entertain as well. I mean, that’s people want to be entertained. S o you straddle that fence of X’s and O’s and, a nd entertaining. And I tell my students, my c lasses i s at the University of Florida in the journalism college. And it’s a play by play on air talent class. And it’s not just T V people, which is really neat. It’s people t hat take it just for public speaking. But for those TV people, if I turn on the TV and I see you just going through the motions, just checking off boxes, not treating your sideline reporter or your analyst with respect a nd, and there’s a true, sincere friendship there then why would I bother sticking around i f y ou, if you’re not into it, if you’re not excited, why should I be excited? Because there are a lot of other football games that are going on right now. There a re a lot of other basketball games out there, and there are a lot of people that want your job. So when I t urned on the TV, I just want to see you just oozing with appreciation because you’re living out a dream. And so I just try to think like that every time, y ou k now, I get a little bit sad in the fall, O h, I g ot t o go away for the weekend. The only time the kids don’t have school and they’re going to do such fun things and woe is me. But you know, I just, I make my time count during the week and then go and put everything I can into it. You know, the games that I call, a ren’t the sexiest games in the ACC that weekend. But you know what? These kids are living out a dream and I’m going to showcase them and I’m going to learn their stories and spend the time whether they make the air or not. And that’s really special because I was right there not too long ago. That’s all I wanted to, do was to play football, was t o g o make tackles. And my dad wanted me to be a quarterback, but Brian Bosworth was up at O U when I was in junior high, i n Texas doing his thing and t here was no way I was going to do anything, but be a linebacker and go hit people. And we’re 44. I hate to admit how important it was for me to wear 44. Like I almost, well, they recruited me, they sent me a media g uy. Oh, 44 is not going to be available because of freshmen. W hereas I don’t know if I can go there. That’s embarrassing.

James Di Virgilio: 17:17

I think inspiration is such an important thing. Every, every podcast I’ve done, no matter what the person is working on or doing the inspirations in their lives were key . And , and you’ve mentioned many of them , uh, which has been great. Now I want to turn our attention towards you inspiring some others. And I’ve heard some themes that you’ve mentioned. You’ve talked about being true to yourself, but you’ve also talked about some structure within that. I think in our society, it’s easy to take, be true to yourself, to an extreme, to where, of being true to yourself as rubbing everyone else wrong. You just keep on going. But I’ve heard, you mentioned like gratitude and appreciation and energy and thankfulness, and being in the studio here with you today, I can feel your energy. It’s genuine. And there’s a genuine authenticity to you coupled with your own originality. So when you’re teaching your classes and you’re talking to young artists, or what’s the balance between be yourself and some of these other things that you’re going to have to also have in order to make, cause you can’t just right . You can’t just take that to an extreme.

James Bates: 18:14

Well, it kind of starts with take your job seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously. If you take yourself too seriously and you can’t really come into our class and have an ego, like you have to be able to laugh at yourself, our middle child, Talia, she’s a swimmer. We just dropped her off at school last week. She was a late, late bloomer, but she’s very coachable and she’s going to do every single thing and just crushes her if she lets her coaches down or her parents down. And she stresses a little bit too much. I mean, she’s a perfectionist and it’s gotten her a scholarship to swim at the University of Florida. And I’m so proud of her, but it can have some negative effects too. I mean, she stresses too much and it eats at her and it’s not healthy, but in our house, like you gotta be able to laugh at yourself. I mean, we crush her. You can’t take yourself too seriously if you’re so worried about your own little bubble and worrying about yourself so much, how are you going to give energy to others? I can’t even like begin with someone that has bad intentions and bad energy. And for them to take that to an extreme, like , I can’t even go there. Just be yourself, lead with your heart really and lead with a good heart. I mean, we’re all so fortunate. I remind these kids, you guys go to the University of Florida, that alone, right there means something. And this basically, it’s like your first job. And it’s like, we talk about being on TV. Like, and if you don’t show appreciation, don’t come in here, feeling sorry for yourself, get off your phone, bring your energy to class. I’m not going to keep you all the way to the final bell. I’m not going to give you a lot of homework, but when you’re here, be here and take care of your classmates and let’s all get better. Let’s not worry about one thing. Let’s try things. Even if we feel like complete idiots, let’s just try it. We have so much fun, but we get in trouble by the neighboring teachers, you know, Hey, can you guys keep it down we’re taking a quiz over here. But I guess it’s just that it’s just kind of the heart it’s like I talked about with the commission paintings or somebody buys one of my paintings, it’s it really is from my heart. And for them to respect that and to want a piece of my heart back to Howard Fencer, that’s like doing God’s work. I feel like that’s making people happy and making their homes happy and their, and their families happy. And so I think that as long as you have good heart, you can go to any extreme you want to go. And people may say this is done with a good heart, but a good heart is a good heart. It’s just plain and simple. It’s , it’s , it’s black and white. It’s just, this is good. This is bad type of thing. And so I’m very proud that I’m able to kind of give people a piece like that.

James Di Virgilio: 20:40

Yeah. You can feel when someone cares for you versus when someone is just trying to give off like charismatic energy. And I think, you know, you emanate that and I’m sure as you’re challenging, sometimes the status quo or you’re , you’re exploring your creativity um , it’s always with that lens. Which does give you a little more freedom to try things. And I think that’s a great lesson for everyone out there is to pursue your passions. Yes. But also why are you pursuing your passions? And , and for you, you talk a lot about bringing others joy. It’s very other focused and not in a weird way allows you to express yourself even better. And that’s not necessarily the most popular message today, which is more about, do you do yourself, focus on yourself. I think you’re focused on others, bringing you joy and then allowing you to flourish with how you were created is a really interesting and creative narrative throughout your life. And today it’s been great to hear, you know, last week I was in Milan, I saw the last supper in person painted by DaVinci. And , and what you realize is something you’ve been saying the whole time, DaVinci was always very true to himself, right? He was commissioned by the authorities that be, but he always put himself into his work. And I think as an artist, sometimes that gave you international fame while you were living. And sometimes it didn’t, but I think your message reigns true. There’s a level where each one of us, whether we’re an entrepreneur in the tech world, or we’re an artist, or we’re a play by play commentator, we’re at the end, you want to say that you and your unique DNA structure put your brand on something and you did it in a way that was, that was good and right, and just, and I think your story emanates that obviously you’ve had tons of success in the football field, tons of success and these other things. But I think if I’m going to get this right, what matters most to you sounds like the , the joy you’ve brought to others. That’s what I keep hearing is kind of this excitement you bring to other people, this chance for you to take your talents and skills and maybe better the world around you.

James Bates: 22:22

Well thank you and, and you know what, it’s the same thing with the millions that DaVinci would reach as it is with somebody who has a painting that their mom did have a Lake on their wall. Hey, my mom did this and she loved to paint. She worked really hard. She loved to paint and I love that painting. That’s all it is. You know, anybody that has that in them that wants to create, I hope that everybody gets a chance and in whatever walk of life, I mean, we sit in meetings at the board for the Cade museum. I mean, like most of that stuff, I’m like, why do they have me here? Why do they come here? What am I doing? Okay, I’m 46. Now I could go home and study it, but I’m no, I’m not. I’m out of school a long time ago, but it’s such an incredible place. And it’s such an amazing feeling for everybody to want us to be up there, to be a part of it that they feel like we can make it better. It’s for creative ideas and it’s, and it’s so neat to see team because not everybody’s wired like that. And like, Oh, okay, this is my chance. This is where they want me. But sometimes when we get into some of the real nitty gritty of the stats and the numbers like, Oh no, I just want to curl up in the fetal position, roll around on the floor. I’ve always been like that though. Even with my football, you know, my , my dad and brother, they’re always been students of the game. X’s and O’s, and , but I’ve just kind of enjoyed the human interest side of, of all of it, but yeah, really enjoying it all.

James Di Virgilio: 23:41

Well, James, thanks so much for being with us. He is James Bates, four time, four consecutive time, I should say SEC champion national champion artist , entrepreneur, teacher, analyst , right? List goes on, a dad, fantastic,

James Bates: 23:56

I’m a good dad too. We didn’t talk about that too much, but I’m maybe most proud of , of being a good dad and a good husband.

James Di Virgilio: 24:01

Well it’s been amazing to have you and to hear your story. Thanks for, thanks for sharing it . I’m sure it will inspire others. And for Radio Cade , I’m James Di Virgilio .

James Bates: 24:08

Thanks James

Outro: 24:09

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.

