Welcome to Human Enough, the podcast where we explore the stories, struggles, ideas and experiences that reminds us what it really means to be human. I'm your host, Emmanuel. We rarely think about how much our independence is built into ordinary objects. A knife, a door handle, a chair, a bottle is a tool. We use them without thinking until one day our body changes. Maybe we are aging, maybe we have been injured, maybe we are living in a disability and suddenly something that was once simple becomes difficult. Today's guests became fascinated by that gap between the products, between what products are used, are supposed to do, and what people actually need. Douglas Katz is a West Point graduate, disabled Army veteran, inventor and entrepreneur. His own physical limitations and experience caring for his father eventually led him to create NULU, an adaptive kitchen knife designed around control, function and independence. But Douglas's work is not simply about creating better products, it's about dignity. It's about designing for people. Instead of asking people to constantly adopt themselves to poorly designed products, today we are going to talk about innovation, aging, disability, caregiving, independence, and what happens when we start designing the world around real human beings. Douglas, welcome to Human Enough.

Thank you, Emmanuel. How are you today?

Yeah, I'm doing great. Thank you so much for asking. You know, you have had a fascinating career from West Point and the military to infrastructure, telecom, lending and eventually product design. What happened that made you want to start building adaptive products?

I got old. You know, I had kind of a pretty typical corporate career after leaving the military and, you know, I don't think there was a lot of deliberate, "hey, I want to do this next." It was as opportunities came up, I pursued them and I'm like everybody else, you know, you got to pay the bills, you got to support the family, you got to do all that stuff. Being an entrepreneur, which is really heavily connected to what you're talking about on the adaptive side, was something I always wanted to be. I always was working on other projects and never necessarily found the right one. When I moved to where I live now in 2021, I ended up hitting a point where my shoulder needed reconstruction. And you know, I'm kind of like everybody else—eventually stuff tends to wear out. So that's what happened to me. And I'm a hobbyist knifesmith and I like to cook, which is another hobby that led me to create my product. And it was never with the—it's kind of funny—I had all these other ideas that I wanted to make businesses, and the knife was an idea that I wasn't thinking about commercializing. It was something I made for myself and then through great input and help from other people, got the incentive and the inspiration to commercialize it and take it to market.

Right. Thank you. You know, you talk about designing for people dealing with aging, disability, injury and recovery. What do most people misunderstand about the everyday challenges those individuals face?

I'm going to approach that answer a different way. I think what people fail to realize is they will be those people someday. Age and Mother Nature and Father Time are undefeated. They win every time. Because of that, we're all going to have degraded strength, degraded coordination, degraded dexterity. We're all going to face challenges that are part of the human condition. So from that perspective, it's not as much looking at somebody with a disability—that's an obvious one—and having some type of thought about that. It's that "will be me." Or if you're in a situation where you get a diagnosis or are in an accident or something occurs, it may not be age. It could be another factor that gets you there. And to the degree that we should all understand them, that they're no different. The people with the disabilities, we all have the same DNA. We really need to be thinking as one group of humanity to come up with products and other ways of doing things that provide a better experience for them and actually for everybody. A lot of times the better experience with our knife as an example, isn't that it's specifically for people with disabilities. That's who we're marketing to right now because that's who will pull money out of their wallet or write a check. It's more a matter of oh, if the mechanics and the ergonomics and the force transfer is good, it doesn't matter if you're disabled or not disabled. It's a better knife.

And then why are so many products difficult to use when someone's strength or mobility changes?

I think it's really based on kind of the paradigms of the past of how things are and having at any given time a minority of the population that is unable to use them. In your previous question, one of my things is we're all going to get there, but we're all not there at the same time. Many times some of these things are more expensive and they change how people look at things. If you look at our knife as an example, the knife is a tool that is in every culture, is very connected with history and culture and norms and traditions. So with our product, people think in their mind of what a knife looks like and something that varies from that is very hard for them to get their brain around. The big one people talk about are curb ramps, curb cuts... the touch screen on a phone was actually an adaptive design for people, I believe with vision impairment and some degree of mobility issues. But until there's a broader acceptance that people kind of understand the benefits, it will be relegated to that adaptive space.

Let's talk about NULU. How did the idea for an adaptive kitchen knife begin?

