Plastic Straws
I’ve been making brain monitors and running small innovative companies for 45 years. I’ve seen it all in terms of ups and downs and the uncertainties of start-ups. I never followed the playbook for entrepreneurs; rather I wrote my own and had fun doing it.
In the early days of Moberg Research, paying employees was the primary use of money–everything else, including taxes, was secondary. This was pre-Internet where you had to wade through books and pamphlets to figure out payroll rules. One summer day a young lady walked through a large open garage door and into the warehouse where the company was located. I was up on the mezzanine where our desks were. She looked up and asked if I knew Richard Moberg. The employees all looked at me and smiled because they knew I was going to say the same thing I always did. “It depends. If you’re from the IRS, I have no idea who that guy is. If not, I may be able to find him.” The employees laughed, but the woman didn’t… and she proceeded to pull out a badge and say, “I’m Amy Katz, and I work for the IRS”. The employees looked at me stone-faced to see what I was going to do. I had no idea what to do, but I walked to the back of the mezzanine and down an enclosed stairway and then emerged on the first floor where Amy was standing and said, “I don’t know who that guy was, but, I’m Richard Moberg”. The employees broke out laughing and, fortunately, so did Amy. After two hours in our conference room I got schooled in the proper way to file taxes. I was a good student and Amy became a good friend and actually told me which taxes could land me in jail if not paid and which would just accrue penalties and interest… and she told me how to get the penalties waived.
The Moberg Research team on the mezzanine of the company warehouse
These events happened all the time. I remember being flat out of money with payroll due in two days. I went into my local dive bar for a beer and was talking to the bartender. Unexpectedly, I left the bar with a check she wrote for $30,000. I had no idea she had that kind of money. There were many more, including the time where a stripper in Chicago funded the company; this incident was actually written up in an IBM business journal in an article about the challenges of start-up funding. I’ve always run my companies on the edge and with a cowboy mentality. You get more stuff done and you get it done quicker, which accelerates the innovation.
I’ve wondered at times how I kept the companies going in such an unconventional way. My conclusion was that I got to know the importance of two things: honesty and trust. I was always honest with people and I built trust by paying people back. I realized good people like to do good things for other people and for society as a whole. When Amy learned about our mission and the fact we were creating jobs, and that we were not trying to cheat the government, she jumped in to help the cause and was willing to guide me through the sea of tax rules. I have to admit that a sense of humor also helped.
I look at what’s happening today in the government in the U.S. and my head spins. The traits I have always held as important have been thrown out the window. How can you trust the top health official in the U.S. when he has no medical background and doesn’t believe in vaccinations? On an hourly basis we hear false statements from the president and his cronies and then see them amplified by Fox News. We have Elon Musk raiding the supposedly protected information on every citizen. And many decisions are made by our president as retaliation towards his enemies. Joe Biden set a noble goal of eliminating single use plastics in the government by 2035, but Trump signed an executive order to bring back plastic straws. To be fair, there are arguments on both sides of the straw debate, but this was clearly a childish slap in Biden’s face and a nod to the plastics industry. This isn’t really about plastic straws. It’s about a government that prioritizes performative gestures over real leadership. Instead of investing in innovation, sustainability, or public health, we get petty reversals and corporate favors disguised as policy.
So today, we have bad people doing bad things for their own good.
At this point, it’s hard to run a company or a university or a government organization without any predictability as to what comes tomorrow from our “leaders.” Sources of funding can evaporate overnight, programs can be cancelled, and people fired. I’ve talked to friends at NIH, universities, and small businesses like ours. Innovation, research, and any kind of progress will definitely slow down. Nobody knows where to spend their money or invest their time. Several Trump operatives freely admit that all of this is a smoke screen while democracy is dismantled and an autocracy is built. This is sad.
So what are we doing? We are creating our own “Project 2025” and we invite your thoughts and collaboration. We can’t do this alone. Here’s a starting list of how we can navigate through the next few months.
Are there research projects we can start that require little or no funding? Just collecting data at your hospital is a start, and we are working with a few sites to come up with low-cost ways to do this. We are also working on some collaborative developments that will be informal and move slower, but with little or no funding.
Would access to a harmonized neurocritical care data set help in creating some analytics? We host some data where use agreements can be obtained. We welcome other data contributions. Maybe we can start to build up a freely usable, de-identified data set and continue progress on more analytic tools.
We have established an internship program at the company where students can learn data science skills in neurocritical care. We have two interns coming this summer.
To counter the demise of DEI, we are considering a summer internship and other programs for underprivileged kids and/or minorities to teach them Python and data science. We would like to collaborate with some universities on this.
There are other ideas brewing. Let us know your thoughts. What’s important is that we all hold on to our ideals and create our own way forward. Resist dishonesty and anarchy. Join the Revolution. We can’t sit still, or we lose.