Jeff Fitzsimmons, a professor of radiology at the University of Florida, invented a way to use RF antennas to capture detailed signals from body parts that are undergoing an MRI.   A native of Newark, New Jersey, Jeff moved to Florida as a kid, where his dad worked at the (future) Cape Canaveral in the early 1960’s. “One of my biggest thrills,” he says, “was going out to the range with my dad to see a missile fired.” His dad was also a radio amateur, which introduced Jeff to the concept of antennas at a very early age. This came in handy when Jeff was a Navy communications specialist during the Vietnam era and at the National Security Agency. Later in life he formed a successful company that was bought by Philips Electronics. *This episode was originally released on February 20, 2019.*

Jeff Fitzsimmons, a professor of radiology at the University of Florida, invented a way to use RF antennas to capture detailed signals from body parts that are undergoing an MRI.   A native of Newark, New Jersey, Jeff moved to Florida as a kid, where his dad worked at the (future) Cape Canaveral in the early 1960’s. “One of my biggest thrills,” he says, “was going out to the range with my dad to see a missile fired.” His dad was also a radio amateur, which introduced Jeff to the concept of antennas at a very early age. This came in handy when Jeff was a Navy communications specialist during the Vietnam era and at the National Security Agency. Later in life he formed a successful company that was bought by Philips Electronics. *This episode was originally released on February 20, 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: 0:20

Our guest today on Radio Cade is Jeff Fitzsimmons: an inventor with a magnetic personality. And I mean that both literally and seriously, as the saying goes. Jeff is a Professor of Radiology at the University of Florida who invented radio frequency coil arrays for high field MRIs. Welcome to the show, Jeff. And did I get that description right?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 0:20

Yes, you did.

Richard Miles: 0:20

So I got it right, only because I read it off a sheet of paper but, I need you to explain, briefly and in layman’s term, exactly what an RF coiler array for MRI means and what it does.

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 0:39

Sure. So the best way to think about this is if you’ve ever seen a television antenna or you’ve ever seen a radio tower or you’ve seen a cell tower or any of those devices, those are all radio frequency antennas. The cell phone that you carry around with you has a very tiny radio frequency antenna built in. In fact, it has, it has a number of them built in. And of course in the old days, your television set used to have a radio frequency antenna on the roof. So, the antennas that we designed and built, and the reason they were unique, is that they were designed to pick up signals from parts of your body and so they focused on your shoulder or your hand or wrist or your knee or your foot or your brain or your heart, things like that. So these are custom designed radio-frequency coil arrays that are essentially antenna arrays that are conformed to a particular body part. So, they maximize the signal from that part and give you the best possible image.

Richard Miles: 1:35

Okay, great explanation. I think I get it. So these are obviously used in a wide array of applications in hospital settings. Right. So basically anytime you go into an MRI, depending on what hurts or what ain’t working, there’ll be some sort of coil array that will be looking for signals from that part of the body…is that about right? (Jeff: Yes, that’s right.) Okay. All right. So like many inventors, you started out in academia, and then you made the transition through the commercialization of your research and that is a story that is not always successful. In fact, I’m guessing by the numbers, this fails more often than it succeeds. Can you describe a little bit about what led you to that path? I guess what led you to the decision first fall that you had a technology that you thought had market potential, and then what was your thought process as you said, okay, I think this has market potential. Here’s my to do list for the next year or two. Do you remember that far back or you push it out of your mind?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 2:26

Sure. Well, we had serial number three MR scanner here in the United States so that put us at the very leading edge of MR Imaging and we previously had a laboratory with small scale animal imaging. So I had experience building devices and radio frequency antennas for animals like mice and rabbits and things like that. So when we scaled up to the human version, we immediately saw the opportunity to do this with humans. And I remember the first thing we did was look at the human spine because everybody’s interested in their spinal cord and they’re interested in the discs that are in their spine. And so we built an RF coil to image the spine and we put it into this large magnet system. And we made images of the spine that were better than the ones that the manufacturer was making. So they started coming to me over a period of time and I was asked by companies like General Electric to make these things for them, make them available. And my initial reaction was, no, we really didn’t have the team or the wherewithal to do that kind of thing. I was really more interested in the research. So it took some time before the right people came along that I was able to recruit to form the nexus of a company to tackle this problem. B ut I would say, you know, the opportunity sort of came to us to put it that way.

Richard Miles: 3:21

You know, what year are we talking about? What’s their timeframe?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 4:16

We’re talking about the late 1970s, early 1980s.

Richard Miles: 5:14

And how was a MRI technology generally received or viewed by the medical community then? Was it seen with some kind of new fangled thing that wasn’t really necessary or was it immediately embraced by doctors?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 6:10

Yes, that’s a good question. I have to give a lot of credit to radiologists because radiologists are technology adopters. They like new technology, they get excited about new technology and they’re not, I don’t want to put down other professions or specialties, but because radiologists have this history of going from x rays to ultra sound to computerized tomography. They have gone through any number of large technological shifts that have given them new information. And so they see it as a way to get more information from the human body without cutting you open. So we call this noninvasive imaging. And of course magnetic resonance imaging was a great opportunity to do even more noninvasive imaging. So they were excited about it. They wanted it.

Richard Miles: 6:10

So let me hazard a guess here. Were surgeons against this? I mean, did they , did they think it wasn’t as good or that you still needed to do surgery or what was their response initially?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 6:21

Yeah, I think most of the medical community took a wait and see approach. And the early scanners that were put out there, the images weren’t very good. So we may have made an image of the spine, but it was kind of grainy and it wasn’t particularly pretty. You couldn’t see the details that you might like. So there was a period of technical evolution that took a good three to five years just to get it to the point where a radiologist would say, oh, I know exactly what’s happening at c four or know what’s happening at l three, uh , that took some time and then even much longer to become what it is today. Today, the resolution of a modern MR scanner is astounding. I mean, it’s, it’s better than you can do by cutting your body open.

Richard Miles: 6:57

Jeff, I heard you talk earlier about there’s a common perception out there as people develop new technologies or companies based on new technologies, the examples you’re looking for or the Googles and the Facebooks and sort of the big cash outs, or the Snapchats or whatever we’re talking about. And I think you think that’s unrealistic, right? Tell us, what is your view on, you know, if you are serious about commercializing any technology, how much time do you mentally need to devote to sticking with it before you can expect a good payday ?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 7:55

Yeah, I think people often talk in terms of three to five years and you know, maybe they’ll cash out and go home. And I think those kinds of timeframes are really very, very unrealistic. It becomes more realistic when you start talking about 10 to 15 year timeframes. And so people that are starting out and look, I had several partners that helped me in this endeavor to begin with and they basically worked for free. And so you can anticipate several years of working for free and then several more years of working for peanuts and then several more years after that before you actually get paid. So you know, you’re looking at an endeavor that in terms of actually returning a profit that minimum of 10 years and more likely 15. That’s much more realistic.

Richard Miles: 8:38

So better up front to tell your mom you’re going to be sleeping on her couch for a good long while.

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 8:44

Or if you borrow money from your parents to start the business, don’t tell them they’re going to get it back in three years.

Richard Miles: 8:49

Right. Good advice. All right, let’s back up, Jeff, and talk about sort of pre-success, Jeff Fitzsimmons maybe pre-career. What were you, and I ask this of all guests, I think it’s interesting. Where were you born? Where’d you grow up? What were you like as a kid?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 9:07

So, I was born in Newark, New Jersey, which is neither here nor there in terms of the story. My dad moved to Florida when I was still quite young and he took a job, eventually he had several jobs, but eventually ended up working for RCA at the missile test center. So back then it wasn’t the Kennedy Space Center, it was the Patrick Air Force Base missile test center because it was part of the Air Force. The missile test center was the Air Force basically. So RCA had a huge technical laboratory on the base and my dad worked there. And so I was introduced to computers and telecommunications and satellite communications and things like that when I was a kid. And of my biggest thrills was going with my dad out to the range to see a missile fired. And we’re talking now in the 60s. Right. And so not everybody was going out there to see missiles fired. It was really not even known what they were doing on the Cape at that time. But, my father was also radio amateur.

Richard Miles: 10:12

So this is just before the space program?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 10:14

Yes, it was before,

Richard Miles: 10:14

before late fifties, early sixties?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 10:16

Early sixties. So, my father was also a radio amateur, so he had in our back porch a complete radio station. And we had antennas going up to trees and various contraptions that were strung around the house and most of it’s self made. I mean he designed and built his own radios. So I became a radio amateur when I was 12 years old. And that was a little premature for most radio amateurs that usually wait until they’re a little bit older, but I was very excited by that and my dad was a great teacher and so I learned a great deal from him. I guess, you know, that’s really the genesis of my involvement in technology was it came from my father’s example.

