Dr. Lonnie Johnson is a literal rocket scientist who also happens to be the mastermind behind the legendary Super Soaker water gun. He’s also racked up over 250 patents and landed a spot in the National Toy Hall of Fame. Inventor, aerospace engineer, and entrepreneur, Dr. Johnson joins this week’s episode of Before IT Happened to talk about growing up during the civil rights movement, helping build stealth bombers and rockets for NASA, and making the the idea for the Super Soaker a reality.

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(03:10) - Growing up in Alabama during the civil rights movement - “I was obviously very in tune to what was going on in the environment because during that time segregation was legal and discrimination was legal, and so there were certain things that I knew I couldn't do.”

(08:17) - Developing a passion for mechanical and nuclear engineering - “The Junior Engineer Technical Society sponsored a competition at the University of Alabama. Linox won 1st place in 1968 and we were the only black kids represented. That was a huge, huge moral victory for me personally.”

(16:29) - Working on the Stealth Bomber and NASA's Galileo mission - “It was just fascinating as hell. Going to the cockpit, it reminded me of being on the USS Enterprise Star Trek.”

(22:36) - The error that changed everything - “I was working on a heat pump that would use water instead of freon. So I made some nozzles and I had these small nozzles hooked up to the bathroom sink, and I shot this stream of water across the bathroom, and I thought, ‘Geez, a high-performance water gun would be a lot of fun.’”

(26:16) -   Becoming the ‘King of Toy Guns’ - “Nerf dart guns were already on the market, but I started designing guns that were much better than what Hasbro had.” 

(32:42) - Inspiring the next generation of inventors - “Get involved in technology and engineering and enjoy it before it becomes something that you're afraid of.”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Learn more about Dr. Lonnie Johnson and follow him on Twitter

Watch CBS Sunday Morning’s Mo Rocca interview Dr. Lonnie Johnson

Watch Dr. Lonnie Johnson’s TEDx Talk: Revolutionary designs for energy alternatives

Read Popular Mechanics: Super Soaker Inventor Aims to Cut Solar Costs in Half

Learn more about the all-solid-state batteries Dr. Johnson is developing at Johnson Energy Storage

Learn more about the Thermo-Electrochemical Converter that Dr. Johnson is developing at JTEC Energy

Thank you for listening! Follow Before IT Happened on

Millions of people have been affected by data breaches and leaks in recent years. But what if there was a better way to keep our digital identities secure? In this week's episode of Before IT Happened, Locke Brown talks about how his company NuID is working to both simplify and strengthen online security by rethinking the traditional password-based approach to authentication in favor of a decentralized, user-controlled solution. 

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, or a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(03:40) - Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s - “We had a family computer in the kitchen and the internet was kind of the wild west. People couldn't imagine putting credit card information online, and now we literally go online and ask a stranger to come to pick us up and get in their car.”

(07:55) - Getting started in Silicon Valley - “I actually went straight to Silicon Valley from Mongolia to start my internship at Google.”

(14:18) - Meeting his NuID cofounder - “Lord knows what conversations we got into, but you know, all sorts of tech. And he was in the distributed systems and the guy's mind, you know, was so sharp and we just hit it off on all sorts of fun little tangential thoughts and things.”

(19:32) - How easily passwords and login info can be compromised - “Some admin that has a responsibility and is in control of securing some database of user login data, they get compromised somewhere along the line, whether that's social hacking or maybe they use the same password that they use on their, say, LinkedIn account, right?” 

(27:42) - How NuID is using blockchain technology - “We're going to eliminate the need for you to ever see, store and therefore be liable in having to secure any user login data. That database of login information that we've talked about, that's gone. There's none of that. You never actually have to touch this stuff.”

(35:49) -  The future of cybersecurity and what’s next for NuID and Locke - “NuID could disappear and our protocol and the credentials that are registered through it for users would persist because they are stored outside of us.”

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Connect with Locke Brown on LinkedIn 

Follow NuID on Twitter

Learn more about NuID and their utility token

Read NuID’s White Paper

Thank you for listening! Follow Before IT Happened on Instagram and Twitter, and don’t forget to subscribe, rate and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! 

