moonshots ep142 mary lou jepsen open water transcript

you have had uh incredible positions around the world Google and Facebook the head of engineering there the Intel CTO you ran the largest consumer product development ever and you gave that up you transformed yourself from that into what what’s your mission and passion today using all the stuff that’s coming down the pike maybe we could affect on a cellular level disease States these are conver ing exponentials this is the intersection of physics and Ai and chipsets this laser for example was a size of room in a million dollars and this is allowing us with camera chips in your smartphone to see blood flow 20 times better than a multi-million dollar MRI machine or CT machine or anything else we can find published in literature so vitalic says listen if you open source this I will give you $50 million all 68 of our patents um all of our software all of our Hardware agpl continue open source you’re about to

[00:01:01] unleash an entire Revolution hi everybody Peter dandis here and welcome to moonshots today’s episode is perhaps one of the most important episodes I’ve recorded in recent past it’s with an extraordinary entrepreneur and engineer a designer someone who is Transforming Our medical future she is the CEO of Open Water an advanced Medical Technologies company that’s not only developing diagnostic but incredible Therapeutics to fight cancer to fight mental disorders to fight addictions to fight Strokes her name is Dr marilo jebson you may know of her she was the CTO of Intel she was director of engineering at Google and part of Google X executive director of engineering at Facebook in Oculus along with Professor Nicholas negroponte she developed the $100 one laptop per child program a bachelor’s in engineering a master’s from MIT a PhD in Optical

[00:02:00] physics from Brown professor at MIT jebson was named one of the Time magazine’s 100 most influential people CNN’s top thinkers Forbes top 50 women I can’t tell you how excited I am for this conversation if you care about your medical future if you care about transforming the world taking huge moonshots what it takes to be an entrepreneur that impacts a billion plus people Dr maril Jepson has your playbook and she’s an amazing human being by the way if you’d like me to have conversations like this with other people please subscribe I’m excited to serve you for me this is the most important work that I can do to inspire and guide you to show you people like this who are changing the world all right let’s jump in to an incredible episode with Dr Mary L Jepson before we get started I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible breakthroughs coming on the health span and Longevity front these Technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live how long we’re healthy the truth is is a lot of the approaches are in fact

[00:03:01] cheap or even free and I want to share this with you I just wrote a book called Longevity guide book that outlines what I’ve been doing to reverse my biological age what I’ve been doing to increase my health my strength my energy and I want to make this available to my community at cost so longevity guidebook.com you can get information or check out the link below all right let’s jump into this episode Mary Lou I cannot tell you how excited I’m about this podcast you know you are an extraordinary entrepreneur technologist uh and a disruptor and I want the world to know what you’re doing because you’re about to change health care for uh for decades ahead and so thank you for taking the time I want to go deep with you I want to talk about how you’re Reinventing healthc care how you’re using exponential Technologies to transform Our Lives um honestly how you’re making the impossible possible so thanks for

[00:04:00] the time today thanks for having me and I’m so excited to show everybody what we’ve been doing through pandemic because it’s been a lot and I really we’re gonna unveil some stuff today that no one’s seen yeah thank you for featuring us you’re welcome uh you’ve been on an incredible Mission I mean you have had incredible positions around the world right if I were to lay it out you know you were at a few different Tech Giants uh Google and Facebook Facebook the head of engineering there the Intel CTO you were uh Reinventing everything from holography to VR screens um I mean you ran the largest consumer product development ever uh and you gave that up you transformed yourself from that into what what what’s your mission and passion today using all the stuff that’s coming down the pike for Next Generation can s Electronics be it VR AR l r and

[00:05:03] using the fact that both infrared light ultrasound and electromagnetics penetrate our body and with the manipulation we can now do using Mo’s law exponential reduction in feature size we can make devices this is why I started this company close to 10 years ago called Open Water we’re going to talk about it today using these principles I thought that maybe we could have fect on a cellular level disease States like kill the cancer cells without killing the healthy tissue fix the stroke fix the neurodegenerative disease and now it’s really eight years into this feels like 10 though uh we have pretty strong results and we’re about to scale out and go into production of devices anybody can buy to push this research forward in a whole set of dis of disease States including pathogen deactivating like Co

[00:06:00] or other diseases So for anybody listening uh what we’re about to go on is a journey uh a revolutionary Journey on how the technologies that Mary L has been pulling together you know these are converging exponentials this is the intersection of physics and Ai and chipsets that’s turning what was once huge bulky expensive equipment into software um into different Therapeutics that are you know I talk about the 6ds uh Mary L that when you digitize something it dematerializes it demonetizes uh and it democratizes and that’s exactly what you’re doing to you know so we say billions of dollars worth of worth of healthcare Tech yeah I mean this laser for example was the size of a room in a million dollars and this is allowing us

[00:07:00] with camera chips in your smartphone to see blood flow 20 times better than a multi-million dollar MRI machine or CT machine or anything else we can find published in the literature it literally makes Holograms it records um the phase of light here’s here’s the eight camera chips the lasers in there yeah and it records the phase of light because the chips in your smartphone are so small that the pixels are the size of the wavelength of light which means we can record the waves in the waves and light and there’s information in that and with that information with this laser we made this goes into production like literally next month but we already have been in hospitals for four years with this technology so this is just one of the kind of modules we’re getting out to everybody and I I want to go into this technology but I guess I want to I want to preface this if you’ve ever had anybody uh for our our viewers viewers and listeners ever had anybody who has had a debilitating stroke

[00:08:00] um which is the second leading cause of death in the world if you’ve ever had anybody with mental disease or addictions or I’ve had anybody who has a uh you know an aggressive cancer um like a Glo blastoma uh the work that you’re doing is the chance to provide not just treatments but effectively cures for these things potentially a cure I mean we have results just from this week looking at amalo micr pla with ultrasound at certain frequencies and one of the issues is that the microp plaes uh are too big to go through capillaries so it kills off whatever is close to the capillaries that get clogged up with these microclots it happens with aging it happens with neurodegenerative disease it happens with acute covid it happens with type2 diabetes we’re clearing 80% of them and we’re reducing the size

[00:09:00] from an 8 Micron diameter to a 4 Micron diameter and that’s a really big deal because capillaries are 5 to 10 microns wide and so if it’s eight it may not get through if it’s bigger it can’t get through it’s clogged yeah and so the potential is very strong again this is just lab work we’re doing but what we’re looking at doing is basically taking something like this putting it behind your KNE and you’re holding up something the size of a cigarette pack basically yeah so this in it has a transducer an ultrasound transducer um that’s an 8 by8 array and we’re able to uh Focus wherever we want to using antenna Theory but it we’re able to make uh resonant frequencies that allow us to selectively attack the microc clots like an opera singer can uh stimulate or or even break a wine glass but harm nothing else on the room when she things so I want to slow this down do

[00:10:02] this by the way this is a diagnostic level of ultrasound so yes you want to slow it down I want to slow it down for everybody because there’s so much here but what you’re about to hear is um what I think is the most important revolution in healthc care uh that we’re going to see over the next few years uh with a chance to really uh democratize this at a extraordinarly affordable cost I mean right this is this is and I I’ll ask everybody to put in the comments here if you agree this is so revolutionary that um I want to get your name out there before you win your Nobel Prize so that uh people know about this the goal so I want to I want to start to change Healthcare I know I know it isort of put it on this track of other things the 20 to 40y year Moes our anti- Innovation for the thing that kills us and and we got to speed it up and yes we got great technology I

