March 21, 2024 • 66 mins
In a special episode of Starkey Soundbites, we welcome two hearing aid industry legends: Starkey's founder and chairman, Bill Austin, and Karl Strom, Editor-in-Chief of Hearing Tracker, for an enlightening discussion hosted by Dr. Dave Fabry. The episode outlines the journey of innovation that led hearing aids to have all of the remarkable capabilities they have today and recounts the transition from custom-made hearing aids to digital hearing aids, and to today’s devices that offer a range of beneficial features for overall health monitoring and connectivity.
After more than six decades in the hearing industry, Bill Austin shares what he has learned throughout his impressive career, and his experience with the many groundbreaking developments that have changed countless people’s lives. He discusses his fascinating journey in the industry, starting with how he began making ear molds and later developing in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aids. Mr. Austin’s unique strategies, such as offering all-make-repair service and ensuring fast delivery, have transformed the hearing aid market within the US and globally.
Karl Strom reflects on the changes he has seen in the hearing industry throughout his career and emphasizes the importance of honest reporting in disseminating information to patients and providers. This episode presents an inspiring testament to the transformational potential of technology when used for the betterment of humanity.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to a very special issue of Starkey Soundbites.
I'm Dave Fabry, Starkey's Chief Hearing Health Officer, and with me today,
this is a topic and a podcast that I've really been looking forward to for a long time.
Two, I don't think it's hyperbole to say, two industry legends who've been witnessed
(00:21):
to and instrumental in the development of the hearing aid industry,
continuing to impact it and report on it and chronicle it, as we've been discussing
here prior to turning on the camera today. First, Mr.
Bill Austin, Starkey's founder and chair, and as well, Carl Strum,
who is currently the editor-in-chief of Hearing Tracker, and also someone that
(00:47):
I've known both of you for,
let's just say a few decades. A little while. few, a little while.
And, you know, it's really a privilege to sit with both of you today and have
a conversation a little bit about the way that you both have innovated in this
industry from different ends of the spectrum and reported on it and continue
to impact the industry in many ways today.
(01:10):
And Bill, you can shrug all you want, but your humility is, in my mind,
you know, it's, you've made a tremendous, tremendous impact on this industry.
And we're the young pups here.
I've got 30 years, you've got 40 years, and Bill has 62 years.
I mean, I've written articles before and said that, you know,
(01:34):
Bill, more than anybody I know,
has had kind of a front row seat to the hearing industry for 62 years.
Through the history of hearing aids. Yes.
There's various new inventions, great new inventions.
And if you look back in the archives, you find that there's those things that were thought of before.
(02:01):
And not only that, fairly well stated before as far as explaining to patients
how hearing aids work and what they can expect and what they can do.
So, I think that hearing aid history, if you block it into pre-electric hearing
aids, which is the acoustic devices,
(02:24):
and those acoustic devices were designed to fit in canes, walking sticks, fans.
There was bone conduction fans and air conduction fans and various bells,
tubes, horns, and those devices certainly helped people for a long time.
(02:44):
In fact, there was such a prolifer of those devices that in the late 80s and early 90s,
there were big catalogs showing all manner of them that you could look for the
device you thought you would like to try to get some help from.
A lot of otosclerosis then, the help that was supplied was limited.
(03:09):
They didn't have the power to really help bad hearing losses.
But what happened is they were better than nothing. It gave you a little boost.
And so people were appreciative of that. They got a few more cues and they were able to hear.
Well, and it's sort of interesting you bring up the pre-electronic era
because I think the way I'd like to channel the
(03:32):
discussion is really on the technology and on the
process because you've been highly influential in
the process of dispensing and how hearing aids are sold in the market and you've
been so over decades but in that pre-electronic era I mean many people who are
new to the profession may you know have been interested in the past few years
(03:54):
that there were bone conduction hearing aids that would actually actually vibrate your teeth.
People were biting on, in your museum. That was a common process used in the
late 1800s. Right, right. They would create a hearing fan that was Bakelite.
It was a thin plastic, and the person would, you know, have a fan.
(04:18):
And on the back of the fan, there was a network of strings that went out to
the edges, which you could apply tension to the fan and get just the right tension
for the right vibration from the sound.
So when someone was speaking, like in church, a minister,
the wearer could discreetly put the edge of the fan between their teeth,
(04:44):
bite it, pull on the strings,
and direct the fan towards the, kind of direct it discreetly towards the sound
source and help their hearing.
So, and there were other, you know.
All kinds of efforts that were made. And the fan one was really a multi-purpose,
(05:05):
multi-function device in the sense that if it got a little hot in the place
of worship, you could use it as a fan.
Yeah, that's true. They didn't have air conditioning then.
The one fan I showed you, Carl, was actually given me by the patient who used it.
And I fit her with a hearing aid. She'd lived that long.
And it was, you know, many years ago. But that's what I mean about if you're
(05:30):
old enough, then you remember the original guys. Right, right.
So I knew people who used those, who used carbon electric hearing aids and vacuum tube aids.
We still service vacuum tube aids when we first started all make repair. Okay.
And you probably still saw some of the A and B battery types of aids. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
(05:52):
And when you came in? You would have to, you would show the ladies how they
could harness those things up and not have anyone see them.
So cosmetics have always been a part of the package. They'd wear the battery
packs often on the hip. Right.
Where with the bigger skirts of the day, that wasn't noticed.
(06:14):
Right. So those were the early days of powered devices, but they used carbon.
Carbon batteries were the first powered, weren't they?
The microphone was carbon. Okay. The battery was not carbon.
Battery. What was the battery composition?
The battery composition was, it wasn't mercury.
Oh, was it? It was alkaline. Alkaline. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Okay.
(06:38):
So, yeah, they had that battery as a source of power to the microphone.
Okay. The microphones were big. Enormous, yeah. So you'd wear them outside on your chest.
Yeah. Looked like you had a big metal. Right.
And on the back, you could adjust the volume. Okay.
And you got a little better boost than you could get out of the fans of the acoustic things.
(07:04):
And everybody in my generation saw the church microphones that you picked up
from the pins. Yeah, and you could plug them in. Plug it in with a handle to your ear.
Yeah, like an old telephone. That's the first thing that I remember in the early
60s, mid-60s, about hearing aids.
(07:25):
Absolutely, yeah. And then we
saw also in the museum some of the early hearing aids from the early 50s.
Hearing aids were among the very first medical devices, certainly,
to use integrated circuits and transistors.
Transistors first. Integrated circuits didn't come until about the early 50s. early 60s.
(07:48):
Transistors came in the early 50s, and vacuum tube aids came in the early 20s. Right.
That's, so there was, the World War II was in there, and there was a big.
Focus on supplying the war effort and
so hearing aid kind of
stayed at its point that
(08:11):
it was in in the 30s you know evolving slightly but still vacuum tubes and there
were a lot of people tried to make them smaller you said that sonotone was like
one of the one of the original kind of families of it and others branched off
of it but there were a lot of hearing aid comp like you you You showed us a Zenith hearing aid.
Yeah. So there were a lot of different companies.
(08:33):
There were a lot of different companies. In the U.S. and Europe,
there were so many different people trying to make hearing aid, hearing devices.
Most of them didn't do too much volume.
And so you see a rare model now and then. A company that went away was Jim Earphone,
(08:57):
G-E-M, and they made quite a few hearing aids, but they vanished from the scene.
Acousticon, the first electronic hearing aid company, and Sonotone,
which started in about 1912, were the two big, big hearing aid companies that
spawned off everything underneath them. Now, E.A.
(09:20):
Myers, I think he started on his own with Radio Air in Pittsburgh.
He was separated from the other guys.
And that came out of the idea of a radio where you'd use a vacuum tube radio
after they were first made and you could turn up the volume.
So his irrigates were table models like radios, the first ones.
(09:42):
And in the meantime, other people were making smaller vacuum tube aids. And E.A.
Myers, you pointed out that E.A.
Myers, his, his, his daughter had married Sam Leibarger.
Yeah, in fact.
I think that might have been a granddaughter. Okay. Because E.A.
(10:05):
Myers was an older guy, and the company was E.A. Myers and Sons.
Okay. So when he started, he was there a couple years, and then the torch was
passed to the Sons, and then I think one of the Sons' daughters married Sam Leibarger.
And Sam Leibarger was oftentimes thought of as kind of the grandfather of acoustical
(10:27):
standards, and he served on a lot of ANSI committees, They did a lot of groundwork
for modern hearing aids.
They made bone oscillators that were used not only for hearing aids,
but for testing hearing, for bone conduction tests.
And a lot of the audiometers were using radio ear oscillators.
(10:49):
And not to, but to stick with Sam Leibarger for a moment, he had the Leibarger half gain rule.
You've seen all of these different strategies for fitting hearing aids at the
same time from that era all the way up to now.
And I'm sure you have your own way of secret recipe, as you will,
(11:13):
for fitting hearing aids. Look, it's not secret at all.
I have ideas. I think about things a lot. But people are looking for the easy way.
My ways always require a lot of effort.
Hearing is subjective.
(11:35):
Hearing is individual. Hearing is unique to the human being.
So, if I want to do a good job, when a patient is in front of me,
I'm not thinking about golfing or fishing.
I'm not thinking about anything else except that one person.
It's all that's on my mind. I'm gathering every bit of information I can get
(12:01):
from them, because little tiny things give you cues.
I listen to what they say. I ask questions.
And we do some basic measurements. We look at audiograms, which gives us a general idea.
But the audiogram is not a very good predictor because I can have a patient
(12:23):
with a very poor audiogram, very bad audiogram and good discram.
I can have a patient with a much better audiogram and much better discram.
I can have a patient with a poor audiogram that doesn't need nearly as much
power as most people do, or as the real ear formula would say, you need it.
So it's all wildly variant.
(12:45):
So if you want to do a really good job, you just have to listen to the patient.
They used to say, well, the early hearing aids, those were just amplifying devices.
The early hearing aids had a whole series of different receivers for different frequencies.
There were ways that we managed sound,
(13:06):
but fundamentally, if you give a person a clean sound that's distortion-free,
and you have about a 6 dB per octave rise slope on it, and you turn it up and
you vent it properly, you're there.
And that's about as good as you're going to get. When you start trying to jerk
(13:28):
the frequency response around according to the audiogram with very steep skirts,
you cause harmonic distortion.
The harmonics are no longer in line with the fundamentals. It's screwing everything up.
But people who only think audiograms try to follow that around.
(13:49):
You can't follow that around.
That's not right. And the other thing you've got to realize,
it's the fundamental peak of receivers.
That's the output transducer. That's the sound that's going into your ear.
It doesn't matter what the circuit's doing. That peak is pretty much,
it's a main factor, so you should know where it is.
(14:12):
And it usually works to your advantage with most hearing losses.
If you try to reverse-slope amplify, you get a hearing aid that sounds just awful.
That doesn't work. So even though the sound is down in the lows and it's rising,
you still have to fit that with a 6 dB per octave rise, or it won't sound good.
(14:35):
And you'll lose low-energy high-frequency cues in upward-spread of basket.
It just doesn't work. And it creates a very bad sound.
Hearing aids that sound really mellow to a person with normal hearing that don't
sound like hearing aids work really good for hearing impaired people. So first we had...
(15:00):
Carbon mics, then vacuum tubes, then transistors.
And it got more powerful with vacuum tubes and it got more powerful in tubes,
but the sound didn't get better. Right.
It just changed it and it allowed you to address a more severe hearing loss.
