Show Notes
Does UV light kill COVID-19? How can we best use it? Is it expensive?
Terry Berland, CEO of Violet Defense, whose UV solutions are currently being used in operating rooms, hotels, schools, ambulances, food processing, and athletic facilities and Jim Thomas of Kirenaga Partners and The Central Florida Tech Fund join the program to discuss all things ultraviolet light.
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: 0:00
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.
James Di Virgilio: 0:39
Welcome to another COVID-19 edition of Radio Cade . Today, we’re going to talk about UV light. It has been described as nature’s disinfectant. Does it solve the COVID-19 crisis? Can it help us move forward with disinfecting things? For Radio Cade I’m James Di Virgilio, my guest today, Terry Berland, CEO of Violet Defense, a UV light company, and Jim Thomas of Kirenaga Partners and the Central Florida Tech Fund. Gentlemen, thanks for joining the show. -Absolutely great to be with you. Now Terry, in 1910 in Marsay, France, UV light was essentially first used as a disinfectant or so it’s credited, you have a very interesting background in a lot of things. Tell us a little bit about how you are qualified to do what you’re doing and how you’re running Violet Defense.
Terry Berland: 1:26
So let me start with my first job out of college. I was undergraduate at Notre Dame and I needed to pay for my last two years of school. And so the Navy came to me and said, why don’t you come teach nuclear engineering for the Navy as the Naval nuclear power school in Orlando, Florida, and in exchange for that we’ll pay for your last two years. So my first job out of college was actually teaching nuclear engineering, never in a million years did I imagine that what I learned there, which is all about photonics and radiation would actually play out some 25 years later. From there, I went to graduate school. I was a partner at McKinsey in the healthcare practice I spent about 13 years on wall street , uh , was part of, kind of two major transformations, one, the bear, Stearns, JP Morgan transformation, the other one, the Lehman brothers and Barclay’s transformation. I then went to work for the largest hedge fund in the world, an organization called Bridgewater. And then about five years ago, partner Dave Scalzo and I spun out to actually start a venture capital firm called Kirenaga Partners within three months of actually starting that decided I could do that anywhere. And so I relocated back to where I had started my working career in Orlando, and I ended up coming across Violet Defense as one of our first Florida based investments back in 2016. I started as the interim chief operating officer, as well as the lead investor. And then in 2018 , uh , the chief science officer and founder asked me to step in to be the CEO, so he could step back into the science role. And so I’ve been the CEO of the company for the last two years,
James Di Virgilio: 3:00
And I understand a lot of very interesting things have been happening. The bulk of today’s discussion we’ll be discussing UV light, what Violet Defense is doing to help further that study. But first, Jim Thomas Central Florida Tech Fund, tell us about the mission behind this. It’s a very interesting thing, especially for the state of Florida to have something like this.
Jim Thomas: 3:18
Absolutely I’m originally born and raised in Los Angeles, grew up in California. My first career was in politics, so got to travel around, see a lot of things and really see the transition of, you know, I thought I was going to save the world through policy and government really saw it was technology that I thought was really gonna make the biggest difference wanted to get out of California and took a look around the country and just didn’t want to go to traditional Chicago or New York or anywhere on the West coast. And just discovered central Florida, moved here about 10 years ago and seeing the richness of the schools throughout the I four corridor the talent. It was just so impressive. Got to do things like run the regional chamber of commerce here in Orlando, and just see so much opportunity. I met Terry about five years ago and just loved his and Dave’s philosophy about why to fund early stage companies, how to do it and how to do it the right way and was just so impressed with that. So we just stayed in contact over the past five years or so, and just help each other out where we could. And then about a year ago we started saying, what would really change the ecosystem in central Florida is more professional capital and at the right level. And we said, let’s come together, let’s be real specific, let’s call it the Central Florida Tech Funds. We’re not just saying not just early stage, but let’s really dig in on early stage in central Florida. And it’s just been such a great, great ride. We’ve really launched about six months or so ago. And we have these companies in mind like Violet Defense and Ecospheres, which does environmental remediation. And then all of a sudden COVID-19 happens. And technology that’s been developed like Terry just said over a decade ago, all of a sudden becomes really a part of the global conversation. So that’s what we’re excited to continue that work with the tech fund, but it’s to be involved with companies like Violet Defense.