[00:11:00] think the business model we’re using to speed it up is even more compelling and we want to bring other Technologies into this Suite so we can do more colle and we’ll get there so I want to tell your story to begin with um uh you’re a brain tumor Survivor right how much of that is your motivation you mind telling that story um and where does it begin and kid I was pretty sick and in the hospital a lot and uh that got me really good at being on time because I knew I likely end up in the hospital anyway was finally diagnosed I dropped out of my PhD in physics in nvy League school because I was in a wheelchair I was really sick I couldn’t move half my face I was sleeping 20 hours a day but then it got really bad because I couldn’t even subtract and so I didn’t think I deserved a PhD in physics from n League school I had already worked I’d been a computer science Professor I had a degree from MIT I was a brown doing my

[00:12:01] PhD um and I called up my parents and asked them if I could you know come home and and die because Brown had a medical school they let me see the professors there no one could figure out what I had this is 1995 is but as I was headed out um this professor said you know you’ve got really bad headaches right like yeah very bad headaches um so he sprung for the cost of an MRI found my tumor every Mr back then let’s describe what an MRI was for comparison cuz this exactly the same size and shape it’s just 10 times more expensive today yeah rooms law which is More’s law spelled backwards it’s it’s a giant room I would say it’s like 20 20 by 20 foot minimum uh shielded an electric cage with a uh a a large electromagnet and helium cooling a power Center by it the most expensive

[00:13:01] room in hospitals and also the highest margin 90% gross margin it’s where hospitals make their profit and so they’re charging thousands of dollars for this MRI right um I didn’t know need it I would have sorry go ahead so you so it wasn’t that you couldn’t afford it you didn’t know that you needed it and when something is yeah I didn’t know that I needed it they found it then I um sprung found a really good neurosurgeon luckily only needed one have taken a dozen medications every day for the rest of my life and will but I I’ve uh you know every once in a while you sort of look at that I put them all in the same bottle and I’ve got some shots and things but you look and you think boy you know I had to really fight to get these you have to fight for your life often and it just focuses you when we’re here now what do we want to do with our lives and so there’s maybe a positive outcome for that so yeah you go from you go from that recovery of a brain tumor um where did you launch first into your career well I’d already had a bit of career but uh I

[00:14:01] um went to finish my PhD and myself and two other students got $4 million from DARPA to commercialize our PhD technology so we started a company uh called micro display we were the first people to make uh micro displays for uh we were trying to make a wristwatch video VR early smart phones um a lot of projection stuff had mass production set up a manufacturing line in Richmond California just north of Berkeley and and shipped in a few years and we were shipping in all kinds of Novel devices basically something that looks exactly like Google Glass but in 1998 looks the same I mean the the the software improved but the hardware was was there then with a collaboration with an optical company called microoptical I need to be clear about that we made the screen part they made the Optics but so I did that for a while and got recruited an Intel to be the CTO of their division

[00:15:03] um I I I’m I like smaller companies better I don’t like the sharp elbows as much I like everybody sort of in the same little Robo helping each other to do the impossible rather than I don’t know like why they need a out the goals in big companies seem to be having you know how big is it means how many people you have working on it where the ideal for me is sort of like whatsapps $19 billion 50 people like yes like a much more interesting exponential company did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biod defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microb iome and the RNA

[00:16:00] in your blood now viome has a product that I’ve personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health they’ve tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you should eat what foods you shouldn’t eat as well as your supplements and probiotics your biological age and other deep Health insights and the results of the recommendations are nothing short of Stellar you know as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine after just 6 months of following biomes recommendations members reported the following a 36% reduction in depression a 40% reduction in anxiety a 30% reduction in diabetes and a 48% reduction in IBS listen I’ve been using viome for 3 years I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities best of all viome is Affordable which is part part of my mission to democratize health if you

[00:17:01] want to join me on this journey go to vom.com Peter I’ve asked naen Jane a friend of mine who’s the founder and CEO of viome to give my listeners a special discount you’ll find it at vom.com Peter but you ended up in Intel and um and that was an extraordinary uh sort of Resurrection from from surgery to Intel uh yeah and micros finishing the PHD even you know was a lot um and then I left um because intel only has rail rail processes and I ran into the CEO the new CEO just left um I Heard uh and explain why we could never make as good silen as anybody else because all our processes by rail to rail it’s either zero or a voltage but to get the best thing for a screen because we want to see grayscale you need gradiation a voltage so I’m like look we could use anybody’s silicon we’re Intel like come into my office so anyway I effectively um pointed out in two sentences

[00:18:01] literally in an elevator with a CEO the fundamental flaw and so anyway I needed a job I was happy I I saved them you know a few hundred million dollars a year of something that couldn’t be in could not be in Silicon everybody hated me anyway I put I put my resume online because uh I did of that PhD in physics and I’d already been a professor I had taken a break after my Master’s Degree and was a a computer science professor in Australia and then worked as an artist a multimedia artist in Germany I want to get back to that later I want to hear about your art career your music career yeah I only got a C call back at one place it was MIT which is pretty good I applied to like 35 schools um but I ended up with Nicholas Negron I had been a student at the MIT media lab uh in the 80s I did a master’s degree there and made the world’s first holographic video system with a team of graduate students and loved the place and in the final

[00:19:01] interview it was supposed to be like 20 minutes with Nicholas Negron the legendary founder of MIT media lab and and many other things we started one laptop her child and so I started that in parallel and co-founded it with him and became the only other employee for the first year and basically lived on a plane with Nicolas while we I made a prototype of the laptop Kofi an on then head of the for those who don’t know one for child really um it was the objective of how do you get a $1,000 laptop down to 100 bucks and you launched the entire like tablet industry as part of that netbook and and tablet came after that became a bigger thing I actually actually have one right over here if you want me to grab one I can see it on the wall hold on yeah the beautiful green one laap for one laap top design so this thing and it wasn’t just a strip down laptop it was um Lo power laptop ever made lowest cost

[00:20:00] laptop ever made first mesh Network laptop ever made we wrote the first keyboards and Amor and a whole bunch of other languages no reading required to use it because it’s for kids that don’t know how to read how many of those were produced in total Millions I mean it we created a multi-billion dollar non for-profit open source um and um the lasting Legacy is I a few things we transformed what a minister of Education could do for their children another country Intel and Microsoft nearly killed us there was a 60 Minutes say but they spent like um exponentially more than we spent to stop it um but you know eventually they they join yeah there’s a lot of undue criticism on one laptop or child but what you did was extraordinary but so we changed the equation of that we also um uh you know Cinder pet the the CEO of Google um cites this I mean the Chromebook is its grandson granddaughter whatever Grand

[00:21:02] kid uh in terms of what you can do for education to make something quite usable for children so they cross the digital divide and also useful in pandemic right when did you get addicted to moonshots because uh that was probably was that your first moonshot probably holographic video I think like when the Nobel laurat stood up when I gave my first talk and said that’s Poppy and I’ll never work and you know and it felt it was probably just 2 minutes of insult it felt like I was yelled at in front of everybody first talk know 20 something this is the equivalent of R2-D2 projecting princess Le and I remember I had the courage after sort of going back to my hotel room and not being happy probably crying um I went up to him at the reception I said you know we all you know we all you’ve done impossible things in your life and like

[00:22:01] if there’s an issue with this like could you explain like it’s not sufficient to just say it’s impossible could you explain why it’s impossible so let me let me understand let me set the setting here so you’re giving a presentation on holographic video my first presentation on This research project I’m undertaking for my Master’s Degree at MIT as as a first year student and a no La stands up and says it’s crazy right it’ll never work it’s impossible and I remember talking to my adviser at the time Steve Benton um who ran the holography group at the media lab and he said you know when somebody tells you it’s impossible what it means is they’re a little bit jealous and I can’t remember the other thing but it was a little bit jealous keep going I think it means it’s impossible for them um right they tried before but you can look at it with new eyes and find new ways through it and so so yeah so that’s uh what went on you went on to build that yes we did I built