(15:21):
Then you talked about the early transistor aids and they were big and cumbersome. Yeah.
Eyeglass hearing aids were built into both temples in the very beginning and thick, big things.
And generally only amplified unilaterally too, right? Right.
Siemens patented the in-the-ear aid in 1928. They couldn't make one.
(15:44):
They didn't make one. It was never made.
They probably didn't make any kind of an in-the-ear aid until long after we did.
But that didn't matter. I mean, it was an idea. idea. People used to try to patent ideas.
They still do. I never tried to patent ideas. I think ideas are a dime a dozen.
(16:05):
Accomplishing something is another subject.
The first in-the-air aid was made in this country by a guy in Walnut Creek,
California named Leslie Leal.
And Leslie Sleel found a florist in 1957 that had a gigantic ear.
It was absolutely huge.
(16:28):
So he took a plaster cast of the ear plaster pairs, which we use in those days
and cast by the lost metal process.
Like you would make a jewelry, a hollow shell that would fit this guy's ear.
He nickel plated it, then gold plated
it with a thin layer of gold so now he's
(16:51):
had it as a shell and he could take the the
smallest parts at that time which were
still too big to really make
in the ear hearing aids for anyone but the
size that dahlberg used on his first miracle ear aid that would fit inside this
thing because the guy's ear was so big and he made that but couldn't make any
(17:15):
more then you know because nobody had ears that big then a couple years later
the parts were getting smaller so by 19.
60, 61, they were trying to introduce that as a possible solution.
I said at the time, it's not a good solution because you can't modify it because
(17:37):
it's cast metal. You can't grind through the thin metal.
And you were doing ear molds at the time. And I was doing ear molds.
So I said, oh, I'll just hollow out the ear molds and I can make them.
So it wasn't my idea. And by the way, the first directional.
Which I said was made by Martin Wachowski at our Wilco factory,
(18:01):
that wasn't really his idea.
That idea came from the Bosch company.
You know, fuel injections. Well, at one time they made hearing aids,
but they were a creative German company like many German companies were.
And before World War II, a guy at Bosch wrote a patent for a directional microphone.
(18:24):
And then it just went into the wayside and nobody ever thought about it again
until Witkowski started reading the patent and tried to make one by hand and
did successfully in the first directional microphones.
Microphones, even the ones that were sold to Mako or the early Mako directional
(18:45):
behind the ear hearing aids were made by hand by Wilco.
But then we couldn't do them at scale.
So that went to Knowles Electronics to make.
And how did you...
Okay, so you had all of this background with your Uncle Fred,
Fred, starting with your Uncle Fred and then buying the original Starkey,
(19:08):
explain how you evolved into being such a powerhouse for in-the-ear hearing aids.
And, you know, one of your, I don't know, one of your many legacies,
I think, is really kind of getting the whole ITE.
Hearing aid thing rolling in the United States? Well, there were reasons that I did it.
(19:33):
People, psychologically, if you have a hearing loss, the ears,
the hearing aid should go in your ear. That's empty space.
You know, you don't put your eyeglasses on the back of your head to seeing your eyes in front.
So it makes sense to the patient.
Secondly, if it's custom formed to the ear, you know, it'll ride with them.
(19:58):
If they're playing tennis or moving around, they could do anything.
And thirdly, if you eliminate the tubing resonance from running through the
tube, you can shift your energy peak a little higher, which is good because
most losses are higher frequency in nature. You need more energy out there.
And you could get subtle, high-frequency cues off of the pinna, from pinna effect.
(20:25):
So there's a reason why I thought it was better. The reason why it was worse
for all the other hearing aid companies is they were harder to make.
But remember I said I never minded working hard.
All my ideas required hard work. They require skill and hard work.
(20:45):
So when we send a person to open a new production around the world, which we were opening,
we would not send an ear mold tech with less than five years experience of making
shells for our hearing aids to open, be there for the opening.
Because if they hadn't made literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
(21:09):
them, they couldn't get the nuances.
So anyway, there was a reason why I wanted to make them.
But the reason why Starkey is successful goes back to the reason that we're
in business in the first place.
And that's why we've lasted. I attribute it.
I don't attribute it to being smart businessman, clever salesman,
(21:33):
la-di-da, anything else than this.
I came to Minnesota because I wanted to be a missionary doctor. doctor.
I intended to enroll in the University of Minnesota Medical School.
I took a job making earpieces to make enough money to pay for my tuition.
I had never had a quarter's tuition paid for me in my life. No books paid for me.
(21:59):
There I was going to school and an old man with a a bad, bad hearing loss came
in and they weren't able to help him.
They called me upstairs and I went to work on the guy.
I made him a perfect fitting earpieces that wouldn't leak. He's having a lot
of feedback trouble before.
(22:20):
And when he could hear, I saw in his face, I saw in his face what it meant to him to hear.
I was just stunned because I never thought hearing was very important before that.
I thought I was going to be a doctor and save lives.
I was going to do important important work, what is.
Two-bit hearing aid business. And when I saw what it meant to the patient,
(22:40):
then I knew it was important.
And so, I rode home on the city bus.
In the cantilever of the bus, there was a quote, the true path to humility is
not to stoop till you're lower than yourself, but rather to stand at your true
height against some greater nature that will show the real smallness of your
greatest his greatness.
(23:02):
I saw that quote. I said, that's how I feel. I wanted to be challenged.
So I got home and I sat on the upstairs single bed cot that I had to sleep on where I was staying.
And I started talking to myself, just like I'm talking to you guys.
And I said, Bill, the reason you want to be a doctor is so you can help people.
(23:24):
If you do this work, work, you'll be able to help people and you won't kill anyone.
And so the next thing I said was, how many people as a doctor can you help a day?
20, 25, night will fall. You'll get up the next day, another 20,
25, and you'll spend your life and you'll help a village.
(23:46):
And I said, Bill, you're not likely to impact the world.
I decided right at that moment that I could be challenged by helping more people
through the hands of many.
I knew that I couldn't do much with my two hands,
but I knew that if I could find other people that accepted the values that I
(24:13):
thought were important,
if they respected those values and accepted them as their own,
that we could build leverage and we would stand on those values and the leverage bridge.
Would be the hands of many that would pull on the leverage that we had to move
the world. That's what I felt.
(24:33):
And so I said, if you do this work, you can impact the world.
I had a little rental house that I bought from scrapping cars.
That's why I have those old cars over there today. I feel so bad about,
you know, I slayed a lot of them.
Anyway, I, during the Korean War, metal was, had a good price and I took them down.
(24:56):
I bought this little rental house because I had more money than I needed to buy my first car.
I bought my first car when I was not even quite 15, just about 15.
I knew as soon as I was 15, I could get a learner's permit.
I had a kid lined up down the road that was 16 and had a driver's license.
And if he could ride with me, then I could drive.
(25:19):
So I bought my car. I had enough money left. I bought this little rental house.
I sold that house for $3,000.
I had to make a profit before I ran out of money.
People tell you, you got to have financing for three years. You got a lot.
If you start a business, I had enough financing for three months.
(25:41):
If I couldn't make it work within three months, I was out of business.
And I didn't know anybody that would give me money or loan me money.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't ask anyone. I wouldn't ask my father for money for sure.
And I wouldn't ask anyone else.
Because how why are they going to risk money in a crazy crazy kid 19 19 so anyway
(26:03):
yes i'm i've got i've got this idea and it was very slow for a long time i had
this to sell hearing aids.
To pay the bill, and worked on developing the in-the-ear hearing aid.
I had enough, far enough along that I started, opened a little factory.
(26:26):
And hired a guy from the Tone Master hearing aid company in Peoria,
Illinois, to be the production manager.
And was he the gentleman you said made the best hearing, or made the best ear molds that you ever saw?
Oh, my heavens, no, that was Paul Jensen. Paul Jensen.
So, I made my own ear molds, and Paul made better-hearing ear molds than I'd
(26:51):
ever been able to make because he developed a process of casting the shells hollow.
I was taking a solid block and grinding them out.
It was laborious, and it left the inside rough and varying thicknesses of shell.
You know you'd have to leave it thick
enough so you couldn't see through it but thin enough
(27:13):
that you could get all your parts and it was a little
more work a lot more work i took the parts over to this is early 1964 over to
golden tone and golden tone was owned by a guy that owned a tv store store named Johnston,
(27:36):
and he'd acquired the Golden Tone Hearing Aid Company,
which had been existent. He sold Zenith TVs.
And anyway, Ray Clark, a World War II veteran that flew for England in World War II, he.
Had invented a cattle prod. Johnston said, I'll trade you the hearing aid company for the cattle prod.
(27:59):
Well, the cattle prod never went anywhere.
And the hearing aid company didn't either. They were sitting in the building
owned by Dan Lang and Henry Kuzmin.
And they, he hadn't paid the rent in over six months to Dan Lang,
Dan owned the building. And they didn't know what they were gonna do.
And I came in and I said, I've got these components components,
(28:21):
and this is, I want to make these hearing aids.
And Ray Clark said, well, we can't do that.
But he showed me these old golden tone eyeglass aids on other aids.
I said, no, I'm not interested. This is what I want.
And I started to leave. It was by the front door. And a voice came from the
back room and said, don't leave.
(28:42):
I think we can do that. And so it was Dan Lang. I went went back there.
And so he started making hearing aids for me.
And I was supposed to get $15 a hearing aid override on any that Golden Tone
sold, took them in my car to the first IHS convention they ever went to, paid the expenses,
(29:04):
signed up some people to buy the aids, Milt Tavell in,
Indianapolis, Maury Perlman in Louisville, Kentucky, Lee Schaefer in Rochester, New York.
They were all good customers that I brought on board.
And, but they never could pay me because they never had a lot enough money.
(29:25):
So I went on my way determining that wasn't going to work and just kept evolving
and making my own hearing aids.
And Bill, that was the era of single line dispensing too, right?
Yeah, pretty much single line.
You had a brand and that was it. You stuck to it.
(29:46):
So how did you get your feet in the door of those businesses and get Starkey
kicked out? Well, at that time, I couldn't get decent service.
So I didn't like the way it was being done.
And so I started an all-make-service business.
(30:07):
And I started policies that were just different than anyone else.
They were all parts of labor at that time. And you just pay to have your hearing aid repaired.
And they'd charge you for a new receiver, this or that, something else.
(30:27):
You'd wear it two days and maybe drop it on the floor, the microphone.
They'd say, well, it's the microphone this time. They'd charge you again.
There was no, the only warranty was on the part they replaced,
and it was always a different part.
I didn't like the whole system. It was set up for being dishonest and cheating the patients.
(30:48):
So I said, we're going to charge a flat charge. No matter what's wrong, we'll take care of it.
We'll service any kind of hearing aid made, including even old vacuum tube aids.
We serviced everything.
And we said, and we made them look like new, and we sent them back.
And I said, you know, for the eyeglass aids, a lot of the, some of the dealers
(31:13):
were afraid to heat and bend them because you could damage- The electrical components?
Yeah, you could damage it.
You had to do it just right. I knew how to do it, but they didn't know how to
do it, a lot of them. And I said, go ahead.
Heat them and bend them. If you break them, we'll take care of it. No charge.
(31:34):
We'll re-case them because they need to fit decently.
I wanted patients to be happy with hearing aids because I thought anyone saying
something bad about our business not only reflected on the person that sold
it in the company, but it reflected on the entire industry.
And it kept And it kept people from coming forward that needed help and should get help.
