The Inventivity Pod

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

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro (00:01): 

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

James Di Virgilio (00:39): 

Innovation. Does it follow a specific path? Is it spontaneous? Is it something that we can plan for ahead of time? My guest today is Gary Miller, the co founder, and executive VP of research and development at Exactech. Gary, you’ve done so many things in your career. Your first let’s call official, right? Patented innovation was called the cemented hip. Yes? 

Gary Miller (01:05): 

No. 

James Di Virgilio (01:06): 

Not your first? 

Gary Miller (01:07): 

No, no. That was years later, but it did involve cement. My first invention, I was actually, by that time on the faculty, in the college of medicine, I was a researcher there as an engineer working in orthopedics and at the time, and still today, they have a very active bone tumor group. It’s really one of the foundational elements of that department. And we treated a lot of folks with metastatic disease. And when you have tumors in your bone, it’s very, very painful. And one of the things that we were trying to figure out is how to reduce the pain. And it turns out if you could reinforce that bone, it didn’t hurt as much. And my first invention was taking a metal rod, which was used for trauma or fractures and perforating the sides of that rod and using it as a long cannula to inject cement through. And that’s cement. So very liquidy viscous kind of material that hardens inside the body and leave the rod with the cement there, take the nozzle off and remove it. And that was the first foray for me into seeking an invention. I hadn’t even thought about patenting it and somebody suggested that’s a good idea. Why don’t you think about patenting it? And that led to that first patent for me. 

James Di Virgilio (02:21): 

Now, patents are often talked about, but are also very confusing. Did you find that to be true? The first patent you had to apply for like, what’s it like, how long does this take, what am I even patenting? 

Gary Miller (02:31): 

Absolutely. That patent world, the words, the phrases all mean something. And I think for an inventor, you know what the picture of it looks like, but in the patent world, it’s about the written claims. In fact, the pictures don’t matter. So that was very much new for me in my career. I was new in what I was doing and had that the good news was the university had patent attorneys on call that helped us do all that. And I really enjoyed that of the engineering and the law and continue to spend a lot of time to this day. I still do a lot of that kind of work because it’s a lot of fun to do. It can be very disappointing for the creative person. Oh, this is great. Nobody could have ever thought about that. Again. It used to be hard to find out whether it had ever been done because it was before the internet. Now in seconds you can find out by searching the internet and the US patent and trademark office, all the international offices now have online services. You can do basically a Google search. There’s Google patent is actually one of their products and get right into it very quickly. And you’ll find out well, half a dozen people have variations on this theme. And then if you do really want to pursue that patent, you’ve got to figure out what is in fact, new and inventive that somebody that skilled in the art of what you’re doing, wouldn’t have thought of it. And there’s an obviousness test that you have to perform. I’m not an attorney, but it’s a lot of fun being there because it really does help. You fine tune what you’re doing. Find out what’s really important about it. 

James Di Virgilio (04:04): 

Imagining that we’re in an operating room and we’ve got a surgeon and we have a patient, and then we have you. And then there’s me as an observer. And you’re watching the surgeon work. You’re seeing a medical device go in, it’s a hip or a knee, or it’s something that’s going to help the patient. You have two people you’re really serving there. You’re serving both the surgeon and the patient. And if it just works for the surgeon, but the patient’s like, Hey doctor, this is really painful. This is not working. I’m not feeling good and the surgeon thinking, but this is wonderful. Like how efficient this is. I can put this right in. It’s not successful. So you have two, and what you’re doing in this example, you have two end users two people that this matters the most to you, and you have to find a solution that works for both. That seems incredibly sensical. However, I think what you said is true. Oftentimes if you look at businesses or service models that don’t work, there’s so many layers between the person creating the solution and the person using the solution that the solution no longer works. How is it that you learn, as you’ve talked about off air to speak the language of the surgeon and the patient to find the proper solution, that’s an art and a science. I feel like. 

Gary Miller (05:08): 

It is. It’s an art and the sciences that takes a long time. And I liked the way you couched it. I don’t know that I was as efficient at it. Then as I like to think, I have become as you as an interview or no there’s good ways and not so good ways of trying to elicit responses, answers from people, being able to be conversant talking their language helps a lot. And I remember very distinctly first years of my career, attending orthopedic conferences, just listening to the surgeons, talking to each other, you build a vocabulary, you build an understanding of what they’re talking about. They use a different lingo than the engineer uses. The most effective teams are an engineer working with a surgeon who has a background or has learned the lingo of the engineer. So when I give out an engineering term, I don’t have to translate it for that person. So we can be talking about a design and a solution. And I’ll say, well, the stresses are going to be too high here. And they know what a stress is. And it doesn’t mean that you’re nervous about something. We’re talking about an engineering principle that resonates with them. So you get rid of the translator in the middle, if you will. So it can be very rapid fire. Most of the inventive work that I’ve done, I’ve always been surprised how, again, a little bit serendipitous, you’ll be working on a problem, working on a problem. All of a sudden this answer pops out for me. It’s usually not a solitary event. You’ll notice on my patents. I may have one or two that are just my invention, but I’ve shared ideas with people. Who’ve shared their ideas with me. And so I’m a co-inventor with folks and that’s the way patents are. That’s the way it should be. That all the people that created that inventive step should be included in the patent application and the eventual patent that efficiency can bubble. And they’re good folks to work with. And that’s so good folks to work with. And you’ll find that some people are very dogged in the solution that they brought to you. So what they’re really looking for is somebody to render their idea. That’s a very different kind of concept for me. I’ve been very lucky in my career that I haven’t been faced with that very often or when faced with it. I’ve usually been able to walk the person back to, I understand you have this answer, but could we talk about the question for a minute? Can we look at what the need is? And either work with me as a helper and translator to work with some of the brilliant minds that I’ve been able to work with. They’re people that design, that’s what they do. Engineering design in specific areas like medical devices. I’ve been really lucky and enjoyed immensely working with those kinds of creative minds. But when we talk to each other about, well, when did you finally figure that out? It’s the old adage? Oh, well I was taking out the garbage or I was in the shower. It’s when you stop thinking about something that you sometimes come up with your most creative ideas, I’d never been good at saying, okay, I’ve got this problem to solve. I’m going to sit down this morning and I’m going to spend the next hour. I blocked out the time to be creative or to be invented for me that doesn’t work. My mind doesn’t work that way. I have a bunch of stuff rumbling around in it. And every once in awhile at births an idea, and sometimes you could go for a long time. It’s the equivalent, I guess, to writer’s block when it just, it’s not there. It’s not there. 

James Di Virgilio (08:34): 

Is there pressure once you’ve innovated and created at a certain level to have to keep creating new things, you get to five, six, seven, eight patents, and it’s sort of like, Hey, Gary’s the guy. He can create stuff. He’s a visionary, he’s a creative. Do you feel that pressure build as you do more and more? Or is it just a thought where, Hey, if I have a good idea, I’m going to do it. And if I don’t, I don’t feel any pressure. 

Gary Miller (08:56): 

Two answers to your question. I don’t judge a person’s creativity or ability to solve unmet needs. I keep going back to that theme because I really believe in it to improve patient outcomes is another way to say it. It doesn’t have to result in a patent. Being the first in the market could be very valuable. Let’s just get it out there. Let’s just do it. If you look at the number of things that I’ve had, the opportunity to work on, the patents, don’t speak for the number of different things that we’ve done on the teams that I’ve worked on over the years, that’s sort of icing on the cake for me. I would be not telling you the truth. If I said that, getting that first one, which I still have, it’s all coffee spilled on it and everything else, but getting that first one and seeing it and seeing your name on it, it’s a validation of your inventiveness, if you will. But for me, it’s really about in the area I work in it’s about improving patient outcomes. There’ve been a lot of ideas that I and my colleagues have come up with that I would call me to, or people will come to you and say, well, three other companies had this, we need this one. We should make it. In some cases, you need to have that full bag. I go kicking and screaming in that direction sometimes. But finding that thing that hasn’t been solved out of that myriad of stuff and be able to come up with an answer to it that advances the art or the science that you’re in is what makes me tick. It’s what I love to do. So it’s a long way of answering your question, but there’s always stuff that I think we can improve. You know, I’ve been in this area of medical devices for over 40 years. Now that I think about it and still working on hips, one of the first implants that I developed, you mentioned it earlier, when I corrected it was a cemented hip and there were a lot of them on the market at the time. And working with an orthopedic surgeon who became my partner, Bill Petty, working together, the idea was, well, there’s all this stuff about cemented hips that work, but they don’t last for the lifetime of a patient. Could you get just one and be done those kinds of things. And we’re still advancing that art. And there are improvements it’s much faster to put them in, the instrumentation has improved, all of those kind of innovations contribute to that improvement in the patient outcome, because we all know it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, the faster and better you can do something with the least amount of insult. In this case to the body, usually the better the outcome is going to be. And thinking back historically, when we used to judge, whether an implant was going to work very well, we thought about the 65 to 70 year old person that weighed 157 pounds. That was the standard that the first Food Drug Administration standards, had, imagine that today we all know people that are in their fifties or sixties that have arthritis that would benefit from a total joint replacement, for whatever reason. Sure. It would be better to get it later in life, but wouldn’t it be great if you then have a solution to that that lasts the patient’s lifetime and they’re in and out of the hospital the same day, it used to be a seven day hospital, stay in a very old population of folks. Now you hear about it and you see it on the news. You see it in your friends and family around a person. Well, I had my surgery one day and I was out the next day or two days later, walking around. Think about those improvements in four decades. Those are the kinds of things that you hear. That that’s what gets me excited. That’s, what’s nice about what we do. And I think there’s still a lot out there to improve and improve the experience for the patients and for the surgeons. It’s a lot of work doing a lot of these cases, standing there all day long and here, again, improving the instrumentation, working with surgeons to do what they think will work best. And time is a measure of that. Used to be years ago, you did two cases or three cases in a day, and now you could do five or six or more. And I say that primarily because you can double the number of patients that you can treat with the same resources for all intents and purposes, which is something that we as baby boomers get out there. We need to be able to do more cases. 

James Di Virgilio (13:14): 

What kind of environment do you need to be able to create and improve the world around you? We’ve talked on previous podcasts that the United States is significantly the leader in medical, technological improvements. It’s not even remotely close. It’s the US way ahead of Germany and everyone else. Why it’s a question that gets asked a lot you’re directly working in it? Why or what is the environment that allows companies like yours brains like yours and the US to innovate at a way higher level than what we see across the world? 

Gary Miller (13:45): 

Well, I think if I knew that that’s the $64,000 question, I don’t know that I have a great answer for you. I think one answer is we want, and in some ways, demand being healthy. And I put healthy in quotes, short on pain threshold, want to be able at age 55 to be able to play singles tennis and all those kinds of things. You don’t want to see yourself degrading if you will, and all those things you want to do. And I always joke if you lived your life backwards, you finally get the time when you can be out there playing and doing whatever and traveling, and you find your body giving out on you before you can do it. But back to your question, I’ve traveled to a lot of places outside the world had been really lucky to be able to lecture and be in those environments around the world. You know, it’s not fair to generalize probably, but you see people that have more deformity, they endure more pain before they get treatment, whether it’s because it’s not available. And it’s a vicious cycle. In some ways in the United States, we apply a lot of resources to creating an environment so that we can solve those problems as you were talking about. But I think that’s one of the answers. I don’t have a perfect answer for you. There are a lot of countries that do have niches though, within what we would now call the medical community, whether it’s drug development, the pharma industry, a lot of that happens outside of the United States, as you know, and a lot of computer assisted kinds of stuff happen in various places around the world as well. One of our divisions is in France that we’re works a lot on our computer assisted surgery happens to be an area in the South of France that does a lot of that kind of stuff. And it breeds itself. You have people that are working together, I think to do it well. It is a team sport and the United States creates a good playing field to use that analogy for engineers to both be trained and to be able to create careers in this area and do well at it. 

James Di Virgilio (15:48): 

Do you have a favorite project that you’ve worked on or creation or innovation, something that sticks out as like that one was really special. 

Gary Miller (15:57): 

You know I really don’t. I talk about that rod that I worked on at the very beginning, that was very, very rewarding for me. Let me twist it a little bit for you. One of the nicest things that I see, one of the most rewarding things for me as an engineer working in medicine is you get that feedback of how you’ve done. It was amazing to me with that first experience as a person that was debilitated on heavy drugs, couldn’t really walk. And it’s an end of life experience. It’s metastatic bone cancer, but their quality of life was really awful because of pain. And after doing the procedure that we had created, the orthopedic surgeons and I at the hospital would get up the next day, even though they had had a surgical procedure and say, Oh, wow, this is great. They were ready to go. Similarly, a person with really bad arthritis. They can’t get in and out of a chair to have to use the arms of a chair. One of the things I always kid around with some people is try getting up from a chair with no use of your hands. You have to have good knees to do that. And your hips have to be functioning really well. One of the nice things that we get to do in biomechanics in the field that I’ve spent my career in is seeing that patient walk out of the hospital or getting up that first day and say, well, I know it hurts because I had surgery, but it doesn’t hurt like it did before my surgery. That’s the measure that we have. There’s other areas of engineering that it’s much harder to get a read on the success of what you’ve done. I think that one of the things I’ve enjoyed so much working in medical devices and working in biomechanics over the years and being in a clinical situation, their research areas are all those things and not to dismiss those that I need as a person, you need the tools and the toolbox to be able to do all the things that we do. We need the materials. We need some of the understanding of design that are done in a laboratory setting. I’ve worked my career in applied biomechanics, if you will, or applied biomaterials where I get to use some of those early inventive steps to create a product or a device, if you will, that goes into a patient or is used to put something in a patient. And it’s been tremendously rewarding for me because as I said, if we can give a surgeon the opportunity to do that extra case, that’s one more patient. That’s gonna not have to endure pain for an extra day. It’s all about that patient outcome thing resonates with me. And I’ve been lucky to be able to spend so many years just being in that sandbox. 

James Di Virgilio (18:29): 

I’m hearing so much passion and excitement and joy for what you do. And I’m wondering after a full career of doing all these things, when you wake up each day, are you just as excited about solving problems today as you were 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago? 

Gary Miller (18:44): 

Yeah. I am. I don’t know if I can get there as fast and do it as quickly, but yes, it’s a terrifically rewarding area to be, and it’s what keeps me going for sure. 

James Di Virgilio (18:55): 

I think that’s true of people in general. You know, my belief and philosophy in life is that we’re here. We’re created to be here. We’re created to attempt to improve the world around us and your energy. As I’m sitting 10 feet away from you is palpable. You can feel the satisfaction and the drive that you have to improve the world around you. And that’s what creativity and innovation does. Let’s bring this down to the listener, whether they’re 15 or they’re 50, and talk about this idea of problem solving, how do you teach somebody to have not the same passion you do? Cause we’re all created differently in that regard, but to maybe view the world that way, Hey, maybe you too can see some problems and begin to think about solving them. Can this be taught? Are you born with this? What is this? Like? 

Gary Miller (19:35): 

Yes. And yes, the folks that are successful, I do think bring that intellectual curiosity with them. They don’t take things for granted about how’s it working, what it’s doing. And so I think that is innate. I think because there are people that are frustrated that they can’t sometimes I wish it was totally teachable because we could use more people inventing, right? If you use my basic thesis of improving life, however, to answer your question more specifically, very structured ways of looking at things that if you learn those techniques, that you can be better at it. I’ve been asked this by students before when I lecture. And one of the things I love to do is mentor at this stage. If somebody is willing to listen to you about your experiences and how you solved it, you end up transferring both the passion and the technique. So yours is a very good question. There’s structured ways of doing it and being creative there’s skills that you can learn. You look at a solution and say, what happens if you turn it upside down? What happens if it’s backwards? They’re ways of brainstorming is a catch phrase that some people use where you put every which way, think you could do it down on paper without judging whether it would work or not. And then manipulating those images of what you thought about. It works really good in a group setting that people throw stuff out on the table, if you will, and you’re not allowed to critique whether it would work or not. The whole idea is to generate the most ideas. So there are techniques. There have been a lot of books written about it. There have been a lot of books written about a lot of things. And how many books have been written about how to become a millionaire? How many people read the book and become a millionaire? I think the same applies here. I have been impressed though that the tools have gotten more powerful for us. I remember 40 years ago, it was a drafting table and a pencil and scale and compass and drawing stuff. And if you wanted to make four sizes, you had to make four different drawings and you sat there with your slide rule and or a tablet of paper and added all the numbers up fast forward to today. When there’s three D rendering of computer assisted design, and you can look at it on the screen and you can make it larger and smaller and you can take four pieces like their fourth five pieces in a given joint replacement, put them all together, see how they move together. Those are incredibly powerful tools. And then you decide, well, I want the smallest one to be this size and I want the largest one to be this size. And then you can do the scaling if you will. And the system, the computer helps you. I have to tell you, I have yet to be able to be good at computer assisted design, but I work with people that are just, they blow your mind away. You’ll say something about this idea you have, and they’ll walk in and say, how about looking at this on my tablet used to be a desk size computer. Now it’s on a tablet if you will. So we’ve gotten really good and powerful tools. Testing has matured dramatically. We can’t use the person as the experiment here, and you’ve gotta be able to do a lot of simulation testing. A lot of those kinds of things, which were very hard to do in the past now because of the computing power we have, we’re able to make simulators that run an implant for 50 million, 20 million to look for the endurance. How’s it behaving all those kinds of things. And you can do a lot of things simultaneously. So between CAD simulation and all those things, it’s a far cry from what it was many years ago, when you had to build a prototype and try to test it in some way in a laboratory. And then honestly, in those days, once we thought we had it pretty close, we’d start using it. And it would be used in patients that needed it the most so that the risk reward was there. Now we can do a lot more and we can do it much more quickly. We talked about earlier about the length of time that it takes to do a design when everything works well, 18 months is not out of the question sometimes because of the regulatory overhead that we have. It takes longer than that. But in years past, it could take five years, seven, eight years, and then you weren’t anywhere near as sure about what the outcome was going to be. As I think we are now, they’re less small steps, 

James Di Virgilio (24:01): 

Words of wisdom. So here you are decades of experience. I want you to imagine going back in time and having a conversation with your 20 something self, what are two things you would tell yourself back then? Here’s what I want you to anchor to. As you go forward and you have this career doing all these things, remember these two things, 

Gary Miller (24:20): 

Be sure to listen and to watch what’s going on. That would be number one for me. And number two would be, I know you’re going to be asked to learn a lot of things that you don’t think you’re going to need to learn. And all I can tell you is I’ve used almost everything that I was taught, except for super higher math. I’ve never liked partial differential equations, and I’ve never had to use them, but I’d mentioned the tools in the toolbox to you earlier. I would tell a person earlier in their career, learn as much as you can keep learning it, keep learning new things, because you’ll never know when you might need to use it. And I could cite examples over and over again of things. I never thought I would be in business. That engineering economics class looked like a waste of time to me. And it’s helped me those on the finance side that say, I still don’t know how to read a balance sheet. What can I tell you, James? But at least I know what I don’t know. And sometimes you need to know what you don’t know. 

James Di Virgilio (25:22): 

There’s a lot of wisdom there, especially if you look at being a lifelong learner, having no idea where your life will take you. And then as you mentioned, maybe one of the most important things that I hope listeners pull from. This is what we’ve talked about. Indirectly sometimes directly about this concept of communication language, if you will, and if you’ve traveled at all, you can relate to what it’s like to drop yourself. I went to Asia many years back and you drop in the middle of China or Japan, and no one speaks a word of your language and you don’t speak a word of their language and you both could be brilliant people. And you’re reduced to hand signals, right? And as you mentioned, you want to go from hand signals to fluency in whatever language you have, and you have no idea what language is you’ll pick up throughout your time, whether yours is a mixture of engineering and finance and classes you’ve taken or life experiences you have and how they will cross over down the road. That’s very wise. 

Gary Miller (26:13): 

Yeah. I have examples of that in my own life and career. What I love to tell traveling in Spain, I speak minimal Spanish. And at the time I spoke absolutely no Spanish and went to dinner with one of those creative orthopedic surgeons like I was telling you about. And both of us were so frustrated trying to speak through the one person at the table who spoke English and Spanish. And after about 10 minutes, we both had our pens out and you’re going to laugh at me, but we kept moving the glasses and the plates out of the way. And we started drawing on the tablecloth. And so the visual became our medium for communication. And you were teasing me about cemented hips there earlier. We went through his idea of a hip design on that tablecloth and two napkins, as I recall, and we got to the end and we understood what each of us was trying to say. And it came to a pretty nice solution in design that we were able to move forward on. The only embarrassing thing was in this very nice restaurant in Spain, we had to have them take the tablecloth and the napkins off the table and wrap them up and give them to us because it was before cell phones and the only way to transport all this work we had done for two and a half hours at a classic Spanish dinner was to take the table with us. So it’s a fond memory. Obviously for me, I bet a wonderful group of people all over the world. And it comes down yes to hand signals and drawing, drawing. The visual is really without language usually. 

James Di Virgilio (27:45): 

And that’s one of the greatest things about doing this podcast, talking with you today is that it’s people, it’s people like you. If you’re listening and it’s people like Gary, it’s people that have ideas and get together with other people that have ideas and those ideas become a reality, right? The things you’ve created, those were humans, creating the ideas and putting them into play. It wasn’t some magical process. It didn’t happen on its own. What you’ve learned what’s in your brain is valuable. Working with others valuable. One of my favorite economic examples is Milton Friedman. You can find this on the internet does like a two minute video on the pencil, the humble pencil, but the pencil comes from so many different places all over the world, which is what allows it to be so cheap nowadays. Right? But at one point in time, it wasn’t so cheap, even just getting led was difficult. And we’ve talked a lot about a lot of these things today. I always find it very encouraging when we’re talking to someone who’s created as many things as you have to hear that it really does come back to what do you know, what do other people know? How can you get together, work together, find solutions to problems that exist. It’s been absolutely great to have you. My guest today, Gary Miller, the co founder of Exactech, also a man of many other things. We can’t just label you as that. And also on the board for the Cade Museum. I would remiss, if I didn’t say that. So thank you for all of your support and also for your time today, we certainly loved having you on Radio Cade. 

Gary Miller (28:55): 

Well, thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure. 

James Di Virgilio (28:58): 

For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio. 

Outro (29:01): 

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

When Carolyn Yarina, today’s guest, walked into her university’s Center for Entrepreneurship one day as an undergraduate, she was convinced that she would never become an entrepreneur herself. “I remember tapping my foot, being impatient,” she recalls, laughing, “I couldn’t wait to get out of there, thinking that entrepreneurship wasn’t for me.” Fast forward to a few years later, and she is now the co-founder and CEO of Sisu Global, a company that is committed to providing medical technology which enables healthcare for each person in their own community. 

In this episode, host Richard Miles sits down with Yarina to learn more about Sisu Global and more specifically, Hemafuse, the company’s handheld, mechanical device for intraoperative autotransfusions, designed to replace or augment donor blood in emergency situations.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro (00:01): 

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

James Di Virgilio (00:39): 

Innovation. Does it follow a specific path? Is it spontaneous? Is it something that we can plan for ahead of time? My guest today is Gary Miller, the co founder, and executive VP of research and development at Exactech. Gary, you’ve done so many things in your career. Your first let’s call official, right? Patented innovation was called the cemented hip. Yes? 

Gary Miller (01:05): 

No. 

James Di Virgilio (01:06): 

Not your first? 

Gary Miller (01:07): 

No, no. That was years later, but it did involve cement. My first invention, I was actually, by that time on the faculty, in the college of medicine, I was a researcher there as an engineer working in orthopedics and at the time, and still today, they have a very active bone tumor group. It’s really one of the foundational elements of that department. And we treated a lot of folks with metastatic disease. And when you have tumors in your bone, it’s very, very painful. And one of the things that we were trying to figure out is how to reduce the pain. And it turns out if you could reinforce that bone, it didn’t hurt as much. And my first invention was taking a metal rod, which was used for trauma or fractures and perforating the sides of that rod and using it as a long cannula to inject cement through. And that’s cement. So very liquidy viscous kind of material that hardens inside the body and leave the rod with the cement there, take the nozzle off and remove it. And that was the first foray for me into seeking an invention. I hadn’t even thought about patenting it and somebody suggested that’s a good idea. Why don’t you think about patenting it? And that led to that first patent for me. 

James Di Virgilio (02:21): 

Now, patents are often talked about, but are also very confusing. Did you find that to be true? The first patent you had to apply for like, what’s it like, how long does this take, what am I even patenting? 

Gary Miller (02:31): 

Absolutely. That patent world, the words, the phrases all mean something. And I think for an inventor, you know what the picture of it looks like, but in the patent world, it’s about the written claims. In fact, the pictures don’t matter. So that was very much new for me in my career. I was new in what I was doing and had that the good news was the university had patent attorneys on call that helped us do all that. And I really enjoyed that of the engineering and the law and continue to spend a lot of time to this day. I still do a lot of that kind of work because it’s a lot of fun to do. It can be very disappointing for the creative person. Oh, this is great. Nobody could have ever thought about that. Again. It used to be hard to find out whether it had ever been done because it was before the internet. Now in seconds you can find out by searching the internet and the US patent and trademark office, all the international offices now have online services. You can do basically a Google search. There’s Google patent is actually one of their products and get right into it very quickly. And you’ll find out well, half a dozen people have variations on this theme. And then if you do really want to pursue that patent, you’ve got to figure out what is in fact, new and inventive that somebody that skilled in the art of what you’re doing, wouldn’t have thought of it. And there’s an obviousness test that you have to perform. I’m not an attorney, but it’s a lot of fun being there because it really does help. You fine tune what you’re doing. Find out what’s really important about it. 

James Di Virgilio (04:04): 

Imagining that we’re in an operating room and we’ve got a surgeon and we have a patient, and then we have you. And then there’s me as an observer. And you’re watching the surgeon work. You’re seeing a medical device go in, it’s a hip or a knee, or it’s something that’s going to help the patient. You have two people you’re really serving there. You’re serving both the surgeon and the patient. And if it just works for the surgeon, but the patient’s like, Hey doctor, this is really painful. This is not working. I’m not feeling good and the surgeon thinking, but this is wonderful. Like how efficient this is. I can put this right in. It’s not successful. So you have two, and what you’re doing in this example, you have two end users two people that this matters the most to you, and you have to find a solution that works for both. That seems incredibly sensical. However, I think what you said is true. Oftentimes if you look at businesses or service models that don’t work, there’s so many layers between the person creating the solution and the person using the solution that the solution no longer works. How is it that you learn, as you’ve talked about off air to speak the language of the surgeon and the patient to find the proper solution, that’s an art and a science. I feel like. 