[00:23:02] the world’s first ho fully computer generated hram with a micron size pixels in 1987 which was hard to do then um uh and uh computer generated on a supercomputer then which looks a lot like Nvidia now but it was a a connection machine which was earlier early parallel so that’s your first moonshot um probably would you consider one laptop your second yeah I think we uh really did transform things people don’t remember it now but the kids do and they’re still working in the field by the way these laptops have been working for 20 years because they’re they’re so low power too end durable it’s incredible architecture I designed it around the screen Nobody Does that like who cares if the CPU is on the CPU people like Intel they think they’re the brains behind the operation I’m like there could be Little Green Men inside the laptop care the screens on if it responds to a stroke you can shut the

[00:24:01] whole Mother D Bo down a vast majority of the time and then bring it back up in in uh a single digit number of milliseconds and it seems like it’s on and so that’s really important because kids in the developing world at that time half of them lacked steady ready access to power also uh had a screen I’m a screen designer um that was the res better resolution than the app retinal display same time $11 laptop and and the computers at the time cost two laptops cost $2,000 and you had to buy $2,000 of software for him people forget so it was a massive change in cost structure and what kind of battery life did it have oh extraordinary battery life and the life of the batteries we were the first ones I went to byd wow back then lithium ferof phosphate battery because the lithium ion B batteries were burning and lithium

[00:25:00] Ferro phosphate Burns at 100° C and we conditioned it um so that it could last through 2,000 charge recharge Cycles which was like 10 20 times what normal lithium ion batteries could do at the time so’s out of this right now but yeah so there was a lot of innovation we talk we’re talking dozens of hours of battery life um oh uh yeah it would last for a day or two um but you could hand crank it cuz it’s so low power or a small solar cell would recharge it and we gave those out too what a beautiful design um so thank you for that work so after one laptop where do you go next um I start a company called pixel Chi because I thought I sort of gave up my job thinking that you know the laptop’s built why don’t we get somebody that knows about education coming in here’s where being a woman in Tex like they think I know about education like well you know I know children was I did go to school but it’s time to bring in

[00:26:01] education experts and so I decided to help the industry design more interesting stuff so I left MIT because I was more excited about what I could use with the multi-billion dollar Fabs of Asia despite the best postto I could get could maybe make one thing once but then not be able to repeat it for a year because the contamination and whatever happened in the beautiful MIT Labs I moved to Asia um started a company called pixel Chi and made really innovative screen technology as the first fabulous screen maker and made a lot of screens for for tablets and laptops and smartphones but then other unique screens until Sergey kind of Sergey uh Google um fell in love with it also was trying to work on brain computer interface and as they were starting Google app we’ll come back to BCI for those listening there’s there’s a BCI story hired the whole company so you end up so you end up uh with Sergey at Google in their moonshot Factory right cuz Sergey wanted a lot of stuff

[00:27:02] but I’m working on Innovative consumer electronics Levering Android and many other abilities of Google so I’m doing things that Larry and ser want me to do you can read about what I’m I’m not supposed to ever say what I did there um you can read about it I know what you did there yes um so there were some very cool projects uh and uh and then large large holographic walls included yeah sure and you know screens on every surface how do you do that and then why would you do that um I mean I’m I’m they weren’t holographic though they were flat something I’ve been doing in pandemic is I think everybody wants a million dollar view so all you have to do is make the screen um at Optical Infinity meaning and then you anybody could feel like they were someplace else when they got home a lot of people spent

[00:28:00] time I was just at a friend um I was just at uh uh Mark Pink’s home and he has a beautiful home overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the golden great bridge there and it was you know Florida ceiling 30 foot 40 foot wide windows and it was breathtaking View and I was like I would love that on a screen why can’t anybody and the 3D is very important yes screens are now about $10 a square foot windows are more expensive it’s amazing what’s happened morphos silicon it’s also what the substrate for solar panels it’s just Mass you know abundance so if you’ve got that how do you use that and our tools the software they at like but we have all of these photos of everything and yeah you can have updates do you think you could create a a a a large scale video wall that looks identical to

[00:29:00] a view out the window well I yes and that’s like a side project I call it my Venice B and Alley project I don’t know if I’ll get into can I join you on that one I love that idea yeah I’d love to do it and like as an art project and then just get it into get someone else to the startup like honestly or maybe you can think of somebody but you know it’s a got in mind yeah no I mean yeah it’s a side project I have a little Studio I on that sometimes on the weekends just to clear my head and you can flip the switch and you can be on the surface of the Moon or Mars over the Eiffel Tower it’s much easier if you’re at Optical Infinity um meaning um if you close one eye and then the other eye you see a disparity a difference between the views but if something’s far enough away um it’s um easier to compute uh yes uh everybody’s winking their eyes right now left and right it’s easier to so anyway there’s all this stuff but I walked away

[00:30:01] from screen technology I just miss it sometimes particularly in the isolation of pandemic so you’re at you’re with Sergey you’re in the moonshot factory there which was an exciting time I mean you know with Astro Were You There When Astro was there or or just before I did overlap a bit with Astro yeah yeah and then on to Oculus from there yeah Mark recruited me he had bought this company for a bunch of money they never shipped anything particularly just during the by the screens and the Optics it kind of bought me like I was a company I didn’t actually want to go some things happened to Google that pissed me off that sorry I shouldn’t go into detail because never speak ill but you know it really was lucrative my most successful project up till then had been the not for-profit you know so it was uh quite lucrative to go I I probably shouldn’t have gone I liked Google better um despite I love Google as a culture and I mean they’ve done so much people don’t know how much Google has

[00:31:00] done for the world in so many ways the Investments the projects they’ve done yeah I I liked and I loved working for Sergey he was fantastic to work for and hi Sergey anyway so you go and you join the team uh at Oculus you reporting directly to Mark where are you in the in Facebook it moved around they called me Game Changer whatever I had another title too but I was supposed to sort of figure out how to change the game from what we were doing um but it was it was a I knew that it was a rocky road I mean it they were you know they’ just gotten bought they were trying you know whatever so I did what I could um and invented some very cool sunglass BR systems and a bunch of things that hopefully we’ll see the light to day so let me take an aside there one moment because you are the uh uh the screen goddess and the minorization goddess uh how far do you think we are from wearable um arvr specs like you’re wearing right now

[00:32:02] that are light and and uh enjoyable it’s a matter of will I mean they’ve spent hundred billion dollars I know it’s a lot of money and it’s surprising how little of whatever they have in the labs if if they’ve pursued that has seen the light of day it’s not that efficient I mean I think you know Reed Hoffman wrote a book about it Blitz scaling like when you sp ton of money it’s it’s not that efficient it’s not maybe supposed to be makes her taxes come out right whatever but it’s a lot of money Mark really deeply believes in it I don’t know I I think I would didn’t like the Facebook I don’t you like covering like covering your face with a giant mask ski ski go well that’s why I want the million dollar view I don’t want to wear it I don’t want like so but different you know all of this is true of any techn it’s a bunch of different opinions and they mix and match and this has been going on since the late 60s with VR and

[00:33:01] AR and different um since the human interface Labs up in Seattle yeah they were yeah but you know Scott um boy I can’t think of his name I’m thinking a guy at MIT as well but you know and Jaren laner and you know the different waves of it and move for it and what we did in holography too you could I want to set the picture here you have been at the top of the entire Tex stack the industry at Intel at Google at Facebook and you you witnessed digitization dematerialization demonetization democratization you’ve seen the power of these Technologies um when what was the moment that you decided I need to focus on Reinventing healthcare because it’s so broken when I left Intel in 2004 and pitched at the media lab and got the faculty cu but I got distracted with $100 laptop