(31:57):
So our policies were designed to help the dispenser help the patient,
to please the patient, and back them up.
Well, that became a popular concept.
Within two years, we were the world's largest service place for all makes of hearing aids.
(32:19):
And so I kept working on the end-year aides but that gave me entree to the dealers
across the country even if they sold something else they've sent service to
us right and once they knew me,
they began to decide they could trust me sure and I did the best I could for
(32:40):
them every time And was the leap to building hearing aids and selling them to
these people, was that a big risk for you?
No, it wasn't a big risk. It was more of an illusion. What I said,
I said to people, I would have a hearing aid that we'd finished after the pickup
was gone in front of our building in St. Louis Park.
(33:03):
Yes. And that last mail pickup had gone downtown. The last pickup was like 5.30 or something.
Sure. It were six. If you didn't get it done by then, it didn't go to the next day.
And so I'd take one hearing aid, drive it downtown in my car.
Walk up on the back loading dock at the main Minneapolis post office,
(33:26):
talk to the people there and ask them which mail, which bin was going out next to be sorted.
And I would get, be sure it was in the right bin.
It went out because I said, the hearing aid is important to the patient.
It might be a graduation, a wedding anniversary, who knows what it might be,
(33:48):
but any day without without hearing, is not a good day. So I said, they need it back.
And people would tell me when I'm getting in my car, going downtown,
the people that work for me said, that's stupid because it costs more for the
gas to drive back and forth, even though gas was cheap then.
Then we'd make in profit on that transaction.
(34:11):
But I didn't mind losing money occasionally to keep our reputation really good.
Our reputation had to be as good as it could possibly be.
And I said, our reputation has to be good because it's our most valuable asset.
And we're going to do something besides just repairs.
We're going to, I knew we were going to sell them hearing aids when I was satisfied
(34:36):
that we had a good product.
I still wasn't satisfied. I couldn't make.
To quit venting for the mild losses. Vents at those days in the air haze,
we'd put tubes through and it didn't do it.
Finally, I had a guy, Austin Reynolds in Rochester, Minnesota.
He came back and forth. This is already in 72 when I'm getting at the end of
(34:59):
my design. I'm making them for other people.
And in 72, during the summer, he was saying, no, I'm still occluded.
I'm still occluded. It went back and forth. finally i
can't we cast through a great big cast
through vent like we use today yeah and i thought surely we would have too much
(35:20):
feedback but we didn't and the guy was happy there it was it was austin riddles
so then i knew how to vent it wasn't the tubes it was those cast in vents that
that we've used ever since.
And I'd gotten Harold Paul Jensen.
He was making all the molds for Starkey. Harold Starkey had a little ear mold
(35:45):
company, and that's how he got the name.
And I wanted his shells. I knew I needed the shells.
So August of 1970, I bought that little ear mold company for $13,000.
It wasn't worth 13 cents, but it was
incorporated and my business wasn't it was much bigger
(36:06):
what i really was buying was paul jensen
and i could have i could have hired paul jensen but
i didn't want to i couldn't do that to harold he
was a nice little guy that would put him out of business so i bought his he
went he retired to black duck minnesota with his wife who was a registered nurse
to run a nursing home paul came to work for me we had beautiful shells then
(36:28):
i had to work on the the performance.
So now I could fit the mild losses, but how could I fit the most profound losses?
Well, Westinghouse in Canada was making an integrated circuit at that time,
which was the most powerful thing I could find.
When we put that integrated circuit into the hearing aid for our push-pull,
(36:52):
really bad losses, instead of the transistor circuit that we were making.
And we We made those transistors, we assembled the circuits,
you know, with the capacitors and resistors, all of these peripheral parts that you have to have.
But what we did was we beta checked our components to make sure they matched.
(37:14):
And other companies would get components that were graded. You get a transistor
that's this grade, another transistor that's this grade, another transistor is that grade.
And the factories would take from each grade to make a hearing aid.
The hearing aid would vary all over the place.
By beta matching the hearing aids, I was able to get a little more dynamic range,
(37:35):
the components, and make a better sounding device.
So we got to.
Better sounding device than most of the hearing aids that were being sold. We had nice shells.
We had everything. And then we got the push-pull circuit and I was able to fit
the worst hearing losses, really bad hearing losses.
(37:58):
I could fit everything with an in-ear aid. So I said, we're ready.
January 1st, 1973, I sent out a letter.
There was no advertising, no flyers, no brochures. I sent it out with the statement,
the December statement, came January 1st. I'd save on postage.
I would only— In that January letter, was that when you said,
(38:21):
here's the hearing aid worthy of your consideration? Yes. I said,
we do something other than make earmolds and service hearing aids.
We make an in-the-ear hearing aid worthy of your consideration.
That was the words. I said, and then I went on to say the provision of better
hearing is unpredictable at best.
(38:43):
No one knows how someone else hears except the patient. So our hearing aids will be on 90-day trial.
That was considered heresy. Instead, the industry changed.
We said the hearing aids have to be provided on trial.
And I felt that because the industry couldn't afford a bad reputation from somebody. money.
(39:06):
I said, they don't buy a piece of plastic. They buy better hearing.
And that's unpredictable at best. So it would be unconscionable for us to take
their money for something that they thought they were buying that they didn't get. So I said that.
And then I went on, the last thing I said was furthermore, we address the hearing
(39:26):
loss, not the pocketbook.
So if you have a patient who can't afford our hearing aid.
Just write Starkey Fund on the order, and we'll provide the same hearing aid
for your poorest patient as we do, the wealthiest at no charge.
And it was a trust thing only.
They didn't have to send in a financial statement.
(39:47):
And our loss and damage coverage, you didn't need to send in a police report.
It was all based on trust, which some of the companies tried to institute.
And most of our people, were very trustworthy.
And so those were our policies from the beginning. And they were policies that
were appreciated by the dispensers.
(40:10):
Our hearing aids worked really good.
And our problem was keeping up.
We didn't have a problem with advertising or trying to get, our problem was
keeping up with the orders because it just kept spreading.
And it was really, yeah, you, you by then had perfected custom,
(40:30):
you know, you had begun this trail of innovating in that space and really delivering.
They were a nice looking aid.
The edges had to be rounded, edges, the battery doors had to be rounded.
There was no square edges on it. So it would blend with the air.
And I said, you know, we're not making it invisible. It's not obtrusive.
When you look at someone, you should look at their eyes, not what the heck of
(40:52):
that on their ear. Your eye shouldn't be drawn to the ear.
Not that it's not there, but it shouldn't be drawn there.
And so those were our guidelines of what we did.
Then with the 90-day trial, with a hearing aid that, like you said,
the advertising was to build a hearing aid worthy of your consideration.
(41:13):
You already had the all-make repair.
So you were You were servicing products that other single line manufacturers
were, you know, and you were, you were providing them with an opportunity then.
And for the next decade from early seventies until 83, you continue to innovate
in making better performing, smaller custom devices.
(41:35):
I did. And then 83, you know, the other thing I think that everyone remembers
in 1983, President Reagan.
And, you know, you fit him with a custom device when BTEs were the norm, right?
Because this is now an area that I was in in the early 80s, 70 to 80% of devices
(41:56):
were behind the ear, but they were also fitted on one ear.
And I think that's something that people don't talk about a lot,
that you not only fit then-President Reagan with a custom hearing aid, you fit him in both ears.
Well, I'd been fitting people with both ears since the 60s when I started.
I didn't fit one ear. But you were zigging when other people were zagging.
(42:20):
People were concentrating on one ear and you were fitting. What led you to that?
Revelation. People hear better with both ears. That's all.
And there was a lot of, you know, like Ernie Zelnick and guys like that were
starting to accumulate some good evidence for that at the time.
So, in the 1970s, as I said early in the 70s, 1970, 70, 71, we did the real
(42:49):
ear microphone with Dick Martin.
Then we started and making devices that would help people with niche problems
that you couldn't make money on because there wasn't enough volume,
like headband bone conductions for people with atresia ears,
power stethoscopes for hearing impaired doctors.
(43:10):
Not a lot of doctors wanted to admit to hearing loss.
They thought it made them look incompetent. So I built it into the stethoscope
tubing and and made it black like the rest of the assembly.
And hopefully, you know, the patient would know any difference.
Not only that, the doctor could leave it in his ear, and it had a hearing aid
function on, so he could hear and then switch it into the stealth mode.
(43:36):
Right. And you did a lot of that. I did all that creative stuff. With your engineers.
All of the books, the counseling books, I said hearing aid is more than the
device itself. It involves a family and we need oral rehabilitation.
I have articles in Hearing Instruments of you going back to the late 1960s anyway.
(44:01):
There's probably some before that.
So I worked on that stuff. stuff.
We made the first tinnitus masquerades and tinnitus masquers for a guy in Portland,
Oregon, that was researching tinnitus. Vernon, yeah.
Jack Vernon. Jack Vernon. And so we started working with him in the 70s.
(44:26):
So anyway, as the evolution goes along, we were selling the RE1,
2s, and 3s and 4s to universities to do pro bike research. research.
We made the hearing science lab with classic experiments in acoustics.
It had gates and filters.
(44:46):
You could simulate all kinds of things. You could make any kind of hearing aid
you want off of this big thing, but you could do other classic experiments.
We made HAL, the Hearing Aid Laboratory, which had a little acoustic chamber
and you could You could measure responses like a fry box.
We made an egg chair for testing, which was spun mold out of fiberglass,
(45:11):
which was an egg that was padded inside and had speakers.
It was a little bit of an interesting test environment for people.
And we did all kinds of... And you did some of the, we were talking about,
you did some of the first real ear stuff and got some of that rolling as well. That was early on.
(45:33):
Okay. And then we just kept evolving different things.
All I did was I kept working on trying to help find ways to help people hear better.
And I think that's why Starkey's still around today and successful is because
our focus has been on serving better.
We have to serve better today than we did yesterday.
(45:56):
And we have to serve better tomorrow than we served today. day.
We're always working on improving and climbing that mountain.
And I think if I can reach tomorrow, it's going to be beautiful.
And I think I'll just have to climb a little bit higher.
And we're getting there. We're really getting there.
I said in an article in 1980 or something, I think that if you said that what's
(46:21):
the future of the hearing aid industry or hearing aid business,
I would say there is no future.
A hearing aid in the future will involve more than just hearing people.
It will be a communication bridge across language barriers, distance barriers.
Hearing loss is just a barrier.
(46:42):
We need connectivity to clouds and other devices today to get all the information
we need. So the hearing aid has to do that.
In 1998, in a meeting that we called of engineers and people from around the world in Germany,
I described this further because at that time,
(47:04):
it wasn't possible in the 80s.
And you had, I mean, the present company included some real legends that you've
employed over the years,
Dave and Dale Thorstead and Jim Curran and Earl Harford and Dave Preeves and you can go on and on.
You know, people that are employed because they want to be here.
(47:27):
And as the keeper of the faith, I can't let the ownership go to a bunch of people.
Not because I want it or need it, but because they'll decide they've got to
sell out for money. And I know I won't sell out.
I'll keep reinvesting that in the future because that's where I think we should
(47:48):
go for the people we serve. We have to serve better.
And we can do so much more.
That's this is the it's a new generation of
hearing aids now so hearing aids have gotten smaller and smaller
and then we had digital hearing aids well at the beginning people said oh my
gosh digital is wonderful it's so much better well the real reason for digital
(48:11):
is so you can help people hear better and so we had to evolve our ability to
do that and it took a little little while to do that. And we are doing that today.