Gary Miller (05:08): 

It is. It’s an art and the sciences that takes a long time. And I liked the way you couched it. I don’t know that I was as efficient at it. Then as I like to think, I have become as you as an interview or no there’s good ways and not so good ways of trying to elicit responses, answers from people, being able to be conversant talking their language helps a lot. And I remember very distinctly first years of my career, attending orthopedic conferences, just listening to the surgeons, talking to each other, you build a vocabulary, you build an understanding of what they’re talking about. They use a different lingo than the engineer uses. The most effective teams are an engineer working with a surgeon who has a background or has learned the lingo of the engineer. So when I give out an engineering term, I don’t have to translate it for that person. So we can be talking about a design and a solution. And I’ll say, well, the stresses are going to be too high here. And they know what a stress is. And it doesn’t mean that you’re nervous about something. We’re talking about an engineering principle that resonates with them. So you get rid of the translator in the middle, if you will. So it can be very rapid fire. Most of the inventive work that I’ve done, I’ve always been surprised how, again, a little bit serendipitous, you’ll be working on a problem, working on a problem. All of a sudden this answer pops out for me. It’s usually not a solitary event. You’ll notice on my patents. I may have one or two that are just my invention, but I’ve shared ideas with people. Who’ve shared their ideas with me. And so I’m a co-inventor with folks and that’s the way patents are. That’s the way it should be. That all the people that created that inventive step should be included in the patent application and the eventual patent that efficiency can bubble. And they’re good folks to work with. And that’s so good folks to work with. And you’ll find that some people are very dogged in the solution that they brought to you. So what they’re really looking for is somebody to render their idea. That’s a very different kind of concept for me. I’ve been very lucky in my career that I haven’t been faced with that very often or when faced with it. I’ve usually been able to walk the person back to, I understand you have this answer, but could we talk about the question for a minute? Can we look at what the need is? And either work with me as a helper and translator to work with some of the brilliant minds that I’ve been able to work with. They’re people that design, that’s what they do. Engineering design in specific areas like medical devices. I’ve been really lucky and enjoyed immensely working with those kinds of creative minds. But when we talk to each other about, well, when did you finally figure that out? It’s the old adage? Oh, well I was taking out the garbage or I was in the shower. It’s when you stop thinking about something that you sometimes come up with your most creative ideas, I’d never been good at saying, okay, I’ve got this problem to solve. I’m going to sit down this morning and I’m going to spend the next hour. I blocked out the time to be creative or to be invented for me that doesn’t work. My mind doesn’t work that way. I have a bunch of stuff rumbling around in it. And every once in awhile at births an idea, and sometimes you could go for a long time. It’s the equivalent, I guess, to writer’s block when it just, it’s not there. It’s not there. 

James Di Virgilio (08:34): 

Is there pressure once you’ve innovated and created at a certain level to have to keep creating new things, you get to five, six, seven, eight patents, and it’s sort of like, Hey, Gary’s the guy. He can create stuff. He’s a visionary, he’s a creative. Do you feel that pressure build as you do more and more? Or is it just a thought where, Hey, if I have a good idea, I’m going to do it. And if I don’t, I don’t feel any pressure. 

Gary Miller (08:56): 

Two answers to your question. I don’t judge a person’s creativity or ability to solve unmet needs. I keep going back to that theme because I really believe in it to improve patient outcomes is another way to say it. It doesn’t have to result in a patent. Being the first in the market could be very valuable. Let’s just get it out there. Let’s just do it. If you look at the number of things that I’ve had, the opportunity to work on, the patents, don’t speak for the number of different things that we’ve done on the teams that I’ve worked on over the years, that’s sort of icing on the cake for me. I would be not telling you the truth. If I said that, getting that first one, which I still have, it’s all coffee spilled on it and everything else, but getting that first one and seeing it and seeing your name on it, it’s a validation of your inventiveness, if you will. But for me, it’s really about in the area I work in it’s about improving patient outcomes. There’ve been a lot of ideas that I and my colleagues have come up with that I would call me to, or people will come to you and say, well, three other companies had this, we need this one. We should make it. In some cases, you need to have that full bag. I go kicking and screaming in that direction sometimes. But finding that thing that hasn’t been solved out of that myriad of stuff and be able to come up with an answer to it that advances the art or the science that you’re in is what makes me tick. It’s what I love to do. So it’s a long way of answering your question, but there’s always stuff that I think we can improve. You know, I’ve been in this area of medical devices for over 40 years. Now that I think about it and still working on hips, one of the first implants that I developed, you mentioned it earlier, when I corrected it was a cemented hip and there were a lot of them on the market at the time. And working with an orthopedic surgeon who became my partner, Bill Petty, working together, the idea was, well, there’s all this stuff about cemented hips that work, but they don’t last for the lifetime of a patient. Could you get just one and be done those kinds of things. And we’re still advancing that art. And there are improvements it’s much faster to put them in, the instrumentation has improved, all of those kind of innovations contribute to that improvement in the patient outcome, because we all know it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, the faster and better you can do something with the least amount of insult. In this case to the body, usually the better the outcome is going to be. And thinking back historically, when we used to judge, whether an implant was going to work very well, we thought about the 65 to 70 year old person that weighed 157 pounds. That was the standard that the first Food Drug Administration standards, had, imagine that today we all know people that are in their fifties or sixties that have arthritis that would benefit from a total joint replacement, for whatever reason. Sure. It would be better to get it later in life, but wouldn’t it be great if you then have a solution to that that lasts the patient’s lifetime and they’re in and out of the hospital the same day, it used to be a seven day hospital, stay in a very old population of folks. Now you hear about it and you see it on the news. You see it in your friends and family around a person. Well, I had my surgery one day and I was out the next day or two days later, walking around. Think about those improvements in four decades. Those are the kinds of things that you hear. That that’s what gets me excited. That’s, what’s nice about what we do. And I think there’s still a lot out there to improve and improve the experience for the patients and for the surgeons. It’s a lot of work doing a lot of these cases, standing there all day long and here, again, improving the instrumentation, working with surgeons to do what they think will work best. And time is a measure of that. Used to be years ago, you did two cases or three cases in a day, and now you could do five or six or more. And I say that primarily because you can double the number of patients that you can treat with the same resources for all intents and purposes, which is something that we as baby boomers get out there. We need to be able to do more cases. 

James Di Virgilio (13:14): 

What kind of environment do you need to be able to create and improve the world around you? We’ve talked on previous podcasts that the United States is significantly the leader in medical, technological improvements. It’s not even remotely close. It’s the US way ahead of Germany and everyone else. Why it’s a question that gets asked a lot you’re directly working in it? Why or what is the environment that allows companies like yours brains like yours and the US to innovate at a way higher level than what we see across the world? 

Gary Miller (13:45): 

Well, I think if I knew that that’s the $64,000 question, I don’t know that I have a great answer for you. I think one answer is we want, and in some ways, demand being healthy. And I put healthy in quotes, short on pain threshold, want to be able at age 55 to be able to play singles tennis and all those kinds of things. You don’t want to see yourself degrading if you will, and all those things you want to do. And I always joke if you lived your life backwards, you finally get the time when you can be out there playing and doing whatever and traveling, and you find your body giving out on you before you can do it. But back to your question, I’ve traveled to a lot of places outside the world had been really lucky to be able to lecture and be in those environments around the world. You know, it’s not fair to generalize probably, but you see people that have more deformity, they endure more pain before they get treatment, whether it’s because it’s not available. And it’s a vicious cycle. In some ways in the United States, we apply a lot of resources to creating an environment so that we can solve those problems as you were talking about. But I think that’s one of the answers. I don’t have a perfect answer for you. There are a lot of countries that do have niches though, within what we would now call the medical community, whether it’s drug development, the pharma industry, a lot of that happens outside of the United States, as you know, and a lot of computer assisted kinds of stuff happen in various places around the world as well. One of our divisions is in France that we’re works a lot on our computer assisted surgery happens to be an area in the South of France that does a lot of that kind of stuff. And it breeds itself. You have people that are working together, I think to do it well. It is a team sport and the United States creates a good playing field to use that analogy for engineers to both be trained and to be able to create careers in this area and do well at it. 

James Di Virgilio (15:48): 

Do you have a favorite project that you’ve worked on or creation or innovation, something that sticks out as like that one was really special. 

Gary Miller (15:57): 

You know I really don’t. I talk about that rod that I worked on at the very beginning, that was very, very rewarding for me. Let me twist it a little bit for you. One of the nicest things that I see, one of the most rewarding things for me as an engineer working in medicine is you get that feedback of how you’ve done. It was amazing to me with that first experience as a person that was debilitated on heavy drugs, couldn’t really walk. And it’s an end of life experience. It’s metastatic bone cancer, but their quality of life was really awful because of pain. And after doing the procedure that we had created, the orthopedic surgeons and I at the hospital would get up the next day, even though they had had a surgical procedure and say, Oh, wow, this is great. They were ready to go. Similarly, a person with really bad arthritis. They can’t get in and out of a chair to have to use the arms of a chair. One of the things I always kid around with some people is try getting up from a chair with no use of your hands. You have to have good knees to do that. And your hips have to be functioning really well. One of the nice things that we get to do in biomechanics in the field that I’ve spent my career in is seeing that patient walk out of the hospital or getting up that first day and say, well, I know it hurts because I had surgery, but it doesn’t hurt like it did before my surgery. That’s the measure that we have. There’s other areas of engineering that it’s much harder to get a read on the success of what you’ve done. I think that one of the things I’ve enjoyed so much working in medical devices and working in biomechanics over the years and being in a clinical situation, their research areas are all those things and not to dismiss those that I need as a person, you need the tools and the toolbox to be able to do all the things that we do. We need the materials. We need some of the understanding of design that are done in a laboratory setting. I’ve worked my career in applied biomechanics, if you will, or applied biomaterials where I get to use some of those early inventive steps to create a product or a device, if you will, that goes into a patient or is used to put something in a patient. And it’s been tremendously rewarding for me because as I said, if we can give a surgeon the opportunity to do that extra case, that’s one more patient. That’s gonna not have to endure pain for an extra day. It’s all about that patient outcome thing resonates with me. And I’ve been lucky to be able to spend so many years just being in that sandbox. 

James Di Virgilio (18:29): 

I’m hearing so much passion and excitement and joy for what you do. And I’m wondering after a full career of doing all these things, when you wake up each day, are you just as excited about solving problems today as you were 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago? 

Gary Miller (18:44): 

Yeah. I am. I don’t know if I can get there as fast and do it as quickly, but yes, it’s a terrifically rewarding area to be, and it’s what keeps me going for sure. 

James Di Virgilio (18:55): 

I think that’s true of people in general. You know, my belief and philosophy in life is that we’re here. We’re created to be here. We’re created to attempt to improve the world around us and your energy. As I’m sitting 10 feet away from you is palpable. You can feel the satisfaction and the drive that you have to improve the world around you. And that’s what creativity and innovation does. Let’s bring this down to the listener, whether they’re 15 or they’re 50, and talk about this idea of problem solving, how do you teach somebody to have not the same passion you do? Cause we’re all created differently in that regard, but to maybe view the world that way, Hey, maybe you too can see some problems and begin to think about solving them. Can this be taught? Are you born with this? What is this? Like? 

Gary Miller (19:35): 

Yes. And yes, the folks that are successful, I do think bring that intellectual curiosity with them. They don’t take things for granted about how’s it working, what it’s doing. And so I think that is innate. I think because there are people that are frustrated that they can’t sometimes I wish it was totally teachable because we could use more people inventing, right? If you use my basic thesis of improving life, however, to answer your question more specifically, very structured ways of looking at things that if you learn those techniques, that you can be better at it. I’ve been asked this by students before when I lecture. And one of the things I love to do is mentor at this stage. If somebody is willing to listen to you about your experiences and how you solved it, you end up transferring both the passion and the technique. So yours is a very good question. There’s structured ways of doing it and being creative there’s skills that you can learn. You look at a solution and say, what happens if you turn it upside down? What happens if it’s backwards? They’re ways of brainstorming is a catch phrase that some people use where you put every which way, think you could do it down on paper without judging whether it would work or not. And then manipulating those images of what you thought about. It works really good in a group setting that people throw stuff out on the table, if you will, and you’re not allowed to critique whether it would work or not. The whole idea is to generate the most ideas. So there are techniques. There have been a lot of books written about it. There have been a lot of books written about a lot of things. And how many books have been written about how to become a millionaire? How many people read the book and become a millionaire? I think the same applies here. I have been impressed though that the tools have gotten more powerful for us. I remember 40 years ago, it was a drafting table and a pencil and scale and compass and drawing stuff. And if you wanted to make four sizes, you had to make four different drawings and you sat there with your slide rule and or a tablet of paper and added all the numbers up fast forward to today. When there’s three D rendering of computer assisted design, and you can look at it on the screen and you can make it larger and smaller and you can take four pieces like their fourth five pieces in a given joint replacement, put them all together, see how they move together. Those are incredibly powerful tools. And then you decide, well, I want the smallest one to be this size and I want the largest one to be this size. And then you can do the scaling if you will. And the system, the computer helps you. I have to tell you, I have yet to be able to be good at computer assisted design, but I work with people that are just, they blow your mind away. You’ll say something about this idea you have, and they’ll walk in and say, how about looking at this on my tablet used to be a desk size computer. Now it’s on a tablet if you will. So we’ve gotten really good and powerful tools. Testing has matured dramatically. We can’t use the person as the experiment here, and you’ve gotta be able to do a lot of simulation testing. A lot of those kinds of things, which were very hard to do in the past now because of the computing power we have, we’re able to make simulators that run an implant for 50 million, 20 million to look for the endurance. How’s it behaving all those kinds of things. And you can do a lot of things simultaneously. So between CAD simulation and all those things, it’s a far cry from what it was many years ago, when you had to build a prototype and try to test it in some way in a laboratory. And then honestly, in those days, once we thought we had it pretty close, we’d start using it. And it would be used in patients that needed it the most so that the risk reward was there. Now we can do a lot more and we can do it much more quickly. We talked about earlier about the length of time that it takes to do a design when everything works well, 18 months is not out of the question sometimes because of the regulatory overhead that we have. It takes longer than that. But in years past, it could take five years, seven, eight years, and then you weren’t anywhere near as sure about what the outcome was going to be. As I think we are now, they’re less small steps, 

James Di Virgilio (24:01): 

Words of wisdom. So here you are decades of experience. I want you to imagine going back in time and having a conversation with your 20 something self, what are two things you would tell yourself back then? Here’s what I want you to anchor to. As you go forward and you have this career doing all these things, remember these two things, 

Gary Miller (24:20): 

Be sure to listen and to watch what’s going on. That would be number one for me. And number two would be, I know you’re going to be asked to learn a lot of things that you don’t think you’re going to need to learn. And all I can tell you is I’ve used almost everything that I was taught, except for super higher math. I’ve never liked partial differential equations, and I’ve never had to use them, but I’d mentioned the tools in the toolbox to you earlier. I would tell a person earlier in their career, learn as much as you can keep learning it, keep learning new things, because you’ll never know when you might need to use it. And I could cite examples over and over again of things. I never thought I would be in business. That engineering economics class looked like a waste of time to me. And it’s helped me those on the finance side that say, I still don’t know how to read a balance sheet. What can I tell you, James? But at least I know what I don’t know. And sometimes you need to know what you don’t know. 

James Di Virgilio (25:22): 

There’s a lot of wisdom there, especially if you look at being a lifelong learner, having no idea where your life will take you. And then as you mentioned, maybe one of the most important things that I hope listeners pull from. This is what we’ve talked about. Indirectly sometimes directly about this concept of communication language, if you will, and if you’ve traveled at all, you can relate to what it’s like to drop yourself. I went to Asia many years back and you drop in the middle of China or Japan, and no one speaks a word of your language and you don’t speak a word of their language and you both could be brilliant people. And you’re reduced to hand signals, right? And as you mentioned, you want to go from hand signals to fluency in whatever language you have, and you have no idea what language is you’ll pick up throughout your time, whether yours is a mixture of engineering and finance and classes you’ve taken or life experiences you have and how they will cross over down the road. That’s very wise. 

Gary Miller (26:13): 

Yeah. I have examples of that in my own life and career. What I love to tell traveling in Spain, I speak minimal Spanish. And at the time I spoke absolutely no Spanish and went to dinner with one of those creative orthopedic surgeons like I was telling you about. And both of us were so frustrated trying to speak through the one person at the table who spoke English and Spanish. And after about 10 minutes, we both had our pens out and you’re going to laugh at me, but we kept moving the glasses and the plates out of the way. And we started drawing on the tablecloth. And so the visual became our medium for communication. And you were teasing me about cemented hips there earlier. We went through his idea of a hip design on that tablecloth and two napkins, as I recall, and we got to the end and we understood what each of us was trying to say. And it came to a pretty nice solution in design that we were able to move forward on. The only embarrassing thing was in this very nice restaurant in Spain, we had to have them take the tablecloth and the napkins off the table and wrap them up and give them to us because it was before cell phones and the only way to transport all this work we had done for two and a half hours at a classic Spanish dinner was to take the table with us. So it’s a fond memory. Obviously for me, I bet a wonderful group of people all over the world. And it comes down yes to hand signals and drawing, drawing. The visual is really without language usually. 

James Di Virgilio (27:45): 

And that’s one of the greatest things about doing this podcast, talking with you today is that it’s people, it’s people like you. If you’re listening and it’s people like Gary, it’s people that have ideas and get together with other people that have ideas and those ideas become a reality, right? The things you’ve created, those were humans, creating the ideas and putting them into play. It wasn’t some magical process. It didn’t happen on its own. What you’ve learned what’s in your brain is valuable. Working with others valuable. One of my favorite economic examples is Milton Friedman. You can find this on the internet does like a two minute video on the pencil, the humble pencil, but the pencil comes from so many different places all over the world, which is what allows it to be so cheap nowadays. Right? But at one point in time, it wasn’t so cheap, even just getting led was difficult. And we’ve talked a lot about a lot of these things today. I always find it very encouraging when we’re talking to someone who’s created as many things as you have to hear that it really does come back to what do you know, what do other people know? How can you get together, work together, find solutions to problems that exist. It’s been absolutely great to have you. My guest today, Gary Miller, the co founder of Exactech, also a man of many other things. We can’t just label you as that. And also on the board for the Cade Museum. I would remiss, if I didn’t say that. So thank you for all of your support and also for your time today, we certainly loved having you on Radio Cade. 

Gary Miller (28:55): 

Well, thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure. 

James Di Virgilio (28:58): 

For Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio. 

Outro (29:01): 

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

The fight for a cure to Parkinson’s Disease has been a decades-long battle, with several treatments evolving alongside the evolution of medicine as a practice. In this episode, host Richard Miles sits down with Dr. Michael Okun, the Chair of Neurology, and Professor and Executive Director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at the University of Florida College of Medicine.  He is an expert on deep brain stimulation, and author of over 400 peer reviewed articles as well as the book Parkinson’s Treatment: 10 Secrets to a Happier Life.  

Here, Dr. Okun dispels myths surrounding Parkinson’s, talks about his research and clinical work, and discusses his involvement with several non-profits raising awareness on other conditions and diseases.  “Every day that I practice medicine, I know less,” says Dr. Okun.  “It’s a profession where you have to have a lot of humility. You have to have an open mind and things change over time.” 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro (00:01):

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. Parkinson’s Disease. What do we know about it? Why does it seem to be more common and how do we treat it? Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host Richard Miles today. I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Michael Okun the Chair of Neurology and Professor and Executive Director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Dr. Okun’s also an expert on deep brain stimulation and author of over 400 peer-reviewed articles, as well as the book “Parkinson’s Treatment: 10 Secrets to a Happier Life.” Welcome to Radio Cade, Dr. Okun.

Dr. Michael Okun (01:11):

My pleasure to be here, Richard.

Richard Miles (01:12):

So before we start, I have to mention you’re also a poet and that caught my eye mostly because I find myself in middle age becoming very interested in poetry, but only as a reader, not an actual poet. So I have to start, is this something you’ve always done or is it because being a brain doctor wasn’t challenging enough for you? What got you into poetry?

Dr. Michael Okun (01:28):

My original bent was in humanities, and I have a degree in history. And so, I love to write, and I love to try to express myself in different ways. I love poetry, because there’s a new precision towards, and I think that through poetry, you can express concepts using emotions and other modalities to reach your readers. And so, over the years I’ve done a number of poems, and I have an old book called “Lessons From the Bedside” and have done some writings in said time as well.

Richard Miles (02:01):

I love that analogy too, to the work that you do. Cause one of the things I have noticed in my very limited foray into studying poetry is precisely what you said, that the precision of the use of certain words versus not other words. And that reveals a lot of the thinking and so on. And I imagine studying medicine, there is some similarities there.

Dr. Michael Okun (02:18):

That’s right, and really keeping an open mind. And I am also a neurologist by training. And so I practice medicine and I say often that every day that I practice medicine, I know less. It’s a profession where you have to have a lot of humility. You have to have an open mind and things change over time. And we’re really like cabinet advisors to people. We’re here to help with the best information that we can, but we really shouldn’t be so prescriptive, and so sure of ourselves. And I think anybody, whether you’re an inventor, you’re a scientist, you’re a clinician or all of the above, will look back and say what I did five years ago, versus what I’m doing now, is different. And it might seem subtle because you lived it, but if you think in those terms, that’s, I think what I would term as wisdom and you realize that practice of medicine and the understanding of diseases evolves and that there’s not one solution for everyone.

Richard Miles (03:15):

That’s a great way of looking at it. And that really helps, I think, for what we’re about to talk about now, and that is you have developed, or you’re known as really one of the world’s experts on a technique to treat Parkinson’s. But before we get into the details of what that is and how it works, I’d like to talk more broadly about Parkinson’s itself, which is a disease that most people probably have heard of or know somebody with Parkinson’s, but they may not know exactly how it works and what are some of the underlying causes. And I noticed that a few years ago, you wrote a paper called “The Emerging Evidence of the Parkinson Pandemic,” which caught my eye, obviously because we’re in the midst of another pandemic. And so pandemics in general, I think are of higher interest to everyone. But in that paper, you said that neurological disorders are now the leading source of disability globally, and the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world is Parkinson’s disease. And you said that from 1990 to 2015, so about a quarter century time period, the number of people with Parkinson’s disease doubled to over 6 million. And finally your quote, “for most of human history, Parkinson has been a rare disorder, but various factors have now created” what you call Parkinson’s pandemic. There’s a lot there, but why don’t we start by briefly describing for listeners who are maybe not exactly sure how Parkinson’s differs from other types of neurological diseases. Define it for us. And then why don’t we spend some time talking about those various factors that have caused it apparently to go from a rare condition to pandemic-level proportions.

Dr. Michael Okun (04:40):

So first Parkinson’s Disease, it’s a neurological syndrome, and it comes with symptoms that people can readily detect. Oftentimes when you’re in a crowd, you see somebody might be shaking, they might be shuffling their feet, their handwriting might be small when they’re at the bank, and they may be struggling with some of these, what we call motor features and also what we call non-motor features. So it’s a brain disease that affect depression, anxiety, and quality of life. And it turns out that Parkinson’s Disease is not just a disease of dopamine. And so a lot of people believe that you lose dopamine in the brain and you get Parkinson’s, it’s actually degeneration of multiple circuits. I’ve spent my career studying the circuits and Parkinson and in other diseases. And when we think of Parkinson, I remember when I was at the White House in 2015, I was quoted as saying, “Parkinson is,” and I’m not the first person that said this and won’t be the last, “the most complex medical disorder period,” because there’s over 20 motor features and non-motor features. So tremor, stiffness, slowness, (and not everybody gets tremors and not everybody gets stiff necessarily, it could be different varieties) in depression, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, other issues too. And then you throw in dopamine replacement therapies, you throw in deep brain stimulation ,what you mentioned, and it’s something that we’ve been researching now for a few decades here at University of Florida with one of my partners, Kelly Foote, and Mendez and many other people in the laboratory. And so Parkinson’s Disease is a neurological disorder. It is rapidly expanding. And about eight years ago in the book, 10 Secrets to a Happier Life, in the prologue, I said: “Parkinson has all the same characteristics of a pandemic.” And that was very controversial at the time. That’s eight years ago. And our most recent book that just came out from Hatchette publishing, “Ending Parkinson’s Disease,” it was originally titled the Parkinson’s pandemic. The publisher changed the title, and they wished they could have that back because it came out in March, 2020. So, “pan” means “all” in Greek, “demos” means “people.” And when you apply the concepts of a pandemic, they can apply to other diseases. Although, I was just on a call with the World Health Organization last week, and I think it’s fair to keep the term pandemic reserved for infectious diseases. Although people should know that the rapid expansion, the geography, the people not being immune to it, it all applies to other diseases like Parkinson’s.

Richard Miles (07:06):

So tell us, what are some of the factors that researchers have uncovered, or maybe that you hypothesized are at work here that are causing it to grow, I’m guessing, dramatically on a per capita basis? Are there geographic differences, for instance, in range between different countries or different demographic groups? What is going on here, and what do you think is behind it?

Dr. Michael Okun (07:25):

So we just had a conference with our colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland at the World Health Organization that have taken this on. And there’s a working group of us from all different countries, from rich countries, from poor countries, from countries somewhere in the middle…Parkinson occurs in all of the above. Now, one of the myths of Parkinson is that it’s all due to aging. And so as you get older, you get a higher prevalence of Parkinson and that’s true. Now, many people might be surprised when I tell you in our waiting room, I see people in their teens, and twenties and thirties with Parkinson’s, and it becomes more of a common as you get older, but it doesn’t mean it can’t occur in young people, as well as people–I don’t say old people–I say more seasoned people. And it turns out that age, it’s a myth. Age is not the only thing that’s driving this increase. There is going to be a doubling of Parkinson between 1990 and 2015. That’s already happened. It’s going to double again from 2015 to 2040 and could collapse healthcare systems, cause lots of suffering if we don’t get out in front of it. And so there are other factors that are driving this. And one of the ones that we talked about in the latest book is about pesticides and chemicals and environmental factors, and how those factors and the industrialization of society and how that’s changed the game.

Richard Miles (08:47):

That’s fascinating. So let’s move on to, what are some of the treatments that are available? You mentioned deep brain stimulation that you and Dr. Foote and others have been working on for a couple of decades. What led you to that I guess, and tell us how it works and what sort of improvements that you see?

Dr. Michael Okun (09:02):

Back in the 1930s and 40s, there weren’t treatments for Parkinson’s and for other diseases of movement. Some of the early attempts were actually making holes in people’s minds and disrupting these abnormal conversations. So if we think of the brain as a group of islands and the islands are all talking to each other, if you disrupt the conversation, people discovered that this is a potential way to treat specific symptoms, depending on which circuit you disrupt that conversation. And as time evolved, we were able to modulate conversations by using medicines. And the first major medicine was introduced by George Cotzias in the 1960s, and that was dopamine replacement therapy. And that actually modulates, it changes the way the brain’s oscillations are moving, and everybody, whether you’re awake or you’re asleep, your brain is always oscillating. And when you have a disease, particularly in neurological disease, that oscillates in different ways. So surgeries came back; when we have better technology to get to very specific sub millimeter zones of the brain, we started burning out pieces of the brain and that’s what I did during my training. And then as we moved along, we began to understand how the different areas were talking to each other, and we develop what’s called neuromodulation, so sticking straws in, introducing electricity into those circuits, I’m trying to change the way that they would talk to each other. And so my mentor and one of Kelly Foote’s mentors who I work with is a man named Mahlon DeLong at Emory University. He’s retired now, but a tremendous human being, and he was the one that really spent years and years at the National Institute of Health, and then at Hopkins, and at Emory decoding what the circuits are. And in 2015, he received the Lasker Award, which is one of the highest awards in medicine, just under the Nobel, for this work.

Richard Miles (10:50):

Doctor, now that this is becoming more common and will become more common, walk us through what happens when, let’s say someone’s parent they’re 60, 65, 70 years old, they’re brought in to a doctor like you or a clinic somewhere, and they’re diagnosed with Parkinson’s. What are some of the first steps of treatment? And coming back to deep brain stimulation, is this a one and done type of treatment, or is this a continuous regimen of treatments over time? And then what does the outcome look like for, say, someone in their mid-fifties or early sixties?