[00:34:00] and thought well I can get that to work faster even though everybody thinks it’s impossible I thought it was much faster then uh you know I I got hooked into that and when I went into Google I was supposed to work on this but then when I got in um Sergey said um no we just wanted to know you were creative like so I had all these ideas for bring computer interface and healthc care and when I got in he really needed me to do other things things where I was actually pretty happy to be working there on the things that I was doing so that took a backseat when I went over to Facebook and interviewed with Mark I swear his feet didn’t touch the ground when I started talking to him about brain computer interface we had like a whiteboard in the room and and what we could do for healthcare and I’m like this is it he gets it and then I come and he’s like well you know you got to fix this VR thing first and I spent a lot of money I spend billions of dollars on this I know but this is before this is like whatever this is 2015 um like

[00:35:00] nine years ago I think I start in year later 2016 I left you left um what was that what happened you said it’s time for me to go and build my dream company well it’s the fourth company and I’ve been in startups now for you know half of my life so I’m good at the startups I think um when so many people with so many different opinions I mean one thing I did for Facebook and for Google since the core competency of the executive management was really optimizing click-through revenue for ad sales because let’s face it to say that yeah it’s true or whatever Gmail or like getting social a lot of things like that but it wasn’t on these new technologies so one of the things I tried to bring in is a wide variety of expertise that we could share what we’re doing and just take feedback you know

[00:36:01] and like it’s just frustrating because the you know educating these the the software Giants in this other thing it was actually faster and easier just to start your own and build the thing without all the politics and I’m not you know it’s just it’s look Moon shots you know you could call NASA a moonshot but it was like part of the Cold War the right Brothers was a moonshot yes the invention of the birth control P was a bu other small teams that did it you know somehow and I think it’s just easier honestly to do it that way everybody I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that’s very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it’s a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented Physicians you know most of us don’t actually know what’s going on inside our body we all Optimist until that day when

[00:37:00] you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I’m sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn’t start that morning it probably was a problem that’s been going on for some time but because we never look we don’t find out so what we built at Fountain life was the world’s most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we’re we building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body MRI a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it’s the most advanced workup you’ll ever receive 150 gigabyt of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it’s solvable you’re going to find out eventually you might as well find out when you can take action Fountain life also has an

[00:38:02] entire side of Therapeutics we look around the world for the most advanced theraputics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain life.com Peter when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to Fountain life.com back/ Peter will’ll put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it’s a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to fountainlife decomp it’s one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let’s go back to our episode all right so it’s 2016 and you

[00:39:00] found open water which is the extraordinary company we’re about to dive into where do the name open water come from Peter Gabriel um tell me about that Peter’s amazing Peter Gabriel the the rock star human rights activist extraordinaire um started calling me I knew him from my art school multimedia days in the ’ 80s and I ran into him at a conference and told him what I was doing he started calling me every day saying you’ve got to leave Facebook you have to do this outside and he started writing he wrote this essay about um Open Water about um our thoughts flowing like water and having to take swimming lessons to learn how to deal with it because it would really change how we interact with each other if we are sort of transparent in all of our human weaknesses and seven virtues and seven you know whatever all the the issues that one has if it was

[00:40:02] transparent so he he really strongly encouraged me and kept calling and we had all these great conversations so I said okay great let’s do it can I use the name and he let me use the name so he’s he’s got Sweat Equity he’s also an investor as yeah um and and I got I have to say full disclosure to everybody listening and watching I am an investor through my Venture fund I’m an proud advisor of Open Water so I’m totally and completely biased and I’m sharing this with you because of the extraordinary work that Mar Lou as you she’ll soon see and have seen is doing so I want to make sure that disclosure is out there in the open um so I love that and Peter Gabriel’s probably greatest contribution to society will be the fact that he pushed you to get the company going I stun so much all right one of his um continues to so what was the vision here so let let’s now Dive In because the tech you have built and you are now

[00:41:00] rolling out is going to save millions of lives just to put a number on this it’s I don’t think people realize that near 25% of the US uh economy is going towards Healthcare expenses right 30% for hospitals another 20% for doctors that’s half of it 6% for R&D insurance is only like eight or % but it’s it’s it’s huge and it doesn’t move forward like as you say so articulate sick care you know it’s yeah it’s not moving the needle fast enough uh we need to do something better if we care about people’s lives I don’t think we’re counting the 55 million people that die every year globally can you describe the state of of uh the medical industry today I just want to have I want to set the the comparative objective um that you’re about to crush kill destroy it’s um yeah it’s the cycle time I mean there’s some good cures but you know you

[00:42:02] got one of those diagnosed you know what you know 30% of us are taken out with cardiovascular disease another 25% with cancer day in day out you know neurod degenerative disease takes you out if you L last long enough there’s the pathogens there’s the other chronic diseases like diabetes and so forth um and the the treatments don’t change that fast it’s now um 26 years and close to $3 billion for new drug approval capitalized cost the shocking thing um for medical device a novel medical device it’s close to $700 million in 13 years capitalized cost to get to go from an idea to developing it and getting it approved by the FDA just just for approval let alone reimbursement and becoming standard of care which takes you out to about $ 1.5 billion so say you do that for a single rare CU it’s faster cost less because you don’t need as many patients you

[00:43:01] spent a billion let’s say you save some money say call 700 million few thousand people have it what do you charge per patient yeah so Zer few thousand people divided by the 700 million or 700 million by the, things like it’s a understatement to say the vast majority of humanity can’t afford that cost so what are we doing why are we funding this the big funders of healthcare R&D nine out of every 10 Healthcare dollars in the US comes from Nos and GEOS and they’re funding things that’s like you know maybe trickle down economics Works eventually but the saddest thing and I know you you’ve said this is what percentage of drugs that are subscribed uh prescribed for you actually work oh oh yeah um the the numbers quite low I I 20% for me personally they work I check that because

[00:44:01] I but it’s you assume that when the in that case I’m missing part of my brain it’s a pituitary gland I molecularly replac a age and sex appropriate dosis but but for most people yeah do they work or not and do they cause harm it’s a thing yeah for sure and you know like it’s it’s 5040 to $70,000 per patient in a clinical trial and it takes years to get them through for a bigger disease like mental disease or neurod deener disease you got to do 10,000 100,000 patients so the cost becomes incre and the time becomes prohibitive so to we have to somehow change this if we want more Innovation and to leverage the tools of our time yes AI but also mors law are two of those big exponentials so and there’s others as well which you can list for us because I list them all the time but but clinical trials are they

[00:45:00] they’re exponentially slower and exponentially more expensive over time has it’s been well grafted and they call it More’s law backwards e rooms law so that’s that’s the big problem that that I think you have to change which which enables you to enable low cost but also get more data if you can get more data than we’ve ever had before you can it it’s it’s less risky for a regulator to approve a new treatment or um medical device or so forth but it’s also safer for a doctor and patient to make a decision for their health care so why not just collect more data we’re really good at crunching data we’re going to learn even more through crunching the data with the AI tools than we have but for that it’s very hard if you’re making a new drug that’s never physically existed before and putting it in somebody’s body to get that kind of scale quickly because you got to go through some tests first we’re going to