And we've made really good digital hearing aids.
They've gotten better and better and better. And the other companies have,
but all of us have made hearing aids.
(48:31):
And they, we made the first device now that's not a hearing aid.
I still I still don't know what to call it.
But it's beyond hearing aids.
And because it doesn't have the limitations that hearing aids have always had.
(48:52):
And so once those limitations are taken away, we're able to do a lot more.
But now that we can help people with normal hearing without having them feel
like they're wearing a device that they're hearing normally only better,
they have super hearing,
we can start adding features.
(49:15):
Hearing aid, ubiquitous. You can't be without one.
It's like an iPhone because it will be, you know, your monitoring system for
your health will report that.
It'll be a therapy system.
If you have, if you fall, it'll know before you fall, it'll know that you're
(49:37):
a candidate for falling, that you're going to be falling soon.
It's going to do so much to help people. And that's what I said years ago.
We're going to help people be healthier, live longer, and perform to task better.
That's what a hearing aid does. A hearing aid will help you perform to task
(49:59):
better because it helps you hear and respond to people.
It helps you perform to task better because you can tap your ear and connect
to the cloud and say, who hit the most home runs last year?
You can find out anything you want to know just like that.
The direction of the airport? port what's the weather in tokyo it
doesn't matter you can ask and it's all there and the
and the future with what you're talking about answers and
(50:23):
yeah the hearing aids will talk to you in the future they'll talk
back they'll recognize your voice and other voices
just we have all of this potential coming
at us it's coming very fast and i
realized that we couldn't do that with the the
people we had we'd been trying to make progress for years
with the people we had and i kept telling him you
(50:45):
know we're not we're not getting anywhere we're not getting anywhere and that's
when we uh sent out a search for otch and for a new head of engineering and
we wanted to go outside the industry and he was a head of artificial intelligence at intel.
So the guy was deep in experience and very sharp. He had made Siri and what
(51:09):
is it? All kinds of things.
Oh, yeah. Did the robotic shows for the Super Bowl and a drone.
So he's just a very. Visual. Brilliant, creative guy.
And so it ended up that I met him.
He came here and he really hadn't intended to go to work, but he'd written a paper about me.
I'd never heard of anyone in my life, and there has never been anyone since,
(51:31):
that had written a college paper about me.
And he'd chosen a public company, Microsoft, and a private company, Starkey.
And anyway, he wanted to meet me. And so I took a big board,
like you see the horse races at the track going up the board,
(51:51):
and the guy that gets to the top wins the teddy bear or something. thinking.
And so I said, this is what we're going to do.
These are all the things we're going to do to help people live longer,
perform the tasks better, be healthier.
And I said, some of them are going to be harder, more difficult than others.
And I said, so that's okay.
That's just one of the measurements we're going to do. We're going to do all these things.
(52:16):
And that's what this, that's what we're, that's our future.
That's what we're dedicated to doing is making a device that will help people
better than we've ever helped them before.
And that's why when I asked you in another interview what's the future of hearing
aids, you said, there is no future of hearing aids.
There's futures in these new types of devices. Right.
(52:39):
Of course, they are going to compensate for... That's where the future will be. Right. Mm-hmm.
So, because we focused on that, it's taken years, and we've got billions and
billions of bytes of sound information now that we're working.
Our AI is getting smarter and smarter and smarter.
(53:02):
So, this, Ashton estimates we're five years ahead of anyone else.
And he said within another couple years he'll be 10 years ahead because we're
doing unbelievable things.
In the meantime, we'll keep trying to go to the next level but Ajahn said,
(53:25):
I want to spend the rest of my life trying to help people and do something good
instead of making gadgets and things, so robots.
So he's signed up and for the right reasons.
And that's why our good people sign up because they buy into being part of that.
(53:47):
We're one team. No one can do it alone.
But together we can impact the world in a positive way and the world needs that
now. And it needs something else that we have at Starkey.
Our caring that we reflect to people. It's deeply embedded in this company.
Deeply embedded. And so that respect that each individual is worth the best
(54:09):
we can do for them is part of our culture and part of why we go to work.
It makes our life meaningful. It gives us purpose.
And the people who buy into that find that this is a good place to work.
I've also gotten the sense that there is a fair amount of levity or of your
(54:31):
own way of determining which way you're going to go sometimes.
I was talking to Earl Harford before he passed and asked him how he started
that student education program.
And apparently he said.
Think it was going to work necessarily, but you said, well, go ahead and give this a shot.
And it really impacted some influential audiologists down the line.
(54:54):
Well, I've always done that.
People will do more if they believe in something, if they have a passion for
it. And so I may test them.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. But if they can beat on the table and say,
I can make it work, I will make it work, If they have passion for it, then I'll support it.
(55:15):
Because if they didn't have that passion, it wouldn't get there.
It wouldn't be that significant. So Earl believed that, and so I support it.
Oh, go ahead. We were talking about legacy before.
What do you think you'll be remembered for, and what do you want to be remembered for?
(55:36):
Here's what I think, that I'm remembered by people who will never know me and
will never know me because the caring that I reflect gets reflected to the family and the community.
And that, it lights an inner light in people. It gives them hope.
(55:57):
If they're cared about and someone thinks they're worth it and they have value,
all of a a sudden someone else will think they're worth it.
So I think probably my biggest legacy,
may not be hearing aid inventions, although we've tried to push that,
(56:18):
make other people keep up with us and copy us.
Our policies were very important.
But probably the biggest legacy is is the caring the light we reflect and you
personally have fitted a lot of people all over the world.
(56:41):
But that's what I think will only thing that'll be that won't be remembered
but it will become part of life ongoing so I think as,
you reflect that light to someone of your, you've given your life,
you've given a part of your life, a piece of time to them and only them because
(57:03):
they were worth that piece of your life.
And when you give that to them.
The light inside them, and you can see that reflected back to you, which feels good.
You're bathed in the light. It makes you stronger, and you want to go on and do more.
But they reflect that light then on to others, and that keeps being reflected
forward and forward and forward.
(57:25):
And I think, you know, that really summarizes, I mean, the issue of a hearing
aid manufacturer thinking about the technology, but for as long as I've known
you, you know, you operate by the the mantra, you know, so the world may hear.
And I've been in all corners of the world seeing you provide the opportunity
for people to hear and connecting them, providing that light looking forward.
(57:51):
And I think it's because you haven't, you've always, you've not been paralyzed
by the dogma of the moment.
I mean, you brought up Leibarger from 1944 said a half gain fitting rule was
going to be the key to success in fitting hearing aids.
I've watched you develop Developed the WFA fitting model, which is based on
super threshold, on audibility.
It doesn't even need the audiogram. Yeah. And why is that?
(58:14):
Because you can scale it and you can get to so many more people in all corners
of the world that doesn't depend on plugging something into the wall or using
a piece of equipment, but it provides people with the opportunity and the chance to hear.
You can quickly arrive at the sweet spot for their hearing.
Right. It's scalable. available it's something we can do to bring hearing to
(58:35):
people all around the world and it's not possible otherwise.
There's no other way that you could have built it that way through audiometers,
through a half-game fitting rule.
All you need is your hands. There's too many millions of people and it takes too long.
There's not that much equipment. For me, it's that caring.
And it's a solution that provides us a scalable and sustainable approach by
(58:59):
involving the community and the people that are not there when you're able to
go over and teach them and be there and fit them.
But in that way it takes a
big hairy audacious goal to
be able to say you know brashly so the world i'm
going to try to do and i i think you take that statement literally because i've
(59:20):
seen you get off a bus and fit someone that you saw struggling with hearing
yeah and more than one occasion and if they care that's all i know how to do
so i i have to give what i can i can't solve all the problems.
There are many problems. There always have been, but I can do one thing that I know how to do.
(59:43):
And so I must do that one thing.
Otherwise, who am I and what am I good for?
So it's very simple to me. So that's why I think people say,
oh, I was a great salesman or I was this, that, or something else,
or Bill Austin was some sort of a genius.
(01:00:03):
I'm not a a genius. I'm not a great salesman. I've hired people that are smarter
than I am. They're all around here.
But what I think has kept Starkey going when a lot of companies have gone out of business is that.
Had one goal and it wasn't to make money. It was to help people.
(01:00:24):
The people want to be helped. They don't want to be outsmarted.
They don't want to be duped out of their money, but they're willing to pay a
good, humble servant that helps them.
And that's a reward you've earned. So I've never wanted any money I could make
from winning the lottery or Vegas or anywhere else.
I want money that's really given to me because I've served well.
(01:00:47):
That's good money. That money has soul. I can do something with that.
So it's not bad to have competition.
I knew we could do it better. And the reason I knew we could do it better is
because I was willing to work harder than anyone else.
I was willing to stay there really late at night or all night.
(01:01:09):
I used to work all night a couple days a week because I'd be going too fast
otherwise. I had to slow myself down.
You worked late into the night in the lab. Oh, yeah.
I did that on into my 40s and 50s and 60s. Really, I think anyone can be successful in business.
(01:01:30):
They just have to want to be a good servant. That's the only reason a business
exists is so it can serve.
So the only thing you need to do is try to serve better.
And if you do that, you're in demand.
In a lot of the early years, Starkey wasn't always known as a technology company like it is today.
(01:01:52):
You oftentimes anticipated, it seemed like you anticipated the needs of dispensing
professionals before even they might have been able to articulate.
Disagree. No, I don't disagree. Now that we have a real way to progress,
that we see a path clear for the future to progress on, we will move forward.
(01:02:15):
And artificial intelligence, machine learning is going to be a big deal, a really big deal.
And you've proven, I mean, AI is a machine capable of doing,
you know, you look at some of the visual things that it can do to pick out tumors
tumors in the body with much greater precision than humans can to be able to,
(01:02:36):
you know, even some of the navigation,
better driving, better vaccines, all of that.
It's going to do huge things.
The bridge that it hasn't crossed yet. And imagine, you know,
it's the ultimate challenge is it's currently not capable of displaying empathy the way the human can.
As you mentioned, you know, that caring element of trying to understand,
(01:03:00):
focus and be present with every patient that you're with.
Your focus is on that patient.
And I think as long as clinicians remember that their role more than anything
else is you don't know your patient until you know your patient and you have
to invest yourself in them in order to give them that opportunity.
So far, AI hasn't shown a propensity to be able to do that, that will commoditize
(01:03:24):
or eliminate in our role for those who are willing to care enough.
You've told me before that there aren't any supermen. There are certain people
who are really good at one or two things, but then you build a team around them
and they become supermen. Well.
And women. They're supermen and women because we prop each other up.
(01:03:46):
We all have our flat spots, but that's kind of hidden.
And, you know, if you bring that together, other.
Like bringing together a lot of facets on a diamond. The light they reflect
as you have more facets is even more brilliant.
So we bring these facets, different people together with different talents,
(01:04:07):
and the flaws are hidden inside.
All that you see outside is the light.
That's a good metaphor. I like it. You've provided a lot of great quotes over
the years that I've heard you say, but one of my favorite is when now,
which is almost customary when you speak to our customers or our employees,
(01:04:27):
people inevitably stand up and applaud you.
And when you come up to the front of the room, you say, I'm not a big deal.
Yeah, I usually say, I don't amount to much, but don't feel bad for me because you don't either.
But together. Together we can change the world.
(01:04:49):
And I think that's a good way to end this because I think that's your legacy,
Bill, is it really is that none of us alone, we can't do much,
but together, we can and we are changing the world.