Before IT Happened is produced by Donna Loughlin and

Vlad Panchenko, a lifelong gamer and technologist, is on course to one day build a massive metaverse community and exchange by connecting video gamers on mega gaming platforms. Vlad started his career in Ukraine at the age of 16, where he was paid by the kilobyte to translate pirated video games from English into Russian and Ukrainian. Byte by byte, Panchenko gained the experience that would lead him to create powerful gaming platforms. In this episode, Vlad talks about his latest creation, DMarket, a giant social gaming marketplace where all manner of virtual goods are traded. Join us as we take a step into the brave new world of the future where virtual worlds are a reality.

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(02:44) - Translating pirated video games after school in Ukraine - “They needed somebody to translate from English to Ukrainian and Russian and that was me, and that was my first job.”

(07:35) - How Vlad’s entrepreneurial journey began - “I knew from the very beginning that I'm pretty much ambitious and that I'm going to build, one-by-one, bigger and bigger companies.”

(16:35) - Gamers and unlocking the real metaverse - “I am a hundred percent sure that the people and the community who will actually unlock the real metaverse will be the video game developers.” 

(23:17) - DMarket and the technology behind it - “The marketplace that we provide, it's the best in the world. It's like the blood of all the Web 3.0 and Metaverse, but still, it couldn't fly without the creativity. So the game and the creative part comes first.”

(28:53) - Vlad’s advice to future game developers - “Keep in mind this is the technology. First comes the story, then the narrative and then the actual entertainment.”

(34:22) - What we can learn from the gaming community and how the invasion of Ukraine affected him - “On February 24th, I was at a conference in Las Vegas, and I couldn't believe that it happened. Because in my humble opinion, this is such a stupid thing to do in 2022. You build Web 3.0, you build AI, you build like ‘The Calling of Mars’, you can do so many things, and you still come back to doing something people have been doing hundred years ago. Why? It makes no sense for me.”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Connect with Vlad Panchenko on LinkedIn and Instagram

Learn more about DMarket

Watch CNN’s Tech CEO raises millions in crypto and evacuates employees from Ukraine

Read USA Today’s: 'Hits on many facets of our activities': How the tech industry is impacted by the war in Ukraine

Read Axios’s: Tech CEO flies workers out of Ukraine as fear of invasion looms

Thank you for listening! Follow

Feras Bashnak is a serial entrepreneur who knows first-hand the high cost of opening a business. Want to launch a brick-and-mortar restaurant? Half a million. How about a food truck? $100,000. Either way, you’re sinking a lot of cash into a huge commitment that you have yet to prototype ­– risks few young entrepreneurs are willing to take. In this week’s episode of Before IT Happened, Feras talks about the “aha” moment that led him to founding Ferla Bikes, an e-bike-powered food and retail bicycle and push cart manufacturing company. Listen now to hear more about Feras’s journey. 

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(02:51) - Growing up in an immigrant household - “My dad used to tell me, ‘You can’t expect to get what you want, you have to build it.’ And I think it just came to me naturally, seeing him building his life and our family from the ground up with zero connections.” 

(13:09) - A passion for entrepreneurship - “I knew I’d have to build my own dream, and during staying in the United States that would lead me to seeing so much potential you have here. Everything is possible.” 

(15:09)  - Building buy-in for Ferla Bikes - “When it comes to our idea, it was crazy in a way to start something like this. People didn't believe in us at the beginning. They we like, ‘What is this? I should buy a food truck, or I should buy a concession trailer? Like how do I pedal this?’ And it was really hard to prove the concept.” 

(21:55) - Responding to customer feedback - “Our customers became our engineers. We always listened to them and we always produced and developed what they're looking for.”

(28:30) - New opportunities during the pandemic - “Fortunately, we helped many businesses to save their name. They shut down the restaurant, but they had always an opportunity to come to us and just do a slightly different way of serving their product.”

(30:14) - Building a more inclusive, conscious, and greener society - “I believe we have power and responsibility to make society more inclusive for everyone. And what I mean by that, our main mission for the cargo bikes, it's helped different able communities dramatically.”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Connect with Feras on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Learn more about Ferla Bikes

Read Chicago Tribune’s Sweet Mary’s offers ice cream on the go from a bicycle

Thank you for listening! Follow Before IT Happened on Instagram and Twitter, and don’t forget to subscribe, rate and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! 