James Di Virgilio: 5:13
Yeah, outside of COVID-19, I’d love to have a discussion one day, obviously all about the power of early stage funding and venture capital, the importance to not only the state of Florida, but the country and the world, but one thing COVID-19 shines a spotlight on is, people solving problems, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, right? Often the fastest way to solve a complicated problem is to have people working on it creatively, enter in Violet Defense. This is not a new company I’ve been around since 2012, UV light, not a new thing. We already established that for over a hundred years. We’d known it’s been something useful, but for the listener out there, what is UV light Terry? Is this sunlight, is this something different? And how is it useful?
Terry Berland: 5:56
Yeah. So UV stands for ultraviolet, which basically means below the violet spectrum in a color chart, it’s invisible to humans basically starts at about 400 nano meters and goes down. It breaks into three categories, UVA UVB, UVC. UVA is the stuff that will penetrate your skin and it can give you skin cancer. UVB is the stuff that generally gets your skin hot it gives you sunburns. UVC, which is actually called germicidal UV is kind of a fabulous germ killer, but most of it is actually blocked by the ozone layer. So we don’t get a lot of it from the sun, but it is essentially kind of the highest energy version of UV from a safety perspective. It’s also the one that is easily stopped. So it won’t go through the skin on your arm, it won’t go through a shirt, won’t go through glasses. So it’s less concerning to us. It’s substantially more concerning to single celled organisms, like the ones we’re trying to kill now.
James Di Virgilio: 6:54
What data indicates that UVC is effective at killing viruses, things like influenza, what do we know about UVC’s abilities?
Terry Berland: 7:02
Well, so as you had mentioned, the first test on UV and the antibacterial capabilities are actually as far back as 1877. There’s a report from Down’s and Blunt that started that discussion. In 2000, actually, the U.S. Army did an entire kind of compilation of all of the research that had been done on UV and its effectiveness today. And water treatment actually particularly around the world uses UV quite consistently and has for a very long period of time. So there’s actually a lot known about UV and its killing effects. If you take, for example, the most recent discussion about COVID, COVID is actually one of the easiest viruses to kill. So it is what’s called an envelop virus, which means it has a lipid layer around the outside that’s actually easily destroyed by exposure to UV because the UV photons basically break it down. And then once it’s broken down, the germ dies. So UV’s been used, for mold, mildew, viruses, parameciums, bacteria so it’s just a function of how much energy and that’s a function of time and distance from your light source.
James Di Virgilio: 8:13
How can we best apply UVC if I’m sitting in a room and you’re sitting in the same room with me and you cough, is it possible to have a UVC light in there shining on us? Or is this something that’s not safe for a human body to absorb?
Terry Berland: 8:25
Ideally the current versions of UV, which is A, B, and C, you use the disinfection when people are not in the room. So the way something like that would work is we’re sitting in the room, we have a room outfitted, for example, with a Violet Defense light in the ceiling, because ours are designed for installation, for mounting, as well as mobile deployment. And we’re like, you know what? We need to clean the room so we would get out, we would hit the button, we would start our UV disinfection device and the disinfection device would clean room. All of our units, as well as most of the industrial units that are out there in the healthcare space. If we were to walk back into the room, there’s motion detection, built into all of the units to automatically turn them off until that motion disappears again. And so that’s how you would typically use a UV device today. There is research coming out of the University of Columbia in particular, under Dr. Brenner, that is looking at far UV. So that is actually below UVC. It’s not naturally in creation, but with the right type of bald mechanisms, we might be able to create it. That one, you could actually sit in the room and not have to worry about any exposure, cause it would even be stopped by just the liquid layer that covers your eye. So there is a lot of study about UV that could be run when people are in the room, but the current technology doesn’t allow it.