Richard Miles: 10:59

Jeff, were you a good student in school?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 11:01

Initially in, in grammar school I didn’t do that well grade wise because I didn’t have glasses. And, oftentimes I would write the wrong question down and have the right answer to the wrong question. And that wasn’t discovered until sometime later that I was getting bad grades because I didn’t have the question right. And because teachers would put things on the blackboard and I would just write down what I saw and sometimes I get the numbers mixed up. But after I got my glasses, my grades improved. So, I was a pretty good student. I loved science and technology and that would’ve absorbed me completely except I spent a lot of time at the beach surfing. So that kind of put a damper on being too academic.

Richard Miles: 11:47

So you obviously stayed in Florida. Did you go to University of Florida as an undergraduate?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 11:51

Um, I did. I went to the University of Florida as an Undergrad. And then, I was drafted, this was during the Vietnam conflict. So, I was taken away from all that for four years. I was in the navy. And then when I came back I went to FIT and then later went back to the University of Florida.

Richard Miles: 12:13

Tell us a little about your stint in the navy, what kind of ship were you on and where was it?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 12:17

Well. Um, again, I was very fortunate. I went to a naval communications training center in Corry Field, Florida and there , because I knew the Morse Code and I knew about radios and equipment, I’ve very quickly mastered the program and they made me an instructor. So as a night school instructor, I had a special card that said I could lead the base anytime I wanted to. And so I used to drive home on the weekends, you know, I’d drive to Melbourne, which is a huge drive from Melbourne to Pensacola, Florida. But anyway, I had a little bit of a sense of freedom going through the school. And then I went into the naval communications section of the national security agency. So I basically did electronic espionage, so, I can’t tell you any more than that. I’d have to kill you.

Richard Miles: 13:10

Well, fascinating. Our stories intersect actually in a number of ways that you’re not aware of Jeff. One, I actually was a radio, got a third class radio license when I was 10. I took my exam in Tampa, Florida as my dad was a radio broadcaster, he insisted I do it. And I don’t know why, but I remember taking a test in Tampa and I passed it. I was also in the army, intelligence side and my son is in the navy and communications. The only differences , I haven’t had a very successful company, otherwise we’re the same person. So Jeff, you are a big success in Gainesville and certainly not just Gainesville. And I know you get asked for advice a lot, probably asked you to young entrepreneurs or students or engineers or whatnot. Generally what, what are their questions and what are your answers? And have those answers changed? Do you have a different take say on the success of your company when it happened and the success looking back, have you changed your mind on any of those things?

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 14:20

Well, I think the first thing people come to you for is money. I mean, 9 times out of 10, whenever somebody finds me, they say they want technical advice and they want guidance and they want mentorship. But what they really want is money and investment in their company. So, I have to inform them that I do invest in startup companies, but there are a lot of stipulations that go with that. And, first of all, asking them a lot of questions about what they can tell me about what they’re doing. So once again, the typical inventor will come to me with some idea or some device which they think is the greatest thing since sliced bread in which they’re convinced everybody in the planet is going to have to have one. And then we have to work through that illusion and try to pare it down to the people who actually might buy this thing and what they would pay for it and what the profit margins might be in all those nasty things that you’d have to consider. And so it turns out in the long run that the technology, and I tell this to people all the time, it’s great to have a great idea. I love it. It’s exciting. It’s fun, you know, but it’s not near enough, you know, it’s just only the beginning. And so what they need more than anything is they need a small team, a core group of people who are dedicated to the mission, who understand the mission, they understand the technology, they understand the purpose of it, the broader implications of it, and they are willing to dedicate themselves to it’s future. And so we were very blessed and very fortunate in that regard. I had two or three people working in my laboratory at the time on campus. And so when we formed our company, those people transitioned off to working for the company. But you know, I didn’t have to recruit them because they were already graduate students and other people that were in my research group. So I sort of stole from my own research group and then hired people back into it, you know, over time. What I find is most successful technology groups, they grow like that. They get people to move from one place to another to join a particular effort. But it can’t really be about the money. And thats another thing, you know, you can’t tell people enough, forget about the money. You know, you’re not going to see any real money for a very long time. So you have to be sustained on the mission and on your enthusiasm and determination. And so the word persistence comes up a lot. You have to go at it and keep going at it and be persistent in the face of whatever the odds are. If you have any chance of success, you just have to be quite determined.

Richard Miles: 17:07

So as you look at your portfolio of investments that have sorta paid off and those that have not, have you been able to spawn a common denominator in terms of the quality of the CEO or the colleague of the senior managers ? Set aside for a moment, um, you know, the idea itself, right? I presume you don’t invest in ideas you think are bad. Right ? You probably thought they were all good. And then let’s set aside, you know, some regulatory hurdles that nobody could have predicted. Is there something, looking back on a success as you go “Gosh, I think it was this factor.”

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 17:43

Yeah. We’ve done that retro analysis a lot and I’ve also had the opportunity to look at dozens of companies over the past 10 or 15 years apart from the one that I was intimately involved with and I oftentimes boiled it down to one word. And it’s integrity. People have to have rock solid integrity. If the people in the company can’t be a hundred percent honest with each other and can’t tell each other to their face when they think they’re wrong or they’re right or they’re indifferent, the company doesn’t have much of a chance. If there’s some kind of gaming going on and someone’s trying to BS somebody about what the value is or what something does or doesn’t do, it’s doomed to failure at the beginning. So more than anything, and I know this isn’t an easy thing to assess and I don’t delude myself into thinking I know how to assess it exactly. But I do know that individual integrity over time turns out to be one of the most important ingredients because that’s where honesty comes from. That’s where trust comes from. And if you can’t build something on trust, that’s all the highly successful companies today. That’s what they build their future on is trust. You know, if you can’t get a large number of people to trust you, you don’t have a chance.

Richard Miles: 19:04

And it sounds like candor is one of those as well because what you’re saying reminds me of , you’ve probably read the book, it came out what about 10 years ago , Startup Nation, right about Israel and it talks about these fascinating examples inherent in Israeli culture. One of them being the military, right, where you have these very flat hierarchies and you have private space, telling generals where they went wrong. Something that you probably didn’t see a lot of. I didn’t in the US military. But what that does is it speeds up that self-correction loop, right. In that if you’ve got everybody in your company telling you bad idea. And you trust them, you’re able to either avoid or pull out of mistakes a lot faster. So it sounds like that’s kind of a key ingredient.

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 19:50

Absolutely. You know, because look, everybody’s going to make mistakes. That’s a given. The real question is, my old boss, Clyde Williams, was an MD Phd Rhodes Scholar, brilliant guy. He was the Chairman of Radiology for many years. And he’d say, Jeff, you’re job is to make mistakes faster. Figure it out, get over it, and move on. Don’t dwell on your mistakes. Don’t invest in your mistakes. Don’t wallow in your mistakes. You know, lay it on the table, look at it. Go yup, it was a mistake I made. It is time to move on.

Richard Miles: 20:23

It’s interesting he didn’t say deny the mistake. Confront that and move it on.

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 20:29

Yeah, that’s key. The candor aspect of it is very important and I relate that or call certain integrity.

Richard Miles: 20:36

So Jeff , I’m coming up with a business model now. I think what we’re going to do is bottle your advice and we’re going to go ahead and sell it on the website. You just have to wait 20 years for it to pay off. That’ll be in the small print. Jeff, thanks has been fascinating. Thanks for joining us on Radio Cade . And I look forward to having you and your great ideas back on the show.

Jeff Fitzsimmons: 21:00

Thank you.

Richard Miles: 21:01

Thanks for listening. I’m Richard Miles.

Outro: 21:08

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

One of nine children, Dr. Anthony (Tony) Brennan grew up in a small town in upstate New York. He invented a way to inhibit bacterial growth through plastic sheets that are comprised of millions of microscopic features arranged in a diamond pattern - much like shark skin. A voracious reader, Tony wanted to be an astronaut growing up, but had poor eyesight. His inspiration for Sharklet Technologies was the US Navy, which in 1999 asked him to figure out a way to keep barnacles from growing on its ships. *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2018.*

One of nine children, Dr. Anthony (Tony) Brennan grew up in a small town in upstate New York. He invented a way to inhibit bacterial growth through plastic sheets that are comprised of millions of microscopic features arranged in a diamond pattern – much like shark skin. A voracious reader, Tony wanted to be an astronaut growing up, but had poor eyesight. His inspiration for Sharklet Technologies was the US Navy, which in 1999 asked him to figure out a way to keep barnacles from growing on its ships. *This episode was originally released on September 25, 2018.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01Inventors 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.