Before IT

Maurice Carrubba—also known as the Warren Buffett of restaurateurs—has a knack for finding classic restaurants with great bones and transforming them into go-to dining experiences. Born and raised in Sicily, Maurice moved to Silicon Valley in 1989 where he now runs a restaurant group and a catering company and employs over 150 people. Maurice also runs a nearby farm that sustains two of his restaurants, and he is working to reduce his carbon footprint and foster a culture of respecting and taking care of the earth to younger generations. Tune in to hear all about how Maurice is revolutionizing the food industry. 

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(03:17) - From Sicily to Silicon Valley - “My father, who was an artist with masonry and stonework, they seeked him out, found him all the way in Sicily, flew him out. He looked at the job, he says, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ They were like, ‘Well, 12 other people have told us you you couldn’t do it. Are you sure you can do it?’”

(09:26) - Opening the first family-run restaurant - “My father said, ‘Look, how about we put a little coffee shop here? Would you mind? You know, I'd love to do that. I want to do something with my kids.’ He knew I loved food at a very young age and I said, ‘Dad, I'd love the opportunity.’”

(11:30) - Dishes that define family and taste like tradition - “We love to eat. There's so many different dishes, but I guess it depends on the time of year.”

(15:45) - The Warren Buffett of restaurants - “I purchased some companies that were very good companies, but unfortunately had challenges and operations issues. I was able to take those companies and take those customers and build those companies back up from there.”

(18:31) - The GrandView and growing the restaurant group - “When we purchased the property, we knew it was going to be a huge undertaking. There was a lot of work that needed to be done structurally.”

(28:07) - Grandview Farms and the philosophy behind it - “We don't use any pesticides. We dry farm when we can. The property is all on solar. We compost our scraps from our restaurants.”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Connect with Maurice on Linkedin and Twitter

Learn more about Grandview Farms

Visit Maurice’s restaurants and venues Caffe Riace, The GrandView,  La Foret, Osteria Toscana Palo Alto and San Benito House

Thank you for listening! Follow Before IT Happened on

Modern life can be isolating. We’re wrapped up in our social media feeds, rushing to log into the next Zoom meeting, hurtling down the road in our metal capsules, or holed up in our houses. Being cut off from the natural world often leaves us feeling disconnected from ourselves and others. Enter this week’s guest on Before IT Happened, Joe Patitucci, who’s spent the last decade developing devices that connect us to nature by converting the biorhythms of plants into real-time music, or what he calls, “a sonic window into the secret life of plants.” Tune in now to hear how it all came together for Joe, from growing up in a family of piano teachers and electrical engineers to starting a music label and ultimately creating plant music for audiences all over the world.

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(01:57) - Joe on growing up outside of NYC - “I had this really cool interaction between living in nature and then being kind of in the cultural mecca of New York and the East Village and music and jazz and all these things.”

(11:14) - TEDx Philly - “I was invited to be music director for TEDx Philly. That actually was a huge watershed moment for me because that was the first time I worked with a really big team on something that was a passion project.”

(13:21) - Data Garden and Joe’s next set of milestones - “Records were starting to become cool again and everybody would always ask me like, ‘You should release a record.’ And I would just think, ‘I don't feel like producing a piece of material plastic that could outlive me on this planet.’”

(19:34) - From Data Garden to PlantWave - “What if we took the sensory input of a plant and used the wave form of a plant and actually translated that into pitch and then had that play instruments.”

(27:53) - Turning plant biorhythms into music - “We’re measuring how much connection there is between two points in the plant. That connection between those two points is varying over time based on the plant moving water around through its system as it is photosynthesizing.”

(32:56) - The benefits of plant music - “What PlantWave does is it really helps to connect people more to a moment and helps people be more present. And that's associated in a lot of studies with things like stress reduction, just like better relating with people.”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Learn more about PlantWave and follow on Instagram

Listen to a live stream of plant music at Plants.fm

Learn more about Joe Patitucci and follow him on Instagram, Twitter and Spotify

Watch tutorials and more on how PlantWave works on their YouTube channel

Listen to

Silicon Valley is home to some of the world’s most innovative products and companies. Mighty among them are the design firms that help build and shape those products. In this episode of Before IT Happened, Tark Abed, founder and CEO of the product design consultancy Mighty Studios, talks to host Donna Loughlin about how he became an industrial designer, what his first years in the industry were like just down the street from Stanford’s Institute of Design a.k.a. the d.school in Palo Alto, and how he eventually founded his own design studio. Tune in to hear all about Tark’s career building cutting-edge products and to hear what role Tark says design has to play in our future.  