Dr. Michael Okun (11:20):

So when we think about Parkinson’s Disease, the first thing we think about is when somebody comes in, we need to understand when you say those words, “you have Parkinson’s Disease,” it’s not the end of the world. Okay? There are a lot of different forms of Parkinson’s Disease. And I have folks in my practice I’ve taken care of for 20, 30, 40 years. Okay? So it’s important for us to dispel that myth. And as we dispel the myth and begin to deliver treatment, we recently wrote in the Lancer last week, a seminar on Parkinson’s Disease, 20 page-seminars, get your coffee if you want to read it. But we talk about, in that seminar, there’s a picture of when we started here at University of Florida, we had this concept of model for caring for the Parkinson person. And we said, the person’s the sun, and we should all orbit around the person and the family, because this is such a complex condition. And there are so many, you know, specialists; you need an archeologist, a neurosurgeon, neuropsychologist, PT, OT, and speech, or maybe you need a nutritionist, access to clinical trials… We have over a hundred clinical trials, it becomes confusing. And so, we need to integrate the care, and if we integrate the care into what we call a multidisciplinary team, we’ve learned that it isn’t just–I call myself the drug dealer as a neurologist. It isn’t just the drug dealer or the device dealer, where we take people to the operating room and put a device in that provides the best possible care. It’s this model of interdisciplinary care, and it continuously changes over time, and you have to actually listen to the people, so it’s a different specialty, and to actually listen to the clues that they give you on how they’re living in order to change timing and change doses. There’s over a dozen different medications, there’s all sorts of infusions, there’s deep brain stimulation. And I like to teach, and we have fellows here who, after they’re done with their neurology residency, spend two years with us to train in this, and we’ve trained about 70 of these were all over the world. And what I like to tell people is Parkinson is like a lifetime disease. Think of all these different therapies, and you need to understand how the disease evolves and when is the right window to apply each one. So deep brain stimulation isn’t for everyone at all times, but there are points in the treatment where it can provide extremely beneficial effects on things like just suppressing tremor or movements we call dyskinesia. And so knowing the disease and knowing the person, and then creating the right multidisciplinary plan is important. And the last point is, we wrote something for the Journal of the American Medical Association last year with Melissa Armstrong here at UF. And we, as experts said, a first-line therapy now is exercise. We now recognize that exercise is so beneficial for this disease, that it’s now considered a first-line therapy, right along with the medications. And so that should tell you something about the humility of treating this disease for so many years and us understanding what’s good for folks and what’s not.

Richard Miles (14:18):

If we compare this to a disease like cancer, is Parkinson’s something that could actually be put into remission, or is this a steadily degenerative disease? All the treatments are just slowing down or resting that trajectory, but essentially it’s going down, or can you stabilize somebody for a decade, for instance, with no decline? How does that compare to something like cancer?

Dr. Michael Okun (14:37):

Parkinson’s is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Now there are multiple what we call phenotypes. So we have what some people call benign Parkinson, because it progresses so slowly. And then there are other forms that progress faster. We’re just beginning–it’s like Genesis of the Bible–we’re just the in first couple of days in understanding actually the differences between some of these entities, but it is progressive. Now people might say, well, tell me, how did Pope John Paul get anointed as a Saint, right? Didn’t he cure a nun of Parkinson disease, and that’s how he achieved sainthood. Well, we’d like to leave that story alone because it turns out that many people who are presumed to have Parkinson’s disease do not. And so if you get better then you may not have Parkinson’s, and then there’s a group of people who have tremors and other symptoms that look like Parkinson’s. About 10%, about one in 10, very early on, when you first see them, then never progress. And a lot of times people don’t go back and realize, wait, this person’s not progressing at all — hey actually don’t have Parkinson, they have something else that’s more benign. And we realized that, and we gave this crazy name to that called scans without evidence of dopaminergic denervation. I would never call a person a sweat, that’s what it stands for. But, if you’re not progressing, you may not have Parkinson’s. And sometimes early on the diagnosis can be made in the wrong direction as well. And so it’s very important, but when you do have Parkinson right now, it’s progressive. Now we are searching for things that will slow the disease down and, or provide precision medicine or other treatments for it, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

Richard Miles (16:15):

So let me come back to something you just said about perhaps a faulty diagnosis. It sounds like the ideal treatment or regimen of treatment is this interdisciplinary approach, which you’ve got multiple people looking at it and working on it from different angles for a patient, but I’m guessing that that level of complexity of care is not available to everyone. Do you have to be next to, say a major research hospital, like University of Florida, or some major metropolitan area to get that kind of care? And if you’re not, and you’re in a rural area or in a very poor country, for instance, what is the outlook for somebody in their mid-sixties?

Dr. Michael Okun (16:44):

So in general, if you can get access to one of these multidisciplinary teams, it’s better. We know from Medicare data done by Allison Willis, who is at the University of Pennsylvania, that if you have access to even a neurologist, and most people don’t actually see a neurologist, if you have access to a neurologist, your morbidity and mortality, your nursing home placement, all of those things that are super important, those numbers get better. Just having access. If you have access to multidisciplinary care, the data is beginning to point that this is also better. There are centers of excellence that have been set up through foundations, ike I work as a medical advisor and former medical director for the Parkinson Foundation. We have 47 centers all over the globe, but these aren’t widely available to people. What we do at the University of Florida is we see people from all over the world, we always have, and we try to construct plans for them, so these plans can be carried out by people within local zip codes, whether your local zip code is in Australia or Asia, or you have flown in to be seen, you know, from there where we set the plans, and then we ask the therapists to follow them out. Beause a lot of therapists and other members of a multidisciplinary team, they may be giving you the wrong therapy. And sometimes the wrong therapy, Richard, is worse than no therapy in a disease like this. And so setting the right plans, communicating and creating public health value is important. And one of the three things, we just had a campaign it’s still ongoing called the Give a Dime for Parkinson’s Disease campaign, and our first goal was to get to 10,000 red cards to the White House. We’ve now reached 25,000. One of the three points, while we asked for three things– because if you ask for too many people get distracted–we’re asking the White House and congressional members to consider as one of the three things is to maintain telehealth access for people in the United States. That didn’t happen before COVID-19, and many people don’t realize that that’s not permanent. That has to be made permanent, and then we have to develop these types of interdisciplinary models, so that people who don’t have access or don’t live right next door can still get access and the right advice, and then put the right team together, so they can have the best outcomes. The best outcomes mean less falls, less fractures, billions of dollars in healthcare savings, happier people. And so I think it’s in everybody’s best interest, particularly as the disease has exploded.

Richard Miles (19:06):

And Dr. Okun, In addition to your research and your clinical work, I know you are involved in at least several nonprofits that I know of, probably more. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing in those areas, like Tyler’s Hope and so on, and what has been the response as you’re trying to raise awareness on some of these conditions or diseases that are not as well known.

Dr. Michael Okun (19:23):

Yeah. So I think when you look at other diseases and what they’ve done to change the trajectory, the story of polio, the story of HIV, and in HIV, it took what we call four pillars to do that. So you have to develop a system with any of these nonprofits for any of these really important diseases that are going to affect society. P is for prevent, A is for advocate, C is for care, and T is for developing new treatments through research. We call it the PACT. So when we went and we researched, we said, what do you need to do? So we need to get all of our non-for-profits together and we need to organize and sum our voices, and reach that inflection point where we can become loud enough. We can advocate with enough force to actually push change. And that’s what happened in HIV. For example, they went from a few hundred million in funding to 3 billion, a year in funding. And now HIV, when I was an intern, my first year out of medical school, 25 years ago, this was a bad word to be on. If you have HIV, it was kind of the death word, and it was really not great. And now, it’s a chronic livable condition, the trajectory has changed for literally tens of thousands, if not more people, worldwide. And there’s a reason why that happened: prevent, advocate, care, and treat them. And advocacy was huge. And so I’m a big believer in non-for-profits and even more than opening the checkbook and writing the check, getting involved. And I’m a believer that when you sum voices together, if you can get to a certain level–and nobody knows exactly what that is, maybe we can ask them out loud while our tipping point lives through these things. But there is a moment where things tip. And so one of the things in Perkinson, for example, we’re trying to tip, one of the three things we’re asking for us increase the funding from 200 million to 2 billion a year, by 10 times, because we know that if you increase it by two times, you’re going to get twice as much research, twice as many young researchers. And so this is going to have a multiplicative effect. When it comes for Tyler’s Hope for just only a cure, here, this is a disease where we know the deletion. We know where it lives. We know quite a bit about it. We have a lot of technology, we just need to, sum our voices, push more money into this, and that’s what Tyler’s Hope is doing, push the advocacy, and we can create a precision medicine treatment. And I think we’re on our way and that disease as well, there’s still a way to go, but the same for Tourette. So I’ve been in the tourette world with a non-for-profit called the Tourette Association of America. So I think the story is the same, but I think part of the formula to reach impact is you have to bring together globally voices. And when we were speaking with World Health Organization, there were representatives from all countries talking about Parkinson and creating that grassroots movement. And we have a grassroots movement called the PD Avengers on Twitter. Now there’s 3000, like really loud, obnoxious people on one of them that are really making a lot of noise. And that’s what we need. We don’t need to be polite anymore. We need to be aggressive and charismatic and a bit obnoxious for these diseases.

Richard Miles (22:26):

I like how you put that and, as a comment, as an aside, I spent a good portion of my career overseas. And one thing that non-Americans are amazed by is the level for nonprofit activity that we have in the United States, directed towards all sorts of things, but in particular medicine or health, and the vibrancy of that sector really is something almost distinctly American. They obviously exist in other countries, but not nearly at the level and scope of what you see all over the place in small towns, big towns, and so on.

Dr. Michael Okun (22:53):

It’s a very special thing. And you’re absolutely right. I’ve done outreach to other countries. And I, I won’t say which country I was in, we actually brought some devices in and probably could have been arrested for doing that. And we were helping the doctors with some devices and some implants. And we were out seeing people all over, who just needed help. And it struck me in that experience, and I’ve seen it in other countries as well, that we helped a woman, and then they invited us to dinner, and we realized that, Oh my God, this woman that we helped is the mother of somebody huge in the country that has these huge business interests all over the country. And we said, why don’t you give a whole bunch of money to Parkinson’s disease? And they said, “give money to Parkinson disease? We don’t give money. This is an American thing.” You know, too, we’re having this discussion. “You all give away your money. We don’t do that. We don’t do charity.” And I thought, wow, it is really something special. And, and then I think they felt a little bit embarrassed. And then they said, well, we do give charity. But the charity we give is we support our sports teams. And so we explained to them, well, that’s not exactly charity. And so I do think that it is a uniquely American thing. It’s one of the things that differentiates us, makes us stronger and gives us the potential to mobilize and galvanize against diseases and other issues that face society.

Richard Miles (24:12):

And it’s also a perfect way to mediate between the individual who alone can’t do much, and the government, which often has a lot of resources, but is not terribly efficient in how it distributes them, so it creates this whole layer between small groups and very large governments. Dr. Okun, one final question or a couple of questions actually. At the Cade Museum, we like to not just tell a story of inventions, but the inventors, and not just the story of technology, but the researchers behind the technology. So tell us a little bit about pre-professional Michael Okun: what were you like as a kid? Did you know, early on you wanted to be a doctor or a researcher? What were some of your early influences?

Dr. Michael Okun (24:48):

Yeah, so I had it pretty good as a kid. I grew up with a good house. I had two parents. My father was a dentist, my mother was teacher. And so I kind of got left brain, right brain. They had very different ways of looking at the world. I was always memorizing things like the backs of baseball cards, statistics, things like that. And my life I’ve always had a joy. I’ve always been a person that’s had pure joy to be part of things. And so for me, a lot of my joy was in reading history and humanities and things like that. And so I saw myself more as a teacher and a teacher of history and even going into medicine for me, I saw myself as a black bag family practice doc. But what happened to me was life as a journey. And it’s like a lot of Chinese philosophers say, Lu Zhen is a famous Chinese philosopher who talks about roads, and there are no roads, and when there are no roads, a road is formed because people walk on that road. And so you walk your journey and you take your opportunities. And sometimes you don’t know exactly what you’re interested in or not interested in. And so even when I ended up saying, I want to go to medical school now and try to help people in underserved communities, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a neurologist and neurosurgeon you know, at that point in my life, and you just keep walking the road, and it turns out I’ve always been fascinated by people with tremors and movements and saying why. And I said, I would never do research. I’m a teacher. I would never do research. And then I realized that the government will give you a whole bunch of money to study things that you’re super passionate about that can help people. And so I was super passionate about figuring out where in the brain ticks came from. And so I’ve spent 20 years working on that problem, and we’ve developed devices, systems and things to try to address that problem, same with Parkinson and tremors and certain movements and funny walks. And so I’ve always been fascinated by that. I think the secret is, you find your passion, you spend as many minutes as you can doing your passion. And if you can get somebody to actually pay you to do it, then that’s the bonus, but the bonus doesn’t always happen. And I think in my life, all of those things have aligned and I have great joy every day that I come to work ,every day that we go to the operating room, Kelly and I, I have great joy. We’re always thinking, we’re always innovating. And we consider our labs a continuous beta test. We’re always writing papers. We’re always thinking about stuff. Now, one thing we’re not for people that are listening to this podcast, we’re not like business entrepreneurs. So we patented a whole bunch of different things: how you do a cap on this, how you do reporting on that, how a device would do this, how one side might turn this side on. And, we get involved with all of these things–vaccines–but our job is we just keep innovating, and then we hand that over to someone else and innovations square and let other people run with it, because our passion and our impact is trying to help as many people as we can. And so there are various different aspects to the creativity process, to the invention and the innovation process. And we have kind of a human laboratory, you know, in the operating room and in the clinics and in seeing people and they tell us what the problems are and we try to innovate for them. And the next steps happen as we try to create that, we try to write it down. Remember I like to write poetry and other things. We try to write it down and tell people what we did, and then the next steps will happen. So there is this beautiful process of innovation that happens, and there are a lot of people that quietly do that in the background like Kelly Foote and groups here that are just quietly doing their jobs, writing down what they’re doing, and then letting other people take it to the next level and commercialize these things and make sure that they get out there to help people. And there’s a great quote, I think it was Jonas Salk who they said, are you going to patent polio vaccine? And he said, well, that would be like patenting the sun. And so we’re all into patents and innovations and everything. But at the end of the day, we have a certain amount of minutes on the planet, and if we can come up with innovations that are going to help and impact people’s lives, I think that’s what most of the people, at least on the medical disease side of innovation, are interested in. And so you asked me what my message would be for kids or young people would just be follow your road, spend as many minutes doing the passion that you can, impact as many lives as you can. Don’t worry about the money. Don’t worry about that. Just worry about how much joy you have in your heart. That’s all you need to do.

Richard Miles (29:14):

That’s a great answer. And whether intentionally or not, you summarized also a good chunk of the origin story of the Cade Museum and Dr. Robert Cade, who invented as you know, Gatorade, because he didn’t have any idea how to take that product to market. He liked to write poetry. He had just a real joy in life for helping others and to his final day, he and his co-inventors, the number one thing they were proudest about, about Gatorade, was the fact that it became the cheapest and most widely available treatment for infant diarrhea in the third world. Wasn’t intended to do that, but that’s what they are really the proudest to have, not that it became a culture or a sports icon. And so it’s nice to hear you say that, but just in different words.

Dr. Michael Okun (29:50):

I think it’s a great story, and one I hope kids are listening to, but so many people will give you advice about your career and everything, and I think they make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Richard Miles (30:01):

You precluded my last question, was what would your career advice be? And you just gave it to me anyway, but it’s great advice and really appreciate having you on the show. You’re doing tremendous work, keep doing it. It’s inspiration on all sorts of different levels and wish you the best of luck.

Dr. Michael Okun (30:13):

It’s my pleasure, and we love the Cade Museum. We talked about being involved in non-for-profits, my wife and I are involved in, and we think it’s just a great thing for not only this community, but for the world. So thanks for all you do.

Outro (30:25):

Thank you. Radio Cade is produced by the Cade museum for creativity and invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie, Tom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood, soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist Jacob Lawson.

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.” *This episode was originally released on August 14, 2019.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro (00:01):

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

Richard Miles (00:38):

I’m going to call HR if you work for any size company, that sentence has the appeal of I’m going to tell your mom, but it turns out HR has a fun, sexy side. I’m your host, Richard Miles and today we will be talking about how much fun it is with Jeff Lyons, founder of a company called MindSolve and currently the Senior Vice President of Global Professional Services at Sum Total, welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Lyons (01:00):

Thanks, Richard. Excited to be here.

Richard Miles (01:02):

So Jeff, when I look up fun and sexy in the dictionary, there’s a picture of you, right?

Jeff Lyons (01:05):

Definitely. And HR as well.

Richard Miles (01:08):

I also forgot to mention actually the pinnacle of your professional career has been serving as a board member on the Cade Museum, right? It’s pretty much downhill from here.

Jeff Lyons (01:16):

Yes, thank you.

Richard Miles (01:17):

And normally we’re talking about topics that are unfamiliar to a lot of people, advanced medical technologies, engineering marvels, that sort of stuff. Today, we’ll be talking about something that actually most people understand pretty well, performance evaluations, training skills management, but let’s talk about first of all, how those things in an organization can be a problem or at least what was the problem you saw in organizational process and what was the solution that you came up with?

Jeff Lyons (01:43):

So the first thing I should say is that the core technology that MindSolve took to market was not something that I came up with or, or that the folks at MindSolve really came up with. It was the brainchild of a guy named Harold Fethy who ran the HR function at a pharmaceutical research firm in Palo Alto. And so what was interesting was the problem, there was a unique, because he’s trying to do performance assessment with a company full of PhDs that are going to argue with any kind of measurement model or metric or calculation you can put in front of them.

Richard Miles (02:12):

What year are we talking about Jeff roughly?

Jeff Lyons (02:14):

This was 95, 96. Um, so sort of just prior to the founding of MindSolve, and so it was an idea that Harold had, and then we help develop the technology and then licensed to take that to market.

Richard Miles (02:25):

So what is the problem in principle that you were trying to solve?

Jeff Lyons (02:29):

So the main problem is how do we evaluate employee performance in a way that’s relevant and in a way that has a lot of quality in the data where you can make solid decisions on it, but in a way that’s also easy. Performance appraisal, as you said, everybody’s familiar with it, universally, everybody hates it. It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re never the popular guy walking into the building when it’s performance, appraisal time. But I think we actually did come up with a way to make it pretty sexy and pretty easy and at Aliza because they had a very high bar for data quality and for a robust measurement metric behind everything that was challenging to do in a way that was fun and easy. And Harold had an idea of doing a visual ranking. And I hope talking with my hands on the podcast that comes through, you could describe this to our listeners, but a way of doing just a very simple drag and drop stack ranking on a screen and took Aliza from a process that had very high data quality and was well-respected, but was miserable and onerous and people would do over the weekend with a case of beer and complain about it to something that people were finishing very quickly on time. Not only felt good about the validity, but it was easy to do, and that helped also make it well received. And so that translated very well to a broader audience, that wasn’t a company full of PhDs. And that’s what helped grow the company.

Richard Miles (03:45):

Instead of a long series of questions, for instance, like, is this employee good at X, Y, and Z, it would be more of a graphical interface or?

Jeff Lyons (03:53):

Exactly. So what else it was coming from was an idea called paired comparison, which has a lot of data validity. And you build up a data model by comparing A to B and then B to C and then C to A, and kind of making these one by one paired comparisons. And so the psychometrics behind that are great, but people are pretty skeptical and it’s a hugely painful exercise. Normal performance appraisal looks at every employee one at a time. And you just do like a one to five ranking on a bunch of questions and people try to make it better by asking more questions. And there’s a lot of counterintuitive stuff. You get better data up until about eight or nine factors or questions after that, your data quality drops way, way off. The more questions you ask because people get tired of it and they just start Christmas treeing. So this was a way, instead of doing each employee one at a time, we would take your whole team, put them on screen and say, let’s talk about communication skill, put your best communicator at the top, worst communicater at the bottom, kind of rank people in there. And then we’ll look at decision making and self management. And we ended up with about five criteria for most employees. And I think we added two or three extra for managers. So it was very simple, very fast, but we did a lot of work to look at the data quality and we ended up with very, very good decision quality coming out of the exercise.

Richard Miles (05:05):

That’s fascinating. I wish they had had that when I was in the federal government, which is probably the worst possible example for performance evaluations. But I remember in the army, they had a problem with the officer evaluations and that there were really only two types of officer evaluations. One, your the next Dwight D. Eisenhower and you should be promoted immediately. And the other one is you’re basically a trader to your country and you should be taken out shot. There’s nothing in between. And then the way the army saw that problem is it sounds like something similar. What they started doing is they started putting, I think they called it a diamond and it was after you’d gone through all this verbiage of how wonderful this person was. You were forced to say, well, this person is among the top 5% of officers I’ve ever commanded and so on. And the second and third tier, but then they would add a reality check and that you could then check what your average was. So you kind of knew that this raider was full of it because he gave everybody top diamond or whatever. It’s something like that. Is this something similar in principle to where you’re sort of forcing an accountability so that you can’t just go on and on about somebody’s qualities without comparing them to something? That that kind of it in principle?

Jeff Lyons (06:10):

You’ve hit on a lot of really, really dense stuff. There’s a lot of psychometrics wrapped up in what you just said. So the first is, yeah, if you evaluate people on a 10 point scale, you might have one person who rates his employees, all eights, nines, and tens, and then you have another person, especially in a room full of PhDs. Who’s just much more critical. Nobody’s perfect. And he rates all his employees five, six, seven, right? So the best guys getting a seven versus the best guy getting a nine. And when you want to make a decision across a broad organization, that’s not really fair. So the first thing that we did was we had to normalize that data. So, you essentially come up with a percentile. So what’s my number one compared to your number one. And we were doing multi-raider assessments. So it wasn’t just a manager evaluation.There were peer evaluations, direct reports would evaluate managers. And so you ended up with a lot of different perspectives about a single person’s performance and backing up for a second. When we took the data, we worked with a couple of really great people on the data model. And one of them, they had the advantage of being in Palo Alto is one of Harold’s close friends is a guy named Brad Ephron who was head of Stanford statistics department at the time, and a MacArthur fellow studying small datasets statistics, which is exactly what we had, right? So we’ve got not classic statistics, but five or six or seven ratings about an individual from a lot of different people. So he worked with us to say first normalize the data average that, and what we found was the absolute rating matters, right? A 3 out of 10 is not as good as a 9 out of 10, but the relative does as well. And what, having multiple people on screen at the same time does use your thinking, not just about what is decision making, but you’re thinking, how does Richard make decisions? And I can benchmark that against how does Jeff make decisions? And it helps me as a evaluator ground, something in reality and make better decisions. And there’s also an element of fairness to it. And then you mentioned kind of this idea that we would call like a forced distribution. Like if everybody fits into a bell curve, you can’t have all tens, you can’t have all ones. Where we ended up after lots of trial and error and back and forth and working with people is that it would be invalid to look at a large group of folks and not make decisions about who you’re starting five are, and who’s going to be cut from the team, right? You’ve got to be able to make those hard decisions in any organization. And it’s difficult because people say, well, we only hire A’s, everybody’s an A, but then you can’t get anything done if you’re not able to make those decisions, but we would not force a ranking. You could tie people, you didn’t necessarily have to fit percentages into those sections of the diamond, but you also couldn’t be flat. And what we would do is provide reports back to show where there wasn’t good differentiation in the ratings and go ask the question and you will get situations where we put our starting five all with this manager. So they’re all going to get high ratings or vice versa, but it was pretty rare. And you could look at the data and at least ask the question of, are we making a good, valid decision?

Richard Miles (08:57):

So you started out trying to solve the problem, or at least make more efficient performance evaluations, but then the company MindSolve that you originally founded, started doing other things, right? Like skills training and other types of management process. Can you describe, or the evolution from going to the performance evaluations to the other function.

Jeff Lyons (09:14):

Yeah, absolutely. What got us into more things was that we licensed that technology back from the company we built it for and started selling it to other companies. And what happens, I think this is true of almost any startup situation is if you go in and you help someone solve problems, they turn out to have a lot of problems and are struggled to solve them. And so they end up giving you more work. So if you look in HR, there’s a bunch of different functions. There’s performance, appraisal, there’s compensation, succession planning, learning, and development. And so you do good work here and they say, well, now we want to push that data into our comp process. For example, we use Excel spreadsheets, it’s miserable. We need to automate it. Can you help us automate that and just tie it right in that was the first sort of adjacent space we went into and then kind of worked our way around the wheel of HR. As customers started asking us to do more stuff. So we really grew in a direction dictated by our customers or requested by our customers.

Richard Miles (10:07):

Is there an optimal size of company that’s sort of like your ideal client for whom this is the most useful? Is it relatively small companies that for them you’re taking a huge burden in terms of HR off of their shoulders, or is this ideal for our company of say a thousand employees or more?

Jeff Lyons (10:24):

I think there’s a better ROI larger. And we used to talk about, if you’ve got 10 employees, you can kind of sit around a table and do this.

Richard Miles (10:31):

And rank them one through 10.

Jeff Lyons (10:32):

Yeah, it’s pretty straight forward, and everybody knows everybody. And the value of automation is greater when there, the data gets so big, you just can’t manage it. Compensation is a great example. People would send Excel spreadsheets out to every manager in the company, pull those back together, copy paste. It was a huge just labor problem. If you only have a few dozen employees, anything about maybe a hundred and fewer, is pretty easy to do, above that it gets very difficult.

Richard Miles (10:58):

And so some guy or gal spend their entire day just trying to figure out what everyone should get paid.

Jeff Lyons (11:02):

Yes. Every case that they’re tested around for everybody versus real time, everybody’s kind of in the same data.

Richard Miles (11:10):

Now, you have had as an entrepreneur being in that field, sort of one of those experiences that is both, I guess, a Mark of success, but also a challenge. And that is a company that you helped found, MindSolve became acquired by another company or sold. And then you became an employee for that company. So you’re making the transition from being the top guy to being a guy who probably has to fix a lot more your own coffee and that sort of stuff, right? So tell us, what’s that like mentally or professionally, how do you make that transition from being the person who started something to being the person who is at work.

Jeff Lyons (11:41):

I feel like I should lay down on a couch for this part of this session, that you’re, there’s a lot of scar tissue, your brain,

Richard Miles (11:47):

I just started my clock. I am billing you for this job.

Jeff Lyons (11:51):

Well, first I’ll correct. You going a bigger organization was nice because then you actually had people who would help with administrative stuff. At a small startup we were making our own coffee, we would draw straws on who got to clean the bathroom. You know, the biggest thing though, was the change in the level of control that you have. That was hard. But I think as we got closer to our acquisition, I was really becoming aware of our limitations, which is a really polished way of saying I had no clue what I was doing. And so we had kind of maxed out what we could do with the organization. We needed more funding. We had bootstrapped the organization, meaning just grown out of revenue. We weren’t burning through a ton of VC money, but we also a couple of guys straight out of college who had no idea about enterprise software. And so we really didn’t know how to sell well. And we had kind of maxed out the organic growth model. So I was actually very excited about talking to people who I thought knew how to run an air quotes, real company. There were definitely a lot of frustrations. Things move so much slower. I was not very politically astute at MindSolve our, our decision making model was yell at each other until somebody gave up and that did not serve me well as part of a bigger organization. And then I came to find out that,

Richard Miles (12:58):

So you’re really a consultant is what you’re telling me. You just tell other people to yell at you. And it sounds like a title of a great book or, you know, yell until you win right?