There's several knives that are very similar kind of in the historical record. There's a Mezzaluna that they use in one country. And then there's the Ulu, and the name actually comes from the "New Ulu." The Ulu is an Inuit knife and it's a very efficient knife. It's just very, very good intuitive design. And when I was going through some of my own mobility issues with my upper body and being able to grip, and it was right before I had shoulder surgery, I couldn't really do knife making the way I like to. I couldn't swing a hammer. I couldn't work in the kitchen either, so I couldn't cook. So instead of just sitting and watching TV, I took what I knew about other knife design and tried to create the most efficient knife that you could, because that would solve the problem. And I had some circular saw blades that I was using... I'm like any tinkerer, I have all kinds of scrap stuff in my shop. I took out an angle grinder and started playing around with what makes an Ulu good and how can you expand that to be as close to the pinnacle of efficiency that you can? And that's what sparked the NULU. I like to pay homage and reverence to the predecessor of what I've created.

And then when did you realize you had created something that could genuinely help people?

There are two things. One, it worked. Two, people generally accepted it quickly. The families didn't say, "oh, this one's another crazy idea." They said, "this is cool." Friends, one of whom is now my partner in the business, looked and said we have to make this, we have to bring it to market. So it's really that two-part: the individual validation and the broader validation that it was solving a problem. There's a lot of things I build in my shop that solve my problems. This was that broader piece.

You know, you use the phrase "function over flash" and talk about restoring independence without making people feel like patients. Why is dignity such an important part of product design?

I think dignity is something everybody understands. Independence is something everybody understands. And I'm an optimization nerd, so I like to create things that will use real estate on another product that makes it more functional. My design philosophy, my thinking, my problem solving is really about how can we improve on what's there and make it the best it can be. And I think that taking that approach of optimization is what then leads to a good functional product. Our product is functional but elegant, and that's where my partner comes in. I think you need both. It has to be a product people need and that they want to use. Dignity is a two-way street. We all want to be treated with it. A lot of the adaptive market tends to look clinical. If you were to do a search of adaptive cutlery, much of it looks very clinical in nature. So I think dignity also touches on that elegance, that beauty in design. I'm fortunate to have a partner who is an amazing designer who will not rest until the products are as beautiful as they are functional. Maybe dignity comes from accomplishing that task the way everybody else does with something that is beautiful to use and doesn't set you apart in its clinical design.

Your team includes professionals over 50, many of them veterans. What does experience bring to product design that younger teams might miss?

I think experience, wisdom and maturity are the three big things. Maturity as the basis for any business is great because it's less about ego. If you've been successful and you've truly done the right things, then there's less ego about it. The wisdom and the experience are just—if you were to look, I've got 5 or 6 partners, we're all in our 50s. The amount of time that we've worked, 30 years, 40 years... it's hundreds of years of experience. It's hundreds of times dealing with people in difficult situations. It's having solved a lot of problems. It's very interesting because it's some of the same debate in the AI space. You can't build artificial wisdom, at least not right now. An AI platform is great from an intelligence perspective, but it can't understand humanity. It doesn't necessarily know what the right answer should look like to then be able to work toward that right answer. To have a team of people who are all like that is incredible. Last June, I attended the Atlanta Blade show. My CEO and I had worked together for the better part of two years without meeting face to face. You cannot do that without a seasoned team. The younger generation can understand that the benefit of advisory or help from somebody who's already learned a heck of a lot of painful lessons is worth its weight in gold.

How has your military experience influenced the way you approach problems?

It's defined it. I was very fortunate in being a graduate of West Point. West Point's the oldest engineering school in the United States, so they teach you how to solve problems a certain way, and the Army does that too. The Army shapes so much of how you look at how you manage yourself and what you hold true from your value perspective. When we were trying to understand how to market this, there's a model in the army of how you're evaluated: Task, Condition, and Standards. What's the task, under what conditions, to what standards? It's a very objective way of looking at things. When we started to say "what really is disability?" Is disability an identity, or is disability understanding an array of individual tasks under certain conditions and standards for people of all different types? Then can you change those variables to then meet the same standards? That mindset allowed me to bridge the professional gap when talking to OTs or orthopedic surgeons. I really owe the Army everything in terms of my professional life.

You have also experienced the world of caregiving to your father. What did caregiving teach you about independence?

That a lot of what we had talked about earlier about dignity and independence gives people the ability to remain engaged and not feel like a burden. From a caregiver perspective—and a lot of our knives are bought by caregivers as gifts—it's about also finding time. If you're the person being cared for and it's burdensome, it's painful for you because you're that perceived burden. But I don't like to mince words: it can be very difficult being a caregiver. You lose a lot of your free time and your own freedom. Anything that you can do to provide those people independence has a return on investment across both the people doing the caring and the people being cared for.

Did caregiving change what you wanted to build?