Richard Miles: 0:20We’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: 0:41This morning I have as my guest, Tony Brennan, who is the founder of Sharklet Technologies, which as the name implies, has something to do with sharks. So he’s a good guest. Welcome Tony.

Tony Brennan: 0:51Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here today.

Richard Miles: 0:54So before we talk about Sharklet, I always like to start asking the guest a little bit about their background. So if you could share with us where were you born, what were you like as a kid? What was your family like? How did you end up pre-academic days, so to speak.

Tony Brennan: 1:10So it’s always interesting to ask a Brennan a question like that because I’m one of nine. My father was one of ten. So there’s a lot of us and we have a lot to tell, but uh, just to keep it reasonably short…

Richard Miles: 1:23Maybe I should ask for some ID to make sure you’re really the Tony Brennan I had mind right?

Tony Brennan: 1:27Oh, there’s no doubt about it. Anybody listening will recognize it right away. So I’m one of nine. I was the sixth child. I was born in Saranac Lake, New York, which is famous for being the first town formed in the adirondack mountains. It’s really the home for the Winter Olympics. The mountain lake placid is just outside of Saranac Lake. Whiteface is actually closer to Saranac where the Olympics were held twice. Both times they had to haul snow in. The town I grew up in was a small hamlet, natural bridge, New York, and it’s about 30 miles north east of Watertown, New York, which is 60 miles north of Syracuse, New York, which is right in the middle of the state. So we’re very close to Canada and it was a great place to grow up because it was a town of 600. We had 11 people and so we were predominant in the town and we could do whatever we wanted and so it gave an early opportunity for me to explore.

Richard Miles: 2:29So the early entrepreneurial setting here, so…

Tony Brennan: 2:32Very early.

Richard Miles: 2:33And Tony, I do believe you are the first guest on the show that has a connection to Napoleon Bonaparte. Maybe you could explain that.

Tony Brennan: 2:40Yeah, that is such a fascinating story. We always heard this story that was given. There’s natural bridge caverns in natural bridge in New York and they always gave a tour. It’s a natural bridge formed by the Indian river that goes under through the limestone. So they actually give boat tours and they always told this story about French jewels that were buried there somewhere in the caverns. And we always thought it was just a story. So lately historians have confirmed that Joseph Bonaparte who was king of Spain actually bought land in natural bridge and built a house there. And there was a lake very close to us that’s called Lake Bonaparte. And so the connection is real. The house burned in 1932, I think it was. It was a wooden house and it was actually built to be a summer home for the king, but it also was one of the sites that Napoleon was supposed to be exiled to.

Richard Miles: 3:42Really?

Tony Brennan: 3:43Yes. So we’re very close to Canada and northern New York and that area was largely French populated and luray was a cousin of Bonaparte, owned all the land in that area are currently. Our Fort Drum is on the lorain state and the luray mansion is a guest house on the camp, so it’s still there. It’s a couple hundred years old.

Richard Miles: 4:05Did Joseph Bonaparte ever visit that house?

Tony Brennan: 4:07Joseph Bonaparte visited quite often they said.

Richard Miles: 4:11Wow, okay. So if Napoleon had visited history might have turned out a little bit differently. Um, and so as a kid you were a big reader, read quite a bit. What were your favorite types of books? Are your favorite books when you were…

Tony Brennan: 4:28Well as, as one of nine, I think it’s interesting to think back about what I thought was going on and it was always from my perspective, looking outward and as my other siblings tell me my favorite books were the Compton Encyclopedias that my father got when I was in fourth grade, I think. And uh, I enjoyed reading that cover to cover front to back. But my favorite book was the story autobiography by Benjamin Franklin. He was a fascinating guy. Fascinating man.

Richard Miles: 5:00You were also interested in things like space travel and sputnik and so on.

Tony Brennan: 5:04I wanted to be an astronaut from day one. I used to marvel at the moon walking along and for some reason as a child, I remember we got very large moons and it was because we were so far north, we actually did and you just could see so much detail and I always thought that would be the best thing to travel to the moon, but never had good enough eye sight to become a pilot and you had to be a pilot back then to be an astronaut. So that didn’t work out.

Richard Miles: 5:33So instead of the moon and astronauts, instead you’re dealing with sharks. So somewhere your career took a left or a right turn. Tell us about Sharklet technology. What is it? Why is it called Sharklet? How does it work? And who’s using it?

Tony Brennan: 5:48First of all, the reason for the sharks is that the US navy funded my research back in 1999, I think was when the white paper was submitted. And they funded my research at the very beginning when I just had this crazy idea that if I could make a surface that was unstable, and at the time I was thinking of quicksand. So if I made something that was so soft that organisms couldn’t settle on, it might have a chance. And the navy actually funded me. I don’t… to this day, I can’t believe they did it, but if they hadn’t, this wouldn’t have happened.

Richard Miles: 6:26That and like $600 toilet seats. Right? So…

Tony Brennan: 6:30I give him credit. Let’s not go down that path because I understand all the difficulties of specifying materials to fit on an aircraft carrier or something. Right? So sharklet technologies came about because I was doing research to stop organisms from landing on the side of the ship.

Richard Miles: 6:47And just to clarify, you are a material science professor or…

Tony Brennan: 6:51Yes. I am a professor of material science and engineering. I started out with a chemistry degree because I was seriously thinking about becoming an MD, but at some point, I decided that wasn’t in my life to be an MD. I give those guys a lot of credit. I don’t have the proper traits. So I joke often that I have a PhD, not an MS because I have no patience and I think part of being an entrepreneur you can’t have a lot of patients.

Richard Miles: 7:19So when the navy came to you with this request, presumably you knew what you were doing and that’s why the navy came to you and asked…

Tony Brennan: 7:26Well yeah. So they had funded indirectly my research during my PhD and so the man who funded me knew me from there and so I guess he was taking a little gamble with me, but he felt I was qualified and so I’d worked in dental biomaterials, to begin with, and that’s all about organism sticking to composites that are used to repair teeth or bond to teeth, and that’s what started my thinking. So going on, I just was trying to keep barnacles off the side of the ship when I started looking at sharks.

Richard Miles: 7:59And that’s a huge problem for the navy, right?

Tony Brennan: 8:01That’s a massive problem for the world. Ninety percent of all of our goods are shipped over the oceans and every ship moving from the US to Asia, from Asia to Antarctica to Australia, all around the world. Every shIp goes into a port and sits there and the barnacles of that port are landing or attaching to the ship. The ship leaves carries those barnacles to another port and thus we get what’s called an invasive species. And a good example is the zebra mollusk. Think everybody’s heard of that. The zebra mollusk has been populated from a ship into the great lakes and up where I grew up. So that’s the number one problem. Number two is, of course the economic, and right now we know green gas. So ships carrying all that weight, extra weight and drag on their increases the amount of cost of fuel plus for the navy, it increased the cost of cleaning them and the cost are estimated somewhere around a half a billion dollars a year extra.

Richard Miles: 9:05So they were tryIng to find a, some sort of surface that mollusks or other sea creatures wouldn’t attach to and you came up with an idea and apparently your first try didn’t go so well.

Tony Brennan: 9:20That’s an understatement. So I started out looking at what had been done in this area as far as trying to prevent water from wetting, a surface and organisms. And they tried Teflon early on. It was a miserable failure. They loved it because Teflon is hard. So I was going for the soft surface and um, I decided to be an engineer about it. So I took everything that they’d done with sandpaper and rough surfaces like that. And I said, let’s do it systematically and I started out. The first samples I put in the ocean, especially in Hawaii, were a terrible, terrible failure. And that’s how I got thinking about sharks.

Richard Miles: 10:05So you were talking earlier about a particular moment in which you had, I guess some observers from the navy watching you or sort of testing out and tell us a little bit about that experience. It sounds a little bit dramatic.