Jeff Lyons (13:06):

It’s probably a best seller, but it’s not a very good model. I’ve gotten definitely better models since then. But no, I think we definitely learned a lot post acquisition about the corporate world, how to sell to that world. Surprisingly, there were a lot of things we lucked into doing better at MindSolve. Then we’re done at the big publicly traded company that we went into. And we found that after a few years, that company was acquired by a private equity firm who was extremely focused on operational efficiency. And we looked at massive changes to how we approached management. So that was a big learning curve.

Richard Miles (13:39):

One thing that a lot of people talk about is AI, artificial intelligence and it’s going to take everyone’s job, right? Is this a sector loosely described as you, you weren’t consultants, but basically you are helping businesses do their business better, and by making the HR process across the board more efficient, is this something that you could write into a code, right? Where basically you’ve now got an automated way to swart and judge employees and give them training and so on. So is this in any way going to be, or is it already being affected by AI?

Jeff Lyons (14:10):

It is, at some total and it’s Skillsoft we have AI built into our code now and I think it’s an amazing tool. I think it can help you, but I don’t see it really replacing management judgment strategy, things like that. A good example is we use AI to look at, what do I know about you? What do I know about folks who are similar? And we can recommend, for example, developmental training, that’s better for you than if you just did a random search and found 200 courses on management communication. We’ll find the one that’s most relevant to you, almost like an Amazon matching, but there’s limits to that. As you know, you go into Amazon and you’ve bought a bathtub. Amazon thinks you want to buy five more bathtubs in the next week. It makes no sense, right? So there are those kinds limitations.

Richard Miles (14:52):

I stop at three bathtubs. I never buy that forth bathtub.So we’re not at a point where you ask Alexa what the weather is and she says, Jeff you’re fired, right? We’re not there yet right?

Jeff Lyons (15:02):

I don’t think so. And I think there’s cultural hurdles to that as well. People want a human safety net on that stuff. I think the technology can get you closer to a small set of decisions with good data to help you make a decision. But I think unless it’s just sort of a repeatable cookie cutter, kind of a problem, I don’t see AI solving a what’s best for the company.

Richard Miles (15:23):

And it seems to be the consensus on AI is that it will take away some jobs, but it really just helps people do their existing job better because it cuts out some of that mundane data gathering, I guess, or sorting. Right?

Jeff Lyons (15:34):

You know, I think people never ask the question of what new jobs is AI going to create. Right. And people think, Oh, well it’s just coding AI. It’s not that at all. What we saw with our technology is HR is spending 90% of their time on tactical logistical, moving data around not really adding value stuff. And when we can automate that, it frees up their time to do interesting things right? Drive the strategy of the business, which then creates more work and more growth and all of that. We never really downsized HR because we automated part of what they did. We freed up their time to add more value, to do more things.

Richard Miles (16:06):

So Jeff, now we sort of shift to the best part of the show and the one most likely to get subpoenaed in a few years. And that is what were you like as a kid, where you smart, curious, are you just someone whose parents drop them off at the mall as fast as they could, you know? And your a Jacksonville boy as well, so tell us a little bit about growing up in Jacksonville. What were you like? What did you do? That sort of thing?

Jeff Lyons (16:25):

I was a nerd that kind of sums up most of it.

Richard Miles (16:28):

It’s amazing how many Radio Cade guests describe themselves as nerds, it’s gotta be over 90%. So we’re doing something wrong here. I don’t know.

Jeff Lyons (16:33):

You’re definitely hiring to a profile. Look that just cuts out about 20 minutes of description right? Um, I was not at all athletic, I was super uncoordinated. I liked to do a lot of different creative stuff, all the normal nerd things in terms of reading and movies and watching Star Trek and I never really got big into the Star Trek versus Star Wars debate. I was more of, we can like everybody,

Richard Miles (16:58):

We can all get along here, we can.

Jeff Lyons (17:00):

Yeah, exactly, always did well in school to spite myself. I never applied myself at all until I got to college.

Richard Miles (17:07):

So you’re a little bit younger than I am. What was the cutting edge technology when you were say in ninth grade, what was the thing that everyone was talking about? Can you remember, or that you just had to have.

Jeff Lyons (17:17):

This is horrible. What we used to do was go to the Radio Shack in the mall and they would have their Tandy computer sitting out there and you could walk up and immediately just interrupt it and write little basic programs to scroll words at random, across the screen and do stupid stuff like that.

Richard Miles (17:30):

So Radio Shack, Tandy computers, maybe you are as old as I am. You just look, younger.

Jeff Lyons (17:36):

Keyboard built right into the monitor. You know, that kind of thing. I mean, that was just when Atari was coming out and Kaliko Vision and, and television and all that stuff. So that was kind of the hot stuff we wanted with just the home video games. We would spend all our time at the mall, arcade,

Richard Miles (17:52):

Re-programming. Okay. Was there a certain point in your childhood or later in high school where the idea of going into business of some sort of, kind of entrepreneur appealed to you? Or did you think about it? Did you have your own business? Did you know lawn business or whatever in high school, or did that come later?

Jeff Lyons (18:07):

I always worked. I was cutting yards when I was young. I worked through high school at a shoe store. That’s a nice embarrassing podcast we can save for later time. But I was never, I need to go start a business or dream of being an entrepreneur. It was more, I needed money.

Richard Miles (18:22):

So it’s a fine motivator. It works for a lot of people.

Jeff Lyons (18:27):

It went from, you know, wanting to be able to play video games at the mall to wanting to buy beer. There are always staples of life that I needed. No, it was more about that. And I think that’s one thing that served me well, it’s always had a decent work ethic. I was never afraid of working late.

Richard Miles (18:41):

Now you come from a family of engineers. Correct? Your father is a civil engineer. Right? And you have a couple of siblings that are engineers?

Jeff Lyons (18:47):

I have an older brother who yeah designs subdivisions.

Richard Miles (18:51):

Alright. But your degree was in, what? Was it software engineering?

Jeff Lyons (18:55):

No, my degree was in mechanical engineering. So back to your question of wanting to start a business, now, I thought I’d go into engineering and I used that approximately zero days after graduation.

Richard Miles (19:07):

So you graduate your mechanical engineering degree and what did you do?

Jeff Lyons (19:09):

Well, I was working part time for some folks in Gainesville doing software development. That’s what got me into software and then when,

Richard Miles (19:15):

Again, what year are we talking about here?

Jeff Lyons (19:17):

I started working with them in 90 and I graduated in 94.

Richard Miles (19:22):

So software was still kind of in its infancy in terms of,

Jeff Lyons (19:25):

Very much so.Yeah. I mean, we were writing really rudimentary code, but also doing really neat stuff. We doing three dimensional models and walkthroughs of, of hotel ballrooms, really, really neat stuff. And when I graduated, we had been developing some software that we decided to take to market. So that was kind of the first startup pre MindSolve, which was a big failure, but fun. And so I had this offer to come be employee number two, working out of a defunct dentist office in Gainesville. And my other offer was a company that was in the fortune one at the time. And so, uh, those were the two ends of the bell curve. And I said, well, I’ll go give this a shot. And if it doesn’t work out after a year, I can go back to being an engineer. And I did that these little one year, i’ll just give it one more year for quite a while and that led to today, basically. Yeah, so that was the last time I got a job was straight out of college.

Richard Miles (20:17):

Okay. Well, I hope you’ve worked on your resume recently.

Jeff Lyons (20:21):

Yeah. There was not a lot of planning involved or this was not a, this is what I want to do with my life. There was a lot of being open to stuff and working really hard and people going, Hey, come solve this problem for me.

Richard Miles (20:31):

Well, so that’s kind of a nice segue into my next question is asking you your words of wisdom and maybe you don’t have any words of wisdom, Jeff, I don’t know, but most people do or they make it up on the spot, but let’s say you magically encounter that the 22 year old version of Jeff Lyons, probably in the arcade at the video games, what would you say? What would you tell him aside from always wipe off the fingerprints, what would you say to that person?

Jeff Lyons (20:53):

You know, it’s really funny, I’m really of two minds of it because I think I’ve had a really fun life. I think it’s been really rewarding and I’ve liked the journey, but there’s a big part of me saying, don’t do what I did. I mean, we made like every mistake you can make. I was very lucky to have great mentors and advisors early on, right? Even though one of my co-founders, Dan and I were sort of straight out of college. Our third co-founder was a guy who had been an entrepreneur for a long time, was able to give us great advice was a very calming influence on, on a couple idiots, straight out of school. So I did have that, but I still think, just get more advice of people who had done it. There was no real startup community. And in Gainesville, um, as you said, software and the technology,

Richard Miles (21:32):

There wasn’t a startup community until like 2006 or 2007? You waited a long while.

Jeff Lyons (21:35):

This was before the.com boom. I mean, there was no model. And so we were just kinda making it up as we went along and our story is great and it sounds fun and everything until you realize that we had a competitor of similar size that we had better technology, but they knew how to sell things and were connected and invested. Right? And that company later sold to SAP for $4 billion. So I probably would have preferred to run that company. Um, all things being equal so,

Richard Miles (22:05):

Well then you wouldn’t be in a booth with me, it’d be on your private jet somewhere. So lets just be honest here right.

Jeff Lyons (22:10):

So we probably tried to do things too much on a shoe string. I think being well-funded especially now is even more important. So that’s a pretty easy lesson to share is don’t be afraid to give up a little bit of control to people. You’d benefit from them having a little bit of control and who can bring a lot of funding and not suffocate the business.

Richard Miles (22:28):

Well, it’s interesting because you hear a lot from other people saying, give up control, any control at your peril and don’t take any money because they’ll take over and so on. But it’s interesting counterpoint that that may limit a lot of what you can actually do. You don’t have the resources.

Jeff Lyons (22:43):

Yeah. Very much. And I’ve seen the downside of that as well. The other thing I’d say is more on a personal level versus a professional for me coming out of engineering school and just being a very technical oriented type of a person we joked around before about kind of the communication style and the debate style that decisions got made. But in reality, it took me about 10 years to realize that other people have feelings and that most people don’t enjoy vigorous debate as much as I do. And that I think held me back from being an effective leader for a long time. So to somebody who can recognize that handicap in themselves, paying more attention to the people side versus the technical side will serve you very well.

Richard Miles (23:25):

Well, Jeff, my invoice for counseling is already hit probably about a thousand dollars here. So I’m going to have to wrap this up, but Jeff Lyons author of the soon to be written book yell until you get what you want. Jeff, thanks very much for coming on to Radio Cade, wish you all the best in your professional career. And I look forward to having you back on the show.

Jeff Lyons (23:43):

Richard, it was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Richard Miles (23:45):

I’m Richard Miles.

Outro (23:46):

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.

Nina Kraus, a professor of communication sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, has done a lot of research on the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development.  She explains the “musician’s advantage,” which includes better reading skills, and how music training can be a tool to improve the performance of students from low socio-economic backgrounds.  *This episode was originally released on June 10, 2020.*

Intro (00:01): 

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 (00:39): 

The sound of music, not just a movie about seeing Austrians, but also a fertile field of research, specifically the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development. I’m your host Richard Miles. Today my guest is Nina Kraus, a professor of communication, sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago. Welcome to Radio Cade, Nina. 

Nina Kraus (01:02): 

I’m so glad to be here. 

Richard Miles (01:03): 

So Nina, you’re one of those difficult guests that you have done so much, and we could talk a lot, but then this would not be a 30 minute podcast, it would be like a 30 hour podcast, but I have heard you speak before, and I know you were actually quite good about summarizing your research so I know you’re up to the challenge, but I’d like to start out by focusing on one particular area of your work. You’ve done a lot in sound processing and how the brain processes sound, but why don’t we start with some basic definitions for our listeners. So from a scientific perspective or researchers perspective, what is the relationship or the difference, I guess, between music, noise, and language. What’s the relationship between those three things? 

Nina Kraus (01:41): 

What a great starting question. So sound is the common denominator for all the things that you mentioned and sound is a very under-recognized force in our society. It is very, very powerful, and yet we don’t pay very much attention to it because it’s invisible, first of all, like a lot of powerful forces like gravity. So you don’t think about it. And we live in a very visually biased world. And even scientifically there was a National Institute for Vision 13 years before there was one for hearing. And that was the National Institute for Deafness and Communication. We share that with smell and taste, but all of the things that you mentioned, language, and, music, and noise, these are all sounds. And I’m a biologist and I am interested in sound and the brain. And so really the overall umbrella over everything that we study is sound and brain. How do we make sense of sound? How is sound processed in the brain and how does our experience with sound shape how we perceive the world? 

Richard Miles (02:52): 

I saw on one of your papers, you have a specific way or methodology that you can actually look at brain as it is interpreting sound, right? 

Nina Kraus (03:01): 

Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about that. Initially, as a biologist, I came into science studying single neurons, actually, single neurons with scalp electrodes and animal models and one of my first experiments was to play sound to an animal while I was recording the brain’s response, the one cell’s response, to that sound. This was a rabbit, a bunny rabbit, and we taught the rabbit that the sound had a meaning that every time the sound happened, he’d get some food. So the same sound, same neuron, but the neurons response to that sound changed. And so we could see firsthand learning, the biology of learning, and that’s something that I’m deeply interested in. My lab, which we call Brain Volts has been looking at how our experience with sound shapes our nervous system, but I was coming from the specificity of recording from individual cells. And so these are signals. These are tangible signals that you can really define, and that felt good. And so the question was, well, how can we get a way of measuring sound processing in the brain in humans when we can’t go sticking needles into individual cells? You know, there are many ways of recording the brain’s response to sound with scalp electrodes. And of course, as I’m talking to you, now, the nerves in your brain that respond to sound are producing electricity. And so with the scalp electrodes, we can pick up that electricity and that’s been done for a long, long time, but most of the measures that we can obtain from the scalp are rather blunt with respect to what I’m interested in, which is the different ingredients of sound. So sound consists, again let me make a visual object comparison. So with vision, everybody knows that a given object has a shape, a size, a color, a texture, that’s all very obvious, but people don’t realize, first of all, that there is sound and secondly, that sound also consists of ingredients like pitch, how high or low a tambour, a violin and a tuba sound different when they’re playing the same note, that’s tambour. The harmonics that differentiate one speech sound from another. There’s phase that tells us where objects are in space, based on the time of arrival of the sound to your two ears. And there’s a huge timing. So the auditory system is our fastest sense, even though light is faster than sound processing sound happens on the order of microseconds because there’s so much timing information in sound. That’s how sound works, it’s fleeting. And so, what I was interested, what I am interested in is how do we figure out how the brain makes sense of these different ingredients? And we figured out a way of doing this because most of the methods that were available to us in the past, you could just see is the response large, is the response fast to sound, but I want to know how does your brain respond specifically to pitch and timing and tambour and phase all these different ingredients. And so one of the metaphors that I like to use is a mixing board. So if you think about the faders on a mixing board and you think of all the different ingredients and sound, when they are transduced into the signals of the brain, which is electricity, it doesn’t work like a volume knob. People, even musicians, are not good at processing all the sounds like a volume knob. They have specific strengths and weaknesses like the faders on a mixing board and I wanted a biological approach that would be able to look at that, would be very, very precise, and not only be able to tell us well, what is the effect of playing a musical instrument for many years? What is the effect of speaking another language, but not only looking at these group differences, but what about individuals? I mean, my auditory brain is different from your auditory brain, we’re all individuals. And so would it be possible to actually have a physiologic response that reflected these ingredients, A-of-all, and B-of-all would not only reflect what happens with experience in groups of people, but even on an individual basis. And we have really figured this out. So this is a response called the ‘frequency following response’ the FFR, which we have adapted to our use and we are able to use very complex, sounds like speech and music and analyze the responses in a way to see how an individual processes these different ingredients. And we’ve spent a lot of time on the methodology. So we have two tutorials on the frequency following response, which really speaks about these responses in a lot of detail. We have a number of patents on what we’ve discovered in terms of how to measure these responses. So this is really something that has kept us busy. So on the one hand, it was really a quest to search for a biological approach, which I’m really happy with now. And then it is a matter of applying that biological approach. Partly it was synergistic because we wanted to see, well, is this approach actually yielding the kind of information we want through research. And so we’ve done a lot of research and now we can really have confidence that a person’s response to sound really does reflect how their brain processes the different ingredients, how it might’ve been affected by the songs we sing, the languages we speak, and even your brain health, because making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs that we ask our brains to do. So you can imagine that if you get hit in the head, it will disrupt this very, very fine microsecond level processing, which is one of the areas that we’re interested in looking at is, is what happens with head injury, especially with concussion, sports induced concussion. And so again, we can do that as well. 

Richard Miles (08:56): 

So on your website, I think you have this great graphical representation of the frequency following response, right? Where you will play a snippet of almost anything, but let’s say a piece of music and in the brain of the person listening to it, you have almost a mirror image right, of that same frequency. And you can see differences in the ability of the person to process what they’re hearing. And so you found, and again, I may have this wrong, you found that musicians had several advantages in the way that you will play for them something say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a musician will hear it differently than when you say musician, it’s someone who actually plays an instrument, right? Not just a music appreciator, or someone who plays an instrument. Those people process the sound differently than those people who are not trained in playing music. Is that correct? 

Nina Kraus (09:55): 

That’s exactly right. Because what is so beautiful about this biological approach is that the response we get from the brain, the electricity actually physically resembles the sound that was used to evoke it. This hardly ever happens in biological systems. I mean, usually you’re looking at something very abstract, like lipid levels, cholesterol levels, to give you some index of cardiovascular health. Then, to actually be able to say, Oh, well, people process sounds in a way that we can actually see with a certain transparency. So the transparency is, as you said, is such that we play a sound wave and you can see the sound wave and you can then deliver that sound, wave to a person and pick up the electricity that the sound wave generates. And then, you know, we’re all familiar with taking a sound wave and feeding it through a microphone, and then you can play it through a speaker. And then the same way, you can take an electrical response that you have recorded from the brain, it’s just an electrical response, and you can deliver that to a speaker and play it so we can both see and hear a person’s response to sound. And yes, in fact, we can see the people who regularly play an instrument, so I’m not talking about professional musicians. I’m just talking about people who regularly play a musical instrument, you know, as little as half an hour, twice a week on a regular basis. And one of the things that we’ve been able to find is that there really is a neural signature for the musician. So remember I said, that sound consisted of these ingredients like pitch and timing and tambour. And what we see as the musician strength is a strengthening of the harmonics in sound and of various timing ingredients. And it turns out that both the harmonics and the timing are not only important in music, but they also overlap with what you need for language. So you can imagine how if you are doing an activity that is strengthening your brain’s response to the harmonics, which not only are important for playing a musical instrument, the harmonics are what distinguish B’s and P’s, and D’s, and G’s from each other. So these are the same signals. They’re the same ingredients. They’re these beautiful signals outside the head and inside the head that we can see, how does experience shape how we perceive the world. So the musician signature really has a strengthening of harmonics and timing, which it turns out transfers to language abilities and language abilities, including things like reading and being able to hear speech in a noisy place like a classroom, being able to figure out what’s going on in a complex soundscape. So these are advantages that seem to come along with the brains increased stability, strengthened ability to process these particular ingredients of harmonics and timing and what we call FM sweeps, which are basically the simplest FM suites. It’s a change of frequency over time. It’s like a cat call, right? It’s a sweep up and down. And it turns out that speech sounds have very, very, very fast FM sweeps that distinguishes one consonant from another, that happened in a very, very short period of time. And so the brain’s ability to process these FM sweeps is something that we see as a strength in musicians, and is very much an important ingredient in language. 

Richard Miles (13:32): 

I find all of this fascinating Nina. I remember the one example that you gave you tested musician’s ability to, as you said, pick out a particular sound in a crowded room, and you compare that to non-musicians and that the musicians had this definitive ability to recognize a sound pattern and all that. And then of course, different types of syllables or consonant, they also had that ability. The only time I can ever do this, I’m not a musician is if we’re at a party, I can hear Phoebe’s voice in a crowded room, and then she said, well, yes, that’s because research has found that men interpret women’s voices like music. So finally, I have a researcher. You tell me, is that true or not? 

Nina Kraus (14:08): 

Well, I would say that you have had a lot of experience with Phoebe’s voice and so you’re sonic brain is tuned to that voice. And we say this, when, you know, you pick up the phone, your son calls you and you say, “Oh, it’s so good to hear the sound of your voice”, the years of the sound to meaning, sound to emotion connections that you’ve made with that voice even before you hear the particular words, you have this very strong connection to what you’ve learned. And so I think that’s why you can hear Phoebe so well. 

Richard Miles (14:41): 

Let’s talk some more about work that you have done, very interesting work, with something called The Harmony Project in Los Angeles. This is something, I think in 2014 was the research, and essentially you worked with an organization in Los Angeles, it was giving music lessons, I think mostly stringed instruments, right? They’re giving them lessons for a substantial amount of time and then you started tracking them doing assessments to see if there were other advantages, right, that translated not just the ability to play a given instrument, but also the ability to do other cognitive skills. Tell us a little bit more about that. 

Nina Kraus (15:14): 

So, we’re really fortunate as scientists, and also if you read about Brain Volts and what we care about in our lab. We really are interested in sound in the world and we’re less interested in creating an experiment in the lab where people come in and they are given a certain amount of training with sound. We’re really interested in what is the impact of playing a musical instrument in actual music programs that live in the world? Also, one of the questions that one often asks is, well, is it that the brains strengthened response in musicians is just something they were born with so that if you have a strength in a certain domain, you might be encouraged to pursue that activity. A way of, of trying to understand what the effect of experiences is to do a so-called longitudinal study. Let me tell you the long in longitudinal is no joke, because that means tracking the same individuals year after year after year. So, we had the opportunity to do this in Los Angeles in the gang reduction zones of LA. And also we had a companion project at the same time in the Chicago Public Schools, where we basically had the same experimental design, which consisted of you take two groups of people and you match them at the beginning of training, or before training has started, and you match them on age and sex and reading scores and IQ and everything that you can think of, and then one group gets music and another group gets something else and you track them over time. So you track them year after year. And we were able to do this in LA with elementary school kids, second, third, and fourth graders. So we did this over three years and then the project in Chicago was adolescents also in low income areas. We’ve tracked the adolescents from freshman year until they graduated as seniors. And what was important is that the individuals in the different groups were in the same classroom, same teachers, same socioeconomic areas. And we could see, well, what happens if one group gets music and another group gets something else? So what we were able to find was, first of all, we were very interested in, well, we already knew from cross sectional studies across the, about this musician signature that I told you about that musicians had strengthened responses to FM sweeps, to harmonics, to timing in speech. The musicians had these stronger responses, but we wanted to know, well, is this something that develops over time? And in both studies after a year of regular music making in LA, these were after-school programs five times a week. If you also include Saturday and in the Chicago public schools, it was actually within the school day so that they had an hour every day of music, just like you had an hour of English and Math and History. We’d measure sound processing in the brain using our biological approach at the beginning of the year. And then at again at the end of the year, and after a year in both studies, we found no change in the brain’s response to sound. And that’s what the data showed but we kept going. And so in both of the studies, what we found was that it takes a while to change the brain. And that’s a good thing. If your brain was changing in a fundamental way, every second, you’d be really confused, but you speak a certain language that has certain sound ingredients after a while. And it’s really after years of speaking of particular language, your brain automatically changes and changes in a way fundamental or your default experience of the world. I mean, even if you’re asleep and I’m measuring your brain’s response to sound, you will have this heightened response to certain sound ingredients, because it has just become a fundamental way of how you perceive the world. But this takes, while it really did take two years to see these changes. And at the same time, of course, we were interested well, are these kids doing better in school in various ways, in terms of literacy, for example, and being able to hear speech and noise. And in fact, again, we were able to, to track the changes in the brain with these gains in literacy, and in being able to hear, for example, speech in noise, 

Richard Miles (19:52): 

So Nina, it’s fairly common observation that the younger you are the easier it seems to do things like learn languages, foreign language, play instruments, and so on. Is there anything in your research or other people’s research that indicates are there definitive windows of neuroplasticity past which it’s not really worth it or the returns are so diminishing that every 10 hours of effort you put into it is really not going to get you much. Do you find that there’s a cutoff? Does it happen in elementary school or middle school? Or can you go on up through your twenties and still reasonably hope to take up an instrument or learn a foreign language and accomplish a very high degree of proficiency with it. 

Nina Kraus (20:28): 

Great question, the answer is no, there is no limit. Certainly the way that a young brain learns is different from an older brain, but we continue to learn until the day we die. And in fact, there’ve been very beautiful experiments in auditory learning in animal models where you can very easily and in a very precise way, regulate an animal’s experience at different ages and see how their brain responds to learning an auditory task. And there have been experiments showing that certainly animals will learn differently when they’re younger and when they’re older, but they will continue to learn until the end of their lives. And this is born out in human studies as well, specifically with music. So in our own experience, in the harmony project, the kids were elementary school kids, in high school, the kids just began their music instruction as freshmen. So what was kind of a tragedy for these kids? The fact that they really had had no music instruction of any kind before they were freshmen in high school, turned out to be from a scientific standpoint, very important, because we could see that certainly the kids who began their music training as adolescents had the same kinds of brain changes that we saw in the younger kids. Moreover, the number of labs have looked at learning in older people. And even if you’ve never played a musical instrument, your brain can change and you can continue to learn music, to learn new languages. And we have this very, very dynamic system, and I think we should embrace the differences in the way we learn at different ages, because as we’re older, we bring wisdom with us and we bring an understanding of what we’re doing that is very different from the way a child might approach learning, for example, a musical instrument. But the fact is that the benefits of playing a musical instrument, which are profound, really in terms of memory and attention and emotion, sociability, these are gifts from music that you want to experience throughout your life. 

Richard Miles (22:41): 

If we could just stay on that just a little bit more Nina, one of the fascinating things I saw in one of your papers was the connection of musical ability or music training to reading, and that you expected to find obviously, a connection to speaking, cause that’s sort of an auditory sound function, right? But reading, and I didn’t realize the extent to which a solid understanding of how a word sounds, how are phoning sounds is essential to reading a written word. So comment on that, but there’s a second part of my question. Let me put it in right now, what are the other cognitive things that you have found that improve? I mean, is there a link with math, for instance, do you increase math abilities among musicians? Are there any other cognitive things that appear to be improved or beneficial as a result of music training? 