That was the big vision in late February 1961 when I saw the limitations of
(01:05:12):
myself and faced them for the first time.
I never thought I had any limitations. I was going to be a great healer.
And then I saw I could only do this much.
But if I can get other people that agree with me, then we can impact the world.
That's your legacy to me. That's it.
So thank you for that and for this discussion. And Carl, thanks for leading this discussion.
(01:05:37):
Well, thank you so much, Bill. Thanks for sharing your philosophy and knowledge. Thanks, Carl.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I don't know anything.
What can I say? What I've said before. I just like to go to work.
Music.
Welcome to a very special issue of Starkey Soundbites.
I'm Dave Fabry, Starkey's Chief Hearing Health Officer, and with me today,
this is a topic and a podcast that I've really been looking forward to for a long time.
Two, I don't think it's hyperbole to say, two industry legends who've been witnessed
(00:21):
to and instrumental in the development of the hearing aid industry,
continuing to impact it and report on it and chronicle it, as we've been discussing
here prior to turning on the camera today. First, Mr.
Bill Austin, Starkey's founder and chair, and as well, Carl Strum,
who is currently the editor-in-chief of Hearing Tracker, and also someone that
(00:47):
I've known both of you for,
let's just say a few decades. A little while. few, a little while.
And, you know, it's really a privilege to sit with both of you today and have
a conversation a little bit about the way that you both have innovated in this
industry from different ends of the spectrum and reported on it and continue
to impact the industry in many ways today.
(01:10):
And Bill, you can shrug all you want, but your humility is, in my mind,
you know, it's, you've made a tremendous, tremendous impact on this industry.
And we're the young pups here.
I've got 30 years, you've got 40 years, and Bill has 62 years.
I mean, I've written articles before and said that, you know,
(01:34):
Bill, more than anybody I know,
has had kind of a front row seat to the hearing industry for 62 years.
Through the history of hearing aids. Yes.
There's various new inventions, great new inventions.
And if you look back in the archives, you find that there's those things that were thought of before.
(02:01):
And not only that, fairly well stated before as far as explaining to patients
how hearing aids work and what they can expect and what they can do.
So, I think that hearing aid history, if you block it into pre-electric hearing
aids, which is the acoustic devices,
(02:24):
and those acoustic devices were designed to fit in canes, walking sticks, fans.
There was bone conduction fans and air conduction fans and various bells,
tubes, horns, and those devices certainly helped people for a long time.
(02:44):
In fact, there was such a prolifer of those devices that in the late 80s and early 90s,
there were big catalogs showing all manner of them that you could look for the
device you thought you would like to try to get some help from.
A lot of otosclerosis then, the help that was supplied was limited.
(03:09):
They didn't have the power to really help bad hearing losses.
But what happened is they were better than nothing. It gave you a little boost.
And so people were appreciative of that. They got a few more cues and they were able to hear.
Well, and it's sort of interesting you bring up the pre-electronic era
because I think the way I'd like to channel the
(03:32):
discussion is really on the technology and on the
process because you've been highly influential in
the process of dispensing and how hearing aids are sold in the market and you've
been so over decades but in that pre-electronic era I mean many people who are
new to the profession may you know have been interested in the past few years
(03:54):
that there were bone conduction hearing aids that would actually actually vibrate your teeth.
People were biting on, in your museum. That was a common process used in the
late 1800s. Right, right. They would create a hearing fan that was Bakelite.
It was a thin plastic, and the person would, you know, have a fan.
(04:18):
And on the back of the fan, there was a network of strings that went out to
the edges, which you could apply tension to the fan and get just the right tension
for the right vibration from the sound.
So when someone was speaking, like in church, a minister,
the wearer could discreetly put the edge of the fan between their teeth,
(04:44):
bite it, pull on the strings,
and direct the fan towards the, kind of direct it discreetly towards the sound
source and help their hearing.
So, and there were other, you know.
All kinds of efforts that were made. And the fan one was really a multi-purpose,
(05:05):
multi-function device in the sense that if it got a little hot in the place
of worship, you could use it as a fan.
Yeah, that's true. They didn't have air conditioning then.
The one fan I showed you, Carl, was actually given me by the patient who used it.
And I fit her with a hearing aid. She'd lived that long.
And it was, you know, many years ago. But that's what I mean about if you're
(05:30):
old enough, then you remember the original guys. Right, right.
So I knew people who used those, who used carbon electric hearing aids and vacuum tube aids.
We still service vacuum tube aids when we first started all make repair. Okay.
And you probably still saw some of the A and B battery types of aids. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
(05:52):
And when you came in? You would have to, you would show the ladies how they
could harness those things up and not have anyone see them.
So cosmetics have always been a part of the package. They'd wear the battery
packs often on the hip. Right.
Where with the bigger skirts of the day, that wasn't noticed.
(06:14):
Right. So those were the early days of powered devices, but they used carbon.
Carbon batteries were the first powered, weren't they?
The microphone was carbon. Okay. The battery was not carbon.
Battery. What was the battery composition?
The battery composition was, it wasn't mercury.
Oh, was it? It was alkaline. Alkaline. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Okay.
(06:38):
So, yeah, they had that battery as a source of power to the microphone.
Okay. The microphones were big. Enormous, yeah. So you'd wear them outside on your chest.
Yeah. Looked like you had a big metal. Right.
And on the back, you could adjust the volume. Okay.
And you got a little better boost than you could get out of the fans of the acoustic things.
(07:04):
And everybody in my generation saw the church microphones that you picked up
from the pins. Yeah, and you could plug them in. Plug it in with a handle to your ear.
Yeah, like an old telephone. That's the first thing that I remember in the early
60s, mid-60s, about hearing aids.
(07:25):
Absolutely, yeah. And then we
saw also in the museum some of the early hearing aids from the early 50s.
Hearing aids were among the very first medical devices, certainly,
to use integrated circuits and transistors.
Transistors first. Integrated circuits didn't come until about the early 50s. early 60s.
(07:48):
Transistors came in the early 50s, and vacuum tube aids came in the early 20s. Right.
That's, so there was, the World War II was in there, and there was a big.
Focus on supplying the war effort and
so hearing aid kind of
stayed at its point that
(08:11):
it was in in the 30s you know evolving slightly but still vacuum tubes and there
were a lot of people tried to make them smaller you said that sonotone was like
one of the one of the original kind of families of it and others branched off
of it but there were a lot of hearing aid comp like you you You showed us a Zenith hearing aid.
Yeah. So there were a lot of different companies.
(08:33):
There were a lot of different companies. In the U.S. and Europe,
there were so many different people trying to make hearing aid, hearing devices.
Most of them didn't do too much volume.
And so you see a rare model now and then. A company that went away was Jim Earphone,
(08:57):
G-E-M, and they made quite a few hearing aids, but they vanished from the scene.
Acousticon, the first electronic hearing aid company, and Sonotone,
which started in about 1912, were the two big, big hearing aid companies that
spawned off everything underneath them. Now, E.A.
(09:20):
Myers, I think he started on his own with Radio Air in Pittsburgh.
He was separated from the other guys.
And that came out of the idea of a radio where you'd use a vacuum tube radio
after they were first made and you could turn up the volume.
So his irrigates were table models like radios, the first ones.
(09:42):
And in the meantime, other people were making smaller vacuum tube aids. And E.A.
Myers, you pointed out that E.A.
Myers, his, his, his daughter had married Sam Leibarger.
Yeah, in fact.
I think that might have been a granddaughter. Okay. Because E.A.
(10:05):
Myers was an older guy, and the company was E.A. Myers and Sons.
Okay. So when he started, he was there a couple years, and then the torch was
passed to the Sons, and then I think one of the Sons' daughters married Sam Leibarger.
And Sam Leibarger was oftentimes thought of as kind of the grandfather of acoustical
(10:27):
standards, and he served on a lot of ANSI committees, They did a lot of groundwork
for modern hearing aids.
They made bone oscillators that were used not only for hearing aids,
but for testing hearing, for bone conduction tests.
And a lot of the audiometers were using radio ear oscillators.
(10:49):
And not to, but to stick with Sam Leibarger for a moment, he had the Leibarger half gain rule.
You've seen all of these different strategies for fitting hearing aids at the
same time from that era all the way up to now.
And I'm sure you have your own way of secret recipe, as you will,
(11:13):
for fitting hearing aids. Look, it's not secret at all.
I have ideas. I think about things a lot. But people are looking for the easy way.
My ways always require a lot of effort.
Hearing is subjective.
(11:35):
Hearing is individual. Hearing is unique to the human being.
So, if I want to do a good job, when a patient is in front of me,
I'm not thinking about golfing or fishing.
I'm not thinking about anything else except that one person.
It's all that's on my mind. I'm gathering every bit of information I can get
(12:01):
from them, because little tiny things give you cues.
I listen to what they say. I ask questions.
And we do some basic measurements. We look at audiograms, which gives us a general idea.
But the audiogram is not a very good predictor because I can have a patient
(12:23):
with a very poor audiogram, very bad audiogram and good discram.
I can have a patient with a much better audiogram and much better discram.
I can have a patient with a poor audiogram that doesn't need nearly as much
power as most people do, or as the real ear formula would say, you need it.
So it's all wildly variant.
(12:45):
So if you want to do a really good job, you just have to listen to the patient.
They used to say, well, the early hearing aids, those were just amplifying devices.
The early hearing aids had a whole series of different receivers for different frequencies.
There were ways that we managed sound,
(13:06):
but fundamentally, if you give a person a clean sound that's distortion-free,
and you have about a 6 dB per octave rise slope on it, and you turn it up and
you vent it properly, you're there.
And that's about as good as you're going to get. When you start trying to jerk
(13:28):
the frequency response around according to the audiogram with very steep skirts,
you cause harmonic distortion.
The harmonics are no longer in line with the fundamentals. It's screwing everything up.
But people who only think audiograms try to follow that around.
(13:49):
You can't follow that around.
That's not right. And the other thing you've got to realize,
it's the fundamental peak of receivers.
That's the output transducer. That's the sound that's going into your ear.
It doesn't matter what the circuit's doing. That peak is pretty much,
it's a main factor, so you should know where it is.
(14:12):
And it usually works to your advantage with most hearing losses.
If you try to reverse-slope amplify, you get a hearing aid that sounds just awful.
That doesn't work. So even though the sound is down in the lows and it's rising,
you still have to fit that with a 6 dB per octave rise, or it won't sound good.
(14:35):
And you'll lose low-energy high-frequency cues in upward-spread of basket.
It just doesn't work. And it creates a very bad sound.
Hearing aids that sound really mellow to a person with normal hearing that don't
sound like hearing aids work really good for hearing impaired people. So first we had...
(15:00):
Carbon mics, then vacuum tubes, then transistors.
And it got more powerful with vacuum tubes and it got more powerful in tubes,
but the sound didn't get better. Right.
It just changed it and it allowed you to address a more severe hearing loss.
(15:21):
Then you talked about the early transistor aids and they were big and cumbersome. Yeah.
Eyeglass hearing aids were built into both temples in the very beginning and thick, big things.
And generally only amplified unilaterally too, right? Right.
Siemens patented the in-the-ear aid in 1928. They couldn't make one.
(15:44):
They didn't make one. It was never made.
They probably didn't make any kind of an in-the-ear aid until long after we did.
But that didn't matter. I mean, it was an idea. idea. People used to try to patent ideas.
They still do. I never tried to patent ideas. I think ideas are a dime a dozen.