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(02:33) -Tark Abed, a kid with limitless vision - “We started visualizing and conceiving things like spaceships and lots of sci-fi stuff. And as we got exposed to more and more of those movies, that became sort of a passion of ours.”

(04:51) - Skating his way through life - “Skateboarding, failing, getting back up again, doing it differently, learning and moving forward, it’s sort of a metaphor for life, but it’s also a pretty powerful metaphor for the design process.”

(07:45) - Turning his passion into a career in industrial design - “Fundamentally there was formality behind what I had been doing my entire life. There was a discipline there and there was a process too, which was also fascinating.”

(18:14) - Deciding which design projects to develop - “The kind of work we do echoes what's happening in Silicon Valley, right? So, in the early years, it was sort of IoT smart devices. Then it was sort of wearable technology devices, wrist-worn, rings. Robotics, now, is trending. Drones were trending for a little while.”

(22:02) - Connecting people remotely pre-Zoom - “We worked with these amazing acoustics engineers, video engineers. We even worked with a Hollywood movie director on the best type of lighting to create in this environment.”

(24:49) - Designing to solve - “If we’re designing a technology that is wearable for seniors, we’ll go to assisted living facilities or people that are aging in place and learn about their habits and behaviors and their pain points and so forth. It’s only after you do that, and you compile that data that you start to see patterns emerge, and that's a really exciting part of the process.”

(31:07) The future of industrial design - “What I'm interested to see unfold over the next few years is like—as technologies get more miniaturized, more dense—where they end up, right? Are we going to have smart clothing? Now we have smart jewelry and smart watches, but what else could that be? And what are the consumer behaviors that are responding to that. And what are the needs?”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Connect with Tark Abed on Linkedin

Learn more about Mighty Studios and follow them on Instagram

Read Content Magazine’s profile on Mighty Studios

Thank you for listening!...

Carbon-heavy agriculture is responsible for 11% of greenhouse gases worldwide. That’s where Mark Schwager and his team at Monarch Tractor roll in, with the world’s first electric, autonomous smart tractor. Monarch sees its tractor as the future of sustainable agriculture, allowing growers to apply precision farming while cutting their diesel costs to virtually zero. Co-Founder and President of Monarch Tractor, Mark Schawager talks with host Donna Loughlin about the need for more automation and EV in agriculture in this week’s episode. Schwager has an impressive engineering and factory line pedigree. He previously served as head of the Tesla Gigafactory, leading the project from concept to construction. Now he’s applying his deep engineering and production background to the farm. Join us as we explore the future of cleaner and more efficient farming!

Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life. 

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(03:27) - From performing arts to business and technology - “I think life is an evolution, and I think that was my passion at that time and by the time I started learning things like high school calculus and physics, I kind of started gravitating more towards it, even though I went to a special high school for performing arts.”

(05:25) - Mark’s calling to the EV sector - “While I was here on the West Coast, I was staying with a friend’s parents and they handed me a newspaper clipping about a tiny little company trying to make electric cars called Tesla, and I was like, ‘Okay, that's for me.’”

(09:42) - Building Tesla’s Gigafactory - “So basically, Elon said let's ramp it up as fast as possible, and so all of the areas of the supply chain were basically able to accommodate a doubling of production, but not battery cells. And so that essentially was the inception of getting cell manufacturing under Tesla's control.” 

(16:55) - Mark’s light bulb moment - “Having worked around automated processes basically for my entire career in manufacturing, looking back even further than that, I mean, factories have been getting automated since the 80s, but none of that was really there in the farming space.”

(23:10) - Mark’s philosophy at Monarch Tractor - “We don't see ourselves as an electric, autonomous tractor company. We see ourselves as folks who are automating farm operations. And from that standpoint, we’re actually very focused on the quality of the operations and our ability to serve the farmers' needs much more than the vehicle.”

(27:18) - The Foxconn and Monarch Tractor partnership - “We believe that we can drive our competitive advantage from working with Foxconn and industrializing our vehicles with them. We can't do it on our own, but the pooled resources across that factory give us the chance to do that.”

(29:00) - The continued need to scale farming up - “​​There’s going to be like 10 billion people by the middle of the century on the planet. How are we going to feed them? The only way is by making our farmland more productive.”

EPISODE RESOURCES: 

Connect with Mark Schwager on LinkedIn

Learn more about Monarch Tractor

Read Forbes’