Nina Kraus (23:24): 

So your first question is what does sound have to do with reading? And we learned to speak first and what we need to do when we read is we have to associate the sound of the letters with a symbol on the page. And so, we’ve known from decades of research that kids who have difficulty processing sounds have difficulty reading. So there is a very, very strong connection there. Also there’s a part of speech. When you think of music, you know that there’s rhythm in music, right? Rhythm is a part of music, but you don’t necessarily think about rhythm as being a part of speech. But it is. I mean, think of the difference between the word rebel and rebel. It’s the same word, but I have a different rhythm. And even though the rhythm isn’t as regular, we have tremendous rhythmic ability in speaking. So every Martin Luther King day, my husband and I listened to the, I have a dream speech and listening to Dr. King speak, it has this wonderful rhythm and cadence to it. And if I was saying those same words to you, you’d be looking at your watch, you’d be, when is this going to be over? But so much of the communication is rhythmic. If you want to have fun, do some YouTube searches for rhythm and music. And you’ll find there’s a guy who plays drums along with while people are speaking, it really pulls out what is not so inherently obvious. But after awhile you realize, Oh, this is really rhythmic. So this is another thing that gets strengthened. If you make music, you really make abilities get better. And the reason that we know that this is tied to reading is that again, for decades now, people have demonstrated that kids who have difficulty reading have difficulty with rhythm. Rhythm is one part of what gets strengthened with music. And I would say that it’s the rhythm, and it is the tuning, if you will, of important sound ingredients that together help achieve the gains, which is now the second part of your question, which is why do we care? And well we care because we want to know what to pay attention to. And in order to learn, we have to be able to pay attention to sounds. So, for example, my husband’s a real musician. And one day I was trying to learn a dire straits lead on the guitar and he came by and he said, Nina, if you just listen, you would realize that Mark Knopfler is not using his pick on the string each time. He’s not going to Dee Dee Dee Dee. The reason that he’s playing those notes so fast is because he’s actually pulling off the string with the fingers of his left hand, it’s called a pull off. And it has a very special sound to it, that I was deaf to. But now I know what that sounds like. And so when I hear it again, I have learned what to pay attention to. And it’s kind of automatic like, Oh yeah, I know what this is. And so there are so many associations with sound and our ability to pay attention and to then be able to pay attention to other sounds in the world that might be important, like a teacher’s voice or Phoebe’s voice across the room. So that’s one thing. The other is auditory working memory, in order for you to make sense of what I’m saying right now, you need to remember what I just said. So a typical auditory working memory test language is I’ll give you a list of words and then ask you to repeat back only the words that were names of cars that started with M. And so you think, okay, so what did she say? Which ones are cars, which ones start with M. And this is your auditory working memory that is kind of helping you make sense of what you hear constantly. So it’s very, very important. So on the test like this people who are musicians, someone who regularly plays a musical instrument, by the way, singing counts, then across the lifespan, people who are musicians have stronger auditory working memory skills and stronger attention skills, and any teacher will tell you. And one of the reasons this was interesting to me is that teachers will tell me all the time that the kids who play music are the ones who do better in school. 

Richard Miles (27:33): 

Nina, you alluded to this earlier, you talked about Brain Volts, which is essentially, you’re looking at ways to take this research that you’re doing or the findings, and basically help others in other fields. And if I understand it correctly, you can use this in addition to research, but also as a diagnostic tool, right? If you find somebody and it appears to be their audio processing capabilities off, that may be an indicator of something else, such as a concussion or maybe dementia or something like that. I’m not entirely sure about that. So I’m waiting for you to correct me, but is that what it is? And then how’s it gone in terms of setting up something to try to commercialize the technology. And this is something we talk on this podcast, a lot, a lot of people like you, researchers have something that they know has a value outside of the research arena, and they want to take that technology to market. And it’s very difficult. So it’s kind of hit or miss. And we know for the genesis of this particular podcast, the museum project was Gatorade, a research project with great success, but isn’t a tiny minority of what happens to typical research. So first of all, correct me, or affirm me that I have that description of your business model, correct. And then how’s it going in terms of going to market? 

Nina Kraus (28:43): 

So I think the two areas that we have been focusing on, one is language and literacy. And yes, the idea is to use this biomarker, if you will, as a way to provide additional information about a kid who might be having difficulty in school or is having various problems with language and learning. And the question is, is this coming from the fact that his brain is not processing sounds in a typical way? And to be able to at any age, just deliver sounds and just use some scalp electrodes to get this piece of information is very valuable. And people talk about diagnosis. I wouldn’t say that this would be the only thing that you would look at. Any clinician wants to have an armamentarium of clinical results. You go to your physician and he’s looking at all of your various test results, and hopefully he can put together this constellation of findings and be well-informed. Well, I think at being well-informed, if you have a kid with a learning problem, when a language delay, if it was my kid, I would want to know, is there a bottleneck? Is there a problem here with sound processing? I would also want to know is my kid at risk? So I can envision this as now they have newborn hearing screenings where every child gets a hearing test to make sure that they can actually detect the sounds. I could envision the kind of technology that we’ve developed as being something that would be side by side with that. And you would also be able to see is my child at risk for struggling to learn language or struggling to learn, to read way before he actually begins to struggle in school. Wouldn’t it be great to just know that this is a child who is at risk. And so there are various things that can be done, especially if you are aware of a potential problem early on 

Richard Miles (30:39): 

Nina, just to clarify, going back to your analogy of the sound volume knob versus the mixing board the tests are doing now, essentially just measuring the sound knob, right? Can they hear or not? And your test would give the ability to say, well specifically, are there things going on at the auditory processing level that bear watching or concern? Is that? 

Nina Kraus (30:58): 

Yeah, I mean the typical hearing test now is really, can you hear, there’s a range of pitches that language consists of, and can you hear very, very quiet sounds and your ears ability to hear what I am measuring more is the brain’s ability to understand what you hear. And so the sounds that we deliver, aren’t very quiet, they’re conversational level. So we already know that they can hear their ears are working fine. They’ve passed the hearing test from an ear perspective, but we want to know now, if I’m speaking conversationally, I know that you can hear me, does your brain process these different ingredients properly or not? And what are the strengths and what are the bottlenecks? And we know that there are certain signatures, and this is again, one of the things that we have patents on is that we know that there is a certain signature that’s associated with a language delay and literacy problems. And so you would want to look for that particular signature in a child that you were wondering about in terms of their current or their future language potential. 

Richard Miles (32:02): 

Could you use it to detect mild concussions? For instance, if there is neurological damage and traditional tests, weren’t willing indicating one way or another, is this another tool that you could use to figure out something is wrong here? 

Nina Kraus (32:14): 

Absolutely. Because most concussions, unless you have a cerebral bleed, you’re not going to see them on imaging. You need a very sensitive measure and sound processing. The brain does provide that. It’s also noninvasive. It takes 15 minutes to obtain and we have found again and again, we have papers and patents that describe that we’ve established this effect in youngsters who are elementary and high school aged kids. And right now we have a big study looking at division one athletes or northwestern athletes and NIH study, it’s a five year project. That was won on the strength of the original work that we did describing what is now a different neural signature. It doesn’t look anything like the language signature. There are other ingredients that are especially sensitive to head injury. And we can see this right now. I know that the whole issue of diagnosing concussion is a tricky one. And again, historically, people have been looking at vision. They’ve been looking at balance, but looking at hearing is fairly new. And one of the things that we have done in a couple of our studies is we followed our North Side Football League. These are our kids, and we gave them the vision test, the balance tests and the hearing tests. And you could see that they each tell us different things. So they’re not redundant. So you know how wonderful my vision is for a clinician, a trainer, a coach, position, to be able to look at balance, look at vision, look at hearing, and to have this biological marker that would inform the diagnosis of the injury and also inform return to play, because we know that concussions often occur in the same person shortly after they’ve had a concussion. And so, it might be that with the current measures that we have available, it looks as though the athlete is ready to return to play. But maybe if you had a more sensitive measure and objective measure, because again, the athletes are very motivated to do whatever they can to get back on the field. But if you have an objective measure that doesn’t require any kind of an overt response, wouldn’t it be great to know? Let’s just wait another week. His brain isn’t quite ready, just to wait a week or two. I mean, we see that the changes in the brain change very rapidly, usually as individuals, athletes, recover from their concussions. 

Richard Miles (34:44): 

Nina, I know you have a lab there where you can assess people with that method. Is this something that could be done with a medical device? It could be done in a doctor’s office or even in a trainer’s room? 

Nina Kraus (34:54): 

That’s what we do. When we went out to LA, we did this testing in instrument closets, and wherever we could find a spot, it’s very portable right now. It’s the size of a laptop. 

Richard Miles (35:04): 

Nina, this has been fascinating. And like I said, this could be episode one of a thirty podcast series on just sounds. I could listen to this all day and I’ll go meta for just one second here. We’re actually doing this in the medium of podcasting, right, that has made a huge resurgence as people like to listen now. And I don’t know what that says about humans or our society in general, but it is a throwback to the days of the thirties and forties, right? When people consumed a lot of their entertainment from radio shows. Right? And what I like about it forced a little bit of your imagination, and play, because it’s not laid out for you visually, you’re listening to somebody sound or a sound clip of a particular event. And anyway, I thought I’d throw that in there. We’re talking about sound on a medium that is only sound. 

Nina Kraus (35:44): 

I love that. I love that. And actually I have to say for myself, I do a lot of my reading, listening to audio books. I think we all spend probably too much time looking at screens. And it’s just wonderful to kind of give your eyes a rest and listen. Of course I love radio and podcasts and I consume books that way. Sound is awesome. 

Richard Miles (36:05): 

Nina, thank you very much today for being on Radio Cade, hope to have you back maybe with an update on Brain Volts or your new research. Thank you very much for joining us today. 

Nina Kraus (36:13): 

Thank you for having me take care of Richard. Bye. 

Outro (36:18): 

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

Is Bitcoin a store of value during a financial crisis? What role does it play in a portfolio? Scott Melker, a successful trader and one of the leading voices of Cryptos discusses the origins of bitcoin, its uses, and what the future may look like. *This episode was originally released on March 25, 2020.*

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro (00:01):

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

James Di Virgilio (00:38):

Today, we are joined by Scott Melker. He is a leading voice in cryptocurrency. He’s a trader he’s an advisor. He formerly was a DJ and at times like these discussing cryptocurrency is more than just whether or not Bitcoin is an investment. It’s actually an indictment on where we are as a society, monetarily, fiscally. What does all of this mean? Scott, welcome to the program. It’s great to have you.

Scott Melker (01:04):

Thank you so much for having me. I’m truly honored.

James Di Virgilio (01:06):

Now, Scott, I know your background really for the first 15, 20 years of your career was as a DJ. In fact, you gained a significant amount of fame doing that. Then at some point in time, you got into dealing with the cryptos. Tell us about that transition and how that happened.

Scott Melker (01:20):

As you said, it was about two decades of DJ and music with a million other projects. On the side, I was always superficially interested in trading and investing. My parents gave me a pretty good base and understanding of money and finances and how to save. But as a trader, I was pretty much an amateur and actually pretty terrible at it, especially riding through the recession of 2008 and all of those things. But as I began to feel like I was aging out of music, I’m in my forties. Now I was deejaying to kids that were twenty, just became very awkward. I started to look for other things, but at the time when, if you were trading anything, crypto became just absolutely huge. You couldn’t stop hearing about it. It was at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 and so I put a little money into it. I started trading it and just by virtue of being in the right place at the right time, it quickly became something that could sustain and become a career. So I sort of fell into it to some degree. And then interestingly, at the same time, my daughter who’s now five was born and alongside, already feeling like I was too old for a music production and deejaying having her really took me off the road and put me back in front of my screens to trading. So she was born and I had to go to South by Southwest to play a concert literally the next day and going away and having that feeling. I knew that that was just not going to be my future path. And so I decided to pack it in and focus on trading crypto.

James Di Virgilio (02:39):

Now learning is a large part of this podcast. We’ve had chances to talk to so many different innovators, entrepreneurs, creativity, leaders, you jumped into a field that was entirely different from what you did, how difficult was it to learn the concepts behind how to trade, how to trade correctly, how not to lose your money, how to invest. And then how did you learn? What was your primary tool for learning?

Scott Melker (03:02):

Like I said, I’ve had a level of base knowledge. I at least understood the basics of technical analysis and charts and had a bit of an understanding of chart patterns and things like that. And I think I also had a generally good understanding of how to balance a portfolio, not trade with all your money and basically just be responsible as a whole. But to some degree it was a trial by fire. Like I think it was for anyone else. Trading crypto is very different than trading stocks or any other assets. It is primarily technical being that almost everyone is using charts as opposed to fundamentals. There’s no PNL or quarterly earnings report for Bitcoin. There’s no CEO to call and see what your expectations are for the next year. So you’re really trading based on charts, which is effectively just trying to guess, where are the big players in the market are likely to inflict the most pain on retail traders, where they’re likely to sell and where they’re likely to buy and try to be on their team. So that’s something you can do by gaging sentiment and looking at a chart. But as I said, it was somewhat of a trial by fire. Luckily I found a friend who became a mentor who is an exceptional trader for over 20 years. His name’s Christopher Inks of Texas West Capitol and to some degree I forced myself under his wing. And when 2017, I really learned even more by multiples of what I knew before. And at that time, I really think I honed it in and became a pretty exceptional trader.

James Di Virgilio (04:22):

So as a voice for crypto, as someone who’s living this and breathing this every day, we’re going through a financial crisis right now, due to coronavirus. There’s a lot of thought that something like Bitcoin or maybe another coin, but cryptos in general could serve as the antithesis of what we see with central banks around the world here in the US we’re printing trillions of dollars to bail out the country. And obviously the idea for something like Bitcoin is if you can have a stable currency that maintains its value, you’re not going to have a Fiat currency, right. A currency that can be manipulated by a government that can be inflated. That can be cheapened. Do you see that as a narrative for Bitcoin in the long run? Or is that an idea that was nice and novel, but not reality?

Scott Melker (05:06):

Uh, honestly, it’s a bit of both. So I think that the notion that people would rush to Bitcoin when they’re losing their money in a risk off environment is somewhat absurd. Never in history have people when they’re losing their money in the market, run into something that’s perceived as riskier, they run to cash, right? And so at presence, even though a dollar is inflationary, it’s behaving somewhat deflationary in that the entire world is trying to rush into dollars. So I don’t know if you’ve seen lately, but for example, recently against the Australian dollar, the dollar rose 20% in value in a matter of hours. So right now people want dollars. And so I don’t think that notion is correct at the moment, but when you look at Bitcoin as a whole, it’s not a hedge against your portfolio dropping what it is a hedge against is that inflationary environment of Fiat because Bitcoin itself is deflationary. So I think there’s a differentiation between what the given price of Bitcoin is at any moment and what its actual true value is to look at a society like Venezuela country, like Venezuela, where they have hyperinflation a suitcase of money. It doesn’t even buy you a loaf of bread. There are people who, regardless of what the price is on Coinbase or an American crypto exchange, are there are people who are surviving strictly because they’re mining or trading or transacting in Bitcoin. So it has real life use cases in a lot of countries and a lot of the situations around the world, but that’s just never been seen on a macro level. So I don’t believe it’s a store of value like gold or something like that. I’ve never really subscribed to the digital gold or store value narrative. But I do think that in certain environments, when it really goes somewhat madmax on the planet, unfortunately, which could be a future that we’re somewhat headed towards. I think that it has tremendous value. So I believe that everyone should have at least minimal exposure to Bitcoin, just in case of the worst case scenario. Not because they believe that next week it’ll necessarily be priced higher or lower.

James Di Virgilio (06:59):

Well, the Venezuela example is interesting because as you mentioned, if we live in a Keynesian and if you’re not an economist, John Maynard Keynes, a leading economist in the 1920s and thirties, you could say is largely responsible for how most of the world manages debt and fiscal responsibility, monetary policy. Nowadays, you can certainly make, as you mentioned, this longterm argument that Bitcoin, if you lose your currency, right, runaway inflation becomes something you may go to because now you and I need to exchange goods and services in Venezuela. The last thing we want to do is do that in the Venezuelan currency, because that is wildly losing value every single day. So we choose to use something like Bitcoin, obviously gold function this way, really, for most of human history, the idea is Bitcoin of course could function that way. I think you’re articulating very nice that it’s nowhere near that yet. And the reason for that, it’s very simple to be a usable, consistent currency. It needs to be stable. And that’s why the U S dollar, despite I think a lot of real fundamental issues that we could bring up and spend an hour talking about today is still that safe haven is right now. As far as history goes, that’s your most proven safe asset.

Scott Melker (08:01):

The only true safe haven in my eyes. But I do think that we’re going to see that change likely very soon not to be alarmist, but the fact that the value of the dollar is rising so fast is not actually a particularly good thing. But like you said that’s a conversation for another day.

James Di Virgilio (08:16):

Right? And that is certainly an interesting one. I mean, like we said, fundamentally where we are as a world and what we’re doing with monetary policy matters a lot. In fact, that’s something I talk about in my profession. Maybe more frequently than anything is to learn about monetary policy study. What’s good or bad. That’s going to change the world significantly. And that could certainly in the future be an opportunity for something like Bitcoin. Now I think a big hurdle for most people on Bitcoin is understanding why it’s possibly even theoretically, a stable currency. Let’s assume the best case scenario in this becomes stable. What is a Bitcoin? How do we get a Bitcoin? It’s easy to understand gold it’s in the ground. I mine it, people think it’s valuable. Explain to us how Bitcoin has any value or how it’s stable or what it really is. Cause I know that loses most people right here in this part of the conversation.

Scott Melker (09:02):

Well, it’s certainly not stable and I don’t necessarily believe that it will be. And actually as a trader, the volatility is what draws so many people to trading Bitcoin and their interest in it. But a Bitcoin it’s a protocol it’s math. And the computer has to effectively at the most basic level, computers around the world are competing to solve a complicated math problem. And when they solve it, that creates Bitcoin. It’s a ledger that keeps these transactions on the blockchain. And once an individual block is locked, it’s effectively unhackable. And so the idea is that you’re not on a centralized server somewhere. You know, it’s decentralized, it’s spread all over the planet and the miners are creating Bitcoin. And like I said, you have these unhackable blockchain decentralized it’s trustless. You don’t have to trust a government or a central party. And that’s really the appeal to a lot of people because you want to use PayPal or your bank or whoever it is. There’s a third party involved in you transacting with someone else. And this eliminates that third party in a manner where you’re at much less risk. But that said as an average person to understand that, you have to understand that you are now your own bank, nobody is going to bail you out. If you get hacked or if you get your Bitcoins stolen, you’re not insured. So for the average person, I think it’s actually terrifying. Most of them don’t even understand that. I think they just buy it on an exchange and they leave it there. When you buy Bitcoin on an exchange and you leave it there, it’s not really yours. There’s a saying in crypto, uh, not your Bitcoin If you don’t have the private T’s basically. So unless you put it on your own hardware wallet or move it somewhere offline, I mean, there’s a conversation that could go for hours. And, and it’s funny because I actually was recently the victim of a pretty major hack attempt by some famous hackers in Europe. They swapped my SIM card. They attacked my exchange accounts, but because I have my proper security in place, I didn’t actually lose any money. They made my life really miserable for a couple of weeks. But stories like that are going to drive your average retail person away from Bitcoin. And let’s be honest, in 2017, when everyone was interested in Bitcoin, they were not interested in it because it was a hedge against inflation or because it could protect them from their government. They were buying it because someone told them that they make a ton of money selling it later. That’s not a use case. That’s just FOMO, fear of missing out. So at the end of the day, you can’t explain all of that to a five-year-old effectively. And I think that’s been one of the greatest impediments to Bitcoin because people just don’t want to learn and they don’t want to deal with that. They don’t want to go buy a private hardware wallet and understand their seed phrases and private T’s, and that they got to put one on a safe and one of the safe deposit box. It’s really crazy. I mean, you really are your own bank.

James Di Virgilio (11:32):

Yeah. And everything you just said there, I think is exactly the reason why Bitcoin is nowhere near a currency adoption, despite in a theoretical world, how nice it does sound on a macro level. Look at what it can do. Look at the hedge against currencies. Those are all nice thoughts. But the function as that kind of store of value, one of the things is it really needs to be simple and easy to understand. You mentioned something that obviously a significant hurdle for Bitcoin, and this is this idea of safety, your digital wallet being safe every single day. We know of people getting robbed or mugged or their money being stolen, their dollars being stolen. Right? But it’s rather unlikely that someone’s going to get into your bank account and pull your money out without stealing your credit card or something of that nature. But even when that happens, Scott, the banks will usually cover you, right? But if somebody comes and takes my digital wallet, what happens?

Scott Melker (12:21):

If they’re not taking your digital wallet, per se, what they’re basically doing is they transfer your Bitcoin through many ways of hacking, but they’re sending their Bitcoin from your wallet into theirs and becomes untraceable. They spread it around and it’s gone and there’s no way to go get it back. So yes, you’re at tremendous risk, but there’s a flip side to that, which is that if you’re carrying cash, say you’re leading an African country right now, or you’re a refugee, or you’re running away from this virus and you get to the border, we’ve all heard the stories you want to come into the country, give us everything you’ve got. Your cash, your gold, your everything. So physical goods are still far easier to steal and in an environment like that, going back to it, yes, we’re not talking about going into your bank and stealing your money.

Scott Melker (13:02):

But if you’re really in a desperate situation and you have physical goods, those are more likely to be taken from you. If you have your seed phrases in your head, you don’t even need to have a physical hardware wallet, all that is the place to store your private keys. Well, your Bitcoin goes with you wherever you go, and nobody can steal it from you in that regard. So as a hedge against bad actors, as a hedge against dishonest government or the hedge against all of these bad things that could be coming for us in the future, and I’m not trying to be alarmist, I don’t think we’re going on mad max or anything, but it happens in other places in the world and Bitcoin or some digital currency can save your life. In that scenario, you will be able to trim back when you cross that border.

James Di Virgilio (13:40):

And this is not historically unprecedented. If you think back on the history of gold and monetary value in general, that same problem that you just illustrated was the original problem that led to winding up with a dollar in your pocket, right? That was the issue. Hey, I’m carrying all of this value from the goods that I have just transacted with. And now I’m at risk of being robbed or mugged, or my train is going to get stolen. And so how do we find a way to deposit money now in the city I’m in. Travel to the next one with effectively, nothing but still have access to that money. And that was a very, a nice example. I think of something that does become appealing in a frontier situation. If you will, now let’s focus back in on trading it. You mentioned it’s very speculative in a lot of ways and an overly simplified version trading Bitcoin, it sort of feels like tulip mania and that it’s largely people driven. That’s kind of what you’re talking about. When you’re looking at sentiment and charts, no one has any idea what Bitcoin is worth, right? And you couldn’t tell me what it’s worth, but it’s fundamentally worth what you’re looking at is what people think that it’s worth. Talk a little bit about the human behavior impact on cryptos.

Scott Melker (14:41):

So it’s my opinion and on chain metrics, somewhat support this, but everybody has their own opinion. I believe if you look at the way that Bitcoin transacts, the it moves between exchanges and the ways that it trades is that it’s still a highly manipulated asset. And by the way, I believe everything is a highly manipulated asset. So that’s not necessarily a point against, but it’s a highly manipulated asset. That’s traded by a few huge players. That’s in our industry. We like to call whales and effectively in markets in general, they just players like compound operator or whatever you want to call them. Their general goal is to inflict as much pain on retail as possible. They want to take advantage of where your stop loss might be or where you might be interested in buying and selling. And they want to just basically abuse you. And that’s the way that markets work. And so it’s a very frictionless environment with Bitcoin trading. One person with a whole lot of Bitcoin can move the books, 30, 40, 50% in a matter of hours, but that offers a tremendous amount of opportunity. If you’re a trader and you can get on the right side of those moves, which is basically what I mentioned earlier, that you think about it. Everybody I think is somewhat, at least superficially aware of what happened to Bitcoin two weeks ago. And it dropped 50% in one day. But if you look at the on chain metrics, 70% of all Bitcoin basically has not moved in ages, right? It’s the people who mine it, the original holders, whatever they’re holding onto it for dear life, it’s going nowhere. So when you look at the way that Bitcoin moved around and also there’s a huge percentage that’s been lost, and obviously there’s a finite amount of Bitcoin that’s going to ever be mined. So you’re really talking about 20, 25% of the Bitcoin that exists in the world is what’s being traded and moved around and affecting the price of the market. So it’s very strange in that regard, but if you look at what was happening, it’s basically a few people likely got together and decided, Hey, we’re just going to dump all this Bitcoin on the market, on the exchanges. And we’re going to absolutely destroy the price. Why would they do that? There’s a million reasons to speculate. Maybe they had a margin call because the market was crashing and they had to sell Bitcoin for a margin call. Maybe they’ve mined so much Bitcoin since 2009 or 2010, that they have so much supply to dump on the market. That for them, it doesn’t matter if they sell it at 20,000 or 2000, it’s just profit. They did it for a dollar who cares if they sell it for 2000 or 10,000, maybe they want to move into cash. It doesn’t really matter the reason. We just know that it’s a few people who are doing it, but when you look at the price of Bitcoin, as we speak in the mid six thousands, it dropped basically from 8,000 to 3,600, that’s a humongous move, but it’s already back to 6,600. And from 3,600, it bounced to almost 6,000 in a matter of 12 hours. So as a trader theres far more money to be made by longing catching the bottom, buying somewhere between 3,640-4500 and just selling it 12 hours later at 6,000 than there even was in being short or selling during that entire move down.

James Di Virgilio (17:34):

So right. I mean, absolutely. Is there any element of catching a falling knife there? Did you just time that based upon, Hey, I caught the falling knife correctly, it didn’t cut me. Or is there a level of predictability, like you said, you’re telling story of really low volume, significant price trades that you feel like, Hey, there is a floor here, right? Basically cryptocurrencies, aren’t going to zero. Bitcoin’s not going to zero.

Scott Melker (17:58):

Right. It’s not, but there’s a leverage exchange. That’s the biggest in the world that almost took Bitcoin to zero during that move because of an inefficient exchange. So Bitcoin on that exchange could have touched zero that day. If it had not turned the exchange off, which is somewhat astounding and shows you how much the market is affected by traders and those being high leverage traders, which is effectively worse odds than throwing craps in Vegas, at least you get free drinks there. I think there’s always an element of touching a falling knife. I generally, as a trader and this becomes a technical thing, but I look for when a level that seems key is recaptured as support, as opposed to just trying to catch it on the way down. But I’ll tell you, I got very lucky on that move. I had orders at 4,000 that had been sitting there for I mean months and it happened in the middle of the night. I woke up, I looked at my phone, the price of Bitcoin was $5,800. And I had bought it at $4,000, three hours before, while I was sleeping. I sold it immediately for an almost 50% profit.

James Di Virgilio (18:54):

Yeah. Those are the moments as a trader, right? That keep you coming back now, how do we apply this? What’s your advice for the average family out there? They’re investing in their 401k. They’ve got some real estate they’re doing the very normal things. How do they employ or should they employ Bitcoin or a crypto in their portfolio?

Scott Melker (19:12):

I’m certainly not a financial advisor. I guess I should put that disclaimer out there. As I mentioned before, I believe that everybody should have at least minimal exposure to it. 1%, 2%, for me, I’m comfortable more 5% to 10%, but how do you do that? I think that the best way, like any market might invest in your 401k is to start small and dollar cost average until you have a full position. I mean, it’s such a volatile asset that one week you can be buying it at $8,000 in the next week at $3000 and then a week later at $14,000. So trying to catch a price that you’re comfortable with for most people, if they’re not traders is an extremely uncomfortable thing. So set up an automatic buy and buy $500 worth of Bitcoin every Monday until you’ve bought the $10,000 allotment that you have for yourself or do it once a month or whatever that is. I think that’s safer for more mentally stable people than traders, the safer and smarter way probably to acquire a position.

