Episode 80 – Dr. Cori Lathan

Erik Martinez: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez, and today I'm thrilled to have Dr. Cori Lathan. Dr. Cori is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, neuroscientist, and an inventor who believes that technology can augment human capabilities.

Dr. Cori, welcome to the show.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Thanks, Erik. I'm so glad that we're doing this.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, even though it took me a little while to convince you to come on.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Not because of you, but because of me. I'm a technologist. I'm not a marketer, but I'm excited to be here.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, but you know what? There's this interesting convergence of [00:01:00] technology and marketing today. I mean, it's been happening for the last two decades, but it's accelerating. And you know, I have been reading your book, Inventing the Future Stories from a Techno Optimist, and I've been absolutely fascinated by the integration of technology and the types of inventions that you've made.

And I think this conversation about being a techno optimist in this world is really applicable to any discipline and marketing is no exception. So, it's so fascinating to read your stories about working with the Department of Defense and NASA. You actually rode on the vomit comment.

Darn cool. For those of you that don't know what the vomit comment is, it's the airplane that they use to simulate weightlessness in space is how they train astronauts.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yes. 20 seconds at a time of zero gravity.

Erik Martinez: I just can't imagine. So we might have to dig into that [00:02:00] one a little bit later as well. And then, you know, you've been a researcher trying to help children with disabilities learn using technology.

In your own words, can you just briefly tell the audience about your journey in all this amazing experience you have.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah. Well first of all, I'm so glad that you're enjoying the book. I deliberately didn't call it lessons from a techno optimist. It really is stories. It's stories about how the intersection of technology and need and market. Come together in these really super creative ways. I mean, I created the first virtual reality system for the International Space Station back in the early two thousands.

In the nineties, I developed an educational robot for kids with disabilities, which ended up being brought to market as an alternative computer interface and software. So, this concept of a techno optimist and stories from a techno [00:03:00] optimist really reflect my philosophy or my driving philosophy as an engineer and inventor.

That technology should make us stronger, healthier, and happier. Technology should enable us to do things we couldn't do without it. And technology should create an equitable future. So I was thrilled to be able to share that manifesto through this book, but the book is really a history and back to really your question my journey was not straightforward.

My undergraduate majors were mathematics, biology, psychology. I smooshed them all together and came up with a special major because Swarthmore let me do that. And then I took a year off to go work with the French Space Agency. And I ended up living in France for a year working in a lab where not only were they working with the American Space Agency, NASA, they were also working with the Russians. And we had just flown a French [00:04:00] astronaut on the MIR space station and we were flying a French astronaut on the US shuttle, and it just opened my eyes to the power of technology in a way that I hadn't really thought about.

Okay, yes. I wanted to be an astronaut, and tech was cool, and science fiction was cool, but oh my God. - technology and collaboration could bring world peace. It was this really kind of aha moment. And so, I carried that with me through grad school. I came back from France and did my PhD in neuroscience and master's in aerospace engineering at MIT. I continued my collaboration with my French collaborators, and when I graduated, I thought that, academia was the way to achieve this vision of collaboration and technological advancement. And I knew that there were some issues with academia, but I honestly, I thought it was MIT. I thought that the silos that you see in academia, where [00:05:00] every professor has to hold on tightly to the one thing they're an expert in and publish over and over in that, so they're the world expert, and collaboration is frowned upon - honestly, I thought that was MIT or research one universities. So I deliberately chose to go become a professor in a new field, biomedical engineering, which was emerging at the time. And at a Catholic University in DC, which had a great blend of undergrad and graduate.

Long story short, I discovered that, no, it was not MIT - it was all of academia. I left after four years to start a company. I had a joint appointment over at University of Maryland. They had a business incubator, which I discovered what that was. And I started a company and basically ran an engineering R and D company. For over 20 years and our philosophy was: let's do cool projects with cool people.

And so, if you had a hard problem to solve that technology could help, and there was a [00:06:00] market for it, I was your girl.

Erik Martinez: That's a fascinating story. I think for the listeners here, like, okay, why are we talking to this person who's not a marketer on this show? And I think, you said it earlier, it's the blend of market, technology and need. Right? And as marketers, we're trying to find that intersection and connect with customers in that spot.

And you starting this entrepreneurial company that did r and d and making cool products for cool people or with cool people or all of the above. All of the above. Is really a story about business.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yep, 100%

Erik Martinez: Right? It's business, innovation and viewing the future. And I think that's one of the things that us as marketers have to think about all the time.