Tony Brennan: 10:18Again, I need to emphasize what the navy is trying to do. They’re trying to find a coating that will be on the side of their ship for 10 to 12 years and they don’t want it releasing anything to the environment. They don’t want to killing anything. They just want it to be neutral in the environment. So it’s very difficult. But we had a whole group of people because there was an international conference in Hawaii. We decided to piggyback the navy meeting at the same time so we had all the people from the navy, had other researchers that were there, probably 10 or 12 people. We’re on a raft next to a dock where aIrcraft carriers doc, I mean it’s three or four ladders down from the top of that to the water level. It’s just so big. It’s amazing. And we were down there pulling out my panels. They looked horrible and some guy from one of the labs I won’t say where, and he made a wise crack about jesus too bad in the navy’s not paying you to get things to stick because you did a good job here. So that started my brain going…

Richard Miles: 11:20Right. Probably still wake up dreaming about that.

Tony Brennan: 11:24I still laugh about it because It got me mad and I was looking off because I just was trying to keep myself cool. And so I was looking and a nuclear sub was leaving and seemed like it was next to me, but it was a long ways away and I could see the green algae is stuck on the hall and I was really upset. I said we’re supposed to be stopping that and we’re not doing a very good job.

Richard Miles: 11:47So the sub is pulling out. It’s got algae and then you figured out something about that that led to sharks?

Tony Brennan: 11:53I just said it looked like a big whale and then I said, come to think of it whales are fouled and they are. They’ve got barnacles all over them, they got sponge everything. And then I started going down through all the animals in the ocean and everybody had a reason why thIs one wouldn’t work and why they were clean or dirty or whatever. Manatees, turtles, even blue muscles and red muscles. The blue mussels are clean. The red muscles foul and they’re cousins but they have striations on their back which was very similar to the striations I was testing but a different size. So as I kept going, I brought up sharks and everybody goes, no, they’re fast moving. And I said, not the little guys you get to pet in an aquarium. And I said, what’s different? And a friend of mine offered to catch one for me. He said he catches him all the time and his research and releases them. So that started it.

Richard Miles: 12:44So eventually this led you to the shark. You’ve figured out there’s something about the shark skin that repelled these sorts of organisms. And what next did you go back to the navy and go, “I’ve solved your problem?”

Tony Brennan: 12:57No, but interestingly, the University of Florida is the world repository for everything about sharks. So we have every kind of sharkskin you can imagine. There were fine, even prehistoric. We have bones, teeth, well it’s not bones it’s cartilage, their skeletal structure. We have everything. And so when I came back and started looking, I looked at the sharks and lo and behold, interestingly there’s scales, called denticles, teeth like structures. So I felt like I was back home in the dental field and looking at it, I thought it was very close to one of my models that I drafted up for figuring out how to create roughness. So I hired a young kid to come into my lab and try to draw it on a computer aided design system and uh, he wasn’t successful and I got rid of him. He’s now my son in law and father of my grandchildren. I didn’t know at the time, but he’s one of the best engineers. I’ve ever known, but he was right. I couldn’t do what I initially wanted to do, but I put another student on it who ended up being my phd student and we just flattened it out and when we did that, we ended up with the sharklet design and the first time we tested it against that green algae that was on the submarine it had an 85 percent inhibition, So 85 percent of the cells that usually get on the surface weren’t there, and that’s the first ever anybody had ever been able to inhibit those cells.

Richard Miles: 14:24So, Tony, I remember you telling me this story a few years ago and I thought, okay great, you must have made a lot of money. Go back to the navy and tell them you’ve got this great technology that keeps their ships and subs clean and you looked at me patiently and explained to me the other applications of the technology that actually could be more exciting. So let’s fast forward to sharklet technologies. Who are your main customers? And, I guess what is the most exciting application of the technology that you think of?

Tony Brennan: 14:51Well, let me just finish off one little case. The reason I can’t use it on the side of a ship right now is because the green spores are so small and the barnacles separately are so large and there is a size dependence of their ability to respond to the sharklet so we literally have to work more on the chemistry and that’s what we’re doing now in our lab. But sharklet technologies was because of that test in Hawaii. There’s a tube born there that needs bacteria and every time I sent it to the University of Hawaii to be tested, they said, oh, it’s not working. We got this problem, this problem, this problem. We found out by accident really that there were no bacteria on the sharklet. And that’s where sharklet technologies comes from. So we are excited now about the fact that we have a urinary catheter that has been tested in a very small number of people in europe and it showed that it did keep the bacteria off the urinary catheter, which is the biggest problem we have in hospital acquired infections. It’s terrible. And the patients said it was much more comfortable than a conventional one, which it is. Has lower friction so it goes in and out easier. So it’s more comfortable that way. The doctors and nurses loved it and it did reduce the bacteria. And it’s interesting. It reduced the bacteria and the patient just like in the lab.

Richard Miles: 16:15So that’s fascinating. So you set out to solve a problem for the US navy on big ships and you end up with catheters eventually that sound like they’re easier, safer, more resistant to bacteria, which is a massive problem as you said.

Tony Brennan: 16:30It is. It is a huge problem. We also have work in developing an endotracheal tube and some of the more interesting things that most people will see is we’re working on cloth for chairs and public places and we’ve been able to show a significant reduction in bacteria transfer from one person to the next via that see. A lot of people worried about that going into trains and buses and airplanes. So we’re producing cloth with the sharklet pattern. But probably the most exciting one for me is going to be the fact that my initial invention was bioadhesion, not inhibiting. So bioadhesion lets me talk about inhibition and enhancement. That means I can stop cells from going on or I can encourage them to land on the surface.

Richard Miles: 17:21Got it. Okay. Tell us, I guess a little bit about sharklet itself. We find it’s a common story. Researchers decide to commercialize their technology. They form a company and then they find it’s not like the academic world, that the entrepreneurial / business world is substantially different. Tell us about some of the challenges of getting the company going and tell us about a good week or a bad week. What were some of the best successes you’ve had and then what were some the surprises or failures or setbacks that you’ve had, if any?

Tony Brennan: 17:52So I’m unusual maybe because I did ten years of industrial work in the biomedical field before I got my phd.

Richard Miles: 18:01Okay. So you knew a little bit about this beforehand.

Tony Brennan: 18:04I knew a lot about how to run a business and I also… this is my fourth business that I’ve started. Some of them were young as a child in natural bridge, but I’ve had a lot of businesses.

Richard Miles: 18:15Which is somewhat unusual I have to say for some in the academic field to have had that business experience prior.

Tony Brennan: 18:22It is, but I think it’s a benefit for my students to be able to give them real life examples and as an example, coming back to your question, the first biggest concern that we had was being able to manufacture sharklet. So we have been pushing technology and manufacturing to the point where we now have to have new inventions and we just had one issued last monday of this week actually. So I got another invention on how to manufacture it. That’s probably been our biggest challenge… effectively manufacturing in a cost effective manner.

Richard Miles: 18:58I see. So it’s not enough to develop the technology and the principal in the lab. You’ve got to really be able to make this so.

Tony Brennan: 19:03You do.

Richard Miles: 19:04Industrial clients can demand it and order.

Tony Brennan: 19:07Right. So some of the successes are going to be, first of all, the urinary catheter. That, to me, is a huge success, but it’s a very slow process to get it through the FDA and everything and so that’s something I knew about, but it’s still discouraging the time it takes to get it through the system. The other things that happen are money. Money is always a problem when you’re starting a company. So we started out with three people committing for a million dollars. Our next money was $500,000 and that’s over about a year and a half period. Well that sounds like a lot of money until you start putting people in materials and buildings together. That money goes fast. So we were lucky. We had hired great people to work on writing grants to the federal government and we got funded by the NIH, National Institute of Health, small business innovation research program, which is a phenomenal program started by Reagan. For those of you who may be listening, that was a very insightful program that they created and it gave us a lot of money to create these products and develop them. And we have been a success story for NIH because our products are actually going to market.

Richard Miles: 20:19I’m sure Tony, given your background, you probably get asked a lot for advice, career advice and so on. When you have, not necessarily researchers, but probably researchers or people who have developed a good idea, said that the idea is sound and they want to try to get that idea into the marketplace. So maybe they’re thinking of starting a company or trying to attract investment. What sort of words of wisdom do you or would you give to somebody like that starting out, say on there under journey.

Tony Brennan: 20:46Be committed. Don’t take no for an answer, but be intelligent enough to listen and listening to people who understand markets. That’s probably the biggest issue. You’ve got to have an existing market. Don’t create a market. It’s too big of a push and we still struggle with that somewhat in terms of trying to convince people or get them to understand what it means to inhibit bacteria on a car seat as an example. Um, doctors and hospItals see it right away. They understand it’s not a problem, but commitment, listening and push, push through.