James Di Virgilio (20:06):

So Bitcoin is a tremendously creative and innovative idea. If this podcast could interview the founder of Bitcoin, of course, no one really knows exactly who this person is. Right. We would certainly do it because of creativity. I often find that fields overlap in life, whether you’re an artist or a musician or a trader, you can find commonalities. What commonalities have you found between your life as a musician and your life as a crypto guru?

Scott Melker (20:31):

The obvious ones, which is that I’ve forged the path where I never had to have a boss, which is always very important to me. It’s funny you guys had my dad on the show recently, definitely got the best of what the Melker had to offer in that case. You know, my parents and I was very fortunate. They sent me to an Ivy League University. They were able to leave me without student debt. And then one day I called them and said, I’m going to be a DJ. When I graduated with my Ivy League degree, I could have gone at that time. It was very easy to get investment banking job and go to the wall street route, like all of my friends, but I was just never the kind of person. I don’t know if it’s an acceptance of authority or that I’m a bit of an ADHD case and I’m scattered. And I don’t fit into those environments, but I was always someone who was trying to forge my own path. So I’d say the most common theme obviously is that I make my own schedule. I work when I want to work and I worked as hard as I want to work, which usually is very hard, honestly, when you’re doing it yourself. So that’s one I can tell you on a creative level, it’s very funny. I produced music for forever and using all of these different DWS, you have all your workstations, Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools. To me, it almost feels the same to sit in front of a naked chart and draw the patterns and lines. Even the shortcuts that you use on the keyboard are very familiar. So to me it’s actually very interesting, I almost feel like I’m making music when I’m drawing and identifying levels on a chart. And that’s something that other musicians have actually mentioned to me as well. So there is some creativity and kind of a big game, but I would say that those are the biggest similarities. Really. I think that transition was more of retaining the same sort of lifestyle of being a self starter and not having to really answer to someone

James Di Virgilio (22:05):

Let’s go to that moment where you told your parents that you were going to be a DJ after graduating from an Ivy League school. What was that moment like for them and for you? Were they supportive? Were they frustrated? Tell me about that.

Scott Melker (22:18):

My parents have never been, even for one second of my life, anything other than supportive, it’s more nuanced than that. So first I want to see a music business while also deejaying. So I got a job in New York with a music agent moved to New York. And the first day that I showed up for my job, he told me that he had given the job to his nephew instead. So it was a somewhat forced exit from the music business very early in that regard, but deejaying and making music was always at the core of what I wanted to do. My parents were extremely supportive. I think they always believed that I would find success one way or another. And I didn’t always, I mean, I’ve failed more than I exceeded to some degree. JingingThat’s definitely stumbled forward through certain portions of my life. And I have needed help. There was a time when I was an Ivy League graduate five years out of college and I was deejaying once or twice a week in New York at night for some somewhat of a pittance. And I was delivering packages during the day while all my friends were on wall street. It definitely, wasn’t always easy, but my parents never batted an eye for a second. I have an older brother who’s a very successful physician. So I think that I can’t speak to their mentality about it, but I guess it’s good that they had one who was on the right path out of the way all right for their creative lunatics son kind of came through. But yeah, I’ve never had a conversation with my parents that I felt was uncomfortable about my future, because I always knew that they would talk it through with me, provide good advice and then get behind me.

James Di Virgilio (23:37):

So they gave you a lot of independence and what that independence, you find yourself in New York, you’re deejaying a couple of gigs. You’re delivering packages. What was your mindset at that time? And how’d you get through it? How’d you stick with following your passion, pursuing the path you were on?

Scott Melker (23:53):

It was hard. I was broke and there wasn’t really that much hope, I guess. I mean, I always had hope, but there was no really a major light at the end of the tunnel. At that point, musically, I was playing local bars and clubs every once in a while. I get a big club gig, but you’re talking about sustaining yourself without health insurance. You know, you have to pay for your own health insurance or without any guarantee that that gig will be there next week. So great. You made $500 tonight, but maybe next Friday the club’s going to close or nobody’s going to show up and you’re not going to have a job the next week. So it was always a constant grind and hustle for the next gig or the next thing. And then eventually like an actor or any musician, you kind of catch your break for me, it was in 2006, a friend called me in and said, listen, they’re auditioning DJs for this big tour in Japan, they audition 50 DJs. I got the job for an artist named Toshi Kubota, who is effectively, you know, they call them the Michael Jackson in Japan. It was his 20th anniversary tour. I had no idea what a big deal it was. I was just trying to get a job. I happened to bond with the drummer who was doing the auditions and we kind of jammed out. And so I spent the next two months rehearsing. And then five months after that, traveling in Japan, playing stadiums in 30,000 to 50,000 person shows as the DJ and opening act and percussionist in a 14 person band for this huge Japanese artists that not only offered some financial help because I got paid well for it. But it also gave me a lot of confidence in the platform to jump from there and do other things.

James Di Virgilio (25:18):

So you mentioned that you’ve failed quite a bit, right? Like anyone who’s done anything successfully, especially somebody who’s blazed a trail on their own. How did you keep learning from the failure without letting it beat you down to the point where you would just quit?

Scott Melker (25:32):

I dunno. I think it becomes routine to some degree, not to say that you become negative about it, but hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. I started a print publication in Philadelphia after I moved back from New York to Philadelphia, where I went to school and it launched and it was really like great success, well received. And two months later, 9/11 happened and all the businesses that were my advertisers started to go out of business. And so that was interesting experience and kind of lighten it probably to a lot. What’s going to happen to people now, but I think I’ve always had a positive support system for better or for worse. I would say that I knew that if something really went bad, I would have a soft landing. I never feared being homeless. I could have always gone back to my parents. I never did, but I guess mentally, you know that. And so I’m very fortunate to have a good support system in that regard as well, but I really never cared so much when I failed. I always just looked on the bright side and enjoyed what I was doing. I absolutely absolutely loved music from the earliest age. I started playing piano at five. I was a singer and saxophone player and everything. So it was just, music was always what I wanted to do. So at any point, regardless of what my financial situation was or how much I was working, I was just really excited be making music and to be a part of that scene, my passion for what I was actually doing, carried me through largely the rough times.

James Di Virgilio (26:50):

And this is interesting because given your background as a musician, what would you say to people that are inspiring to follow their passion, but maybe there’s no money in it or there’s inability to make a career out of it at the moment, do you have a view on the balance between continuing to drive for your passion, but also maybe providing for yourself and your future and your family. It’s a delicate dance to make. What’s your counsel on that? Having done that successfully kind of in several arenas.

Scott Melker (27:16):

I think it’s largely dependent on the individual, their financial situation, where they are in their life. And again, like how much of, I guess a support system they have. I think that at a certain age, you probably have to give up and become realistic. If you have a family, if you have kids, but if you’re a single person in this world with a true passion, I think that you should give it everything you possibly have until you can’t anymore. I know that if I had quit in 2005, I would have never known what was coming for me. But I really think that I would have a lot of regret not try my best and most passions that people have are things that they could probably do part time to some degree, go to your job and then come home and sacrifice your sleep and sleep four hours a night and make music and get it out there. I mean, it’s never been a time in history where it’s been easier with social media and all of these platforms, the SoundCloud and Spotify to get your work out there. When I was making music, I was one of those guys, on Canal St in New York City with CDs trying to get stores to sell my CDs and handing them out to strangers and stuff. So it is much easier now I think, I mean, you have to cut through the noise, but if you’re truly talented and you truly believe and you work hard enough, listen, the important thing to understand is you can be passionate about something, but if you’re bad at it, it’s not going to happen. I hate to say that, but if you have a discernible talent and you try your hardest, I do believe that the career that you dreamed of probably won’t happen. But I do think that you can probably make a living pursuing your passion.

James Di Virgilio (28:40):

Yeah. I think that’s really good advice. You balanced a lot of things there. One is balancing responsibility. Where are you in life? Who are you responsible for, is what you’re doing, going to cause others to have to pick up the slack for you towards significantly alters their life. And then secondarily, if you are actually really good at something and you continue to do it, if you live in a society that’s free and able to invest in that sort of talent, I totally agree with you. It could be longer than you wanted it to be, but at some point in time, if you are good, if you are skilled, you will find a way to be able to craft something out of that. Now, who knows how much you’ll get out of that. But that’s a good feedback mechanism. And often failure, Scott is obviously feedback. It tells us whether or not we should continue or whether we should keep going as a trader. You know, the failure is really a part of every single day, practically in your life. Uh, because traders traders are seeking to make very small wins, right? 52%, 53%, 54% of your trades are wins. You’re a hero. You’re a legend. So failure is something you learned to live with. I think it’s very helpful. I read on your Twitter about how you said really emotionally. You’re not that involved in what happens if you lose a lot, you can take it. You have a high pain tolerance, and it makes sense, given what you’ve just said in your life, there’s a lot of dots connecting there to the foundational floor. You’ve built what you view as success, which you view as failure. And one thing I’m not hearing a lot in your story is a prideful angle. I’m hearing a lot of humility with, Hey, I’m going after what I like and what I enjoy. And if I fail, it doesn’t mean I, myself am a failure as a person. It’s a chance for me to respond to what I’m learning.

Scott Melker (30:06):

I’ve never heard it put that way, but I do think humility was another thing that was deeply ingrained from my parents. I just feel like unless you become the biggest artist in the world or the biggest, this and that, where your ego is being fed 24/7. And I think that most people probably maintain that humility because especially as an artist, you know, that it can all be taken away from you in a second. I mean, how many, one hit wonders are there who bought their Ferrari and then returned it for half or had it repoed six months later? It’s just the reality of being a creative is that it’s not the 1950s. You don’t have a job your entire life. You don’t have a pension. Eventually you probably are not going to be at the top of your game and it’s somewhat a cycle. So I think that you just have to accept that whether you want to skin it as failure or whether it’s just the downturn or whether it’s that slow, steep descent from popularity into oblivion, that it’s coming for. Almost all of us who are not, like I said, just add a job and working for a boss who is able that boring and, and you know that you’ll have your job. So I don’t see how you can really be too prideful. You know, I’m proud of the things I’ve accomplished, but I also recognize that it was not all my doing. I had a lot of support and that it was very hard along the way.

James Di Virgilio (31:13):

Scott, it’s been excellent talking with you today. Kind of getting your background, hearing your stories, talking about cryptocurrency, music, trading. So many things you can follow Scott and find a lot of his insights on his Twitter feed the Wolf of all streets. Very interesting stuff there. He is Scott Melker. Scott, thank you for joining us today.

Scott Melker (31:31):

Well, thank you so much. It was really my pleasure.

James Di Virgilio (31:33):

And for Radio Cade, I’m James Di Virgilio

Outro (31:37):

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

The weather; everyone talks about it, so the old joke goes, no one does anything about it. Dr. Leela Watson, founder and CEO of InitWeather, says that by using advanced algorithms and machine learning, we can make faster and more reliable predictions about the weather that can help a wide range of industries, including agriculture, energy, and aerospace.  “When I started this,”  said Dr. Watson, “it was, oh , let’s just do this. And then when you dive into it, you realize why not so many people have been using machine learning within weather, because it is such a big problem. And just sorting through all the different ways that it can be done is a challenge.”  

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: 0:40

The weather: everyone talks about it, but so the old joke goes, no one does anything about it. However, using advanced algorithms and machine learning, we can make faster and better predictions about the weather that can help a wide range of industries. Welcome to Radio Cade . I’m your host, Richard Miles. Today I’m very pleased to welcome Dr. Leela Watson, a former NASA meteorologist, and the co-founder and CEO of InitWeather. Welcome to Radio Cade, Leela.

Dr. Leela Watson: 1:05

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Richard Miles: 1:06

So Leela, I’m guessing that as a meteorologist, you have probably heard lots of jokes about the weather. Are there any good ones out there, because it’s not exactly comedy gold, right?

Dr. Leela Watson: 1:15

No, it’s definitely not. I mean, I’ve heard them all, so I’m waiting for that really great one. That real zinger, that–

Richard Miles: 1:20

That actually makes you laugh, right? Yeah. There are a lot of lame weather jokes, but none that I’ve heard that are really good. So that’s a tragedy for your profession, but anyway, why don’t we start out by explaining for the listener exactly what it is that InitWeather does. And as I understand it, you crunch a lot of existing data to come up with faster and more reliable forecast. Something that is very particularly useful for things like the agricultural industry. And of course, utility companies, as we saw in Texas a few weeks ago, actually. So, how does it weather differ from other weather forecasts?

Dr. Leela Watson: 1:51

So, at a really basic level, what we do is we use machine learning to create better weather forecasts. So, the way that we’re different is that weather forecasts are generally made from computer weather models that are out there and forecasters take that information and make their weather forecast . So what we do in our product takes that weather data that’s available. We run it through our machine learning algorithm, and then we do create better weather forecasts than what are currently out there now.

Richard Miles: 2:20

But you’re taking obviously, from more than one data set, when you see a weather forecast on the TV or in the newspaper, are they all drawing from the same pool of data or do they all have different data sources that go into that forecast?

Dr. Leela Watson: 2:31

So when you watch a TV program, say you’re watching the evening news and they’re showing you graphics of the weather that’s coming through the front, that’s coming down, or precipitation that’s going to impact that area. Those are graphics that are produced from a weather model. So, a weather model at the most basic level is really just a series of equations that govern the atmosphere and create forecasts of temperature, precipitation, and all sorts of other variables. So, those forecasters on TV and the government, anywhere, are taking those weather models and then creating their own forecast, refining them a little bit and specifying for their particular area of interest. So, that’s one source of data for weather forecasts, and of course you have observational data. So what’s happening. now? You have weather stations that can give you your precipitation amounts, so your temperature, humidity, and all that. So, it’s kind of a combination. Forecasters look at tons and tons of data to make their forecasts . So not everybody uses the same thing, but generally there’s a certain set of weather models that everyone’s looking at. And of course, using your observations for your own local area to help make your forecast

Richard Miles: 3:38

So InitWeather then, just so I understand, it’s not a person like you or somebody on your staff that’s sort of sorting through this like a news station might; you’ve got a software program, I’d take it right? That sucks in all this data. Is it faster guesses about what the weather’s going to be like, or do they turn out to be more reliable or is it both?

Dr. Leela Watson: 3:56

Most specifically, it’s more reliable forecasts because we do rely on other data that’s out there. So, whenever that data becomes available, then we take it and run it through our algorithm . So, sometimes in some cases, yes, we can be a little faster than what’s out there, but really what we’re shooting for is more reliable, so that various industries, people who work in those industries, can then use our forecasts more reliably than what’s already out there and available. Of course, everybody wants a better forecast. So, that’s what we’re trying to give them.

Richard Miles: 4:24

So, Leela, if you could give me an idea of what’s sort of the degree of precision that say a farmer or a large agricultural company needs in order to count as a better forecast for them? Let’s say next week, a normal weather forecast say, well, we think we’re going to have between three to five inches of rain in your area. If you say, okay, it’s only going to be two to four. Is that valuable information to that farmer, that agricultural business? What degree of precision are we talking about?

Dr. Leela Watson: 4:47

That’s absolutely valuable. And for the general public, a three-day to five-day forecast that you get from the local weather from the national weather service is good enough, but for a lot of industries, they need to have more specific forecasts , especially tailored for their areas. For example, in agriculture, temperature’s actually obviously a huge, huge issue, especially frost or freezing temperatures, or if there’s excess of heat. So for example, if we talk about when are we going to reach freezing? So say that we have a forecast that says, oh, it’s going to be about 30 to 32 degrees on this particular night. Well, that’s a big deal. If somebody is trying to protect their crops from being damaged by freezing temperatures, if they’re off, if it turns out to be 35, well, then they’ve gone through all these procedures to protect their crops and then they didn’t really need to do that. They could have saved that time and money doing something else. On the other hand, if the forecast is saying, oh, it’s going to be about 35 degrees, and then all of a sudden it hits 30, well, that’s a big problem too. They have to take these preventative measures to protect their crops. So, having something very accurate is very important for them.

Richard Miles: 5:58

I see. So if you can even buy them a few hours, for instance, if you know it’s going to hit freezing at exactly 2:30 AM, as opposed to 4 or 12 or wetter, then that could make the difference between getting out that equipment, say to save a citrus crop or something like that and not. Is that more or less accurate?

Dr. Leela Watson: 6:11

Absolutely. It’s not only how low the temperature will go, but like you mentioned, what’s the timing, especially with precipitation, also. We can do pretty good with precipitation forecast, but usually we’re off with timing or maybe location, and that stuff is very important to the farmers that are relying on precipitation for their crops and definitely in other industries as well.

Richard Miles: 6:33

So give us an idea of the other industries. I mean, I mentioned that the utility industry, the whole experience in Texas, where they had to sub freezing weathers for a long time, they didn’t really know, is that a one-off thing or is that a common problem for utility companies as they try to forecast demand and so on? Would something InitWeather give them as much of an advantage as say a farmer?

Dr. Leela Watson: 6:52

Absolutely. Yeah . Weather impacts almost every industry in some way or another. Of course, we hear a lot about severe weather and that has very detrimental effects on many industries. And then there’s of course, just the mundane weather. When are we going to reach freezing like I mentioned, or is it going to be very, very hot or lots of rain, but we work in many different industries, and one area that we also work in is aerospace. So, they’re not really concerned with temperatures at the surface; their big problem is upper-level winds. So, for them having accurate upper level winds forecast is very important, and it doesn’t even have to be a large wind event to make an issue for them. So, it’s just blowing slightly harder at the upper levels, well, that has an impact on their rocket. So, that could change their trajectory, it could blow the rocket, it could topple over. So there’s many, many different areas that, industries that the weather will impact.

Richard Miles: 7:46

That’s fascinating, because that’s obviously a case in which being a little bit off can cost you a hundred million dollars or a lot of money if you lose a rocket or something like that. Is it correct? Are you partnering now with a company to get into the unmanned aerial vehicle space to collect very, very high altitude weather? Is that correct?

Dr. Leela Watson: 8:03

That is actually a project we’re working on right now. So, we would love to be able to have better upper level observations, especially wind observations for the aerospace industry. And actually, it can be useful to other industries as well. Right now we rely on weather balloons. That technology is almost over a hundred years old and it does its job and it works okay, but we’re thinking let’s look to the future. How are we going to improve that some more? So the project we’re working on is to take a UAV and use it like a weather balloon and send it up vertically, collect weather observations, and bring it down and be able to do that multiple times in the leadup to a launch, so they can get that information and use that for their rocket trajectories and forecasting for launch.

Richard Miles: 8:47

So very much like a custom design solution. This would be for a particular client who wants a very particular, say, launch window or period of time that you would put up that UAV. This wouldn’t be an ongoing service, because I imagine that’d be pretty expensive.

Dr. Leela Watson: 8:58

Yes, it would be pretty expensive. Um, but so it would be designed for launches, and launches, they’re doing many, many more of them now, and there’s more launch sites that are opening up worldwide. So, there is a market for that. It’s still in its infancy, this project, but we’re hoping that it takes off soon.

Richard Miles: 9:16

Tell us a little bit, Leela, about the origin stories of InitWeather. For some young companies or inventors, it’s the classic Eureka moment: all of a sudden you have this blinding insight. Was it like that for you and your co-founders? Did it just dawn on you: hey, we’ve got something that we can package into a model that is very useful? Or did you just sort of iterate or stumble your way towards that model?

Dr. Leela Watson: 9:36

I would say it was years in the making for me. My job before I started this company was working for NASA’s applied meteorology unit. So, we had a contract and I worked on that contract and we worked with NASA and supported their space program. And, I was the resident weather modeler, so I ran weather models and I came up with solutions specific to Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. And of course, everybody wants a better model, better output, but there’s only so much you can do with what you have. Now, what’s out there is , is pretty amazing, but it comes to a point where it’s very hard to keep improving that model. So, a series of events happened , um , and I started this company, and the idea was: let’s come up with a different way to improve the models instead of the same old way of throwing more computing resources at it, which equals more money for very little improvement. Let’s come up with a new way to create a better forecast. And of course, artificial intelligence machine learning is not new, and it had been being used in other industries and even within weather, but I hadn’t seen it implemented in the weather industry, maybe in little pockets, but that was my push to develop this and to create that better weather model.

Richard Miles: 10:48

And Leela, remind me what year was that? That was 2016. Is that right?

Dr. Leela Watson: 10:51

Correct.

Richard Miles: 10:52

Yeah. And how has it been since then? This is a fairly common path, or it’s not an unusual path that a university researcher or somebody sort of in advanced research working in the private sector will say: Hey, I’ve got a new idea. They form a company and they take their technology invention to market. How has it been for InitWeather? How many employees do you have right now? And what has that journey been like so far?

Dr. Leela Watson: 11:10

So we’re still very small. We’re only three of us, and it’s been a very slow process, I would say, because I think at the end of the day, it’s great to say: Oh yes, we’re going to use machine learning, create a better weather forecast, but there are so many different ways that you can use machine learning to create these better forecasts. I always call it the original, big data problem. There’s so much data, and so it takes some time to gather that data, run it through the algorithm, decide what’s the best way to proceed, what the best data is. So, it has kind of been a learning process along the way as well. When I started this, it was: Oh , let’s just do this. And then when you dive into it, you realize why not so many people have been using machine learning within weather, because it is such a big problem. And just sorting through all the different ways that it can be done is a challenge, but we’ve gotten really great results. So, now we are in the process of selling product to a lot more customers, and we’re starting to grow now.

Richard Miles: 12:06

That’s great news. I know you’ve done well in competition, including the Cade Prize competition, when you entered there and you were a finalist. I imagine it’s a different world, right? This is what always fascinates me, is that a lot of these pitch competitions or so on, you rarely encounter a bad idea. I mean, all the ideas are pretty good and you , you see them and you, you hear about them and go: well that, yes, it’s plausible, it’s useful. But then, getting from that stage where people will say, yep , good idea to , okay, who exactly is going to buy it or pay for this great idea, how do you do it in such a way that it’s sustainable and not just a one-off thing?, And that is particularly for people from a research background, sometimes can be frustrating I imagine.

Dr. Leela Watson: 12:44

Absolutely. It can definitely be frustrating. And then within weather , we have to compete with free data, free weather, national weather service. They have issued their forecasts all the time and that’s free. You can just go to their website and look at it. But you know, private weather industry really focuses on specific industries and specific problems, and so that’s kind of what we’re going after. We want to help the industries and our customers that the national weather service forecast is not going to help them. You know, they need more specific information, and they need more consistently better information. So, I think that’s really important too . You know, there’s a lot of times that weather models or forecasters really hit one event really well. They nailed it, but we want to be able to do that all the time. And so that’s our goal with our machine learning product is be better and be consistent.

Richard Miles: 13:30

Right, it’s a reliability factor. I think you’re probably onto something, concentrating on the agricultural field. I interviewed last year, the national director of the 4H Foundation, and she pointed out to me that farmers in particular have always been actually early adopters of technology, because they have to be. When you present them with something that actually saves them money right away, they’ll try it out, and they don’t need a whole lot of convincing. And then if it doesn’t work, well, then they stop. But if you can show them that it’s going to increase the yield or protect crops in your case, then they’re willing to give it a try. And a lot of the innovation that is actually later made it to the broader market starts in the agriculture market because of farmers trying to solve problems or agricultural companies trying to solve problems.

Dr. Leela Watson: 14:09

Yeah, absolutely. Our first customers, the first people that came up to us were all within the agriculture industry. And that wasn’t actually even our focus at first, you know, we were kind of looking more towards commodities, which is agriculture to that in aerospace. And then we just had farms, farmers, anybody in the agriculture industry come up to us and say, well , this is really great. We could definitely use this. And that’s kind of how we got into that industry. So, they’ve been great. They’ve been willing to try our product and use it and it’s worked for them. So, we’re happy about that.

Richard Miles: 14:41

I don’t know how much you work with commodities traders or if you’re pitching this product to them. But this idea of being able to seize on a market opportunity, even a few hours before somebody else, it hadn’t dawned on me that wow, that of course would be a valuable service that you could provide. If you were able to provide that again, that reliable data, you can only be really wrong once, right. People will quit using it .

Dr. Leela Watson: 15:01

Absolutely. They do, they need that information and they need it quickly. And we’re definitely aware that we need to be correct. We’re not on a local news. We can’t be wrong and still keep our job if we don’t perform and produce something really great, they can just say: Hey, we’re done and move on.

Richard Miles: 15:15

I was going to say probably the second, most proper type of weather joke is complaining about the weather man , right, who got it completely wrong? I think you’re part of a trend that’s obviously been underway for a while of being able to take large data, big data and crunch it and use it, really add value to a certain segment of the market. Obviously, probably not the retail market for quite a while . I’ve mentioned this before my daughter works in the insurance industry and the car insurance industry, and she was telling me that there’s one company that basically just has a huge data set on every single car produced, every single feature down to the nth degree, so that a car insurance company knows exactly how safe or unsafe that car is particularly now with semi-autonomous vehicles. And those companies that aggregate that data and sell it to the car insurance companies do pretty well, because that’s extremely valuable set of information that a handful of customers out there are willing to pay a lot of money for.

Dr. Leela Watson: 16:05

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve noticed that there are many different industries that need that weather data and they don’t know how to get it, process it, and use it for their industry. So that’s definitely a big thing for weather companies too, is being able to get all that data, put it together in a way that is useful to them, presenting it in an easy to use way as well.

Richard Miles: 16:25

So Leela, you mentioned you’re still very small ,about four people. How do you spend most of your day now? I don’t imagine it’s in sort of the research and , or is it? Or are you on the phone talking to clients or potential customers, or where do you put your energies at this point?

Dr. Leela Watson: 16:39

A little bit of both. So I have a really great business partner, Jordanna, and she takes on a lot of the business side of things and allows me to keep my hands in the research part. So, I do a lot of coding still, and I really love that. I mean, that’s my bread and butter type thing. Of course, I am on the business side of things as well, but the idea was born out of my experience using weather models. So, we found that it was important for me to keep my hands in that side of things. I spend a lot of my day doing that. And then of cours,e we’re a new company or new-ish company, I should say, we’re small. So, we all have to do our part and do all the other administrative and business things that occur, so.

Richard Miles: 17:15

So, I have to wonder with my limited experience of starting institutions, just the Cade Museum, we had a staff of four forever. And then all of a sudden we went to a staff of 30 almost overnight. And you always worry about what if we fail, but you never really think, well, what if we succeed? Then all of a sudden your life gets a lot busier and actually more complicated. So managing success is often part of the managing decline. So just a word of caution. So Leela, you were born and raised in Massachusetts, like a lot of people from the Northeast, you ended up in Florida. You picked up a bachelor’s degree at the University of Miami and then a Master’s and PhD at Florida State University. And you said your first real interest in the weather was after experiencing or surviving a hurricane in Miami, I’m not sure which. Tell us what was that like and how did that steer you into meteorology?

Dr. Leela Watson: 17:56

It was actually just a small, small, I put in quotes, hurricane that actually had a big impact out of Miami, as far as flooding. I wasn’t very worried about it, and then I found that I was trying to get home–I was working actually–and the storm was coming up from the South, and I had to drive South back down to Miami. I was working in Fort Lauderdale and had to drive back down South. And so, when I left Fort Lauderdale things weren’t too bad, but by the time I got down to Miami, it was a different story, and my road was flooded and I had to find a different way of getting home. And it actually just left a big impact on me because for a small, again quote small storm, it had a big impact. So that really fascinated me. I’d always been fascinated by weather, but that was kind of the nail in the coffin that made me realize: Hey, I think this is what I want to do and study this. And so, that’s how I got into meteorology and decided to go to grad school and get my degree there.