(16:05):
Accomplishing something is another subject.
The first in-the-air aid was made in this country by a guy in Walnut Creek,
California named Leslie Leal.
And Leslie Sleel found a florist in 1957 that had a gigantic ear.
It was absolutely huge.
(16:28):
So he took a plaster cast of the ear plaster pairs, which we use in those days
and cast by the lost metal process.
Like you would make a jewelry, a hollow shell that would fit this guy's ear.
He nickel plated it, then gold plated
it with a thin layer of gold so now he's
(16:51):
had it as a shell and he could take the the
smallest parts at that time which were
still too big to really make
in the ear hearing aids for anyone but the
size that dahlberg used on his first miracle ear aid that would fit inside this
thing because the guy's ear was so big and he made that but couldn't make any
(17:15):
more then you know because nobody had ears that big then a couple years later
the parts were getting smaller so by 19.
60, 61, they were trying to introduce that as a possible solution.
I said at the time, it's not a good solution because you can't modify it because
(17:37):
it's cast metal. You can't grind through the thin metal.
And you were doing ear molds at the time. And I was doing ear molds.
So I said, oh, I'll just hollow out the ear molds and I can make them.
So it wasn't my idea. And by the way, the first directional.
Which I said was made by Martin Wachowski at our Wilco factory,
(18:01):
that wasn't really his idea.
That idea came from the Bosch company.
You know, fuel injections. Well, at one time they made hearing aids,
but they were a creative German company like many German companies were.
And before World War II, a guy at Bosch wrote a patent for a directional microphone.
(18:24):
And then it just went into the wayside and nobody ever thought about it again
until Witkowski started reading the patent and tried to make one by hand and
did successfully in the first directional microphones.
Microphones, even the ones that were sold to Mako or the early Mako directional
(18:45):
behind the ear hearing aids were made by hand by Wilco.
But then we couldn't do them at scale.
So that went to Knowles Electronics to make.
And how did you...
Okay, so you had all of this background with your Uncle Fred,
Fred, starting with your Uncle Fred and then buying the original Starkey,
(19:08):
explain how you evolved into being such a powerhouse for in-the-ear hearing aids.
And, you know, one of your, I don't know, one of your many legacies,
I think, is really kind of getting the whole ITE.
Hearing aid thing rolling in the United States? Well, there were reasons that I did it.
(19:33):
People, psychologically, if you have a hearing loss, the ears,
the hearing aid should go in your ear. That's empty space.
You know, you don't put your eyeglasses on the back of your head to seeing your eyes in front.
So it makes sense to the patient.
Secondly, if it's custom formed to the ear, you know, it'll ride with them.
(19:58):
If they're playing tennis or moving around, they could do anything.
And thirdly, if you eliminate the tubing resonance from running through the
tube, you can shift your energy peak a little higher, which is good because
most losses are higher frequency in nature. You need more energy out there.
And you could get subtle, high-frequency cues off of the pinna, from pinna effect.
(20:25):
So there's a reason why I thought it was better. The reason why it was worse
for all the other hearing aid companies is they were harder to make.
But remember I said I never minded working hard.
All my ideas required hard work. They require skill and hard work.
(20:45):
So when we send a person to open a new production around the world, which we were opening,
we would not send an ear mold tech with less than five years experience of making
shells for our hearing aids to open, be there for the opening.
Because if they hadn't made literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
(21:09):
them, they couldn't get the nuances.
So anyway, there was a reason why I wanted to make them.
But the reason why Starkey is successful goes back to the reason that we're
in business in the first place.
And that's why we've lasted. I attribute it.
I don't attribute it to being smart businessman, clever salesman,
(21:33):
la-di-da, anything else than this.
I came to Minnesota because I wanted to be a missionary doctor. doctor.
I intended to enroll in the University of Minnesota Medical School.
I took a job making earpieces to make enough money to pay for my tuition.
I had never had a quarter's tuition paid for me in my life. No books paid for me.
(21:59):
There I was going to school and an old man with a a bad, bad hearing loss came
in and they weren't able to help him.
They called me upstairs and I went to work on the guy.
I made him a perfect fitting earpieces that wouldn't leak. He's having a lot
of feedback trouble before.
(22:20):
And when he could hear, I saw in his face, I saw in his face what it meant to him to hear.
I was just stunned because I never thought hearing was very important before that.
I thought I was going to be a doctor and save lives.
I was going to do important important work, what is.
Two-bit hearing aid business. And when I saw what it meant to the patient,
(22:40):
then I knew it was important.
And so, I rode home on the city bus.
In the cantilever of the bus, there was a quote, the true path to humility is
not to stoop till you're lower than yourself, but rather to stand at your true
height against some greater nature that will show the real smallness of your
greatest his greatness.
(23:02):
I saw that quote. I said, that's how I feel. I wanted to be challenged.
So I got home and I sat on the upstairs single bed cot that I had to sleep on where I was staying.
And I started talking to myself, just like I'm talking to you guys.
And I said, Bill, the reason you want to be a doctor is so you can help people.
(23:24):
If you do this work, work, you'll be able to help people and you won't kill anyone.
And so the next thing I said was, how many people as a doctor can you help a day?
20, 25, night will fall. You'll get up the next day, another 20,
25, and you'll spend your life and you'll help a village.
(23:46):
And I said, Bill, you're not likely to impact the world.
I decided right at that moment that I could be challenged by helping more people
through the hands of many.
I knew that I couldn't do much with my two hands,
but I knew that if I could find other people that accepted the values that I
(24:13):
thought were important,
if they respected those values and accepted them as their own,
that we could build leverage and we would stand on those values and the leverage bridge.
Would be the hands of many that would pull on the leverage that we had to move
the world. That's what I felt.
(24:33):
And so I said, if you do this work, you can impact the world.
I had a little rental house that I bought from scrapping cars.
That's why I have those old cars over there today. I feel so bad about,
you know, I slayed a lot of them.
Anyway, I, during the Korean War, metal was, had a good price and I took them down.
(24:56):
I bought this little rental house because I had more money than I needed to buy my first car.
I bought my first car when I was not even quite 15, just about 15.
I knew as soon as I was 15, I could get a learner's permit.
I had a kid lined up down the road that was 16 and had a driver's license.
And if he could ride with me, then I could drive.
(25:19):
So I bought my car. I had enough money left. I bought this little rental house.
I sold that house for $3,000.
I had to make a profit before I ran out of money.
People tell you, you got to have financing for three years. You got a lot.
If you start a business, I had enough financing for three months.
(25:41):
If I couldn't make it work within three months, I was out of business.
And I didn't know anybody that would give me money or loan me money.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't ask anyone. I wouldn't ask my father for money for sure.
And I wouldn't ask anyone else.
Because how why are they going to risk money in a crazy crazy kid 19 19 so anyway
(26:03):
yes i'm i've got i've got this idea and it was very slow for a long time i had
this to sell hearing aids.
To pay the bill, and worked on developing the in-the-ear hearing aid.
I had enough, far enough along that I started, opened a little factory.
(26:26):
And hired a guy from the Tone Master hearing aid company in Peoria,
Illinois, to be the production manager.
And was he the gentleman you said made the best hearing, or made the best ear molds that you ever saw?
Oh, my heavens, no, that was Paul Jensen. Paul Jensen.
So, I made my own ear molds, and Paul made better-hearing ear molds than I'd
(26:51):
ever been able to make because he developed a process of casting the shells hollow.
I was taking a solid block and grinding them out.
It was laborious, and it left the inside rough and varying thicknesses of shell.
You know you'd have to leave it thick
enough so you couldn't see through it but thin enough
(27:13):
that you could get all your parts and it was a little
more work a lot more work i took the parts over to this is early 1964 over to
golden tone and golden tone was owned by a guy that owned a tv store store named Johnston,
(27:36):
and he'd acquired the Golden Tone Hearing Aid Company,
which had been existent. He sold Zenith TVs.
And anyway, Ray Clark, a World War II veteran that flew for England in World War II, he.
Had invented a cattle prod. Johnston said, I'll trade you the hearing aid company for the cattle prod.
(27:59):
Well, the cattle prod never went anywhere.
And the hearing aid company didn't either. They were sitting in the building
owned by Dan Lang and Henry Kuzmin.
And they, he hadn't paid the rent in over six months to Dan Lang,
Dan owned the building. And they didn't know what they were gonna do.
And I came in and I said, I've got these components components,
(28:21):
and this is, I want to make these hearing aids.
And Ray Clark said, well, we can't do that.
But he showed me these old golden tone eyeglass aids on other aids.
I said, no, I'm not interested. This is what I want.
And I started to leave. It was by the front door. And a voice came from the
back room and said, don't leave.
(28:42):
I think we can do that. And so it was Dan Lang. I went went back there.
And so he started making hearing aids for me.
And I was supposed to get $15 a hearing aid override on any that Golden Tone
sold, took them in my car to the first IHS convention they ever went to, paid the expenses,
(29:04):
signed up some people to buy the aids, Milt Tavell in,
Indianapolis, Maury Perlman in Louisville, Kentucky, Lee Schaefer in Rochester, New York.
They were all good customers that I brought on board.
And, but they never could pay me because they never had a lot enough money.
(29:25):
So I went on my way determining that wasn't going to work and just kept evolving
and making my own hearing aids.
And Bill, that was the era of single line dispensing too, right?
Yeah, pretty much single line.
You had a brand and that was it. You stuck to it.
(29:46):
So how did you get your feet in the door of those businesses and get Starkey
kicked out? Well, at that time, I couldn't get decent service.
So I didn't like the way it was being done.
And so I started an all-make-service business.
(30:07):
And I started policies that were just different than anyone else.
They were all parts of labor at that time. And you just pay to have your hearing aid repaired.
And they'd charge you for a new receiver, this or that, something else.
(30:27):
You'd wear it two days and maybe drop it on the floor, the microphone.
They'd say, well, it's the microphone this time. They'd charge you again.
There was no, the only warranty was on the part they replaced,
and it was always a different part.
I didn't like the whole system. It was set up for being dishonest and cheating the patients.
(30:48):
So I said, we're going to charge a flat charge. No matter what's wrong, we'll take care of it.
We'll service any kind of hearing aid made, including even old vacuum tube aids.
We serviced everything.
And we said, and we made them look like new, and we sent them back.
And I said, you know, for the eyeglass aids, a lot of the, some of the dealers
(31:13):
were afraid to heat and bend them because you could damage- The electrical components?
Yeah, you could damage it.
You had to do it just right. I knew how to do it, but they didn't know how to
do it, a lot of them. And I said, go ahead.
Heat them and bend them. If you break them, we'll take care of it. No charge.
(31:34):
We'll re-case them because they need to fit decently.
I wanted patients to be happy with hearing aids because I thought anyone saying
something bad about our business not only reflected on the person that sold
it in the company, but it reflected on the entire industry.
And it kept And it kept people from coming forward that needed help and should get help.
(31:57):
So our policies were designed to help the dispenser help the patient,
to please the patient, and back them up.
Well, that became a popular concept.
Within two years, we were the world's largest service place for all makes of hearing aids.
(32:19):
And so I kept working on the end-year aides but that gave me entree to the dealers
across the country even if they sold something else they've sent service to
us right and once they knew me,
they began to decide they could trust me sure and I did the best I could for
(32:40):
them every time And was the leap to building hearing aids and selling them to
these people, was that a big risk for you?
No, it wasn't a big risk. It was more of an illusion. What I said,
I said to people, I would have a hearing aid that we'd finished after the pickup
was gone in front of our building in St. Louis Park.