It didn't as much as—I built it for myself and then used my dad as a guinea pig. It was an "aha" moment realizing this benefits the person I'm caring for. It shaped how we look at ability and disability being that curve. It's not about the condition; it's about the symptom. Instead of saying we're going to solve MS or Parkinson's, it was tremors or root causes of why people could not cut.

Adaptive products are often treated as products for a small special needs population. Do you think that's the wrong way to look at it?

I do, because we approach it as a curve and a scale. If you look at ability and disability as black and white, on/off, then you really miss the plot. At any given time, you have people who have a condition, people who are temporarily disabled due to injury, seniors aging into disability, and even young people with dexterity issues. To say it's a small population misses the plot and undercounts. I'll get into arguments in pitch competitions. I'll say it's about 150 million people in the U.S. and they'll say it's impossible. But how do you define disability? If you define it as the inability to do a task without pain or help, the scale is huge. Our knife helps both the person with mild arthritis and the person whose condition has progressed much further.

Now that NULU is in production, what has the real-world experience taught you?

The biggest reward—and it's cheesy to say—but when somebody walked up to us at an abilities Expo and said "thank you for inventing this," that's a reward that's really hard to articulate. Money will come and go, but when someone in a wheelchair tries a demo and their face lights up and they pay for it right there, that allows us to have a rally point when things get tough with manufacturing or tariffs. When somebody tells you that you have created something that has changed their life, you can't help but be humbled.

What surprised you most about launching the products?

The people that it benefited. Before, we were very upper-extremity focused. But when we started to listen to the market, we found that the entirety of people with mobility issues have cutting challenges. Vision impairment blew me away. I didn't set out to put a blade in the hand of somebody with degraded vision—the safety considerations alone make you pause. But then someone with vision impairment says, "we have to cut too." The safety of our design provides them a specific benefit.

You talk about building products with purpose rather than chasing trends. What does purpose mean to you?

Purpose is having a product that makes these kind of changes. I don't get up every day saying "how am I going to sell more knives?" My partners and I get up saying "how are we going to make this knife better? What's our next product to solve the same thing?" When you're making an impact, you have a purpose.

When should an inventor walk away from an idea?

Never. You might walk away from how that idea is applied, but an inventor should always be inventing. If one item doesn't have a commercial application now, it doesn't mean it won't later. You can file it away, but if you are truly an innovator, you never walk away. Sometimes the technology or the market just needs 5 or 10 years to catch up. Everything doesn't have to be the "Unicorn" invention that makes a bazillion dollars; sometimes it just makes your life easier.

What makes a product worth bringing into the world?

You have to validate. Does it solve the problem? How many people have the problem? Can I make it at a commercial scale and a viable price? That's where you might walk away from a business enterprise, but not the invention. We're dealing with insurance right now, trying to figure out how to make this a product where insurance companies see it makes sense to lower workman's comp claims. Knowing the landscape helps you know when an invention is viable.

Have your physical limitations taught you anything about adapting emotionally?

Only that you shouldn't accept it if you don't have to. There are ways to adapt so you don't have to settle for the inability to do something you love. A lot of times people are their own worst enemies; they feel that accepting adaptive measures is somehow lessening who they are. Most of the time, adaptation actually helps you live longer and do things you like longer. I picked this up in my 50s. People say "I don't know how to make anything." Have you tried? We live in a time where you can prototype with a 3D printer and "vibe code" with AI. We're working on an AI platform right now to help people understand reimbursement. I don't know how to code, but I'm creating an AI agent that can do that. Don't let "I don't know how" stop you.

What do you ultimately hope people experience?

Independence. I want them to retain as much of their best selves as possible. If I can help people retain purpose, then I feel I'm in a good place.

What's a limitation you have personally had to learn to work with?

For me, it's upper extremity stuff. But I think more often than not, we have layered comorbidities as we get older. To limit it to one is to miss out on the potential to solve more things.

Where can people find you online?

The best place is nuluknives.com. It's got how-to's, testimonials, and the whole product set. If they look for my name, Douglas M. Katz, I have my own website as well. We have a broad digital footprint on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

What is said to you most about the future?

I'm an optimist. I hope my story is inspiration for other people—not only to buy a knife like mine to maintain their independence, but maybe to solve a nagging problem that they can also bring to the world.

Douglas, thank you so much. Your story reminds us that independence is not about never needing help; it's about having the right tools and the freedom to keep doing things in a way that works for you. Good design does not tell people what they can't do; it helps them discover what they still can.

Thank you.