Richard Miles: 18:48

So you’d already graduated with your undergraduate degree and you were working after that, and that’s when you figured out, okay, this is pretty interesting.

Dr. Leela Watson: 18:53

Yeah. So my undergraduate degree was environmental science. And so, I decided to move on to meteorology. I was still interested in environmental science, but meteorology just really fascinated me. So I moved onto that.

Richard Miles: 19:07

So inventors often marched to the beat of a different drummer, and we’ve talked a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs on this show and , and often they have very interesting paths. What were you like as a kid? Were you a good student? What were your interests? Do you remember when you were small, let’s say in grade school first or second grade, do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Dr. Leela Watson: 19:24

I was definitely an introvert, and I was a good student. Weirdly enough, when I was young, I wanted to be a stockbroker. I don’t know why.

Richard Miles: 19:39

Oh wow! That’s a very unusual first grade dream.

Dr. Leela Watson: 19:39

I know, very weird, but as I grew up and grew older, I realized science was what I was really interested in. And so it was just a no-brainer for me to go down that path. I never thought I would do anything else. And as I got older, I knew again, I was going to go to grad school. When, I didn’t know, if I was going to take some time off and then go. But my path was actually pretty clear. And then the whole entrepreneurship thinking about business, it kind of had always been there. My father was a doctor, he had his own practice, and he always talked about business and how he wanted to be in business. So, that kind of got ingrained in me, and I started thinking about it early. I didn’t know if I would actually ever start my own business, but that seed was planted early. And then of course, just working and having so many ideas of how we could do things better from the science side, from the business side, from the marketing side, it became clear. Alright, this is my time. I need to do something about it and start my own business.

Richard Miles: 20:31

So these things or these inclinations often run in families. You mentioned your dad was a doctor. Anyone else in your family, extended family, that is in the general field of numbers, number crunching? I think it’s really interesting you wanted to be a stockbroker. Ultimately, right, that’s processing big data every day for a lot of money or maybe a lot of money. Anyone else? Do you have siblings that do something similar, or?

Dr. Leela Watson: 20:50

My brother is an engineer. My other brother is in computers. My sister was a stay at home mom, but she’s in the political arena now. So not quite the same path as me. I think it is interesting. The fact that I did want to be a stockbroker and then ended up meteorologist I guess my path is always to try to predict the future. That was the path I was on for my job. So,

Richard Miles: 21:11

And certainly in both fields, stock picking and picking the weather, people know when you’re wrong, right?

Dr. Leela Watson: 21:16

Yes, absolutely.

Richard Miles: 21:17

There’s no hiding from your prediction, like oh I didn’t mean that.

Dr. Leela Watson: 21:20

Yeah. At least I don’t have to worry about other people’s money. It’s just the weather. Is it going to rain on their head or not.

Richard Miles: 21:24

Exactly. Exactly. You’re at the stage in your career now where you’ve had some early success and you’re probably asked to speak maybe to groups or people ask you for advice. What do you tell them? Are there any things that you know now that you should know known , say when you were a college freshmen or recent college graduate that you’ve learned either at NASA or in starting up InitWeather that you would impart to say a younger version of you,

Dr. Leela Watson: 21:46

As far as choosing meteorology, I would definitely say, be ready for math and physics. Because when I got into meteorology, you see on the weather channel the graphics and talking about the weather, but then when you get into school, you realize the fundamentals behind the meteorology are all math and physics. And I’ve heard that a lot with students that came in to the meteorology program, they didn’t realize that was what it was. So you have to love science. You have to love math in order to succeed. Um, as far as starting my own business, what advice would I impart? Just be ready to work. It’s a lot of work you’re going to work all the time. I work pretty much every day of the week, but on the flip side, it’s something you love. It’s something that gives you happiness. I wake up and I’m happy to start work, which doesn’t always happen for everybody. So be ready to put your head down and grind and the rewards will come.

Richard Miles: 22:38

So one thing I find fascinating is someone who goes from working for fairly large organization. So you’ve worked at NASA, a subcontractor, right? For NASA. So you worked for one of the largest organizations out there and you go to a four person business compare and contrast. What is that like? In terms of just the whole psychology of on one hand was my case. I worked for the Federal Government for a long time, you show up at work and you’re at a large office building with hundreds of thousands of people. You never have to worry. Who’s going to pay the light bill. You never have to worry about that sort of stuff. And then you go to this existence where you worry about that all the time. So was it a psychological hurdle? Was it exciting? Was it terrifying? All of the above?

Dr. Leela Watson: 23:15

All of the above. Definitely. So working for a larger organization, your voice is not heard as much when you have a conference, there’s 30 people in the room talking and you can put your ideas out there, but there’s a whole lot of other people and ideas floating around. So sometimes you’d feel like you’re not heard. So going to a small group. It’s nice because everybody’s heard everybody’s ideas are taken into consideration as far as paying the electric bill and , and keeping me awake at night. Yes, I’ve definitely gone through that. I definitely wake up sometimes and think we need to do X, Y, and Z. It has to be done right now. And it is somewhat terrifying, but it’s very rewarding at the same time. And I like being small right now. I don’t think if we grew overnight, like you mentioned earlier, it’s a different set of problems. So it’s nice that we’re a small group. Now I can handle that now and hopefully we’ll grow and I’ll be able to transition into that managing a larger group as well. But I like it, how it is now,

Richard Miles: 24:10

I think you put your finger on something you said earlier, and this is my own experience as well, going from the federal government to starting a little nonprofit . And when you’re working for larger organization, often you’re working on very big, exciting, important things, but you’re not exactly sure what your contribution was sometimes where you’re one of a cast of dozens or hundreds or thousands, but in your own little micro company or nonprofit by golly, you know, exactly at the end of the day, what you did get done or didn’t get done. And what your role in that success or failure was, there’s never any doubt about the importance of your role, whereas you do have sometimes at , and in much larger corporations, you think, well, I did a good job. It doesn’t matter. So what I tell people sometimes particularly if you were relatively young in your twenties and so on, consider working for a small corporation, small company, or a startup, because a lot of people that age want responsibility. And then unfortunately the large organization, you may not get that in your career until you’re considerably older before you get real managerial responsibility or decision-making authority. So it sounds like you’re happy with that trade off as well that you get to look back on your day and know precisely where the Leela Watson played a role and what it meant.

Dr. Leela Watson: 25:15

Yeah, absolutely. Every day is different. And I love that. And every problem and challenge is different. And I love that. And I absolutely agree with somebody who wants to come into a smaller organization. Yes, you’re taking a risk because who knows what the future of that organization is, but you will absolutely be given responsibility when we hire anybody. We want them to take the reins . We want them to think outside the box and come up with new ideas and go off on their own and be innovative. And we hope that’s what they’ll do, because quite honestly, we don’t have time to micromanage everybody. So that’s what we’re looking for. And so if that’s what interests you in a small organization is absolutely a great place to be.

Richard Miles: 25:54

So Leela, great advice. Thank you for being on Radio Cade and at a minimum, we now have at least one more person we can blame if the weather doesn’t turn out right now. We can be more precise about our blame. Like, Hey, it didn’t freeze exactly 2:30. Like they said it was going too.

Dr. Leela Watson: 26:07

Yeah, we’ll take it. We’re used to it.

Richard Miles: 26:10

Best of luck InitWeather you all have gotten a strong start and you look like you’re headed to a big things. And so I hope we can have you back at some point after your IPO, right. And you’re cashing out your millions of dollars. Anyway. Thank you very much for joining us on Radio Cade.

Dr. Leela Watson: 26:25

Thank you, thanks for having me .

Outro: 26:28

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

Nasal swabs, something many people had never heard of until COVID, suddenly became very hard to get just two weeks into the pandemic. Dr. Summer Decker and her team at the University of South Florida quickly determined they could make the swabs on a 3D printer. After making the printed swabs FDA compliant, Decker was able to share the design for free with the world.  Since then more than 60 million such swabs have been used in global COVID testing.   “One of our emergency room physicians told me,” said Dr. Decker, “we are fighting a war and you gave us the bullets.”  

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to radio K to 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: 0:40

3D nasal swab, a phrase that doesn’t roll off the tongue quickly and not the name of an indie band, but it has helped tremendously in COVID testing since the beginning of the pandemic. Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host Richard Miles. And today I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Summer Decker , Vice Chair for Research and Director, the 3D clinical applications at the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine. Welcome to Radio Cade, Dr. Decker .

Dr. Summer Decker: 1:05

Thank you so much for having me I’m looking forward to this.

Richard Miles: 1:07

Well , the first thing I got to ask is what’s up with Tampa. You guys are hitting it out of the park. Down there you’re one yourself, and now you have world-class research institutions. There’s something in the water. What is it about.

Dr. Summer Decker: 1:18

Beautiful Tampa Bay, we attract some top sports talent as you will have seen in the last few months here with our Lightening and the Buccaneers and even our soccer team and our baseball team. And , uh , yeah, it’s been an exciting year for us here in Tampa, especially during COVID when things have been so tough, we all needed a little bit of cheer. So I think it’s the Tampa Bay water.

Richard Miles: 1:38

I’ve got to say since we’ve started the Cade Museum project right away, USF University of South Florida came to our attention as just being this very innovative forward thinking research university that kind of started with humble origins, but man, you guys are doing pretty amazing things now.

Dr. Summer Decker: 1:52

Well, I appreciate that. I was lucky enough actually, to do my doctorate here. And one of the things they really do train us on here at the medical school is to think differently about solutions to problems that maybe have been occurring for some time. And so I like to say we’re young and scrappy because we realized we’re up and coming university or up and coming medical school. And so we have that liberty of not having to been, Oh, this is the way we’ve always done it. That we can actually look at things differently and use technology in different ways. And so that’s really what we train. And even as a student here as , okay, you have the way it’s always been done, but how would you do it differently? And it lends that intellectual freedom if you will. So that’s actually what attracted me here to come to USF. I had heard that too, and I’m proud to been able to stay here and hopefully train the next generation of physicians to think the same way.

Richard Miles: 2:41

You’re doing great things. One of the first people we reached out to when we started the Cade Museum, the Cade Prize was the Paul Sandberg.

Dr. Summer Decker: 2:48

Oh yeah, Dr. Sandberg.

Richard Miles: 2:49

Yeah. The Florida Inventors Hall of Fame and their attitude was like, sure, we’ll help you. And they didn’t know us from Adam. So we were pretty impressed with that. Obviously it shows at the USF, the whole philosophy there. So Dr. Decker a year ago, I would have had to explain what exactly a nasal swab is and why they’re important. And now I’d say probably just about everyone has had at least one COVID test and we all know what they do, but I do have to admit that I had never heard of a 3D nasal swab until I heard of the one that you all developed. So let’s start by you walking me through why a 3D nasal swab became necessary, how they differ from a conventional swab and how do you make them exactly?

Dr. Summer Decker: 3:27

A lot of great questions and I’ll try to keep my answers brief as possible. I think this interview is time so perfectly because this really did start out about a year ago, March 17th was the day we invented the 3D printed nasal swab. And the reason we focused on that is that when the rest of the country was trying to get tested, we were trying to figure out how many people in the us do actually have COVID. The first thing we started noticing was their PPE shortages. There were shortages and supplies and testing kits. And so part of that shortage was a supply chain disruption that was occurring with the nasal swab. That is part of the COVID testing kit. And this is actually one here I have on video. It’s a plastic device that has a little bit of a fuzzy tip on it. The problem, the reason there was a supply chain disruption is that these are actually manufactured in Italy. And as we’ll recall , back for a year ago, Italy had shut down completely. And so we really didn’t have no ability to get extra supplies. The backup site was in China and so China was shut down as well. So this actually presents a situation that we had never been in before. Okay. Now, where do you get your supplies? And so here at USF, I was actually in surgery about to hand off a 3D print . And my team does the 3D printing here at Tampa General and University of South Florida Radiology. And so we are handing in case off in surgery to this trauma patient and the surgeon , when I got a message that we were short nasal supplies. So the nasal swabs , and it started sticking in my head thinking all of the other PPE, those are things that I know other groups can do that nasal swab was of interest to me because there was going to be a lot of diagnostic value to that. That was going to obviously be what tells us if you have COVID or not. So that was going to have to come out of a medical school, a medical center, a hospital. And how do you make up for that supply chain? And I run a 3D lab. So we went back immediately started seeing, could we replicate that using a 3D printer?

Richard Miles: 5:21

Yeah , I’m going to reveal my ignorance here, but I thought that nasal swab was really just like a really big Q-tip. So I think it’s probably more complicated than that in order for it to work for COVID because obviously you can’t just use anything.

Dr. Summer Decker: 5:33

No so that’s what made it tricky with COVID was that the traditional Q-tip that you’re talking about, even the things that you’ve seen, maybe if you’ve had strep throat or something with the cotton and the wood actually interferes and the test and the PCR test, you’ve probably all heard about the PCR test that’s out there. So we have to use a specific type of swab that doesn’t interfere in that test and cause a complication. And so the current standard of care swab was a plastic kind of a nylon version with this fuzzy blocked tip on the end to be able to capture a sample. So we really got one of the last samples that they had at the hospital, and we started looking at it and we said, could we actually replicate that using a 3D printer? And it was myself, our technical director, Dr. Jonathan Ford, one of our radiologists, Dr. Todd Hazelton , who specializes in the pulmonary airway . So the lungs and the airways and all of us started looking at it and saying, I think we have some ideas. We ran literally down the hall to our colleagues in infectious disease and told them we have an idea. We’re going to try to 3D print you nasal swabs. And we’ve come up with a bunch of designs working with our colleagues here, and some colleagues on main campus. We just put out a call saying, does anyone have any design ideas? And so we were able to narrow it down to three different ones and the infectious disease team brave to the end. They actually tested them on themselves first. What was most comfortable? We wanted to make sure that we could get enough sample for the test, but also make sure it was patient comfortable and patients safe. And so this is actually what we were able to come up with here. I have a printed version of it. And so there’s some ridges on the edge that way we could actually make sure we had enough surface area to capture the sample and also a softer tip on the end so that you don’t damage any of the tissues. I know a lot of people were concerned about why was it a nasal pharyngeal swab because that region and your face is quite far back, you hear them call brain ticklers and all kinds of different things. But that is actually where the first place that COVID really set in. So it was one of the earliest spots that you can detect COVID. And so that was why it was very, very important to work with infectious disease, neurology, and radiology together to come up with the best safest tool, to be able to capture a sample on March 20th, we went to a bench lab testing. She means we went and tested it in the lab. We were able to have viral samples and our neurology team here worked night and day to be able to test it, make sure that it was able to detect a virus, make sure also that it held a virus. We knew it was going to be some time between people’s tests and when it could be actually ran and all of those things that passed by that Monday, we went to clinical trial.

Richard Miles: 8:07

Wow . So just to refresh for listeners in case anyone has a bad memory of the last year, March 11th, which is exactly a year ago, we’re recording this on March 11th, 2021. And so March 11 , 2020, I think that was the day when everything shut down the major sports leagues, churches, businesses, restaurants. And so you’re talking really a little over a week after that, where basically you were ready to go with something that you could submit to FDA for approval. Is that about right?

Dr. Summer Decker: 8:34

That is right. And the reason we knew we could use this material was in our clinical practice here at the hospital. We make anatomical models. We make surgical cutting guides to really help surgeons plan their cases. They’re really tricky cases. We really do get like the most complex cases that the hospital gets. And so we have materials that have already been cleared by the FDA. We have computers that are FDA cleared for us to be able to do that work in our normal day job, we have printers that are actually medical grade printers that we knew were FDA cleared to be able to do that. And then we had the surgical grade material that had already been cleared. So while standing in surgery, I started thinking, Oh, we can actually kind of jump to the end point if it works, because we’ve already been cleared all these different steps. And so that’s why it was very important to me to use the printer that we used, the materials that we used and also the medical team, because the first things the FDA said was that because it’s a crisis situation has to come from a medical center or licensed device medical manufacturers. And so not just anyone could go out and print, like you’d be at a printer at home. These were going to be diagnostic tools. Meaning they’re going to be used to tell you if you have COVID . So there was a high stakes situation. And so I got so many really sweet emails and stuff from around the world of elementary schools wanting to help print and the local aquariums wanting to help, but it really had to be a medical team doing it for it to be able to be used as a test. And this is what this hospital here, we printed for this hospital for Tampa General Hospital here, Moffitt Cancer Center, the VA hospitals here locally in Tampa Bay. And the reason we were able to do that is because we tested it here. We went through a very large clinical trial. That was a multi-site national clinical trial. And we went and lightspeed to be able to confirm it. We worked directly with Northwell Hhealth, our colleagues up in New York, they were in the middle of the peak of them up there and they had no test kits. So they were wonderful to work with as well as Thomas Jefferson University Medical Center. So all of us working together and that’s, what’s so exciting about this. All of these teams working together as fast as we could just to be able to bring this quickly to the medical teams in their hands. And one of our emergency room physicians has told me we are fighting a war and you gave us the bullets. And basically we were able to tell them if a patient was safe, we were able to keep them safe and keep our hospitals functioning by giving them test kits .

Richard Miles: 10:56

Right. That’s an important point you made just as a side note about FDA approval and most people aren’t familiar with, [inaudible] getting approval for new invention and why should they be? It’s a very short chain process, but I think the term of art is predicate technology, right? Where if you’re coming up with a new device of any sort, if all the components or some of the components of that device have already been approved by the FDA, it’s a much less onerous process because really you’re just taking pre-approved materials. You’re putting them together in a new way. And in theory, the FDA should just go. Yep. Yep, yep. You’re good to go. And it sounds like that’s what happened in this case.

Dr. Summer Decker: 11:30

So the FDA, we worked with them every single week and not to get too technical. It’s a class one exempt medical device. So they recognize it’s a medical device, but it’s not one that they regulated. So what you just said is exactly what was important. Is it been done on materials that are cleared by us? Is it been done on printers, cleared by us and has it been thoroughly vetted? And that’s why it was really important for us to do a full trial. There were so many people when the news broke that we were doing this, I woke up one night to 4,000 emails from around the world and people wanting their hands on it. And we had to make sure that no matter what pressures that were external, and we knew that people like in New York City had no test kits. We were lucky not to be in that position here at Tampa and just yet, but we were all very stressed about making sure we did our due diligence to make this the best clinical trial follow all of the standards that we knew in our normal practice when it’s not in a crisis situation. So we all felt the pressure to get it done quickly, but we also knew we had to do what we normally would do.

Richard Miles: 12:33

If you wake up and theres 4,000 emails waiting for you either you’ve done something great or you’re in really big trouble, right. Whether you’ve won the Nobel Prize or something bad has happened. So Dr. Decker, there was one point you made that I want to come back to. And that’s about, even though the process was relatively simple in terms of assembly, you still have to be able to have a medical grade printer and the supporting materials. Is that something now that is more or less standard at most hospitals or is that really mostly research hospitals are going to have that kind of equipment standing by?

Dr. Summer Decker: 13:03

Well , what a great question. So there are well over a hundred 3D printing teams like ours here, and most of the major hospitals that you’ll see out there and I’m lucky to work with all of them. We actually have a little network and within our radiology society, we have a group of us so that we can all communicate about different cases, that we’re seeing new technology, new materials, we have great relationships with industry so that we can see what’s coming out. I really actually have a voice in what comes out. The 3D printers that we use are often the same printers that aeronautics and the film industry, the automotive industry uses, but with different end points and purposes. And so some of the printers that we use have specific medical grade materials, because we’re all trying to get to as close as we can to human tissues. And so that’s why we have really special needs and special interest . And so you’re seeing more and more of these hospitals and teams like ours coming on board because we’re able to help with, as I mentioned, these really complex cases. I mean, if you knew your surgeon was about to walk in, but he or she’s practiced on this 3D heart on the print and can tell you exactly what devices he’s going to use, what size devices, all of that stuff in advance, or able to actually really reduce medical error and medical risk . I can tell you one of our cases with some cranio facial work that we do in our trauma teams here, we’ve been able to take surgeries that are normally 11 hour surgeries and get them down to three hours because we’re handing them a print. That is the exact, what they need to go in there. So not only does that reduce the operating time of that room and the surgeons being there, but for the patient, the patient risk of being under anesthesia, that long the risk of infection and let’s face it, we are all fighting the American medical system in costs. And so cost is something that you want to be able to do as well. So we’re able to reduce the time the cost and the risk of error by using 3D prints of patient’s specific anatomy and being able to create solutions specific to a patient. So cutting guides and things like that. It’s a really nice technology to have in a hospital. And it’s important for it to be in the hospital so that we can move very quickly. I never know who’s coming through the door behind me and what cases about to happen. So.

Richard Miles: 15:12

So you have an entire lab and staff that sits around and wonders what you can do to help people with 3D printers, which for a lot of people, that’s your dream job description. So what else do you have in the pipeline? What are you working on now at your lab or that you know of that’s being worked on that could be a breakthrough procedure process say next few years.

Dr. Summer Decker: 15:31

So things that we’re working on eminently , we worked directly, as I mentioned with industry to come up with better biomimetic or mimicking tissues. So we are working every single day, including just even today on creating tissue and a printer that feels like that heart, that feels like a face. And we work with a craniofacial facial team here and they can actually cut on the 3D prints and operate. And we work with the children’s hospital here in Tampa and their team over there. And we collaborate with them on that. So getting our clinicians really accurate feeling materials, and I think the end point goal eventually of all 3D printing and this kind of comes with more bio-engineering is being able to print directly into the body, whether we’re being able to use human STEM cells, to be able to do things like that, or be able to use materials that are safe to be embedded into the body. So thinking of my patient with a shattered face, instead of us being able to have to reconstruct all of that manually, we can actually print something in there. And our team holds a number of patents in this area. So that is our goal is to really get it to where we can print and embed into the body and make internal casts. If we break something, we can fix it internally and have that print grow with you, things like that.

Richard Miles: 16:45

So what you’re telling me is that within the next 10 years, we’re all gonna look like movie stars. Is that the message?

Dr. Summer Decker: 16:49

Can’t you tell?

Richard Miles: 16:51

I love it. This is great. So 3D technology or 3D printing, I should say in general, has been portrayed by some as this kind of miracle technology. And essentially you can eventually manufacture anything anywhere all the time. And I suspect the reality is a bit more complicated, is that even feasible? And what are the practical or the physical constraints that limit 3D printing.

Dr. Summer Decker: 17:14

We know that we’ve even had 3D printers sent to space so they can use them. And so I can tell you that we’ve worked with teams with the military, that they are on nuclear submarines. So you imagine that we have teams that are underwater somewhere and something breaks on the submarine and they can actually print from the 3D printers. That’s there a file can be sent from back wherever the team is and sent out to that location. So 3D printing is getting more affordable, smaller, there are printers for that, but there’s a big difference. There’s a big jump from the hobbyist type printers. And I hear this all the time, Oh, my kid has one of those are like a toy and that’s fun. And I’m excited to see children get involved in that. Cause that’s where it starts. These printers that we’re playing with are not the same kind of printers. They’re very complex machines. They’re very finicky human type machines. So I think that being able to do this in the future, everyone has them. I think that that is feasible, but it will be a matter of materials and really knowing what works for the solution that you’re trying to be. So you see right now, 3D printed houses happening, but these of course take up a lot of space. So I could see we’ve got 3D printers that are used for eating so you can actually print food and designs. So I think that really what’s exciting to me as I hear new solutions, new applications, all the time, things I would never have thought of. And so that’s what I really love hearing from younger students and kids, because they are thinking things so far ahead of us hearing the innovation come out of that age group. I can’t even imagine what the technology will look like. It’s a miracle now of what we’re being able to do. I really I’ve seen it myself. I’ve seen patients survive things that they had 0% chance of survival. And that’s what makes me happy when I leave work for the day, but to see what’s coming next, I’m excited about that. And I hope that I get to be part of it in some way.

Richard Miles: 19:03

So one of the things we like to do on the show is we realize inventors are actually real people. And I’d like to hear a little bit about your background. I know you were raised in Florida up in Jacksonville, right? So tell us what you were like as a kid. Were you a good student? Were you a wild child? What was the deal up in Jacksonville?

Dr. Summer Decker: 19:19

Well, I’m sure that my school up there would probably say what they thought about it, but I was actually a very quiet student, very much a reader. I loved science a lot. One of my favorite stories is that my fifth grade teacher actually had us write out what we thought we would end up doing in our lives. And I remember some of my friends saying, I want to be a football player. I want to be a ballerina or something like that. And years later they actually gave me the letter. I wrote myself and it actually said, I loved computers. I loved computer programming and I loved anatomy. And so, yeah , and also I liked forensics at that age. I loved mysteries. I read mystery books, lots of Nancy Drew. And so here’s the little kid, you know, single digits. Are she writing out that somehow I wanted to be able to use computers, anatomy to solve mysteries. And my training is actually in forensics beyond that. So when I look at it now, I think I must have had some early idea that this could come at some point. But when I went to college, my field really didn’t even exist. So I have been back to my high school and to my elementary school and they kind of laugh that I was the quiet, very reserved kid. And so it baffles them, seeing me talking on stages, talking in interviews because I was very quiet, but I love what I do so much that I want to share it. And so, yeah, I was the kid apparently who knew what I was going to end up doing.

Richard Miles: 20:40

That’s pretty amazing. Most kids do not. They think they do, and then they get it wrong. It’s interesting. You did go into forensic anthropology and also Spanish. Right. But then you eventually made your way into medical imaging, radiology, 3D printing. Tell us a little bit about that path. Was it an early class that you took as a freshman that kind of awoken those desires to go into the medical field? Or what was that like?

Dr. Summer Decker: 21:00

So the area that I went into anthropology is called physical anthropology. And what I really loved about it was basically it was osteology or the study of bones. And so we are able as trained forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists, physical anthropology covers things from fossils fossil record to ancient historical remains. And I specialized in forensics because I wanted to be able to answer forensic questions, more modern crime type questions. And in the course of that, I actually started working with the medical examiner in Las Vegas because I went to University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and working with them. I started becoming an autopsy technician. And so I assisted there and I talked to the pathologist there and I said, I love this. This is what I want to do. And they’re the ones who encouraged me to go to a medical school. They said, we really would love to see you at a medical school. And the other thing they also did was they told me that in the future, they really could see that autopsies would be done using imaging. And they showed me the news story of a group in Switzerland that was doing virtual autopsies or imaging guided autopsies. So they started making me run all the x-rays. So I started reading x-rays and learning that. And so once I graduated with my master’s in anthropology, I ended up coming to a medical school where they actually had a 3D team. And while I really loved the clinical medicine, I really did love the research side of it too. And I didn’t want to have to choose. And so I’m really excited to be a clinical PhD. And that means that I have our clinical practice and I do what we do with our cases, but I also get to do a lot of research. And so my area of specialty is actually forensic radiology. And I actually worked very closely with the Swiss team that they mentioned to me as a baby student. And so I go over and teach with them and train other pathologists and radiologists how to get in this field. And it’s such an exciting area to be able to combine medical imaging and pathology and 3D and be able to solve crimes and solve who people are. And so we actually have funding right now with the National Institute of Justice here at USF, to be able to help identify people using lumbar scans is so you imagine lots of patients have lower back issues. So you’re seeing just as much as teeth are seeing lumbar scans. And so we’re now able to use those scans to identify people.