James Di Virgilio: 9:42
So currently, it’s application to COVID-19 is this famous photograph of a bus in Shanghai, like a UV lit up station with UV lights on it almost looks like a futuristic techno photo. At the end of the day, that bus is sterilized from any of the activity that’s going on and those surfaces that maybe would have had COVID-19 on it that still would have potentially been infectious are no longer, correct?
Terry Berland: 10:05
It’s interesting that you pick that picture. That picture is a fabulous marketing picture, but actually does very little to clean the bus. So if you notice the bulbs were on the outside of the bus, and so they clean the outside, but the sun has been cleaning the outside all day long. So the real concern that you have with pathogens is when you can’t get sunlight to them. And so that’s now when you’re talking about indoors, right? So inside the bus and there are UV devices that are being used to clean inside buses, they’re also being used to clean COVID masks. So one of the other interesting pictures for your listeners, if they would like, is to go look up the Nebraska protocol for UV disinfection of 95 masks, it has two large UV devices. And in between it is essentially your grandmother’s clothesline with UV masks being held on by clothespins , but we’re allowing UV exposure to both the front and the back side of the mask, to allow people to reuse it instead of having to throw them away.
James Di Virgilio: 11:01
Now, what I’ve seen on the reusage of mask, is the risk is that if I miss shine, UV light on even a tiny corner of that mask, I could leave some of the virus on there, right? -That is correct. So you have a shadow issue.
Terry Berland: 11:14
Yes. You have a shadow issue and you have a duration and exposure issue. And the way you deal with that is a combination of just long enough runtime, but also multiple point sources. So one of the challenges with the existing UV technologies is they tend to be very big units. Look at a company like Xanax. They have $125,000 unit. It’s about 60 to 70 pounds at its height. It gets to about six to eight feet, but it’s a single point source. And so the problem is if anything is in its way, the other side of that won’t get cleaned. Now imagine if you could take that same power and break it up into 20 different point sources that are located throughout a room. And now, while it may be blocked from the light coming from the left, it’s completely exposed to the light coming from the right. And that’s why if you look at the way, rooms are lit, rooms are rarely lit with one big light in the center. They’re lit with a bunch of distributed lights that give you multiple point sources. And that’s actually how you deal with the shadowing.
James Di Virgilio: 12:18
So you could place the N 95 mask in a room that you can ensure, hey, this lights being hit from all these angles. All of this light is the UVC light that’s going to take these pathogens away. And then a single use N 95 mask becomes something that can be used repetitively, which obviously is going to help. I’ve also seen hospitals are using, and this is not the right description, but sort of like a Roomba that they put into a room that then cleans the whole room, clean surfaces, cleans tables, cleans chairs, applications like that as well.
Terry Berland: 12:45
Yes. And again, those are actually valuable, as long as the pathogen that you’re going after is very close to the device. The challenge, particularly for something like COVID is it can stay in the air for awhile . And so, there’s great value in surfaces infection, but if you don’t clean the air above that surface, within a short period of time, that surface is going to be recontaminated. And so that’s why at least the devices that we have, we call them Sage, which stands for surface and air germ elimination.
James Di Virgilio: 13:14
Sunlight has been talked a lot about as a potential source for helping you mention this on the buses, naturally cleaning things off it’s nature’s disinfecting . It’s great for water, right? Whatever purification and treatment, you can leave it out there for six, seven, hours and it’s going to do its job. But from what I’ve read, it seems like the consensus is sunlight is not really strong enough to kill COVID or at least consistently is that accurate?
