What if the kitchen knife you have used your whole life was designed for a fight, not for cooking? Douglas Katz thinks we can do better. "If you designed a knife for a robot, it wouldn't look like the linear knife that we have today," he says, and that single reframe sits at the heart of this episode.

Douglas is a West Point graduate, a disabled US Army veteran and a lifelong inventor who tells his story in three acts. From the leadership lab of the military, through a long and often grim chapter in corporate America, to the workshop where he forged a new kind of blade, his journey is one of reframing what looks fixed until something better becomes possible.

After upper body injuries made an ordinary knife painful to hold, Douglas refused to give up cooking and redesigned the tool instead. The result is NULU, an adaptive kitchen knife inspired by the traditional Inuit ulu and built around a concept his team calls force transfer geometry. From there grew a bigger idea. Ability and disability, he argues, are not a switch you flip. They are task-based and they move along a curve we all travel. We will all age into disability, and designing for that reality makes life better for everyone.

Along the way Peter and Douglas get into Aikido and softness, barrier-free, universal and inclusive design, ADHD as a feature set rather than a bug, and why AI might be the infinite assistant that lets more of us think like Tony Stark. It is honest, funny and quietly profound.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Aikido
9:12 Douglas' Story in Three Acts: The Military
16:29 A precursor to the second Act - Leadership
19:39 The second Act - Corporate America
25:56 The third Act and Doug's current innovation
36:36 Reframing ability and disability and design for it
41:39 A 101 on Disability Design Theories
48:03 The NULU Knife - an example of adaptive design
51:27 Helping incubate adaptive design ideas
53:30 A discussion on "ADHD wiring”
1:02:09 Intelligence, pattern recognition and AI
1:08:20 AI in work and education
1:14:41 Doug's Future Plans
1:18:34 Q&A Start
1:18:53 What does innovation mean to you?
1:19:17 Key Moment, Event, Person
1:21:59 Time Management
1:24:43 Favourite childhood memory
1:27:02 Biggest challenge to date
1:30:41 Advice for young professionals
1:33:55 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:35:31 Where can people find you?
1:37:07 Final Message
1:37:41 Outro

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