Richard Miles: 23:15

You’re the sort of person, the TV show is structured their entire show around you’re the character, right? Dr. Decker say, get Dr. here stat, you pal around with this cast of MCIs, I imagine.

Dr. Summer Decker: 23:26

Erotically . I was there when CSI was developed .

Richard Miles: 23:29

Really. Wow .

Dr. Summer Decker: 23:30

I actually remember the day they came and talked to us about it and Las Vegas that there was this TV show. We actually laughed that nobody would ever watch it. We said, well, we are a bunch of science dorks who cares about us.

Richard Miles: 23:40

Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Dr. Summer Decker: 23:41

And so some of my cases that I worked on there in Las Vegas appeared CSI. So for awhile , that’s how people knew me. But as much as I love the forensics, being able to help a patient walk out of that hospital, it really does make it worthwhile for me. So I love being able to do both.

Richard Miles: 23:57

So this whole career Dr. Decker is really just a way to get to Hollywood, right? You can just,

Dr. Summer Decker: 24:02

As I sit here in a room that I’m normally in the dark, but you know what I actually do tell the students is the software that we use, the tools that we use are the ones Hollywood uses. Um , one of my people worked with me, went off to work for Pixar. And so a lot of it is the same thing. So we actually do go to Pixar movies and see like, Oh, we’ll be able to use that. And so there’s actually in the history of Pixar, a radiologist was actually involved in that because it’s all image analysis. So when I was in college, I had the opportunity to National Geographic Show. And I remember thinking that was the pinnacle of my career because I really loved documentary film growing up. And now I use the same tools that they use for that to be able to answer medical problems. And so I tell my students here at the medical school, I play video games for a living. It just happened to be medical ones.

Richard Miles: 24:47

One pointless anecdote about National Geographic, one of our daughters intern there for awhile . And she said that they had two popular topics that just always sold way better than other ones. One was anything about big cats and anything about Alaska. They didn’t issue an Alaskan big cats. And it just like broke all records.

Dr. Summer Decker: 25:03

Ours was on mummies , but again, using medical imaging to work with the dead and being able to answer questions, using the tools that we have for our clinical patients, then looking at the ancient remains or even historical remains. It’s what we should be able to do to progress the field and understand how things have worked even in mummies .

Richard Miles: 25:21

So one final question, one of the corollaries of being successful as you have been certainly in the last year, but really your whole career is that people start asking you for advice. So tell us what sort of questions do you get say from your younger researchers or students and what kind of advice do you give?

Dr. Summer Decker: 25:36

Well, thank you for saying I’m successful. I’m one of those people that constantly doubts. And I think that’s why I keep pushing and pushing. And that’s actually probably what I tell my students when I came through school and you kind of touched on this, my field didn’t exist yet. And so I had people think I was crazy. Why do you like computers? Why do you like all of these things? And I don’t know why, but I just really loved that. And so when I tell students, you don’t know, you’re so young, you don’t know yet what is going to even be possible. So don’t get discouraged because I was told by so many people you’re not good enough and that you’re not smart enough for that mathematics or whatever. It came a little bit harder to me. I had to work hard for it. And so if it is something that you’re passionate about that you love, don’t give up on it because you never know how you might be able to help a pandemic because you had that vision, that idea, we know that our swabs over 70 million people have had them and 50 something countries. And if I had listened to the people who told me that I can never do this, this is crazy. That’s not really a field then that wouldn’t have happened. And what I tell people is honestly, stick with your passions just because it doesn’t exist now does not mean it won’t. And maybe you’re the one that’s actually makes that field. And so when I see people around me that are like-minded, it’s like finding your high, if your bees. And so being able to be around friends and colleagues that thought the same thing. Now , we were all kind of crazy. Well, now we weren’t so crazy anymore. And so that’s what I tell students. When you walk into medical school, a lot of times people think, Oh , I’ll never do that reading again. Or I’ll never do that video game again, or I’m supposed to be serious. Now don’t give up on those things. If you’re passionate about it, because you never know how that’s going to come back and help other people. So that’s what I tell people.

Richard Miles: 27:22

Well, great advice. And certainly you’ve done the state of Florida proud Jacksonville girl, ending up as a medical researcher in Tampa. So certainly have represented the state well, but we wish you the best of luck. Thank you very much for the work that you’ve done and helping us get out of this pandemic as hopefully we soon will be and look forward to new and exciting things coming out of your lab.

Dr. Summer Decker: 27:41

And I appreciate that. Thank you. And I’ll tell the team that too. I’m just one of many thousands. I know, but.

Richard Miles: 27:47

Somebody’s got to take the credit, right? I wish it was them. Dr. Becker. Thank you very much for being on Radio Cade. Thank you so much.

Outro: 27:56

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

Making virus testing easy, or at least easier, will enable companies and organizations to reopen faster as we enter the beginning of the post-corona era. Dr. Timothy Garrett, the Chief of Experimental Pathology at the University of Florida, has developed a test that can detect multiple viruses, including variants, from a single sample. Better yet, this can be done in a portable lab for remote testing, potentially making it widely available in many communities. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

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

Richard Miles : 0:39

Making virus testing easy, or at least easier will enable companies and organizations to reopen faster. As we enter the beginning of the post Corona era. Welcome to Radio Cade. I’m your host, Richard Miles. And today I’m pleased to welcome Dr. Timothy Garrett an Associate Professor and the Chief of Experimental Pathology at the University of Florida, as well as the founder of three companies, including Juno Metabolomics where he remains the Chief Scientific Officer. And he’s also a friend. So welcome to Radio Cade Tim .

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 1:06

I’m glad to be here. Thanks.

Richard Miles : 1:07

So Tim, I usually save the toughest question for last, but I’m going to cut straight to the chase. How does a guy who did his undergrad, the University of Georgia and up at the University of Florida? Cause I thought we had rules preventing that from happening.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 1:18

There are a lot of social roles involved in that. But the short answer is that at the University of Georgia, I got introduced to a technique that allowed me the new area of study. And when I came to Florida and one of the top people in my field was here. And so I decided once I got in and this was a great place to go and we liked the warm weather and living in Florida, was attracted to that. So somehow they let a Georgia bulldog and to the University of Florida. And now I guess you can call me a true bull gator because I am a bulldog and a gator.

Richard Miles : 1:46

Well, I hope I haven’t blown your secret and they rescind your tenure or something. Anyway, we’ll talk a little bit about your background later, but let’s start out by talking about what it is that you have actually developed and why we invited you on the show. And so you’re an analytical chemist and you basically specialize in finding stuff and by stuff, I mean small molecules and where they come from. And if I understand correctly, you have developed a test that can detect multiple viruses, including variants from a single sample and better yet. This can be done in a portable lab for remote testing. So has obvious implications for the era that we’re in right now, which is sort of coming out of the coronavirus . But first of all, did I get that completely wrong? Cause you know, I got my degrees in international relations, which should scare you. So tell us what this test does, how it works and why it matters.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 2:30

You got it almost a hundred percent correct. So good job. It’s a test that basically allows you to look at saliva, right? Isolate out instead of small molecules, isolate out proteins that are specific to individual viruses and that includes individual variants as well. And then allow you to measure those individual proteins in a portal style format. So basically in general, it’s a fairly simple process. We isolate the proteins and then we measure those proteins using mass spectrometry. And the cool part about the reason mass spec is important for this is it’s the, of the masses. Meaning that how much the proteins way allows us to really distinguish which protein it is and which virus it comes from. And that includes SARS coronavirus and the original one, as well as SARS cov two. And in Florida, we care about mosquito borne illnesses like Dengue and Zika and other ones. And it allows us also to see those unique patterns that allows us to really differentiate, which is which, and so the really cool part is that from that simple saliva sample, we’ll be able to diagnose what virus the person is infected with. And that would then allow us to really start treatment very much quicker rather than waiting for PCR, which would really only capture one specific virus at a time rather than what we could do is really just search the library and find out what’s there.

Richard Miles : 3:38

So if I get this correct, Tim is the standard of care. Now that in order to really identify whether someone’s got virus A or B or C or D do they have to have blood drawn and then that blood goes off to a lab and then that you get a result back a couple of days later, is that the current state of affairs or is a real breakthrough here, this one, the saliva test part of it rather than the blood. And is there a speed element involved ?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 4:00

So you can test primarily as nasal swabs or saliva. Most of it was done with nasal swabs until we started thinking about saliva better. One of the key parts with current diagnostics is the use of PCR, polymerase chain reaction methods that are designed to target one specific part of a virus to amplify that signal, to really give you a really strong response. That means that you’re limited to whichever piece of the DNA or RNA that you start with to amplify, which is very specific. And so you need multiple tests for that. The real aspect of this is basically being able to look at patterns. So using pattern recognition approaches to save this as one virus versus another. And that really equates to speed. So you can take 30 minutes to prepare the sample and be able to measure all the viruses versus what you might have to do in a normal clinical lab, which is conducted 30 to 40 to an hour long run to identify a single type of virus.

Richard Miles : 4:50

If we compare this to say like a lot of people have done already, like the saliva based coronavirus tests, but in that example, right, if I think I’ve got coronavirus, I ordered a test , they analyze it. If I had another virus, would that test pick it up or not?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 5:04

No, it would . It would not. So if you, instead of having coronavirus had the Zika or Dengue Fever, it would not capture that. And those have similar symptoms in some ways, headache and runny noses and those kinds of similar clinical symptoms, but you wouldn’t know.

Richard Miles : 5:19

So with your process, somebody could walk into the doctor’s say I feel lousy. I don’t know what I have. They take a saliva sample and then you could potentially look at a whole bunch of different potential virus.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 5:27

That’s correct. Yeah. And we’ve started small on purpose to build libraries in a small way, but then it would expand exponentially really. And the cool part about it is it because it’s a library of information it’s easily transmitted to individuals who have access to measuring in this way, which is part of the reason why it makes it very portable because it’s really just querying a new database of information. And that database then provides the diagnostics.

Richard Miles : 5:50

So it’s really in that back analysis, the saliva, right ? Cause this is an Elizabeth Holmes type thing, right. Where you’re just taking one drop or something and saying, Oh, there are 87 different things wrong with you right?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 6:01

Definitely not that, glad that you brought that up. That’s one of the biggest concerns with developing a test is following that route. But we look at small steps to make sure it works, with just one virus at a time. Right. And then once you do that, then you say, okay, now we can keep building upon that. And eventually, yeah, you could do hundreds maybe, but that would be way down the road. This sort of translates what we do for bacteriology right now in the clinical world for bacterial identification, we use similar approaches to measure patterns, to help us understand which bacteria you might have an infection. And so that’s running a sample and searching against the database to say, yes, we think you have this infection versus this one.

Richard Miles : 6:35

Excuse me, for asking basic questions. But is there any difference from a practical standpoint or an analytical standpoint when you’re working with saliva versus blood? I mean, imagine working with slides a lot easier, right? Probably the way you handle it and care for it and store it is I’m guessing magnitudes easier than handling blood. But in terms of the information that you get from saliva, are you just as good or is it one notch down from what you could get from blood available?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 6:59

Saliva is just as good. And I had the same feeling you had initially when we started working with saliva, that it should be easier. But in fact, it’s 10 times harder.

Richard Miles : 7:06

Really ok, shows you what I know.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 7:09

I didn’t either as an analytical chemist, it’s sort of a fairly new medium for me, blood we know a lot about, and we have a lot of processes in place to deal with how to process it and how to get rid of different components. Saliva has higher variability from individual to individual, meaning that how much water you drink might affect the concentration of saliva. It has so many enzymes that are designed to break down food that those enzymes can get in the way of measuring other species that , that aren’t enzymes like viruses that are present. And it still has the same infectious capability as blood does. And so if you get contact with saliva with viruses , so could have possibility of getting an infection. So from a perspective of trying to measure species that are in really, really low concentrations, the amount of other stuff present, causes a problem, Oh, and the other thing in our saliva, we have bacteria, right? The normal bacteria that live in a part of our gums in our mouth that are part of a healthy, as well as unhealthy mouth that are also confounding some of these issues. So you have sort of like a weird experiment that happens in our mouth every day when we eat.

Richard Miles : 8:08

But from a patient perspective, it’s much easier obviously, right? Because nobody’s faints from giving a vial of saliva where a lot of people are still nervous and myself included about getting their blood drawn. They really don’t like it. So at least from the patient, it’s probably better.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 8:21

That’s a hundred percent true and it is easier to collect, right? Cause someone could collect a sample and drop it off rather than having to have a blood draw a thousand times much easier for individuals. And you can even send them a kit.

Richard Miles : 8:31

They sent it to you in the mail and then they just walk you through it online. Exactly what to do. There’s obviously been a lot of attention the last year on fighting the coronavirus and almost exactly a year later, even as we’re doing this interview about roughly 20% of the population, a little bit less has received at least one shot. And it’s amazing. That is, I think some people have missed the breakthrough or maybe don’t fully understand in the underlying technology of messenger RNA as a process to make the vaccine and what that could mean in treating other diseases. I know that’s not exactly your field, but is that as big a deal as I’ve read or is that just hype?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 9:07

It is a big deal. Not only because of the speed at which it was developed, but the technology that’s in there and it opens up the idea of changing how we do vaccines in the future, right? So normally we have a live virus, right? That’s how you get the flu. The live virus has given you give a little bit of it that tells your body to react to the flu. And then when you get a real stimulus of the flu, you’re immune to that, that’s has some issues, right? In terms of growing it in terms of giving it to individuals, this one tricks your body in the same way to have an immune response, but uses messenger RNA as that trick. Right? And so now you can think about developing a flu virus. That’s not a live attenuated flu virus that could be used to in the same manner and then follow the same procedures and also potentially being a lot broader spectrum coverage then we get with the current life virus where we have to guess, which is going to be the biggest outbreak this year. So to me, as a scientist, looking at it, people worry about the speed of development. They have to sort of understand that all of that speed, we still went through all of the same clinical trials. It just went a lot faster because we had the money upfront to get people in the trials and do this trial as much faster than it would normally take. But the science behind it to me is exciting. And the next four to five years and how this is used is going to be another phase of neurology.

Richard Miles : 10:16

Right. And if I understand it basically with the messenger RNA, you can basically trick or command your body, whatever verb you want to use into producing almost any protein that you want it to produce to fight off or handle a lot of different types of pathologies or diseases. And that is what has got researchers super excited. Yeah .

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 10:32

Yeah. Some of the concerns was keeping it stable, right. And that’s the only real concern right now is making sure that it doesn’t fall apart or degrade, which is why you have to keep it that cold temperatures, but we’re going to solve that and Johnson and Johnson’s one came out and that somewhat solves that issue without worrying about cold storage. But yeah, and it’s tricking your body using a way to really hone in on a specific response is really intriguing. How we then grow from here is something, I think the scientific community is really gonna learn a lot from in this phase, but also in controlling other viruses.

Richard Miles : 11:02

Yeah. As bad as this year has been for coronavirus . And certainly other people that have died has been a tragedy. Ironically, historians may look back on 2020, 2021 as making this huge breakthrough in treating, not just coronavirus, but other types of diseases and viruses that even five years ago or 10 years ago, if we’d been talking about trying to develop a vaccine inside of basically a year, less than a year or 10 months, that just would have been on the level almost of scifi .

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 11:26

Exactly. And then also scaling it up and then manufacturing, not just developing but manufacturing yet at a high enough level to get people, even if we’re at 20%. Now we really only started vaccinating people in late December, January, right?

Richard Miles : 11:38

The first few weeks is pretty chaotic if not incompetent. And so really a ton of the vaccination have taken place and probably the last four weeks or four to five weeks.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 11:46

Exactly. And you’ve mentioned something about the scientific part of it to me as a scientist, when the world sort of stuff went on different lockdowns, depending on what state you were in, the scientific community , started digging through the science really fast. We had some more time on our hands because we couldn’t sit in our labs and do experiments. So we started looking back at old papers that maybe we had to study before. And so what we saw then after that two month hiatus was after that you saw an explosion of scientific discovery, which to me was really fascinating to see. And if you look at the bio archives where people publish early work, you can sort of see how many COVID related publications came out from people who aren’t even studying viruses in the past that sort of got interested in thinking about a problem in a new way. So the scientific discovery, I think from this is one of the very interesting things to see, and then what comes all through this and what generation of scientists tackle this in a different way .

Richard Miles : 12:34

That’s a great point. So let’s move from science to the world of business, like a fair number of researchers you’ve taken several of your technologies or research that you’ve done informed several companies and every story is different. So let’s hear yours, what, or who gave you the idea of commercializing some of the technologies and how are these companies doing?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 12:54

Commercializing really comes from me within and from other people that I’ve learned from the idea of taking something that you develop as a scientist and then write a paper on, but then also deciding how can we help communities with this? How can we design something that not only has good scientific background, but also can be implemented somewhere that helps us grow it as a community. Part of that, of course, the Cade. Robert Cade was a key part to see a scientist who’s working at the University of Florida, right? Developing a product that then becomes something that people really use and need in many different ways, whether there’s a , for normal healthcare , but also just for sports management. So seeing another scientist go that route is a way that I’ve really enjoyed trying to solve the right problems in a way that balances being an academic, but also trying to be an entrepreneur. And so with this new company that we’re in is only a couple of years old. It’s still growing as a company with not just the virus. In fact, we didn’t start it as a virus based company. It started as an analytical testing company for metabolomic measurements and performance, right? Measuring performance enhancement and understanding that how we can improve individual’s recovery and those kinds of components that go into management of athletes. And then when we couldn’t do that research for a little while, we moved on to thinking in new ways and how we could use the knowledge of the company to help and the virus space. And my background is a scientist.

Richard Miles : 14:08

So Tim, sometimes as you well know, the world of basic research and academia is quite different than the world of startups and entrepreneurs and venture capital firms and so on. How did you negotiate that transition? And what do you notice in terms of those two different universes?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 14:23

So speed is one of the first things academic research is fairly slow and partly because you have to find funding right through different areas. And so you ended up having a much slower pace. And when you switched to a corporate or company based work, do you have to be much faster in terms of implementing something and coming up with a solution faster and you can’t necessarily do that without compromising sort of the science behind it. So part of it is making sure you have the right funding in place fast enough to hire the right people, to help those right problems, putting my academic hat on. It’s harder to make that fast paced translation for me. And so relying on others that we have in the company to help move that at the right pace is really what I’ve found to be the most beneficial part. Because training me is sort of like training a dog, a new trick, right? It takes a lot longer to train something new. You don’t end up keeping your old tricks. So really finding new people is one of the key benefits to me.

Richard Miles : 15:13

The Cade Prize competition, we talk to a lot of folks who have done exactly what you’re doing in terms of moving their technologies to market. And several them have commented that the first shock was mostly in academia. And I know I’m generalizing here, but particularly in research, you work on research for a long time. You make a breakthrough, you publish it. You might go to a couple of conferences and talk about research and people applaud and go great job. And then you’re off to the next research, right? You’re sort of done, you’ve published your paper. And they’re shock was when they take this to market and investors go, yeah, that’s a great idea, but who’s going to buy it. Who’s going to pay for it. How fast can you produce it? So they all acknowledged the idea is great and that’s not really the benchmark anymore. Good idea versus bad idea. It’s good idea that can also be manufactured and sold. And that was a cold bath for some of these researchers. Who’ve never had to deal with that before.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 15:59

Yeah. And you’re sort of right. We do the research. We eventually published a paper on it and we talk about it. And then we think about the next research project. Can we sort of encapsulate that this is a publication from the work and go read it and we might often stop there versus yeah. The industry part is, okay, now this is a cool idea, but is there a market for it, right? Or is there protection for it, right. Maybe that maybe you don’t have protection. And we run in this space in biomarker discovery all the time. You find a new biomarker, they’re very difficult to protect. And so when you think about a company, you can still use a biomarker, but you might use it to develop the technology to measure that biomarker. And that would be then how you might translate a cut to make a company successful, putting that mindset on. It’s like, okay, this result has a high percentage of being successful in terms of diagnostic of patients. So how can we then translate that to making a product that works and that makes money and that also provides value to the community. Right? And so one of the hardest parts for me is really that part of taking that research idea and really thinking about what it would look like in the marketplace and not all of them will work that way. And you have to sort of bounce those ideas off of colleagues or friends or people that you think about to say, is there really, truly a market for this? And then find investors that might be interested in sort of helping you translate that to something that they might envision as a different route to it. So I like the publication part, but I also really like trying to see if it really will make a dent. And to me, healthcare is a big part. So healthcare.

Richard Miles : 17:17

That’s what a lot of people say is it gratifying as a recognition is from colleagues in the academic world. It’s knowing that the technology, the research is actually helping people. And the only way that really happens is getting it to market right where it can help a bunch of people. And that’s really provides a lot of satisfaction,

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 17:33

Right? And often our studies are on cells or on other kinds of systems and not on say human samples. And so really you have to see how it works testing in humans to understand really, will it have any impact in the same way that it has in normal laboratory setting .

Richard Miles : 17:46

So Tim, at the beginning of the show, we talked about you did your undergraduate University of Georgia, but you actually spent your childhood in the Midwest and your dad also was a chemistry professor or a researcher and a lead scientist at Owen Corning’s fiberglass. But when you entered college, you told me you wanted to be an English major, but then chemistry found you. So first of all, what happened? And secondly, was there any evidence when you were a kid running around with four siblings, right. That you would be a top scientific researcher, did that just sort of come out of the blue?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 18:15

If you ask my siblings, there’s no evidence whatsoever.

Richard Miles : 18:18

They’re still looking for it. Right.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 18:20

They’re looking for it. Yes. And I’m the youngest of four. I’m a twin though. So I’m the youngest by three minutes. And so as a kid, I struggled in the beginning with math. I didn’t do great about in middle school. I didn’t really come into understanding what I was really good at it until college. So I sort of was just a normal high school kid, did the normal stuff and I have good grades here and there. I did like science and I knew stuff for my dad. I got to visit his company and see sort of stuff he did, but I didn’t really quite understand it. And so you’re right. That chemistry really did find me. And the only reason is because I had to take chemistry because at Georgia, I was in college of liberal arts and sciences. And so I have to have a scientific program. So I was like, Nope, chemistry. I’ll take that. I can ask my dad any questions if I don’t understand them. And then I took it and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t think I would enjoy it. So then I had to take another general chemistry. So I took that and then I still was an English major or thinking about being English, which doesn’t make any sense to me nowadays. But then it made a lot of sense, but I do like reading and I do like writing, but it really wasn’t until I took organic chemistry. And a lot of people will tell you that organic chemistry is sort of cutoff points for both people, whether you like it or not. And so I took organic chemistry and I loved it. I could visualize the molecules in my head. I could really make connections that I didn’t think I could ever see before. And so it really was connecting what was on paper, putting that three-dimensional figure in your head of a molecule coming together or the shape of a symbol , like cyclohexane ring, whatever. And that part was so fascinating to me that you could then see what it looks like, but then also make reactions happen. Right. And then make products from that. And then the last part was doing research in college. Right. And then figuring out like it take one a, the size of a needle, a sample type, measuring what’s in that. And you can measure what was in that. If you just look at your pencil for a second, that’s smaller than that we can measure. Right. And that’s the , wow. You can really measure that amount of material and come up with an answer was pretty fascinating.

Richard Miles : 20:08

I’m guessing that your dad was quite pleased, right? His , his kid goes off to college to be an English major and comes back as a chemistry researcher. Right. He must have been quite happy about that.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 20:17

He was happy, but he kept pushing me into polymer chemistry because that’s what he did. And so he wanted me to go that route cause he didn’t really quite understand what I could do with analytical chemistry right away. But definitely he was encouraging a hundred percent of the way. And I learned a lot about how to do science or how to think about science from him and got to sort of bounce ideas off of him because he could understand what I was trying to go through in grad school and trying to understand different parts of it. He could really help me think through scientific discovery and because of his background, even though it wasn’t the same field, he still sort of had that training and knowledge to help a lot on the way.

Richard Miles : 20:48

Right. Well, it’s funny you had the opposite experience that I did. I was actually fairly good at math in high school. And then I got to college. I took my first advanced calculus class and just completely wiped me out. And I said to hell with that, I’m doing international relations. So, but , um, but my daughter became a math major. So it skipped a generation. So maybe your kids will be English majors Tim, theres still hope.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 21:07

There’s hope that they could be there. That’s that would be awesome. Yes. I totally support them whatever they like to do.

Richard Miles : 21:12

So Tim, you also told me earlier that research is hard and that experiments don’t always work out. And one fascinating thing is you said, what you have found at least is at rest is really important. So can you expand a little bit about that? Because I get lots of rest. But I’m not working on any pathbreaking technology. So I feel like I’m doing something wrong. So what is your secret?

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 21:31

Well, we sometimes get stuck thinking the same way all the time. I’m thinking about the problem , the same way all the time, because we either have our mindset that this is the way I’ve done it in the past. And it always works this way. And I continue to do that and we reach a part in research when you don’t know what the next experiment is, or you don’t know what the result means. If you keep trying to plug away and trying to just run experiment after experiment, you’re not going to necessarily come up with the answer. Right. But I look at it as is, you have to forget about it . And the reason you have to kind of forget about it is if you read a science fiction novel, or if you read something unrelated to your field, that you might get this ding that comes off that says, wow, that’s cool. And think about it in a different perspective. It’s like, well, I’ve been thinking about it this way for the last six months. What if I just do this? And you might just get a clear mind and my wife is an artist, right? And so part of that comes from seeing an artist think and seeing how an artist takes a lot of time and energy to go through many things in their head draws, sketches, and then trying to really balance between science and art to me has been part of that rest. Right? So turning off my scientific mind and just thinking non scientifically for awhile helps me think about new ways. And that then might be the next experiment that you designed, that you could then write it out on a napkin because then all of a sudden you think this would be a cool experiment to do, and I need to do it. And then you still have the knowledge to know how to do the experiment, but you’re just started from a different perspective.

Richard Miles : 22:47

I understand that rest of you is a relative term. You have a young kids at home and a creative, energetic wife who I feel your pain. She’s usually volunteering you to do things to him that maybe you don’t want to do, but you’ve got to do them anyway. But it’s interesting what you say because a lot of brain researchers have said that there’s creative sparks come in fact, when we do relax our brains , so to speak and we take our hyper-focus off of our, our subject area and we stand back a little bit. And then like you said, as an artist maybe stands back from their painting, they’re able to see something there that they didn’t see before. So you’re definitely onto something.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 23:18

Yeah. I’m and to me it’s been the most beneficial parts are just taking a walk right outside and just looking at nature and not really contemplating anything, except it’s talking with a friend or just looking at the birds or here in Florida, looking at the alligators and then you see something or it reminds calm enough to see through the problem. And I think that calming part is really what we sort of miss. Sometimes this high stress high speed environment, you have to have a calming force to really put pieces together. And I deal with data sets that have thousands to hundreds of thousands of features, right. Or signals. And we have to try and make sense of those and that you can’t physically do that without having a relaxed kind of approach to it.

Richard Miles : 23:57

Very well said, Tim, and really have enjoyed having you on the show, wish you the best of luck with your research and also your companies. And look forward to having you back for an update.

Dr. Timothy Garrett: 24:06

Thank you very much for being a part of this. This is a great thing, and I’m glad that we could spend the time together talking.

Richard Miles : 24:11

Great. Thanks Tim.

Outro: 24:13

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