Terry Berland: 13:35
I wouldn’t say it’s not strong enough. It’s missing the particular spectrum of UV that you need for viruses. So bacteria is pretty readily killed by a UVA and UVB. Essentially what it does is it heats up the surfaces of the cell wall and the bacteria die. So think about it as a super sunburn for things like viruses, they’re harder to kill. And so what you need to do is you actually need to destroy the DNA and the RNA of the virus that requires UVC. The sunlight produces a ton of UVC. Our ozone layer blocks it almost all out. So while it is produced, it never gets to the surface of the earth. And so it’s not so much that the sun isn’t strong enough it’s that we actually have a blocking layer, which if we didn’t, by the way, we’d have other problems, but a blocking layer in the ozone that basically keeps that germ killing for germicidal UV from actually coming from the sun and getting to the surface of the earth.
James Di Virgilio: 14:30
Right . And like you mentioned, that’s a good thing because UVC would essentially fry our skin extremely quickly. If we’re just getting overexposed hits to it.
Terry Berland: 14:38
And, all of our plants and most of the animals that we eat and a whole bunch of other things. Yes.
James Di Virgilio: 14:44
Right. So then applying UVC is like you mentioned that’s why has to be an empty room, right? This is not safe for humans to be contacting yet interesting research going on, on a way to do that. So with that being said, we’re looking at a post-exposure room as a disinfectant, is this solution any better than just washing our hands and wearing a mask and going about our daily life? How does the average person not in a hospital benefit from this type of technology right now?
Terry Berland: 15:11
So washing your hands is really good for getting rid of something that is on your hands when you’re near a space where you can wash your hands, but you’re going to touch surfaces all day long. The door handle, when you walk into your office, the button on the elevator, the fork and knife that you got at a restaurant. And so the value of having disinfection devices like this is that they can clean and keep clean what we call the everyday spaces, such that you aren’t susceptible to something that somebody else might have left. So by washing your hands , you’re doing a really good job of making sure that you’re not going to give it to somebody else. And if you subsequently touch your eyes or something like that, you’re not going to give it to yourself, but it won’t change the fact that you could actually be carrying COVID and they just have a recent report about this on the bottom of your shoes. So somebody just coughs under the floor 10 minutes ago, the virus is still alive. I just walked over the top of it. I’ve now picked that up on the bottom of my shoe. In fact, I can’t remember who did the report, but they were talking about some of the most significant contaminated spaces. And one of them was actually just the bottom of women’s purses, because they set them down on all these spaces. And so if you had a UV light like ours, that was constantly cleaning that floor, whether it’s every day or every six hours that you at least go back to ground zero at some point in the cycle and then it has to build back up again.
James Di Virgilio: 16:40
Okay. So clearly you get a reduction it’s obviously not perfect. Like you mentioned, if I go somewhere in the middle of the day and it was cleaned last night, all the people that have interacted with those surfaces during the day, that bacteria and that viral material is going to be there that night, you flick it on UV light does its work, next morning, good to go. But obviously if you’re doing this every day , you are reducing the number of viral agents that are there, that’s the idea.
Terry Berland: 17:03
That is correct, and, if you know that there’s a contaminated area, you don’t actually have to wait until the overnight cycle to catch it you can do spot disinfection and that spot disinfection is particularly enhanced when you have a high power device, that’s the size of a book, as opposed to an 80 pound device that’s five feet tall.
James Di Virgilio: 17:23
I’m thinking of the New York subway right now. And I don’t know how they disinfect the subway right now. How often it’s done, if it’s done, when it’s done, but what would this, -I do! That’s what I figured you might. So one, let’s start with that. How is it done now? And then two, how could UV light and someone like Violet Defense change, maybe forever, how it’s done.