[00:46:01] you so what Mary Lou is talking about is using physics and Ai and chipsets to just not only diagnose but treat disease it is right it is it is 60s it is um it is dramatically dropping costs by not 10x we’re talking about potentially you know hundreds and thousands of X reduction in cost and and putting this technology in potentially every village throughout Africa Mary I’ve been with billionaires all through my it’s interesting on Thanksgiving in the US you end up getting calls the family gets together they find my name somebody’s got a disease so that’s where I spent my Thanksgiving weekend it’s everybody like yes despite economic level and borders and it’s like consumer electronics we all have like so let’s jump into some of the some of the graphics you have here I want people to internalize and

[00:47:02] understand the incredible uh Tech you have built and what the implications are because uh people need to see this to understand it and believe it because it is um it’s as impactful as the as the mobile phone has been yeah so yeah we started in Labs like these and worked to develop different designs modulating the phase of light and sound and then came to to build out these carts in about the year two 2020 and get them in the hospitals and we got really great results in sensitivity and specificity we were able to so slow slow it down slow it down here one second because what you what what you’ve been doing is uh utilizing and miniaturizing um ultrasound and lasers and and cameras to be able to impact things yeah so I’ll show more a little

[00:48:00] bit later like we’ve got great results and I can go about that but so we’ve now shrunk these down how big were how big were these things before because they’re the size now of something like a headband right they SI of the room the thing out that’s what we started with in 2016 with the size of the room and manipulating the phase of light and sound so we could steer it wherever we wanted to in the body we could interfere it to create wave structures and we could resonate it to selectively affect different cells with different structures like an opera can affect that wine glass so that was the premise to start the company using what I know about analog chip design not the digital stop until does but like using various voltages and frequencies and uh so this desktop image you have here is basically the breadboard the proof of concept that

[00:49:00] the physics works yeah these are big optical tables that float on nitrogen gas and allow you to do experiments where you can see the phase of Light which is and if you had to say how much it got miniaturized in scale and price between 2016 and today well give me some ORD of magnitude these are multi-million dollar systems we went down to the carts which were1 to $500,000 and and then we went down to this side so I have it with me like here is the console was the cart okay that starts production next this month and here’s um you know the headset for it that comes in different sizes we have a sixpack of ultrasound for the ABS you can 3D print whatever you want strap it to any part of your body we envision this going on the back of your knee to do both PA pathogen deactivation and also so ccent cell Rejuvenation as well as um

[00:50:02] amalo microclot removal we have some very good results in research for that right now so there’s that and I’ve shown you the box for our Imaging system is this is the console for it and so so it’s a it looks like a 100x or 100000x reduction in in in volume and the cost we we’re selling these for $10 K but at volume this goes to the cost of a smartphone so what would that give me a number here THX reduction in price oh sorry it’ll the the actual device no from where where it was in 2016 but you can treat something for the cost of a phone call then wow which becomes really interesting as you think of cost structures and there’s no like shortages which are really a huge problem also right now in in medical so yeah it’s a device with pan disease um impact well

[00:51:02] let’s let’s dive into the major ones here because uh let’s start I can show you yeah I can show you some of that sorry I’ve got yeah so this is the waves and we steer the waves so here’s like cancer cells in gly blastoma we did have some great results with gly blastoma and the problem is the surgeon can’t get the whole tumor out some cancer cells hide out amid the neurons you can’t scoop out all the neurons but what we do but just so people to know gleo blastoma is right now a death sentence 100% of people do not survive it I had a friend recently who passed um and if you if you’ve ever heard of someone having a deadly brain cancer um it’s the last diagnosis you want to hear and uh uh there’s very little you can do and from the time of diagnosis typically it’s months maybe a year that you have left yeah it’s not long but all Cancer all

[00:52:00] aggressive cancer cells share a mechanical property that normal cells don’t have which it’s the definition of metastasis they’ve got a big nucleus a small cytoplasm the big nucleus because they’re growing so fast they divide the DNA is in there fast because they want to grow and kill you so we exploit that like an opera singer can ping this wine glass match the frequency and destroy that wine glass and harm nothing else in the room so we did that first with 16 different types of gleo blastoma and grew them up in organoids and went through sound sweeps over many octaves and many rhythms to find the ones that killed the glol blastoma cells and didn’t harm the healthy tissue then so you found their resonance fre their resonant frequency basically yeah and then we we did that in mice so here are the mice this is the size of the tumor without treatment here are our top three treatments we gave one two minut do at a diagnostic level that means lower than used on pregnant women

[00:53:02] and their fetuses in the Western World on billions of them for the last 50 years yes diagnostic level destroyed the tumor needed another dose to day five 2minute dose 10% duty cycle 150 khz that’s the frequency of a fish finder this is the best one we tried a bunch of them but then we had some trouble getting into humans because safety and whatever safety literally people are the death sentence that kills me that I hate I hate that 10 billion people right okay so we switch it up to 400 kohtz overfiring neurons like a lot of things cause severe depression these people we did a study of 20 people at University of Arizona with severe depression really severe depression and we took fmis of them we saw the overfiring neurons here in the front you can see the overfiring neurons FM marai shows the use of oxygen and that correlates to overy

[00:54:01] neurons and we quelled them um and nearly half of our patients just first study not even tuning the dosages right went into remission of severe depression of severe depression what’s the best drug do for us today much much less much that’s crazy how long did this treatment take um we did it for 5 minutes a day um every day for the first week 5 days and then the second week 3 days and the the third week 3 days and are still in remission so you could have this device at home and um do it that way we also I showed on stage how we make sure that we align it because what we’re doing is focusing sound to that exact place and so I’ll show you how we align it a little bit later we take a cell phone and take a lot of pictures of your face and then reg make that into a mesh and register the bone structure onto the MRI

[00:55:01] but we do that while you’re wearing this so we know exactly where the transducers are so we can focus at exactly the right spot this can also be useful for addiction I was going to say I heard you say that I mean so someone who has an addictive personality addicted to drugs addicted to gambling addictions all addictions we can see the overfiring I want a glass of wine in the evening you know also I’m working on it uh is not that bad but still you know like whatever it is that your your addiction is like how do you how do you how do you um how do you down reg how do you downregulate it but also I mean this basically leap fog’s transcranial magnetic stimulation which is also approved for neurodegenerative diseases and other things so we’re and then we’re also now I mentioned uh have some early um preclinical work uh showing um amalo mic microclots and sort of ability to so it just goes on it’s a multi-purpose machine but yeah it can take it can do

[00:56:02] this also we think um uh neurodegenerative disease treatments as well as other mental diseases so the results are pretty spectacular uh and you developed this early on for strokes as well stroke detection so the let’s not let’s not forget about about your first right so the stroke detection that’s this unit that’s um the optical laser with the High Quantum efficiency camera chips that are shipping in smartphones that cost a buck a piece and with that we took um these can can we set this up a little bit so the second leading cause of death um worldwide is Strokes vessel occlusion the strok specifically because the large vessels block more flow Downstream so you’ve got a two-hour window to get yourself to the right hospital but even in the US only 5% of the hospitals can do the procedure

[00:57:00] so by law you go to the nearest hospital so your odds are 5% getting to the right hospital for the treatment you need to live so for heart attack there’s an EKG put on your chest find out if you’ve got a heart attack stop you can put an EKG on your forehead that won’t tell you if you’re having a large Vel Collision stroke so we created um a system so far with 151 patients at pan and brown in the Cal lab that’s what they call the place they do the thrombectomy a thrombectomy is basically you snake a a a catheter up your kateed artery and pull the clot out it literally is a plumbing problem the drugs don’t work because it’s too big of a clot and the implications of that large vessel being uded for too long if you’ve got a two-hour window if not if you do live you’re probably not going to walk or talk again or have a job and the brain tissue dies yeah the brain tissues you lose a third of a hemisphere on it easily if and and so your device there can actually determine whether there’s a