Richard Miles: 21:22Push through. It’s a great way to end the program. Thanks very much, Tony, for being with us and look forward to seeing you continue to succeed.

Tony Brennan: 21:29Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation.

Outro: 21:37Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating Inventor Interviews. Bob McPeak of heartwood soundstage and downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing, and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Columns 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.

How do you train people to talk to other people? For some professions, like nursing, communicating with others is a critical part of the job. Computer scientist Ben Lok developed software for nursing students to interview and examine a “virtual patient.”  The patients speak like actual people, have backstories, and don’t necessarily share information easily. The son of a pipeline engineer and a nurse, Lok moved to the Tulsa from Malaysia when he was 5 years old. He credits his father’s prescient interest in computers - and an Atari game - with his career path. Lok’s company, Shadow Health, has plans to develop applications for other occupations that rely on face-to-face communication.  *This episode was originally released on January 2, 2019.* 

How do you train people to talk to other people? For some professions, like nursing, communicating with others is a critical part of the job. Computer scientist Ben Lok developed software for nursing students to interview and examine a “virtual patient.”  The patients speak like actual people, have backstories, and don’t necessarily share information easily. The son of a pipeline engineer and a nurse, Lok moved to the Tulsa from Malaysia when he was 5 years old. He credits his father’s prescient interest in computers – and an Atari game – with his career path. Lok’s company, Shadow Health, has plans to develop applications for other occupations that rely on face-to-face communication.  *This episode was originally released on January 2, 2019.* 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:21

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

Is treating patients like playing a video game and do virtual patients get us better nurses. Here to answer this question is Dr. Ben Lok, Professor in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Florida. Welcome, Ben.

Dr. Ben Lok: 0:49

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Richard Miles: 0:50

So Ben, we’re going to talk about you in a minute. But first let’s start by explaining what your technology or your invention is, what it does and what problem do you think it’s solving?

Dr. Ben Lok: 1:01

All right. When we think about how do we train people to talk to other people. And we think about that. We’ve been working on that for a very long time and we still have the same technologies, the same approaches. We tend to do roleplaying with other people. And that’s the way we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. But now we’ve just entered this place where these computer technologies, these simulations where you can see these virtual people much like you see in a movie or a video game. Could we use them to help you practice talking to another person? It’s kind of initially an interesting question. So it’s not too different than let’s say a flight simulator. But if you could practice your communication skills with these virtual people, would that translate to you talking to real people? And so that was a question we started thinking about back in 2004. So we’ve been thinking about this for a long time. We wanted to study the science behind it and really evaluate whether this was possible. And after about six, seven years, we worked with medical faculty. We worked with educators, we did a lot of user studies, which means we tested the technology out and really be able to understand that people, yeah, did learn how to communicate better using virtual people. Then we decided to form a company named Shadow Health and we said, can we bring this out to the masses? Can we get this rolled out into a lot of universities so we can be helping the new beginning nurse. Think of yourself as a nursing student just starting nursing school and you have to and learn how to talk to people. And so we said, hey, can simulation play a role here? That’s what Shadow Health has now rolled out to lots of universities and colleges across the country. But the goal is again, talk to these virtual people and it’ll help you become a better communicator.

Richard Miles: 2:28

So just so our listeners understand what exactly we’re talking about, they are siting in front of a computer screen. It can be in a classroom, it could be at home on their laptop, whatever. And in front of them, I think your first patient with Tina. And so they see a patient on there. And what happens after that? They look at the patient and then who starts the conversation and how?

Dr. Ben Lok: 2:47

Right. So think of yourself as a nursing student. You learn a topic in class and then the teacher says, okay, now you need to practice talking to a person about it, right? So let’s say you learn about cardiology or respiratory or something like that. Then go home, open up your laptop and log in and you will see a virtual character on the screen. We have many different virtual patients, different genders, ethnicities, backgrounds, ages. And then you can either type or talk to them and they will respond to you. And so the goal is to ask the right questions, observe how she or he is responding to you gesturing and whether they’ve got facial expressions and things like that. Ask questions, empathize, educate. When necessary. But really practice communication skills because we know that at the heart of good healthcare is a relationship that a patient has with the providers, right? And so if you can build empathy and rapport with a patient, we know that you get better health outcomes. Patients get better because they reveal more, they feel secure and they provide you with more information. Getting that’s hard. Practicing that as hard. So think about it. Beginning nurse, you have to know so many things. How can we use technologies now to help you prepare for that? And that’s what this technology is, so again yeah, you open up your laptop, you see a character, you type, you talk to them. But the important part is after you’re done, you get feedback on how you did. Did you address her concerns when she raised that that hey, I didn’t understand the words that you said or my mom got sick from this, I’m scared I could get sick. So these are challenges that are really hard to deal with whenever you do it face to face. But if you could practice it in a place that’s controlled where you can control the pace and really get feedback on how you did, we think that that will improve your communication skills.

Richard Miles: 4:19

And what really impressed me the first time I saw the technology a few years ago was the fact that you design these characters so that they’re supposed to be like an actual person. So if you slip into medical jargon, for instance, they won’t necessarily understand what you’re saying as you said, or they’ll give you half answers, just like a real person might not fully explain their symptoms and you have to ask followup. And that’s deliberate right? To really challenge the student, to frame their questions and their followup questions in a way to get the information they need.

Dr. Ben Lok: 4:49

So when you see a nurse or a nurse sees a patient, that patient has a whole history of what got them to that point, right? They’ve got a belief system, they’ve got a family, they’ve got experiences before that they’ve run into doctors and nurses in a certain way. And all our nurses and doctors, they’ve got a practice communicating with that in mind. So each of us has our own backstory. That’s the challenging part, right? So even us coming to this conversation right here, we just happened to meet at this one point right now, whenever you’re asking me questions for like right now you’re interviewing me, you’re thinking about…

Richard Miles: 5:21

And it’s a virtual reaction, I don’t really exist.

Dr. Ben Lok: 5:24

You are very realistic. You know, the thinking is that you need to be able to unpack and understand how this person got there. If this person is scared or concerned, there’s a reason why. And that’s what a great nurse can do, right? They ask the right questions and to be empathetic at the right moment. So if you say you’re afraid of a procedure or you hear a term that you’re not familiar with and you get nervous, the nurse has a really great opportunity to step in there and comfort you and say the right things and to help explain things. But that requires understanding all this backstory. And so we’ve intentionally built our characters with a store in the back that helps frame who they are today. So if you asked somebody, for example, do you have allergies? If they’re not medically verse, they might say, I’m allergic to cats. Well that’s part of the story, but you can be allergic to medications and latex and so many other parts and so we wanted to build that into our products so that people do get practice understanding the whole story that we’re each individual people I could be male, 43 Asian, but I have a whole backstory. I moved to the US when I was five, for example, so I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Happened to like a little bit of country music, which you might not guess when you first see me, but we all have that story. My mom’s a nurse for example, and that’s why I’m very much into the healthcare profession and trying to help them because I’ve seen my mom do that as a nurse and so these are all part of who I am and how I got to this point and that does build that story in for good healthcare to happen. Nurses have to quickly get at that and try to be able to understand that we’re each individual people.

Richard Miles: 6:47

Right. We’re actually going to talk more about your personal story in just a minute. But one follow up question about the technology itself that I think is important for listeners to understand is this is obviously not alive in the sense that your virtual patient isn’t being controlled by somebody who’s answering. So when you first started out with Tina, how many questions could she answer, you know, was it 500, was it 1000 questions? And then how did you make Tina smarter?

Dr. Ben Lok: 7:11

That’s a huge problem in computer science. It’s a field called artificial intelligence or some sub areas, natural language processing or understanding. And so in that space, when we first started creating Tina, my area of specialty is actually called virtual reality or human computer interaction. And I really wanted to study how people react to these characters. So at one of the nice things about these virtual characters is they can’t talk about everything unlike Siri or Alexa that you have at home, which see me, they can talk about a variety of topics. These virtual patients only need to talk about why they’re there in the clinic, right? So if you asked Tina Jones, which is our first virtual patient, what do you think about the gators this year? What are their chances? She’s not going to have an answer.

Richard Miles: 7:50

She’ll stare at you blankly. Which is a normal reaction, right?