Terry Berland: 17:43
So we’ve actually were asked by the New York Metro transit authority to come up and speak to them about how to use our technology on their buses, their subway cars and the Metro North train cars. So today, the disinfection is done with wipes and individuals in masks, and in some cases they’ll do a full spray down where they actually have people in hazmat gear and they try to get to them as regularly as they can. But the solution is almost all chemical in nature. And so it’s subject to the people on there, being able to both from a timing perspective, that diligence perspective, being able to wipe down every space that you want to, that’s not going to get, for example, underneath the train car seat, because you’re not going to get people down there that are going to be wiping from the underside. So they’re going after the high touch areas. And then, frankly, up until six to eight weeks ago, not sure there was a lot of thought about what would be required past that. So when we were there, we had talked to them about, was actually using our devices with mobile stands that you could actually place, think about a subway car and think about three double-sided units. One that’s flashing toward the backside, one’s flashing toward the front side, just set them up so that essentially you create a UV light bath inside the car. If you turn them on, they closed the car, you let it run its cleaning cycle, and then you move them to the next car.
James Di Virgilio: 19:07
And cost-wise , is this a more effective solution? Would this cost them less money than having manual work to basically clean all the trains down? Or are these lights so expensive? And the devices that deploy them so expensive that it winds up being a more expensive solution?
Terry Berland: 19:20
So, the technology prior to our Violet Defense solutions , that would have been absolutely more expensive. For example, if you were going to do the same thing was I’ll use that extra because I know their pricing. If you were going to use that you do three Xanax machines, you’re talking $375,000 worth of infrastructure on a car that you would be moving from car to car, to car. Our units, even at retail to clean that same car would be under $20,000.
James Di Virgilio: 19:48
So then you could essentially envision buying a lot of these and then you could have them clean the cars for something that may even be equal to the cost they’re spending right now? Is this something that’s, that good that it’s equal spend New York, you’re going to get more disinfected?
Terry Berland: 20:00
So, we would contend likely once they figure out what they can stop doing in the interim, we were just, you know , I think by far the lower cost option for supplemental, and then they largely shut the mass transit system down. And so now kind of went by the wayside for a little bit, but I know certainly when we’ve looked at, for example, schools as a great example, since our units don’t require maintenance and the operating cost on them is pennies a day. Our small units only use about as much electricity as a 60 watt light bulb when they run and then it’s a two watt LED when they don’t. So you’re literally talking pennies a day to run these. If they’re installed where you have no labor, once you buy the units, the overall cost over the life cycle is in dollars a day. You can’t get anybody to disinfect a room for dollars a day.
James Di Virgilio: 20:48
So this is potentially like a ginormous step forward in the world of disinfecting everything, I’m thinking stadiums, airports. I mean anything where people are gathering down the road, you could imagine this becomes the standard of how you disinfect a room. -Yes. What would the contrarians say? Are there people out there who say, hey, this isn’t going to work, this isn’t worth it, this is a waste of time, or is this just universally accepted as the way forward?
Terry Berland: 21:13
I wouldn’t say it is universally accepted. I think the contrarians are having most of their arguments unwound. So the primary push back was that even at dollars a day, it’s not needed, just never had a problem, that was big enough to matter. And for a lot of the places, for example, that are shut down and all their employees are now getting laid off, they still don’t have a problem today, but, the world isn’t going to let them operate on that trust me, my place is good, going forward. We have embarked in a completely new world with the impact that this had. I mean, you would have imagined that something like swine flu might have done that because we had almost a billion people in the world who got it, but we never really changed our behavior on the back of swine flu. This has changed everybody’s attitude. And so whether it’s our devices or somebody, else’s the idea that you’re going to have to have a multilayered solution for disinfecting spaces in order to be able to return to normalcy, I think will be the standard. And so now it’s not about whether the cost is worth it versus not doing anything, it’s going to be is this a less costly and more effective solution than the other solutions? Because I have to have something. And that’s why we do believe that it will become the standard for a whole lot of spaces and stadiums are great examples of it. You know , we’re now in use of the orange County convention center. We’re in the back of ambulances. I’m expecting that these things will become instead of retro devices, they will be integrated into and built as part of the solution and you take the subway car. Now, if I had the ability to build these in, I don’t need tripod and any labor, I parked the car for the night, I hit a button on my way out, the doors closed and it auto runs a disinfection cycle overnight with no labor required. That is guaranteed to be both a less costly solution and a higher quality solution than what they’re dealing with today.