[00:58:00] clot where the clot is we’re able to see it with this specificity and sensitivity this this purple line now using AI 151 patients Brown and pen in the cath lab with mimics we can also see seizures they have a different um different mimic we’re also looking at um capillary blood flow as well with this cuz we can see blood flow very accurately so we we funded that for a few years and the vision here is put this device in every ambulance cuz it’s cheap and the ambulance can know this guy’s got a stroke going take them to this other hospital that can put them in a cath lab right and call the cath lab while you’re at it so they can set it up while in process like seriously those doctors know more about their Uber Eats orders than when they’re going to get the next patient life saving treatment so we can use technology to improve that so yes we’ve got that that working uh to that extent we finished that level of

[00:59:00] clinical trials we send it to the FDA they want 10,000 more patients and you’re like it’s 40 to $70,000 per patient that’s a lot of money so what do you do you get stuck on this the the bit that’s why I say that we’ve got great technology really great technology but the business model is also necessary maybe all startups are great technology combined with a new business model so how you know let’s talk about that because um so first of all I just want to frame this the technology that you have you brought together it’s converging exponential Technologies this is this is uh new chips and cameras uh AI 3D printing uh it’s it’s basically the materialization of physics that enable you to see and manipulate what’s going on uh inside your body inside the brain um that’s going to impact stroke the number two killer in the planet it’s going to allow us to uh address gleo blastomas and other aggressive cancers

[01:00:00] the cancers that uh are killing us very rapidly that we don’t have cures for it’s going to now enable us to support uh those with mental disorders and with addictions I mean that’s a massive moonshot my friend and you made it harming healthy cells these all went through autopsy at Charles River and unlike chemotherapy or radiation therapy or even surgery they could find no healthy cells harmed because they don’t have the same resonant frequency so you’re selectively picking up the cancer cells or the neurons without selecting the others and of course we can also Focus where we wish to in the body unlike a drug that spreads all over I love that and what people don’t know is one of your early Visions here and we’ll get to that eventually is that you can use this technology to read and write onto neurons so it is a version of brain computer interface without drilling

[01:01:00] holes in your head right which we’re doing we’re writing neurons now um providing them from mental disease but we go to thoughts you know real quick I’ve been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin truth is I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a cytic that kills scile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it’s one of the most incredible products I use it all the time uh if you’re interested check out the show notes I’ve asked my team to link to it below all right let’s get back to the episode so I I think the business model which goes to the name open water is you recently took a you recently took in um a large uh Grant from a well-known uh crypto technologist um right talk about that

[01:02:01] talk about this new approach to to business that has uh really given you wings uh he reached out uh he he is who uh vitalic buin who is the uh founder of ethereum and a math genius and uh very suc it’s a very successful cryptocurrency he’s the most visible person the guy Satoshi with Bitcoin he’s disappeared so metallic is a face of it he had a bunch of Shibu en coin and he sold it when Elon went on Saturday Night Live in 2021 because he realized he had like 10 billion dollars worth of it and he um dumped a lot into dead wallets but anyway he was looking for help on covid so he called me like look if I could have done any help on covid I would have dropped any everything in early 2020 and he’s like no I think you can do it so I just started talking to him like 10:00 Friday nights my time zone I don’t know where he was and you know he’d ask

[01:03:01] these really good questions so I’d end up spending the weekend thinking about it write a few pages and it just continued where we realized we should take the company open source and maybe we could help with covid and long covid and many other diseases the disease is accelerated by covid if you look at the some of the early data that has come in like a study of 54,000 veterans it’s uh it’s a amazing the the risk of neuro gen of disease doubles if you’ve had long covid uh the risk of heart failure goes up 173% stroke 164% etc etc and also we think we can help with lung covid because we can see blood flow if you drop covid into a v blood you get these micr clots those are probably not since they’re 10 to 100 microns in size they’re not making it through the capillaries again I’m just a physicist but seems to make sense to me there’s an issue there so anyway so we decided um to open source the company and we took a $50 million you decided to I it’s very important here this is a

[01:04:01] this is H going open source with your fundamental technology that right all 68 of our patents um all of our software Hardware um open source agpl so it it it continues open source and what I think that does is break this 600 this is $658 million is the average capitalized cost to get a new device just a regulatory approval in the US as averaged over every single one that’s done it in the last 30 years but 2024 it’s staggering and what’s really interesting here is that 85% of that cost is actually the device development it’s not the trials if you take that there’s another 7% if you share safety data but if you can create a platform a low Clause platform that we could so we had those carts a year ago we’ve now reduced them to this size and cost

[01:05:02] those carts were 100 to a half million dollar these are $10,000 going to $1,000 people can buy them open source is a distribution model but it’s a trust model yes so so we have everybody lots and lots of people buying these things for R&D to get their regulatory approval the regulatory approval become like apps on an Android phone so you know the the those companies can make some money on it but everybody keeps everybody honest will they make any money like guess what consumer electronics and and and Technology make money like literally 20 years ago the top five companies in the world were oil and gas they’re now Tech the Magnificent 7 you know like we can make money on it but why not like make it up on volume and save more lives for less money so vitalic says listen if you open source this I will give you $50 million essentially although there was a lot more discussion of how we could help in

[01:06:00] covid and other things and it was a long discussion I went to Zulu a couple times that was his uh anyway it it was fantastic but he used Shibu Inu coin that’s super key didn’t sell any ethereum he just people had gifted when you’re sort of a famous crypto he had gotten it and he wanted to use it for his Charities we’re not a charity but we are open- sourcing all of our technology so but I you know I think like one of the reasons one laptop per child couldn’t succeed is we had no way to make money because we we sold it at Cost so we couldn’t sustain where if we just added an extra $10 that could have solved it too but I think a for-profit entity that’s open source is maybe a better solution and I wanted to try that and I convinced all my investors to say yes at the same time and at the beginning I literally had to hold the phone really far away because they thought open source equals charity

[01:07:00] yeah but it’s not any way I could do the business model it was a 10x to 100x more Revenue with this 10x to 100x more margin than any other approach I could find because I mean it feels like we were talking uh in September at dinner it feels like Logan’s Run like nobody actually makes it like it takes too long everybody dies like getting these things out if your small company but a metronic or a GE or a you know Phillips they can take aund a thousand shots on goal so even if somebody has trouble like they they some of them get through and I think you need through the regulatory process because it’s biology is unpredictable we want more data about biology this is a way to get more data on the same platform ISO 13485 low cost I mean right now people make a cart get regulatory approval on it and then have to shrink it and then they have to go through the same process again they go through it for like 20 30 years I love a few things you’ve said I’ve heard you say that you’re basically about to use

[01:08:01] silicon and software to replace drugs yeah silicon hospital we think silicon hospital is in reach and we’ve got some good data on on cancers and mental disease and neurodegenerative disease also longevity stuff and um you know chronic diseases like diabetes and so forth by basically being able to activate certain cells and also monitor um and see uh we have some imaging technology we put on the back shelf for a while cuz we could realize we could ship these faster but we also think like ultimately we can replace the MRI machine with also a wearable uh that’s that’s low cost that leverages a lot of the technology we’re building out in these two units right now so I want to set the a vision of where things are going because I think what’s beautiful here is the same the same technology the same physics the same chipsets that are in those materials in in those devices