Dr. Ben Lok: 7:53

As you know, that’s not really something, I’m here to talk about it. So it really kind of gets you back into this scenario. So we had a very constrained part and the nice thing about a good interview with let’s say a nurse in a patient, is it that it’s slightly structured. You might not know that as a patient. Sure. But there is a structure behind it, right? They’re progressing through stages. And so we leverage that in the technology because we can anticipate what you’re probably going to say, right? You’re not talking about anything under the sun. You’ve got a few things you can talk about. Allergies, medication, family history, they’re constrained, right? So we build these areas that she can talk about. And when we were first in the research lab, she can answer a few hundred questions and she could talk for about eight, 10 minutes. But now with a commercial system that is flushed out and we’ve got professional writers and folks dedicated to building out our characters, most of our characters can answer hundreds of thousands of questions they learn from everybody that they talked to. And there’s some pretty sophisticated backend stuff that really tries to get our characters to learn from everybody that goes through. So as people more and more people talk to our characters, they get progressively smarter. They’re able to expand what set of questions they can respond.

Richard Miles: 8:57

So according to your patients, how are the gators going to do this season?

Dr. Ben Lok: 8:59

Um, I am, I’m very optimistic. I’m very, very optimistic. I hope it will be good year.

Richard Miles: 9:08

Then you’d mentioned earlier that you grew up in a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but you were born in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. How did your family come in the United States? Tell us a little bit about growing up in Tulsa and what was that like?

Dr. Ben Lok: 9:19

So my dad was a pipeline engineer, so he was an electrical engineer by training, and he built pipelines. And so born in Malaysia. That’s where a lot of my extended family still live in and my Dad was working for an oil and gas company out in Jakarta, Indonesia. He had an opportunity to move to Houston or Tulsa. He knew he wanted to somehow make it to the US because there’s opportunities there for his family. And so he chose Tulsa. I’m not sure why, but they love it. They love it. They love Tulsa. They’re still there. We moved there in 1981 and my parents still live there 37 years later. They’ve got their group of friends. They absolutely love it there. My Dad an engineer and so it was just company, his oil and gas company because Tulsa was the oil capital of the world in 1981 and 1982 there was an oil crash. It was a very scary time for my dad because he was an immigrant with two young kids at the time. I think my sister was on the way and I was five from the move, so my dad, I always tell a story. He saw that the computer was suddenly became something that you could buy for the home. It’s extremely expensive. At the time, I think it was like $3,000. Back in, 1981 that’s an enormous amount of money. It still is a lot of money today, but it was as I recall, several months salary. But he said, you know what, there’s something going on here that if you could learn this, you would have a significant advantage. He saw like the draftsman, these jobs are changing. So he invested money and bought an Atari 800 way back when and he said, “you know Ben”, I was the oldest of his kids. I was five at the time he said “if you learned how to use this. I think that this will serve you well.” He didn’t know why right back down. He just, he was electrical engineering by training, so he liked the electronics. But I learned how to start programming when I was five and he really sat me down and we learned together. It was something that you know when I look back on it. It was just fantastic. But the reason I tell that story was two years later was when the oil crash happened. So my dad had just moved his whole family here. Didn’t have much money. He was spending most of his money back home to his parents to pay for his brothers and sisters go to college. And we had just moved to this country and he just spent all this money on a computer. But when the oil crash came and large swaths of his company were being laid off, I think like 60 70% of his company was being laid off and he’d be an easy person to let go, that he knew computers actually saved his job and allowed us to stay in the US and…

Richard Miles: 11:23

Do you still have that Atari?

Dr. Ben Lok: 11:24

My dad probably could be on a show of hoarders and so it is probably somewhere, but I always give him credit for taking a big chance out there. And so yeah…

Richard Miles: 11:34

That was not entirely obvious.

Dr. Ben Lok: 11:36

It was not, it was not. Anyways, because he saw a technology coming down and he invested the money and time into learning it. He altered the course of our family’s history, but it also gave me a passion to say “Hey, this tech can help people,” right? So this tech, it’s cool for games. I love playing games. I love using…

Richard Miles: 11:53

Did you do a lot of gaming when you’re a kid or…

Dr. Ben Lok: 11:54

Yes, I still do, I’ve got my own kids. We play Mario Kart together and it’s great, but it has an entertainment role. But I also think that it’s got an extremely untapped education role. When I say educational, this means just putting a computer in front of a lot of people. That doesn’t mean education, right? So it’s to say, “Hey, we’ve got this new platform. It can deliver experiences in a new way.”

Richard Miles: 12:14

Right.

Dr. Ben Lok: 12:14

“What can we do with it?” And I wanted to innovate in that space. And so that’s really what has been my passion as I went through school, through high school and growing up in Tulsa. And then I went to the University of Tulsa as an Undergrad. I said, I want to go college as far away as possible. And then…

Richard Miles: 12:29

And then 10 blocks, right?

Dr. Ben Lok: 12:31

That was actually a few miles down the road from my parents. A lot of it was the fortune of scholarships and reality finances. Right. But then I went to the University of North Carolina for graduate school then.

Richard Miles: 12:40

And what was your undergraduate major in?

Dr. Ben Lok: 12:42

Computer Science. Computer Science as an Undergrad four years there and then went to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill so I’m a big Tar Heel fan. Yeah, I think they’re going to do quite well this year. I think I’m going to program that into our carriers.

Richard Miles: 12:53

Well what do your patients say, thats important right?

Dr. Ben Lok: 12:53

They’re fantastic. Right? Go Tar Heels. Uh, and I spent… Yeah so I did two years for a masters, then another three more for a Phd. And we were all done in computer science with the, “How can we use this?” There’s a branch of computer science thats very theoretical. There’s also an applied side. And that was the area that I wanted to focus on was the applied, where can we apply these computing to solve some of the problems that five, ten years ago we didn’t have the technology for. So in potentially now that we have this, what new doors could now be open. We’ve got these new tools that have just entered our tool belt. So that’s been a very fun place to be in because the pace of advancement has been so fast, right? Just a few years ago, we didn’t have things like in our homes that we could talk to. That was not a thing even a few years ago. But now we find that by having that we can, you know, we open a lot of doors, but also some really interesting side doors. So for example, we know that things like Google home or Alexa, they can help people on the autism spectrum, for example, learn how to communicate. My son’s on the spectrum and he learns so much about how to communicate, how to phrase questions and things like that, using this new technology. So that’s an example. I’m always fascinated when they created Alexa, that was not their main use case, right? But we’re finding out how all these technologies can have these residual sides. So studying, that’s very exciting. But also innovating in that because we can use it for good or also use it for not so good. So I want to be on the side to help study it so that we can make sure we’re making good decisions with it.

Richard Miles: 14:10

So Ben, that’s a perfect segue because I was just about to ask you about Shadow Health.

Dr. Ben Lok: 14:14

Uh Huh.

Richard Miles: 14:14

And you as a company to deliberately picked nursing as your market that you’re going to go after applying this technology. But as you just mentioned, there are some other obvious, obvious to me, but you tell me if they’re obvious, applications in which you had the same dynamic of communication skills is important and you want to give people an opportunity to practice that. So are there other markets potentially that Shadow Health itself or companies like Shadow Health could get into using the same core insight? Here’s how to practice a communication. It’s sort of a set format and I’m thinking of like even paramedics or firefighters or anybody who has to communicate information to another person, and it’s really important that they get it right. Tell me about that.

Dr. Ben Lok: 14:55

Right. Go back to the very beginning when I said the, the core thing we’re thinking about is how do people who need to communicate with somebody else, which is most people. Most people have a job where they have to communicate with somebody as part of their job. How do they get better at it? Right? That core question is in a lot of places where it’s somebody working in retail and somebody who’s working in banking or finance or an education, the military, there are a lot of folks who have communication needs and so if we could practice that, that would provide significant value. It plays a role in one’s education, right? So absolutely. We, we started in nursing. The main reason we started in nursing, one is that there are a lot of nursing students and so it was just an addressable market that could sustain a company getting started. But we do see the technology having two places, one in healthcare, we want to definitely be able to work with other domains within that space. And we’ve had people in like physician assistant or some medical schools that have said, hey, this technology also applies there, so we do want to see more coverage within the medical space, but then there are other places too such as the education market, right. Thinking about where we could practice communication skills, even K-12 for example, as a place to say, wow, there’s a lot of places one needs to practice. The simple act of, but not so simple act of talking to somebody else. Not only exchanging information but be able to understand cues and be able to understand how to have a conversation to get important information across.