James Di Virgilio: 23:08
And then down the road you can imagine this being installed in homes as well, right? It just, as you build your house, you’re going to wind up having these lights here. You can set up, like you said, the motion sensor cycle or whatever is going to wind up being safe. And every night you flip those on and that could become something that gets applied there. I mean, this is an endless application cycle, essentially, as you’re mentioning it, if this is done correctly, right?
Terry Berland: 23:27
Yes. And as you mentioned that, I have the first installed version of this in my master bathroom at home. It’s actually been there for two years. It runs full time, and basically what it does is when I walk into the bathroom, it sees me, it turns on the bath fan. When I walk out, it finishes as fast fan cycle and immediately goes into a disinfection cycle. I can also cycle it in a day and have it just run a cycle. And that’s actually where our smaller unit came from because we had installed this and then my young daughter came in and she was coughing from school and she was coughing all over the bed and my wife asks , how do I get the unit that’s in our bathroom into this room? And so we basically just went from being an installed bathroom version into a mobile version, which is called the micro . And that’s actually where the original micro came from
James Di Virgilio: 24:14
And thinking of home use, because this is, what’s getting a lot of coverage now is what most people are doing first effective. Let’s assume we don’t have the micro. We don’t have something that’s UVC. If I’m just shining a UV light, a black light, something like that on my bed at night or in my bathroom. Am I actually achieving anything for COVID?
Terry Berland: 24:30
Nope. You’re probably seeing things you don’t want to see, but you’re not going to kill anything. So, UVA by itself, unless it’s very intense and your black light isn’t going to be, it is not going to produce any meaningful kills for bacteria or viruses. In fact, there were some early companies that were trying to make claims about using something just outside the UV space of four or five nano meters space and what they found is for a room you would need to have those units shining 24 hours a day to get something like an 80% reduction, assuming nobody entered the room to infect it again.
James Di Virgilio: 25:03
This is good myth -busting, so, effectively here we know for sure that shining your own UV light is not going to do anything to stop the spread of COVID in your home or elsewhere. So that’s not a productive practice. Is there something I can get? Can I purchase a UVC light that I can do what you’re mentioning with, is that on the market yet?
Terry Berland: 25:20
We just brought one to market. So if you are on our website, there’s actually a button called Sage at home. So we’ve created a consumer level version of the product, which is about half the price of our industrial product that you can actually use at home .
James Di Virgilio: 25:35
And is there like a training program to go through it? There’s if I just shine this at a family member of mine, am I going to wind up injuring them or hurting them or what’s to make of that?
Terry Berland: 25:45
So, we do have in all of our instruction manuals, the safety precautions, you’re not supposed to stare at it, right ? Don’t touch it while it’s running and so we can’t stop people from doing crazy things like that. Now, it also has the same motion detection protection, so if you were trying to shine it at somebody and they were waving their hands or putting their hand in front of their face, you would not even get it to run because the motion detection would keep it from operating.
James Di Virgilio: 26:09
Interesting. I’m thinking of so many questions of things this may or may not do. Like what if I’m sitting still and you shine it at me, I guess people would have to know, right? This is not a toy. Like, you can’t mess around with something like this because UVC rays are very powerful.
Terry Berland: 26:21
Yes. Although as we’ve described, we designed ours to kill germs, not people. And so you’ll get more UV standing in the parking lot for 30 minutes than you would sitting six feet from our unit for 30 minutes.
James Di Virgilio: 26:32
Aha. So you’ve built in something to lessen the effect of this, from what you may read about it. If you’re Googling UVC, you’ll read this thing will fry your skin in five seconds. But your model of the home model, not as intense.