I mean, some days we're just, we're like, oh man, I'm pulling my hair out just trying to think how I can generate one more sale. That's the day-to-day [00:07:00] grind. But if you really step back and look at the bigger picture, we're really talking about the future. And today's future really involves a lot of technology.

Today's marketing involves a lot of technology, some of it, which is good, and some of it, which is great and everything in between. Which takes us to the topic of AI because it is part of every marketer's conversation right now, and it has become ubiquitous. There's AI in everything.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yes.

Erik Martinez: Some version of it on your phone. I mean, if you say, I don't interact with AI and you have a cell phone you're wrong.

Dr. Cori Lathan: If you use a computer, if you make a phone call. Yes. It's everywhere. It is everywhere.

Erik Martinez: And because it's so accessible, it's also a little scary, right? And like, what's this stuff doing? What is it intended to do? How is it helping me?

But in your book, you have this really great quote: "AI is not a technology. It is a technique for [00:08:00] understanding people and making machines act the way people do."

And I thought that's a really interesting point. So would you mind telling the audience how you arrived at that viewpoint and why it's important for us to embrace this technology?

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah, I love that definition of AI. It is, a quote from Dr. Justine Cael a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. And so, that quote is from her. And I love that definition of AI because when I think about my own journey as an inventor, and how I've used machine learning, how I'm using generative AI, how I am using the tools at my disposal, it's that I'm trying to get technology again to help us do things that maybe we can do with a lot of effort, with a lot of help, and technology's gonna make that easier. And let me give you an example. And this example actually isn't [00:09:00] in my book because it's the most recent product that I've been working on this past year.

I was CEO of a startup. An age tech startup. Now talk about a market. If your listeners don't know about the aging population, which I'm sure they do but it's, by 2035, adults over 50 are projected to outnumber those under 18 for the first time in history. And that population spent $77 billion on technology last year. And that could double in the next 10 years. So this general area of technology for the over 50, which I won't even call elderly.

Erik Martinez: Please don't because I fall into that category.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Me too. So, for us, for our parents, for maybe some of us even have grandparents. It's a global economic opportunity of $45 trillion for this area of age tech and AARP in the [00:10:00] US has done a great job of quantifying this market.

So this startup, looking at the need, is preventing falls. Every second, an elderly person falls,, according to CDC. There's a lot of falls in the U.S.. and that's 37 million falls with 40,000 of them resulting in death. So that's 40,000 preventable falls. So we do a lot of things to try and prevent these falls, right? We put people in nursing homes, we give them full-time caregivers, we try and make their homes fall-proof and we put stuff up.

Well, this company - this young inventor, a young woman, Sidney Collin - invented a device that you can attach to any walker or cane. And, Just by turning on a light that projects on the ground or an auditory cue, like a metronome, it changes the neural pathway of walking to one that has been degraded. A self-directed [00:11:00] movement to a goal-directed movement and walking improves and falls are reduced.

Okay, so that's a neurotech. It's using technology to change the neuroscience to prevent falls. But it's very hard to do it with just technology. So of course, therapists have to use this technology to help train them. Well, what if we could get an AI to help train them on this technology when a therapist or a caregiver's not there?

What if we could get an AI that was doing some machine learning on their movement so it knew if their movements were getting too fast or too slow or too unstable and it could intervene maybe mechanically, maybe through some sort of stabilization or maybe with, a nice alert, you know, a friendly voice or alerting someone else.

There's so much, especially when you have access to this kind of data, when you have access to millions of people. When you have a very rich data set, [00:12:00] it's a perfect time you can say, AI could really help us here. We're not replacing a caregiver, we're not replacing a therapist. We're making it so that you're helping an elderly person or elderly mother or father or aunt or uncle get stronger and healthier even when there isn't a caregiver there.

To me that's just such a perfect example of where market need and technology have come together to provide us, not just with that particular example that I gave, but with a whole new field of age tech.

I'll just end by saying - what's fascinating is: who do you sell this technology to? What would be a great marketing plan for this device, called Next Stride, that you attach to a walker or cane. Who do you think is your buyer? Who are you marketing it to?

Erik Martinez: Well, I can think of several audiences, right? On the medical side. You could sell it to therapists.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yep, totally.

Erik Martinez: You could sell it to the end consumer depending on how much it costs. But you could [00:13:00] sell it to the insurance companies because they're always trying to limit risk. Right. And falls are costly

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yep.