Richard Miles: 16:13

I remember when I first learned about Shadow Health, I was fascinated by the business rationale for the model in that in nursing education you had this bottleneck around the ability to conduct patient interviews and as you said earlier, the traditional solutions were either roleplaying, which was expensive because you’ve got to hire actors to play patients and so on and obviously can only do that during business hours and so on or on the job…

Dr. Ben Lok: 16:38

Shadow. That’s the shadow of shadow right there.

Richard Miles: 16:40

Which wasn’t ideal as well because you’re trying to in a real life environment, teach somebody these important communication skills. So that the ability of Shadow Health, where you came in from a business perspective was you’re providing a solution to solve that bottleneck problem. Now a nursing student at 11:30 at night on their couch with a laptop can practice and doesn’t have to rely on actors and so on. So have you identified other markets opportunities like that in which there is a specific hurdle in the training that their means are either too expensive or not very efficient? Is there anything like the nursing market out there that you’re thinking of getting into?

Dr. Ben Lok: 17:17

I want to highlight one of the big bottlenecks is actually the educator, right? If you’ve got a classroom of 120 students and you’re one teacher, how do you provide feedback? How do you provide the individualized attention and experience? Because that’s where a good learning happens, right? Whenever a teacher is able to focus on you… So if you’re gone to a, let’s say a swim clinic. It’s great when the teacher shows everybody in the class how to swim. But if the teacher can critique you individually and tell you what you’re doing, it changes, right? Golf clinics or running clinics or whatever. So the teacher’s really a big bottleneck, right? And actually where I’d like for people to focus on, so empowering the teacher to be able to give out individualized feedback to large numbers of students and the number of students are only growing, right? We got more and more nursing students coming in, but the challenging bottlenecks, the educator being able to provide that feedback and where this technology can really come in, it’s not only do you get to talk to a virtual character, that part’s great.

Richard Miles: 18:08

It captures the conversation.

Dr. Ben Lok: 18:11

It captures, and then after…

Richard Miles: 18:12

It analyzes the conversation.

Dr. Ben Lok: 18:12

Right. That point afterwards, it’s actually where the learning really happens, right? It’s getting feedback on how you did opportunities you missed, here’s what you did, here’s how an expert would have done that, right? So here’s an example. If the character expresses concern around something, I don’t know where that can afford that. Okay, how do you respond? That’s great that you had to experience, but afterwards when you look, go back to that moment and you can see not only how you did but how an expert, “Wow, that was really hard to answer. I don’t even know how I would answer. Oh, that’s how an expert would do it.” That moment is really, really valuable and that’s the part we’re trying to get to more students is to get the individualized feedback to people because we know that we can give that to you right after, not when your educator unfortunately, it’s super busy. As a professor myself, I would love to be able to sit next to all my students and provide that. It’s just not feasible, but technology could be an extension of the professor to give that feedback at that moment. That’s critical and then with that information now you can come talk to me as a professor and then we can have a conversation. It’s a lot deeper than a very superficial level because we have a very careful record of what you’ve done and so it’s really the bottleneck of David Messiah is the CEO of the company likes to say “We’re bringing that relationship between the teacher and the student back to a one on one.”

Richard Miles: 19:21

Does the software have tools so that, let’s say I’m your student, right, and I’ve interviewed a virtual patient and the patient told me they had swelling in their ankles and I miss that or ignored it or whatnot. Does the software flag the fact that I got it wrong and then you as the professor would get a report saying, hey Richard, it’s screwed up here because he should have followed up on that, or would you have to go through my entire transcript and find out all the bone headed things I’ve said or didn’t say?

Dr. Ben Lok: 19:48

That’s a great question. So when you go through and talk to a virtual patient, both in our software and actually other companies in this space, because there are a lot of other folks who have seen that this is a great market to be in. Yes. You get feedback afterwards and say, “Hey, these are opportunities. You missed these” or “Good job. You got these parts, right. You missed these opportunities. Here are other ways that other people could address that.” The educator not only sees that, but they also see that for the entire class. Right? So if you have hundreds of students, you’ve got the next class, what are you going to talk about when you get up in front of them? If you could see that, “Hey, did you know that 80% of your class forgot to ask about allergies?” Let’s say drug allergies or family history questions. Because you’ve been so focused on this. How do you even know that you’ve got a class that might be focusing or forgetting to focus on a topic so the software not only captures and gives you individualized feedback, but also gives class feedback to the professor so that professor can look at it and go, “I thought I covered this thought I said it a hundred times but I guess I’ve got to say it one more time.” to cover topics that the class as a whole is or is not proficient at a level that you would want them to be in. So it provides both individual but also class size feedback to the educators.

Richard Miles: 20:52

One final question on Shadow Health. For the longest time Shadow Health was sort of like the hottest startup in Gainesville and I’m not even sure it’s a start up anymore. But you’re in a lot of universities to tell us what the business environment looks like with Shadow Health.

Dr. Ben Lok: 21:05

Yeah. A lot of folks ask how did the Aha moment happen for Shadow? And the exciting part is that there was no Aha moment. It was a flywheel that kept speeding up. Right? If you read the book Good to Great, for example, the top out of fly wheel that picks up speed. So from 2004 through 2010 we just did research. I had no thought about starting a company. I wanted to do good science. I wanted to do to look at this new invention and really be able to study and we were running it at the medical school, at the University of Florida and then the Medical College of Georgia, we built a consortium of folks there. Then in 2010 I was approached by entrepreneur in town, David who I mentioned before and he was looking at technologies and we had a meeting and he did market research and saw that there was an addressable market with the nursing folks. He said there was enough folks and not only that, if you can improve nursing in this country, that’s actually huge. It potentially is bigger than improving elms, any other profession because you can affect healthcare. Each nurse, there are estimates that they see about 2000 patients a year over a hundred thousand nurses, user software. New students use it every year.

Richard Miles: 22:01

And they’re one of the primary sources of information for the doctors, right?

Dr. Ben Lok: 22:04

Absolutely.

Richard Miles: 22:04

Doctor’s rely on them very heavily.

Dr. Ben Lok: 22:06

You’re talking about hundreds and millions of patient encounters. So I’m very excited that potentially most of us have interacted with a nurse that had Shadow Health training. And hopefully that because of that, when they talk to you, they think back about asking that extra question or observing some response that you gave and connecting it to the feedback that they got. Right? And they ask you an additional question or you remembered to process something a certain way. So we started 2011 and first semester that we sold was 2012 we had six universities that said, yes, we’ll buy it. Even though we didn’t have the software fully done, which showed us that there was really this hunger for this technology. But now we’re in over 1500 universities and colleges and as an inventor, the opportunity free technologies that you know, has a good science foundation to be able to be out there and effecting people. Again, we’ll have over a hundred thousand folks using our software this year. If they each see 2000 patients, that’s 200 million patient encounters that you think could be slightly improved. Right? Not every single one would necessarily be better, but if you could help 1% of those, that’s a significant improvement and potentially affecting healthcare in this country in a very organic education driven way that I’m very excited about. It’s driven by new way to think about technology. These video games, I love video games, I love playing them. These characters that you see there, instead of shooting them with shotguns and running around with them, why don’t we talk to them? That was the genesis of all of this and so I try to explain to my wife when I play video games, it’s just research for… it’s just future research. But it’s surprising how people react to these characters when they see these characters. They have a reaction when a nurse sees a virtual patient, they want to apply their nursing skills to these characters and as a scientist, I always find that very fascinating and like you said, there’s so many more markets and areas that could use this practice. Communication skills and we’re learning a lot from the nursing market so we can apply that to other places.

Richard Miles: 23:48

So we’ll know Shadow Health is truly successful when they do a poll and they find out that a disproportionate number of nurses are Florida Gator fans, sneaking in the subliminal messages.

Dr. Ben Lok: 23:59

All right!

Richard Miles: 23:59

Ben, thanks very much for joining me. Fascinating discussion and hope to have you back on the show at some point.

Dr. Ben Lok: 24:03

All right. Thank you so much.

Outro: 24:06

Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Columns 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.

How do you measure the performance of people whose achievements are hard to measure? Building on the work of Harold Fethe, Jeff Lyons founded MindSolve, a company that developed a technology which made employee evaluations more accurate and more reliable. The company did well and was sold, and Jeff made the challenging transition from founder to employee. A self-described “nerd,” Jeff as a kid used to secretly reprogram Tandy computers at the Radio Shack in the Jacksonville mall. He said “not a lot of planning was involved” in his career, “it was more “just being open to stuff and people who say, ‘come solve this problem for me."