(33:03):
Yes. And that last mail pickup had gone downtown. The last pickup was like 5.30 or something.
Sure. It were six. If you didn't get it done by then, it didn't go to the next day.
And so I'd take one hearing aid, drive it downtown in my car.
Walk up on the back loading dock at the main Minneapolis post office,
(33:26):
talk to the people there and ask them which mail, which bin was going out next to be sorted.
And I would get, be sure it was in the right bin.
It went out because I said, the hearing aid is important to the patient.
It might be a graduation, a wedding anniversary, who knows what it might be,
(33:48):
but any day without without hearing, is not a good day. So I said, they need it back.
And people would tell me when I'm getting in my car, going downtown,
the people that work for me said, that's stupid because it costs more for the
gas to drive back and forth, even though gas was cheap then.
Then we'd make in profit on that transaction.
(34:11):
But I didn't mind losing money occasionally to keep our reputation really good.
Our reputation had to be as good as it could possibly be.
And I said, our reputation has to be good because it's our most valuable asset.
And we're going to do something besides just repairs.
We're going to, I knew we were going to sell them hearing aids when I was satisfied
(34:36):
that we had a good product.
I still wasn't satisfied. I couldn't make.
To quit venting for the mild losses. Vents at those days in the air haze,
we'd put tubes through and it didn't do it.
Finally, I had a guy, Austin Reynolds in Rochester, Minnesota.
He came back and forth. This is already in 72 when I'm getting at the end of
(34:59):
my design. I'm making them for other people.
And in 72, during the summer, he was saying, no, I'm still occluded.
I'm still occluded. It went back and forth. finally i
can't we cast through a great big cast
through vent like we use today yeah and i thought surely we would have too much
(35:20):
feedback but we didn't and the guy was happy there it was it was austin riddles
so then i knew how to vent it wasn't the tubes it was those cast in vents that
that we've used ever since.
And I'd gotten Harold Paul Jensen.
He was making all the molds for Starkey. Harold Starkey had a little ear mold
(35:45):
company, and that's how he got the name.
And I wanted his shells. I knew I needed the shells.
So August of 1970, I bought that little ear mold company for $13,000.
It wasn't worth 13 cents, but it was
incorporated and my business wasn't it was much bigger
(36:06):
what i really was buying was paul jensen
and i could have i could have hired paul jensen but
i didn't want to i couldn't do that to harold he
was a nice little guy that would put him out of business so i bought his he
went he retired to black duck minnesota with his wife who was a registered nurse
to run a nursing home paul came to work for me we had beautiful shells then
(36:28):
i had to work on the the performance.
So now I could fit the mild losses, but how could I fit the most profound losses?
Well, Westinghouse in Canada was making an integrated circuit at that time,
which was the most powerful thing I could find.
When we put that integrated circuit into the hearing aid for our push-pull,
(36:52):
really bad losses, instead of the transistor circuit that we were making.
And we We made those transistors, we assembled the circuits,
you know, with the capacitors and resistors, all of these peripheral parts that you have to have.
But what we did was we beta checked our components to make sure they matched.
(37:14):
And other companies would get components that were graded. You get a transistor
that's this grade, another transistor that's this grade, another transistor is that grade.
And the factories would take from each grade to make a hearing aid.
The hearing aid would vary all over the place.
By beta matching the hearing aids, I was able to get a little more dynamic range,
(37:35):
the components, and make a better sounding device.
So we got to.
Better sounding device than most of the hearing aids that were being sold. We had nice shells.
We had everything. And then we got the push-pull circuit and I was able to fit
the worst hearing losses, really bad hearing losses.
(37:58):
I could fit everything with an in-ear aid. So I said, we're ready.
January 1st, 1973, I sent out a letter.
There was no advertising, no flyers, no brochures. I sent it out with the statement,
the December statement, came January 1st. I'd save on postage.
I would only— In that January letter, was that when you said,
(38:21):
here's the hearing aid worthy of your consideration? Yes. I said,
we do something other than make earmolds and service hearing aids.
We make an in-the-ear hearing aid worthy of your consideration.
That was the words. I said, and then I went on to say the provision of better
hearing is unpredictable at best.
(38:43):
No one knows how someone else hears except the patient. So our hearing aids will be on 90-day trial.
That was considered heresy. Instead, the industry changed.
We said the hearing aids have to be provided on trial.
And I felt that because the industry couldn't afford a bad reputation from somebody. money.
(39:06):
I said, they don't buy a piece of plastic. They buy better hearing.
And that's unpredictable at best. So it would be unconscionable for us to take
their money for something that they thought they were buying that they didn't get. So I said that.
And then I went on, the last thing I said was furthermore, we address the hearing
(39:26):
loss, not the pocketbook.
So if you have a patient who can't afford our hearing aid.
Just write Starkey Fund on the order, and we'll provide the same hearing aid
for your poorest patient as we do, the wealthiest at no charge.
And it was a trust thing only.
They didn't have to send in a financial statement.
(39:47):
And our loss and damage coverage, you didn't need to send in a police report.
It was all based on trust, which some of the companies tried to institute.
And most of our people, were very trustworthy.
And so those were our policies from the beginning. And they were policies that
were appreciated by the dispensers.
(40:10):
Our hearing aids worked really good.
And our problem was keeping up.
We didn't have a problem with advertising or trying to get, our problem was
keeping up with the orders because it just kept spreading.
And it was really, yeah, you, you by then had perfected custom,
(40:30):
you know, you had begun this trail of innovating in that space and really delivering.
They were a nice looking aid.
The edges had to be rounded, edges, the battery doors had to be rounded.
There was no square edges on it. So it would blend with the air.
And I said, you know, we're not making it invisible. It's not obtrusive.
When you look at someone, you should look at their eyes, not what the heck of
(40:52):
that on their ear. Your eye shouldn't be drawn to the ear.
Not that it's not there, but it shouldn't be drawn there.
And so those were our guidelines of what we did.
Then with the 90-day trial, with a hearing aid that, like you said,
the advertising was to build a hearing aid worthy of your consideration.
(41:13):
You already had the all-make repair.
So you were You were servicing products that other single line manufacturers
were, you know, and you were, you were providing them with an opportunity then.
And for the next decade from early seventies until 83, you continue to innovate
in making better performing, smaller custom devices.
(41:35):
I did. And then 83, you know, the other thing I think that everyone remembers
in 1983, President Reagan.
And, you know, you fit him with a custom device when BTEs were the norm, right?
Because this is now an area that I was in in the early 80s, 70 to 80% of devices
(41:56):
were behind the ear, but they were also fitted on one ear.
And I think that's something that people don't talk about a lot,
that you not only fit then-President Reagan with a custom hearing aid, you fit him in both ears.
Well, I'd been fitting people with both ears since the 60s when I started.
I didn't fit one ear. But you were zigging when other people were zagging.
(42:20):
People were concentrating on one ear and you were fitting. What led you to that?
Revelation. People hear better with both ears. That's all.
And there was a lot of, you know, like Ernie Zelnick and guys like that were
starting to accumulate some good evidence for that at the time.
So, in the 1970s, as I said early in the 70s, 1970, 70, 71, we did the real
(42:49):
ear microphone with Dick Martin.
Then we started and making devices that would help people with niche problems
that you couldn't make money on because there wasn't enough volume,
like headband bone conductions for people with atresia ears,
power stethoscopes for hearing impaired doctors.
(43:10):
Not a lot of doctors wanted to admit to hearing loss.
They thought it made them look incompetent. So I built it into the stethoscope
tubing and and made it black like the rest of the assembly.
And hopefully, you know, the patient would know any difference.
Not only that, the doctor could leave it in his ear, and it had a hearing aid
function on, so he could hear and then switch it into the stealth mode.
(43:36):
Right. And you did a lot of that. I did all that creative stuff. With your engineers.
All of the books, the counseling books, I said hearing aid is more than the
device itself. It involves a family and we need oral rehabilitation.
I have articles in Hearing Instruments of you going back to the late 1960s anyway.
(44:01):
There's probably some before that.
So I worked on that stuff. stuff.
We made the first tinnitus masquerades and tinnitus masquers for a guy in Portland,
Oregon, that was researching tinnitus. Vernon, yeah.
Jack Vernon. Jack Vernon. And so we started working with him in the 70s.
(44:26):
So anyway, as the evolution goes along, we were selling the RE1,
2s, and 3s and 4s to universities to do pro bike research. research.
We made the hearing science lab with classic experiments in acoustics.
It had gates and filters.
(44:46):
You could simulate all kinds of things. You could make any kind of hearing aid
you want off of this big thing, but you could do other classic experiments.
We made HAL, the Hearing Aid Laboratory, which had a little acoustic chamber
and you could You could measure responses like a fry box.
We made an egg chair for testing, which was spun mold out of fiberglass,
(45:11):
which was an egg that was padded inside and had speakers.
It was a little bit of an interesting test environment for people.
And we did all kinds of... And you did some of the, we were talking about,
you did some of the first real ear stuff and got some of that rolling as well. That was early on.
(45:33):
Okay. And then we just kept evolving different things.
All I did was I kept working on trying to help find ways to help people hear better.
And I think that's why Starkey's still around today and successful is because
our focus has been on serving better.
We have to serve better today than we did yesterday.
(45:56):
And we have to serve better tomorrow than we served today. day.
We're always working on improving and climbing that mountain.
And I think if I can reach tomorrow, it's going to be beautiful.
And I think I'll just have to climb a little bit higher.
And we're getting there. We're really getting there.
I said in an article in 1980 or something, I think that if you said that what's
(46:21):
the future of the hearing aid industry or hearing aid business,
I would say there is no future.
A hearing aid in the future will involve more than just hearing people.
It will be a communication bridge across language barriers, distance barriers.
Hearing loss is just a barrier.
(46:42):
We need connectivity to clouds and other devices today to get all the information
we need. So the hearing aid has to do that.
In 1998, in a meeting that we called of engineers and people from around the world in Germany,
I described this further because at that time,
(47:04):
it wasn't possible in the 80s.
And you had, I mean, the present company included some real legends that you've
employed over the years,
Dave and Dale Thorstead and Jim Curran and Earl Harford and Dave Preeves and you can go on and on.
You know, people that are employed because they want to be here.
(47:27):
And as the keeper of the faith, I can't let the ownership go to a bunch of people.
Not because I want it or need it, but because they'll decide they've got to
sell out for money. And I know I won't sell out.
I'll keep reinvesting that in the future because that's where I think we should
(47:48):
go for the people we serve. We have to serve better.
And we can do so much more.
That's this is the it's a new generation of
hearing aids now so hearing aids have gotten smaller and smaller
and then we had digital hearing aids well at the beginning people said oh my
gosh digital is wonderful it's so much better well the real reason for digital
(48:11):
is so you can help people hear better and so we had to evolve our ability to
do that and it took a little little while to do that. And we are doing that today.
And we've made really good digital hearing aids.
They've gotten better and better and better. And the other companies have,
but all of us have made hearing aids.
(48:31):
And they, we made the first device now that's not a hearing aid.
I still I still don't know what to call it.
But it's beyond hearing aids.
And because it doesn't have the limitations that hearing aids have always had.
(48:52):
And so once those limitations are taken away, we're able to do a lot more.
But now that we can help people with normal hearing without having them feel
like they're wearing a device that they're hearing normally only better,
they have super hearing,
we can start adding features.
(49:15):
Hearing aid, ubiquitous. You can't be without one.