Terry Berland: 26:42
Not as intense. And actually, even the statement that UVC will fry your skin is just a complete inaccurate statement. So UVC can’t get through the dead layer of skin. So I’ve read some articles where basically people are saying, if you will fry your skin in seconds, it’s just a lie. The biggest issue for UVC is actually exposure to your eyes because there you don’t have dead layer of skin to protect it. So there’s a lot of myths out there that are trying to get people scared of UV. But the practical reality is, the way our units work, which is very different than most of the other UV sources out there. You could have using a UVC bulb, a real problem, because it produces invisible light, you don’t know unless you’re particularly attuned to it, that you may be staring at a UV bulb cause you can’t see it. So you would have real risks that you could stare at it for some extended period of time and create a problem. Ours is what’s called pulse Xenon. So when we produce our UV, we’re not just producing UV. We’re also producing a very powerful, bright flash that is the entire visible spectrum, all the way into the infrared space and also in UV. And there’s no possible way you can keep your eyes open during that flash. So it’s very easy because of the device that we use for people to know that this is producing UV. And it’s also really hard for you to have any extended eye exposure issues. Cause you can’t keep your eyes up. There’s not a challenge for people to try it, but it’s one of the built in safety mechanisms we have based on our design.
James Di Virgilio: 28:10
I love when moments like this happen, when I’ve asked you a plethora of questions and you think of all of them and that’s what good entrepreneurship problem solving is. I feel like often in our society, we think that people discover new things, rather haphazardly. Hey, I’ve stumbled upon this idea I’m going to put it out to market and kill a bunch of people and I’m not thinking of what’s happening, but in fact, most of the time, it’s exactly what you just said, right? You think of all the questions that a reasonable person would think of and you go out and you solve them. What if that happens? What if this happens? How do we fix this? How do we do this? And the innovation level that you’re describing today is obviously very pioneering. You’re very much in the frontier of this curve, but I think it’s also reassuring for people out there that maybe fear innovation. They may view innovation as something to be afraid of because this is going to be dangerous per se .
Terry Berland: 28:53
And there are products and I will be the first one to say, there are products on the market place where people have grabbed the UV bulb off the rack, the UVC bulb off the rack, and then they put a racking cart on it and they run it to market. So one of the things I would suggest to everybody who’s listening to this is ask for the safety certification , ask for the testing certifications and ask them for all of the user manual information that shows you that they’ve thought about this. So like, one of the things that nobody other than us actually thought about that we can tell, is because ours is a strobe, do we have the potential to trigger somebody’s photosensitive epilepsy. So even if I’m not directly in the room, if I see this flash in the back, I can actually trigger an epilepsy event. So the answer is no ours won’t because we’ve worked directly with getting the guidance from the national epilepsy foundation ours only flash once every six seconds. In order for you to have a photo epilepsy event, the needs to be anywhere from five to six flashes per second. So we’re more than a 10 X difference away from what’s required. But it’s another thing that if you read our user manual, you’ll see that we thought about, and we incorporated before we rolled the product out to market.
James Di Virgilio: 30:01
Hmm. There’s just so many applications of this. And yet, like you mentioned, as a frontier market is, you have to be careful with it. And I think the education Terry you’ve given today has been fantastic. It’s pinned wide ranging, full covering. It’s been one of the main topics, right? Vaccinations, masks, ventilators, and you think of UV light. And so I think fantastic work describing not only what UV light is and how it works, but also the upsides downsides and what’s out there and applicable Terry Berland, CEO of Violet Defense, Jim Thomas of Kirenaga Partners and the Central Florida Tech Fund, all of this stuff being possible with entrepreneurship and ideas and ways to move the world forward, to solve real problems that we’re facing today with COVID-19. Thank you both for joining us. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. I know we could discuss way more, but thanks again to your efforts, not only in the state of Florida, but also to the U.S. And the rest of the world and attempting to solve very real problems that we’re facing.
Terry Berland: 30:49
It’s a real pleasure, thank you for the time.
James Di Virgilio: 30:51
Oh Thanks Jim, and for Radio Cade I’m James Di Virgilio.
Outro: 30:55
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 Tom coordinates inventor interviews. Podcasts are recorded at Hardwood 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.