Erik Martinez: From a pure insurance

Dr. Cori Lathan: So, Erik, you hit it. We tried all three of those. And are still trying all three. It's not a one and done. Number three, insurance companies. They're the ones who are willing to actually pay.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, cause it saves them money.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah. Yep and we announced actually a partnership with Prudential. It's publicly announced. But what's interesting is going to the end consumer, what you ended up getting was not an elderly person choosing to use this. You had their son or their daughter, someone our age buying it for their elderly parent who was like, I'm not gonna use this stupid thing.

The end user and end consumer in this case is a little bit confusing. But yeah, you hit on it and it's not easy because you would think a lot of, nursing homes would like this. It could save them huge amount of money. If every [00:14:00] fall costs them money, but they don't have money to outlay. They're not innovative enough. And there's exceptions of course, but it's a very interesting marketing issue. When you're talking about age tech. You really have to think about all of those things that you articulated.

Erik Martinez: It's interesting because when I look at that from a pure marketing standpoint, you sit there and go, "Okay, well, now I want to take that concept and - how do I reach out? How do I approach the insurance companies? What messaging do they need? And can I use AI to help craft the message, deliver the message, create the connections. Help with the case studies and do some of the research, right?"

You guys have done a ton of research to figure out which market's the best market to approach, how to get this technology out into the world, but somebody still has to go market it - they still have to go deliver the technology, educate. I mean, there's a marketing campaign just in [00:15:00] educating the potential users of this.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Right, which makes the customer acquisition cost super high.

Erik Martinez: Super high

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah. So how can AI help there? Can AI make the videos more efficiently, more ability to communicate the message? How do you use AI to reduce that customer acquisition cost? Cause this is very high with a product like this.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, and there's a lot of constituents, right? It's not just one. If the insurance company says hey, this is great. I'm Prudential- this is great technology. We go through and do all our actuarial calculations. This is gonna save us a ton of money in falls, but now we have to educate the constituents. We've gotta educate the therapists and the nursing homes and the end consumer and so on and so forth, and how do we go about doing that? And how could we bring technology, like AI into that conversation. Very fascinating. I think what you do as a developer and an inventor of [00:16:00] product that's solving a need for people who may not realize they need it yet, is a very interesting marketing problem.

And a business problem. Because in your book you talk about multiple examples of where you're like, Hey we got funding to do X and we had to come up with a prototype in 90 days to see if we could pass to the next level and get the next level of funding. That is such a fascinating business model, but also kind of scary.

Because there's a lot of risk involved. There's risk in doing the creating of the thing, but then there's the risk that somebody may not adopt this. And yet you seem to have always found a bright spot in those failures. And I'm air quoting right now.

So what have you learned about failure that would help a business leader think about the future of their company because you live this all the time.

Dr. Cori Lathan: When you talk to an inventor or an engineer about [00:17:00] failure in some ways it doesn't resonate because prototyping, is sort of an iterative design. Is that a failure or are you just figuring out what works? It's hard to translate, my concept of what is a failure as an inventor. I'm not even sure what a failure would look like as an inventor because so much of what I invent will certainly never see financial success. Every once in a while you get lucky as an inventor or an entrepreneur, right?

Serial entrepreneurs are serial, not always because they knock it outta the park every time, but it's kind of a rite of passage to have a small company fail. That's more common than not. So I guess what I try and articulate in my book, that I almost see inventing and even business as a work of art.

Every work of art doesn't always achieve commercial success, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's less valuable as a work of art. [00:18:00] Or, anything from a painting where maybe, you're creating artwork for yourself or a piece of music for yourself, and that's just part of your creative process and part of making you who you are.

And then maybe there's the next level where you show a few friends your artwork or play in a local music festival and then some of these things do reach critical acclaim or financial acclaim. Although in the art world, it's probably more critical acclaim than financial acclaim.

And I really see inventing and even business I don't see any of my inventions as failures, even though not all of them we were able to spin off companies. Some of them we were, and they were maybe successful and are still around. And some of them there just, wasn't a big enough market.

I tell the story of Google Glass in my book, Google put a lot of money, and they still are. These big companies are still putting a [00:19:00] lot of money towards augmented reality and smart glasses. And we're getting closer. But we did that, with the military over 20 years ago, and the technology was there. It was more expensive than it is now for sure. But we were able to create that idea and that concept 20 years ago. And it was needed 20 years ago, but we just weren't there yet. So it's very hard for me to think about failure when I think that any experience is a learning one.

Look, we all need to have financial stability. It's really about risks. The risk trade off, what risk level are you able to accept. I was never really afraid of failure. When I left academia, which many consider to be a very cushy job they offered me tenure, I turned it down. People thought I was crazy. But for me, I was young, maybe stupid. I was lucky enough that I had a partner with a job, so I had a little bit of financial stability.