[01:09:01] you’ve identified with different software can give you different Therapeutics and different Diagnostics right and so if you can put those your Tech open waterers Tech into the hands of thousands of labs and scientists around the world they’ll find novel uses for it new approaches and governments so we’re working governments the ministries of health and big companies and little companies and they can trust it like whatever we if we overcharge or try to GA the for us they can go to another manufacturer and get it made we still have a really good business you know right now nobody can make these we’ve made the plans but you know Elon um open source is patents for the Rockets like go ahead spend the mour pat for for the charging station for Tesla yeah or you know just Boeing could open source all of its

[01:10:00] stuff like it’s still hard to make this stuff and design it so we’re just pushing the envelope but the problem is people are dying in the process we can make it up on volume let’s just work together like we do in consumer electronics it seems really obvious we’ve got some data that’s very promising there’s a million paper scientific papers published in the last 20 years about using infrared light ultrasound electromagnetics to treat hundreds of different diseases it’s literally a rounding error to say zero zero get into people get into the healthare system and that’s because of the $658 million in 13 years and so we have to break that mold too to move it onto a different pathway I’m from consumer electronics we ship me every year or two honestly a complex project is a two-year project so when will we see when will we see these uh being sold uh to labs and governments they’re we’re taking order

[01:11:01] reservations on our website because we can’t sell a non FDA approved thing without a document um because this is a research device but we’re selling them the reservations on our website the first one will ship out this month so 24 production in Q2 amazing um of the shrink thanks to vitalik’s gift we were able to take the money and drink it down we thought it was important CU it is seems like a general purpose platform so uh I love remember the uh the the movie um brainstorm yeah I do and they had this giant device for being able to read and write onto neurons and they shrunk it down to some small device you would stick on your head and um I viewed that as what you’re what you’re doing I mean you’re about to unleash an entire Revolution um yeah so this what else what else haven’t we covered that you want to because I have a few other things in the personal front I’ve got a few I’ve got this presentation I can

[01:12:00] sort of get rid of it but I think this is the idea is flip it on its side so many people like a different companies different organizations healthc carees can treat hundreds of diseases in parallel that lowers the cost of hardware and it gets us more safety data on that platform that we all get to share so we can make it more safe safety and efficacy are important but you don’t get approval so this open- Source thing it’s really it enables vol volum um we make money it’s a crass thing we people ask they’re like you’re nuts me like like well if you make more of something it’s cheaper it’s approximately for every 10x more you make something it’s it’s a slight exaggeration to say it’s 10x cheaper we enjoy a portion of that savings as our profit that’s it it’s Android story it’s what Android did yes yes or quality like there’s nothing quality about a 10un build that’s what the FDA considers a 10un build literally 20 years ago as you mentioned I was CTO of a division in inel our minimum sample size build was

[01:13:00] 10,000 units like just is but this enables Innovation because the best products go through the most iterations and you can leverage the product and it also engenders trust and you get a massive amount of data just a massive amount of data more yes we get to use the tools of our time for AI too to see more things and different people will do better and we you know it’ll move back and forth but we break this cycle this anti- Innovation cycle of 20 to 40 year Moes in healthcare while people are literally dying by the millions of these diseases so that’s where I get to like how do we and so there’s so much talent how do we try those so yes vitalic helped helped us try it and I convinced all of our investors to say yes at the same time and we signed the deal so it’s done we’re open source now and forever open Waters open Source how appropriate that’s great yeah I’m trying to think what else I have yeah so here’s I want to I have a couple a couple of personal

[01:14:01] questions here if you don’t mind sure um I want to know about your childhood um your dad I heard you say once your dad help you learn how to fix things how to build things right you had a farm and um he uh that wasn’t enough money so my dad started this automotive repair business um he rebuilt car engines so I was a little kid and I could shimmy under the car and probably get child protective services now but you know you figure stuff out and you know I we plowed I grew up in New England we plowed the neighbors driveways when it snowed and that ended up being me trying to figure out how to get the tractor to start up and get the plow on and all you know just all that stuff so you just sort of learn how to do that you learn how to tinkered build yeah my dad was that he grew up on a farm you know like everybody didn’t have job s there so he’s was in that transition As Americans went out of many of them and especially New England you

[01:15:01] know the Midwest lasted longer we didn’t have who who taught you art um Mary was I loved art it was to me it was the same thing and that’s where I came to in engineering um I just loved it there was actually literally the the governor of Connecticut’s sister was my art teacher in elementary school r ELO had just come in my parents hated ELO they didn’t like the art teacher either I liked the art teacher and I thought it was fun and I went to one of these schools um that not to date myself but um I started I think kindergarten 1970 this 65 um literally um they had started this the public elementary school in my district and we weren’t in a rich or fancy town we weren’t Rich um was uh continuous progress you could just do what you wanted be how you feel and I just did math and

[01:16:01] art and that’s what I wanted to do so I was doing like think calculus by fifth sixth grade but then I’d spent a lot of time in the art room because I like enjoyed that too like because math is visual I know there’s the the music genius music math geniuses that think of it in terms of music I just really like the art you also were music you played in the band didn’t you I I did but not I wasn’t good what what did you play were you a singer or were you play an instrument I was in a couple of small punk rock punk rock I can see you as a punk rocker didn’t well the Rae it was fun Lov it and then I I heard you met Andy Warhol when was that oh yeah um I well I took all these art classes when I started college my parents didn’t grow up rich and they wanted um me to be able to support myself so they said they helped me get pay for the best college I could get into if and only if I majored

[01:17:00] in electrical engineering and I thought sure I look um I started and I thought it would have killed any ounce of creativity I ever had I might have had and I’m not saying I had much it was so dry it was so boring um like inclin planes they just go these things it’s so they like you spent a whole semester on f equals zero then you spend the next semester on f equals Ma and it’s just it’s boring I found it very boring very dry so I to started taking these art classes I was at Brown as an undergraduate ry’s next door everybody says the best part it’s a famous art school the best part about Brown is rzy the best part of Ry is brown I think they’re both great but I started taking them and it turns out like I just did it to maintain my sanity it’s not like I could afford therapy or anything like that I took art courses and I ended up finishing all of the classes for a second degree in art but they wouldn’t give it to me me because I had to pay for five years I only paid for four fin but later after I got the

[01:18:01] PHD I then got an honorary PhD and they gave me the art degree then I didn’t have to pay for it and I got the honorary pH because I already had a real PhD it’s not a big risk you know well well deserved you know one of the things I talk about um is going from success to significance um and the you know so much of of entrepreneurs measure themselves by their stock price or the amount of money they raised or you know a bunch of different elements can you just speak to the entrepreneurs who are uh listening who are you know want to do s big bold significant things in life what’s your advice to them figure out a new way to do it you know I just was thinking about people keep asking first principles I always thought it was a first principal thing Maxwell’s equations but I think maybe bigger answer to this is read history read History of Science I to

[01:19:00] fund my PhD it was totally unfund this stuff I I didn’t explain what I did but it was unfund I had to get whatever ra I could I got one uh with a history of science Professor for a while and I was building equipment um creating kits for the students and then later gotten asked to do this for elementary schools in Rhode Island Etc um of like a Newtonian teles a Calon telescope there’s reasons people didn’t believe Galileo they were hard to look through when you look at what the greats walked through Faraday Galileo Franklin Ben or Rosalyn you know both of them like you um have this impression that it was always that it was easier than or something it was never easy and people just decided to do it and they just you just work on it because you love it you’re passionate about it and you you know you think you’re going to die if you don’t and if you because I I do think that if you’re going to do something that’s big bold