It's like an iPhone because it will be, you know, your monitoring system for
your health will report that.
It'll be a therapy system.
If you have, if you fall, it'll know before you fall, it'll know that you're
(49:37):
a candidate for falling, that you're going to be falling soon.
It's going to do so much to help people. And that's what I said years ago.
We're going to help people be healthier, live longer, and perform to task better.
That's what a hearing aid does. A hearing aid will help you perform to task
(49:59):
better because it helps you hear and respond to people.
It helps you perform to task better because you can tap your ear and connect
to the cloud and say, who hit the most home runs last year?
You can find out anything you want to know just like that.
The direction of the airport? port what's the weather in tokyo it
doesn't matter you can ask and it's all there and the
and the future with what you're talking about answers and
(50:23):
yeah the hearing aids will talk to you in the future they'll talk
back they'll recognize your voice and other voices
just we have all of this potential coming
at us it's coming very fast and i
realized that we couldn't do that with the the
people we had we'd been trying to make progress for years
with the people we had and i kept telling him you
(50:45):
know we're not we're not getting anywhere we're not getting anywhere and that's
when we uh sent out a search for otch and for a new head of engineering and
we wanted to go outside the industry and he was a head of artificial intelligence at intel.
So the guy was deep in experience and very sharp. He had made Siri and what
(51:09):
is it? All kinds of things.
Oh, yeah. Did the robotic shows for the Super Bowl and a drone.
So he's just a very. Visual. Brilliant, creative guy.
And so it ended up that I met him.
He came here and he really hadn't intended to go to work, but he'd written a paper about me.
I'd never heard of anyone in my life, and there has never been anyone since,
(51:31):
that had written a college paper about me.
And he'd chosen a public company, Microsoft, and a private company, Starkey.
And anyway, he wanted to meet me. And so I took a big board,
like you see the horse races at the track going up the board,
(51:51):
and the guy that gets to the top wins the teddy bear or something. thinking.
And so I said, this is what we're going to do.
These are all the things we're going to do to help people live longer,
perform the tasks better, be healthier.
And I said, some of them are going to be harder, more difficult than others.
And I said, so that's okay.
That's just one of the measurements we're going to do. We're going to do all these things.
(52:16):
And that's what this, that's what we're, that's our future.
That's what we're dedicated to doing is making a device that will help people
better than we've ever helped them before.
And that's why when I asked you in another interview what's the future of hearing
aids, you said, there is no future of hearing aids.
There's futures in these new types of devices. Right.
(52:39):
Of course, they are going to compensate for... That's where the future will be. Right. Mm-hmm.
So, because we focused on that, it's taken years, and we've got billions and
billions of bytes of sound information now that we're working.
Our AI is getting smarter and smarter and smarter.
(53:02):
So, this, Ashton estimates we're five years ahead of anyone else.
And he said within another couple years he'll be 10 years ahead because we're
doing unbelievable things.
In the meantime, we'll keep trying to go to the next level but Ajahn said,
(53:25):
I want to spend the rest of my life trying to help people and do something good
instead of making gadgets and things, so robots.
So he's signed up and for the right reasons.
And that's why our good people sign up because they buy into being part of that.
(53:47):
We're one team. No one can do it alone.
But together we can impact the world in a positive way and the world needs that
now. And it needs something else that we have at Starkey.
Our caring that we reflect to people. It's deeply embedded in this company.
Deeply embedded. And so that respect that each individual is worth the best
(54:09):
we can do for them is part of our culture and part of why we go to work.
It makes our life meaningful. It gives us purpose.
And the people who buy into that find that this is a good place to work.
I've also gotten the sense that there is a fair amount of levity or of your
(54:31):
own way of determining which way you're going to go sometimes.
I was talking to Earl Harford before he passed and asked him how he started
that student education program.
And apparently he said.
Think it was going to work necessarily, but you said, well, go ahead and give this a shot.
And it really impacted some influential audiologists down the line.
(54:54):
Well, I've always done that.
People will do more if they believe in something, if they have a passion for
it. And so I may test them.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. But if they can beat on the table and say,
I can make it work, I will make it work, If they have passion for it, then I'll support it.
(55:15):
Because if they didn't have that passion, it wouldn't get there.
It wouldn't be that significant. So Earl believed that, and so I support it.
Oh, go ahead. We were talking about legacy before.
What do you think you'll be remembered for, and what do you want to be remembered for?
(55:36):
Here's what I think, that I'm remembered by people who will never know me and
will never know me because the caring that I reflect gets reflected to the family and the community.
And that, it lights an inner light in people. It gives them hope.
(55:57):
If they're cared about and someone thinks they're worth it and they have value,
all of a a sudden someone else will think they're worth it.
So I think probably my biggest legacy,
may not be hearing aid inventions, although we've tried to push that,
(56:18):
make other people keep up with us and copy us.
Our policies were very important.
But probably the biggest legacy is is the caring the light we reflect and you
personally have fitted a lot of people all over the world.
(56:41):
But that's what I think will only thing that'll be that won't be remembered
but it will become part of life ongoing so I think as,
you reflect that light to someone of your, you've given your life,
you've given a part of your life, a piece of time to them and only them because
(57:03):
they were worth that piece of your life.
And when you give that to them.
The light inside them, and you can see that reflected back to you, which feels good.
You're bathed in the light. It makes you stronger, and you want to go on and do more.
But they reflect that light then on to others, and that keeps being reflected
forward and forward and forward.
(57:25):
And I think, you know, that really summarizes, I mean, the issue of a hearing
aid manufacturer thinking about the technology, but for as long as I've known
you, you know, you operate by the the mantra, you know, so the world may hear.
And I've been in all corners of the world seeing you provide the opportunity
for people to hear and connecting them, providing that light looking forward.
(57:51):
And I think it's because you haven't, you've always, you've not been paralyzed
by the dogma of the moment.
I mean, you brought up Leibarger from 1944 said a half gain fitting rule was
going to be the key to success in fitting hearing aids.
I've watched you develop Developed the WFA fitting model, which is based on
super threshold, on audibility.
It doesn't even need the audiogram. Yeah. And why is that?
(58:14):
Because you can scale it and you can get to so many more people in all corners
of the world that doesn't depend on plugging something into the wall or using
a piece of equipment, but it provides people with the opportunity and the chance to hear.
You can quickly arrive at the sweet spot for their hearing.
Right. It's scalable. available it's something we can do to bring hearing to
(58:35):
people all around the world and it's not possible otherwise.
There's no other way that you could have built it that way through audiometers,
through a half-game fitting rule.
All you need is your hands. There's too many millions of people and it takes too long.
There's not that much equipment. For me, it's that caring.
And it's a solution that provides us a scalable and sustainable approach by
(58:59):
involving the community and the people that are not there when you're able to
go over and teach them and be there and fit them.
But in that way it takes a
big hairy audacious goal to
be able to say you know brashly so the world i'm
going to try to do and i i think you take that statement literally because i've
(59:20):
seen you get off a bus and fit someone that you saw struggling with hearing
yeah and more than one occasion and if they care that's all i know how to do
so i i have to give what i can i can't solve all the problems.
There are many problems. There always have been, but I can do one thing that I know how to do.
(59:43):
And so I must do that one thing.
Otherwise, who am I and what am I good for?
So it's very simple to me. So that's why I think people say,
oh, I was a great salesman or I was this, that, or something else,
or Bill Austin was some sort of a genius.
(01:00:03):
I'm not a a genius. I'm not a great salesman. I've hired people that are smarter
than I am. They're all around here.
But what I think has kept Starkey going when a lot of companies have gone out of business is that.
Had one goal and it wasn't to make money. It was to help people.
(01:00:24):
The people want to be helped. They don't want to be outsmarted.
They don't want to be duped out of their money, but they're willing to pay a
good, humble servant that helps them.
And that's a reward you've earned. So I've never wanted any money I could make
from winning the lottery or Vegas or anywhere else.
I want money that's really given to me because I've served well.
(01:00:47):
That's good money. That money has soul. I can do something with that.
So it's not bad to have competition.
I knew we could do it better. And the reason I knew we could do it better is
because I was willing to work harder than anyone else.
I was willing to stay there really late at night or all night.
(01:01:09):
I used to work all night a couple days a week because I'd be going too fast
otherwise. I had to slow myself down.
You worked late into the night in the lab. Oh, yeah.
I did that on into my 40s and 50s and 60s. Really, I think anyone can be successful in business.
(01:01:30):
They just have to want to be a good servant. That's the only reason a business
exists is so it can serve.
So the only thing you need to do is try to serve better.
And if you do that, you're in demand.
In a lot of the early years, Starkey wasn't always known as a technology company like it is today.
(01:01:52):
You oftentimes anticipated, it seemed like you anticipated the needs of dispensing
professionals before even they might have been able to articulate.
Disagree. No, I don't disagree. Now that we have a real way to progress,
that we see a path clear for the future to progress on, we will move forward.
(01:02:15):
And artificial intelligence, machine learning is going to be a big deal, a really big deal.
And you've proven, I mean, AI is a machine capable of doing,
you know, you look at some of the visual things that it can do to pick out tumors
tumors in the body with much greater precision than humans can to be able to,
(01:02:36):
you know, even some of the navigation,
better driving, better vaccines, all of that.
It's going to do huge things.
The bridge that it hasn't crossed yet. And imagine, you know,
it's the ultimate challenge is it's currently not capable of displaying empathy the way the human can.
As you mentioned, you know, that caring element of trying to understand,
(01:03:00):
focus and be present with every patient that you're with.
Your focus is on that patient.
And I think as long as clinicians remember that their role more than anything
else is you don't know your patient until you know your patient and you have
to invest yourself in them in order to give them that opportunity.
So far, AI hasn't shown a propensity to be able to do that, that will commoditize
(01:03:24):
or eliminate in our role for those who are willing to care enough.
You've told me before that there aren't any supermen. There are certain people
who are really good at one or two things, but then you build a team around them
and they become supermen. Well.
And women. They're supermen and women because we prop each other up.
(01:03:46):
We all have our flat spots, but that's kind of hidden.
And, you know, if you bring that together, other.
Like bringing together a lot of facets on a diamond. The light they reflect
as you have more facets is even more brilliant.
So we bring these facets, different people together with different talents,
(01:04:07):
and the flaws are hidden inside.
All that you see outside is the light.
That's a good metaphor. I like it. You've provided a lot of great quotes over
the years that I've heard you say, but one of my favorite is when now,
which is almost customary when you speak to our customers or our employees,
(01:04:27):
people inevitably stand up and applaud you.
And when you come up to the front of the room, you say, I'm not a big deal.
Yeah, I usually say, I don't amount to much, but don't feel bad for me because you don't either.
But together. Together we can change the world.
(01:04:49):
And I think that's a good way to end this because I think that's your legacy,
Bill, is it really is that none of us alone, we can't do much,
but together, we can and we are changing the world.
That was the big vision in late February 1961 when I saw the limitations of
(01:05:12):
myself and faced them for the first time.
I never thought I had any limitations. I was going to be a great healer.
And then I saw I could only do this much.
But if I can get other people that agree with me, then we can impact the world.
That's your legacy to me. That's it.
So thank you for that and for this discussion. And Carl, thanks for leading this discussion.
(01:05:37):
Well, thank you so much, Bill. Thanks for sharing your philosophy and knowledge. Thanks, Carl.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I don't know anything.
What can I say? What I've said before. I just like to go to work.
Music.
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com