But I [00:20:00] think when you're thinking about the future of your company, what is it that you're trying to save? Is it your financial stability you're concerned about? Is it, your product that is not finding ground and you don't wanna kill your darling and move on to the next thing. You have to have some self-awareness as to what is it that makes you think it's a failure as opposed to a learning experience that you can take and move on.

I think that makes sense.

Erik Martinez: It makes perfect sense. In fact, you have another great line in your book where you say, the best way to predict the future is to create it.

As you were talking about, I don't really view anything as a failure - in some ways in the business world, we have a marketing campaign and we succeed or it doesn't, right? You know, the goal was X, we either hit X or beat X, or we didn't. It's kind of like this on off switch and you have these competing issues inside an organization where the CFO is going, yeah, okay, he didn't hit [00:21:00] x. You just spent at Y and you didn't hit X. The CMO or whoever heads up marketing's going, yeah, but we learned these five really important things that we can apply to our next campaign. Customer service gets feedback on those campaigns and then, Hey, we also learned three things that we can do better, right?

So you can look at these things as failure, or you can look as them as opportunities. From your perspective, how do you create the future? What's the process that you go through to create the future and what are the opportunities and challenges in that process?

Because I think all of our businesses we're trying to create the future, whatever that future is.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah, sure.

Erik Martinez: Is a little bit in unique and individual to each company and each owner, founder or group of executives. So from your perspective, how do you go about creating a future?

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah. Well, first of all, I love that saying, and it's been attributed to so many different people, different versions of [00:22:00] it. In fact, some people say Abraham Lincoln said some version of it. But that seems to be debunked, so I probably just perpetuated the myth. But, it's not a unique thought. But it's one that resonates very much with me and I think with others.

We can predict all we want and our predictions are probably gonna be wrong unless we're creating it ourselves. I believe that technology can actually make us better. That technology is gonna have better function in 10 years. For example, I already have a titanium knee. I already have had surgery to fix my eyes. I'm probably gonna need hearing aids as I get older. I don't know. But to me I look forward to using technology to make me better to be that future cyborg. I do think eventually we'll have neural implants that will help us retain our cognitive function as we age.

I think that we'll have, personal AI assistance [00:23:00] that are so tied to us more than our smartphones that they are really gonna be very personal and are cognitive orthotic. I mean, no one remembers a phone number anymore because they're all on our phone, right? We used to have to memorize everyone's phone number.

I think that we think of technology as changing and we forget that we're changing as humans as well. And I think what I can do to create the future is to work toward a very optimistic giving people agency and how they act with technology, how they use technology to make them better people, whatever that means to them.

So for me, I think that's more of a general philosophy. How do I specifically put that in action? Again, when I sold my R and D company actually during COVID. I thought I was just gonna kind of advise, and be on boards. I wrote my book and go on the speaking circuit.

And then I was approached by this young inventor [00:24:00] who had the same philosophy that I did - let's use technology to make us stronger, healthier, and happier, and asked for my help. I jumped right in. All of a sudden I'm in that operational role because this technology is creating a future we wanna see. We don't want 40,000 people to die per year from preventable falls. So if I see a problem where I can jump right in and help solve that problem using technology, that's how I create the future.

Erik Martinez: That's fascinating. And I think the corollary for business and marketers is, you as an inventor have to work through iterations, right? You have a concept and you have to kind of iterate through that content. There's a little bit of trial and error. I imagine. I'm not an inventor, but I imagine that there's a little bit of trial and error in coming up. Like, Hey, here's the concept. Now we have to go build it and we're gonna encounter some things that we didn't think about. Whether that is a physical [00:25:00] limitation of the device.

I think one of the stories you were telling about in your book was about one of the early robots in how the first version was like on a remote control car and you had a foam body and you had a painted face right. But your next iteration of the robot then had some more motors and it could do some more things.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah. It had a compact IPAC as a brain,

Erik Martinez: Yeah.

Dr. Cori Lathan: First handhelds.

Erik Martinez: You guys envisioned, right? You had a concept and the first version of it is not what the final version of it ended up being. There was a journey there that took how many years from Jester bot to...

Dr. Cori Lathan: Probably six or seven.

Erik Martinez: Six or seven years.

Dr. Cori Lathan: To the final product till we launched the spinoff company with Cosmos Learning System.