[01:20:00] and significant you know I like to say their overnight successes after 11 years of hard work you have to love it and you if you don’t love the job you should do something else because you do have to spend all your time on it so you know I get up in the I can’t sleep I get up to work on the thing I love the work so you you just keep if you don’t like it you’re not going to do a good job on it I work all the time I love it um it’s hard to stop me from working well you’re not working you’re you’re you’re you’re playing you’re having fun you’re fulfilling your purpose in life right what can you do so you should feel that way about it and then I guess you know another question so yeah first principles what are first principles like Oxford gave a fine if you diverged from arist Aristotelian Theory at the time that Galileo and Newton were making their breakthroughs good thing they weren’t in Oxford right like we still have rules against thinking like it’s just crazy but so you have to find there’s always these barriers you have to find and it’s not first principles

[01:21:01] it’s sort of looking at what’s been overlooked like and so when I work at something I look I go way back as far as I can go to present day go back 50 years and see what people have missed the first principles things well there’s a lot of principles and so which ones do you pick and which how do you see it can you find a new way through it given what we have now all that we have access to now people abandoned it 20 30 50 years ago can we pick that back up com you know mash up different things that’s one thing the other thing that bugs me is the common thing people ask you as a startup they say how big is your company like well how do you measure big and they usually measure it one way how many employees you have it’s the wrong question it’s the wrong answer you know I just tell them but you know it is the wrong answer it shouldn’t be the number of employees what should it how big you are um is it the SI the scale of your

[01:22:01] desired impact number of people you’re touching yeah how big um maybe they want to know I suppose if they’re interested in the company they’d like to know revenue and and and income should be the Dem total shareholder return you know if you’re on a board or something but in terms of of the start and the potential I suppose it should be measured with the potential and what the road map is should be would be interesting more interesting but maybe they’re trying to assess burn rate because that is a good measure with the number of employees and where they’re based I suppose are you glad that you didn’t pursue Open Water um straight out of Intel or straight out of one laptop and you waited till now uh or till 2016 it seems like the tech became enabled in the last few years it’s really the convergence you know the theme so you’re going to be on stage with me at the abundance 360 Summit in March which I’m excited about

[01:23:00] and the theme this year is Convergence and if I think about a technology which is the embodiment of convergence I would say what open water does is is that wow thanks yeah I think we could have made some impact in 2004 when I finally had you know my feet underneath myself after my brain tumor it took years honestly to recover that and design a better me and it’s a longer story but on the the medications that I take and getting those right it was a big fight um I could have started it then I just it was such an opportunity to partner with Nicholas and then the the opportunity to work with Sergey and Google and then with Mark were such big opportunities and and we were supposed to do it it’s just the reality is of business where they run they were responsible for these big business so I understood it so I love I enjoy the work

[01:24:00] I just knew that it could be applied to the body and I suppose yes by waiting yeah mors we’ve gotten more cycles of Mo’s law so it’s easier to make these things and also the manufacturing infrastructure is easier to use than ever before maybe because I’ve been through it so many times like you don’t need actually a lot of people because you use contract manufacturing for a lot of it and you have these teams all over the place and this communication that’s um uh transcends I think the traditional build your own Factory build your own everything it’s takes a long time to build those and so you can turn it on and turn it off quickly and and move to different factories should you find issues but that’s a detail Mary Lou um from heartfelt thank you for all that you’re doing uh this is one of the many chapters in a multivolume uh book called Dr Mary L japson um I’m excited uh people can find out more about Open

[01:25:01] Water by going to openwater dcom openwater do health. Health okay opener. health and are you on are you on social media I’m on uh Twitter x Facebook and what’s your handle there Twitter mlj mlj mlj okay mlj it is um three mlj three mlj in a row I again thank you for your Brilliance thank you for um your perseverance um and thank you for who you are uh I know very few entrepreneurs who’ve got the the spirit the mindset the perseverance and the Brilliance uh that you do so I’m grateful to call you a friend and uh thank you for your time today I’m uh I don’t even know how to respond to such a generous thing but I’m in awe of all that you’re doing and a huge fan of what doing and keep trying to support and a member of a360 and all of that so I’m uh I’ve learned so much from you um

[01:26:02] particularly through pandemic that’s when I joined because I was so isolated and sort of how do you get back to the positivism the thing that you talk about the mindset it’s an Incredible World ahead it truly is um a world you know I think people need to see you know we hear about all of the problems and and issues that are just plaguing society and and all the epidemics and obesity and all and yes those things are true and yes we have to solve the health care crisis and yes we have people and Technology like you and open water that are giving us brand new tools giving us wings um thank you so much for highlighting us and I think it’s much going to be a much bigger story we have those million papers we need to bring them in and all this talent and and just you know support them you’re going to give you’re going to give the scientific crowd uh a new iPhone equivalent um yeah that’s the thing to build apps on top

[01:27:00] and that’s another reason why it’s open source because they’re like well I don’t trust you you know like it’s competitive like everybody has access everyone can use it and we haven’t talked about the implications of AI on top of all of this right because more data these systems are going to generate massive amounts of data you might be able to understand a lot more about biology and you’ll certainly understand a lot more about safety and efficacy and the brain and the brain and read write you know 100 billion neurons 100 trillion synoptic connections and it’s still very much a black box and you’re building the telescope I’m going to call that’s what I’m call it the telescope for the brain or the microscope into the brain it really is we can see I mean I showed live on stage at Ted I think in 2018 focusing through bone and flesh we didn’t get to use real bone and flesh because there was a it’s in Canada there was a rule against it so we use Phantom tissue but we focus to a micron live on

[01:28:01] stage what does a micron buy you in terms of uh neur single Neuron a single neuron so or we could groups of neurons groups of neurons are really useful for mental disease which is and and neurodegenerative disease so that is the focus of our first products but we have a lot of technology that we’ve opened to the world people can push it forward we’ll help we can do lots of different things I can’t wait for my I mean I can imagine everybody having one of these systems at home and they can find the app I want to be happier I want to get better sleep I I mean there’s going to be anything that your brain you know implements or or impacts um right and you can get through clinical trials easier because everybody can have this at home so you can try it more easily we have you know surveillance systems in our home like cameras and microphone so we can see how the effects are and and measure them and

[01:29:00] collect more like you know my watch track or my heart rate monitor it’s accurate to plus or minus 25% but if if you Ma imagine that across Millions rather than you know you look at clinical trials people do 20 people 70 I was looking at a company last night they’ve done 10 years old they’ve done 76 patients insane that’s it yeah like how can you draw um as much meanful conclusions yes right or have the impact given you know how much they’ve spent you know whatever they spent $100 million they’ve done 76 patients and they’ve got a long road to hoe to get through approval processes which probably will need 10,000 patients and so you’re just stuck we can’t get new therapies unless we can get more people to try it how do you make sure it’s safe I mean I think there’s many of these things that look safe people say well using a different frequency we’re only using one frequency what if what if and it’s like well yeah okay great what

[01:30:01] should we do should we do we have to do this all in in a hospital do we have to do this all in a university I mean that’s where you get to spending $40 to $70,000 per patient and then the numbers become astronomical or do you work with the Ministry of Health of a Middle inome Country who’s who would like to own the regulatory you get 10,000 of yeah 10,000 100,000 of these units out there and people say I want to be part of that trial and downlo to their homes and so forth and and they can they can do the trial there or they can do it at the Ministry of Health who then owns the regulatory approval and then they do what they feel has been done to them by big Pharma for example so you know it gets interesting when a country can own the regulatory approvals and I can’t wait to see where you are in March and then uh next year I want to come back and go deeper into the early results and talk about writing and

[01:31:00] reading onto the neurons of your brain so openwater do health and on on X mlj mlj mlj uh is your handle there um have a amazing day thank you again for everything thank you Peter take care my friend [Music]