Erik Martinez: So that's not an insignificant amount of time. And I think sometimes we, marketers we're so locked into the present.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: We don't always think about how to build the system of the future [00:26:00] that keeps our companies energized and growing. But it is the same journey. Like we're going to launch campaigns and some of them are gonna hit the mark and some of 'em are not. What did we learn from that to improve the next campaign? And so on and so forth.

With a bigger goal in mind.

Dr. Cori Lathan: And maybe one from a year ago, which didn't hit the mark is worth bringing back because it was a great idea, but just at the wrong time. Like timing is everything. The technology, and my guess is it is with marketing too, you got to hit people at the right time.

Erik Martinez: Google Glass was a good example. It was a little bit ahead of its time. It sounded really super cool. It was a little bit of faddy. Is that even a word? I just invented a word. It's faddy.

Dr. Cori Lathan: PHAT.

Erik Martinez: I was thinking F-A-D-D-Y, right.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Oh, faddy.

Erik Martinez: Faddy

Dr. Cori Lathan: Gotcha.

Erik Martinez: Wow. Gotta enunciate better. But you're now seeing that get reimagined.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Now I have the meta glasses [00:27:00] too.

Erik Martinez: You have the meta glasses and they looked really cool. It's gotta be an interesting experience, but that's a different conversation. But Google Glass was way ahead of its time, but it evolved, right? And people have evolved off of that into new products that we're starting to see hit the market.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Right. And they haven't abandoned their vision of augmented reality. They've now brought it back. So they're still in that space. I imagine it's very similar for marketing. You study the past to predict the future. I think Confucius said that.

Erik Martinez: That sounds about right. So as we get ready to close I'm curious what advice would you have for imagining or adopting technology to improve your business?

When we saw each other last, I was telling you a little bit about this small printing company that during Covid was having some labor problems and they feed these lines to the stitchers with printed material so you can bind them into catalogs or [00:28:00] magazines or whatever . And they required human labor at that point to feed the pockets, and then they worked with a local software company and a robotics company out of Korea to modify these little robots that basically did that job and what they got. They didn't expect this by the way. They weren't trying to replacing anybody. They were trying to just make sure that they could keep doing the job and they got like a 2% gain in productivity

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah,

Erik Martinez: From incorporating the technology. So, what advice do you have for imagining or adopting technology in business?

What are the things that people should be thinking about? What questions should they ask themselves?

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yeah, there are things that technology's good at. There's things that humans are good at. And I think really giving your business a close look and say what are all the things that you do in your business that your business does for others? And which of those [00:29:00] things really need creativity? Need some risk taking? Need some innovation? And which of those things maybe, take up time or maybe are generating data that you can leverage with AI. Or giving a hard look at your business and understanding where are the bottlenecks for productivity and which of those bottlenecks can you solve using technology versus throwing some human power at it.

And, I think we've all having this experience with chat GPT, where chat can generate some cool ideas. If you say, give me 10 ideas for my next blog post on human technology interaction that incorporates X, Y, and Z. It'll pull up a whole bunch of interesting starters. But it's gonna be very bland in terms if I say, okay, now generate a 500 word essay on that, it'll sound like chat GPT, it's not gonna be my ideas and it's not gonna be that great. Probably be fine if I [00:30:00] wanted to do a generic post or something.

But when you wanna take something from good to great. You are never gonna eliminate the human component. And I think that's something that's true in business, in invention and technology.

My kids who are in college, they can use chat GPT, but it's not gonna capture who they are. And that's what I keep trying to teach them. Let your identity shine through. You need your power as a creative, intelligent, inventive human being to shine through. So I think that's probably good advice for anyone.

Erik Martinez: I think that's great advice. Well. Dr. Cori, thank you so much for your time and sharing some of your experience. I think your background is absolutely fascinating and if you really want to be inspired about entrepreneurship and inventing, pick up a copy of Dr. Cori's book, Inventing the Future Stories from a Techno Optimist.

I think you published what, 2021? [00:31:00] Is that about Right?

Dr. Cori Lathan: 22.

Erik Martinez: 22, so it's a few years old, but I'm telling you the stories in there are still incredibly relevant today. If somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Dr. Cori Lathan: LinkedIn, Cory Lathan on LinkedIn. And then I also have a website, cori lathan.com Or at same website. Invent the Future dot tech.

Erik Martinez: Invent the future dot tech. And Cori is CORI.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Yes.

Erik Martinez: Just in case. I remember back in the early days of websites and people would say their URL, and you're like, but how do I spell that? Because, there spelled like five different ways in our language.

Dr. Cori Lathan: Oh, yeah. I get a lot of lathems, M as in Mary when it's N as in Nancy, Lathan, N as in Nancy. So I, yeah.