She Left Google to Build Tech That Could Save Millions w/ Mary Lou Jepsen | EP #142

28:46Look, but we have all of these photos of everything. And yeah, you can have updates. Did you create a large scale video wall that looks identical to a view out the window? Well, yes, and that's like a side project. I call it my Venice Biennale project. I don't know if I'll get into that. 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 it someone else to the start of like honestly, or maybe you can think of somebody, but you know, it's a lot of fun. I've got someone in mind. Yeah, no, I mean. Because this is the side project I have a little studio I work on that sometimes on the weekends, just to clear my head.

29:30And you can flip the switch and you can be on the surface of the moon, or Mars, or anything. Right, wherever it looks. Over the Eiffel Tower. It's much easier if you're at optical infinity. Meaning if you close one eye and the other eye, you see a disparity, a difference between the view. But if something's far enough away, it's easier to compute. Yes. Everybody's winking their eyes right now, left and right. So anyway, there's all this stuff. But I walked away from screen technology. I just miss it sometimes, particularly in the isolation pandemic. So you're with Sergey, you're in the moonshot factory there, which was an exciting time.

30:10I mean, you know, with Astro, were you there when Astro was there or just before? It 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'd never shipped anything particularly distinctly just 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 happen 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.

30:46So it was quite lucrative to go. I probably shouldn't have gone. I liked Google better. Despite the years. I love Google as a culture. And I mean, they've done so much. It makes me better. People don't know how much Google has done for the world in so many ways, the investments, the projects they've done. Yeah, I liked, and I loved working for Sergei. He was fantastic to work for. Hi, Sergei. How are you doing? Anyway, so you go and you join the team at Oculus. You're reporting directly to Mark, where you in Facebook. It moved around. They called me Game Changer. Whatever, I had another title too.

31:24but I was supposed to figure out how to change the game from what we were doing. But it was, I knew that it was a rocky road. I mean, they were, you know, they'd just gotten bought, they were turned, you know, whatever. So I did what I could and invented some very cool sunglasses, VR AR systems and a bunch of things that hopefully we'll see the light today. So let me take it aside there one moment because you are the screen goddess and the the nutrition goddess. How far do you think we are from wearable ARVR specs like you're wearing right now that are light and enjoyable? It's a matter of will.

32:07I mean, they've spent a 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 they've pursued that has seen the light of day. It's not that efficient. I mean, I think, you know, read Hoffman wrote a book about it, but scaling like when you spend a ton of money It's not that efficient. It's not maybe supposed to be makes our taxes come out right whatever But it's a lot of money mark really deeply believes in it. I don't know I think I Would didn't like the Facebook. I don't You're like covering you like covering your face with a giant mask ski ski golf I want the million dollar view.

32:48I don't want to wear it I don't want. So, but different, you know, all of this is true of any technology. It's all a bunch of different opinions and it makes and match. And this has been going on since the late 60s with VR and AR and different on... Since the human interface labs up at Seattle. They were, yeah, but, you know, Scott, boy, I can't think of his name. I'm thinking of God and my tea as well. But, you know, in Jarin Linear, you know, they look different waves of it and move for it and what we did in the LogarPete too. So I want to set the picture here. You have been at the top of the entire tech stack the industry at Intel, at Google, at Facebook.

33:32And you witnessed digitization, dematerialization, demonetization, democratization. You've seen the power of these technologies. 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 it at the Media Lab, and got the faculty position, but I got distracted with $100 laptop and thought, well, I can get that to work faster. Even though everybody thinks it's impossible, I thought it was much faster. Then, I got hooked into that, and when I went into Google, I was supposed to work on this, but then when I caught in, And Sergei said, no, we just wanted to know you were creative.

34:21Like I said, all these ideas were brain computer interface and healthcare. And when I got in, he really needed me to do other things. I was actually pretty happy to be working there on the things that I was doing. So that took a back seat. 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 a whiteboard in the room and what we could do for health care and like this is it He gets it and then I come in he's like, well, you know he got a fix. This is me our thing person I've been a lot of money.

34:53He's been billions of dollars on this. I know But this is before this is like whatever this is 2015 like nine years ago. I think I So a year later 2016 you left What was that? What happened? You said it's time for me to go and build my dream company. Well, 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 when you had 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 up.

35:43It's sad to say that. It's true. 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. And it's just frustrating because the educating these, 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, it's just, it's, look, moonshots. You know, you could call them now the moonshots, but it was like part of the Cold War.

36:24The Wright Brothers was a moonshot. Yes. The invention of the birth control panelism, they're 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. Companies called Fountain Life. 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're all optimists. Until that day, when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician and they burn in your room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on.

37:09And 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 building 20 around the world These centers give you a full -body MRI a brain a brain vascular chair and AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque dexascane a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced Workup you'll ever receive 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable.

37:56You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Found life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 health 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 fountainlife .com -peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people who reached out to us for fountain life memberships. If you go to fountainlife .com -peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. It really is something that is 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 life spans.

38:49Go to fountainlife .com, backslash, Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. All right, so it's 2016 and you found Open Water, which is the extraordinary company we're about to dive into. Where's the name Open Water come from? Peter Gabriel. Mm. Tell me about that. Peter's amazing. Peter Gabriel, the rock star, human rights activist, extraordinaire, started calling me. I knew him from my art school multiple days in the 80s and 90s. And I ran into me to conference and told them when I was doing, he started calling me every day, saying, you've got to leave Facebook, you have to do this outside.

39:35And he started writing, he wrote this essay about open water, about 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 issues that one has if it was transparent. So 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 got sweat equity. He's also an investor.

40:16As a group. And I have to say full disclosure to everybody listening and watching. I am an investor through my venture fund. I'm in a proud advisor of open water. So I'm Totally completely biased and I'm sharing this with you because of the extraordinary work that Mary Lou as you She'll soon see and have seen is doing so I want to make sure that disclosures out there in the open 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 Stuncelnet all right one of this It continues to. So what was the vision here? So let's now dive in because the tech you have built and you are now rolling out is going to save millions of lives.

41:04Just to put a number on this, I don't think people realize that near 25 % of the US economy is going towards healthcare expenses. Right. And say, three percent for hospitals, another 20 % for doctors, that's half of it, six percent for R &D. Insurance is only like eight or nine percent, but it's so, it's huge. And it doesn't move forward. Like as you say, so articulate sick care, you know, it's not moving the needle fast enough. We need to do something better if we care about people's lives. I don't think we're counting the 55 million people to die every year globally. Can you describe the state of the medical industry today?

41:48I just wanna set the comparative objective that you're about to crush, kill, destroy. It's a... It's the cycle time. I mean, there's some good cures, but you know, you got one of those diagnosed, you know, what, you know, 30 % of us are taken out with cardiovascular disease, another 25 % with cancer, or day in day out, you know, neurodegenerative disease takes you out if you last long enough. There's the pathogens, there's the other chronic diseases like diabetes and so forth. And the treatments don't change that fast. It's now 26 years and close to $3 billion for a new drug approval, capitalized cost.

42:33The shocking thing for medical device, a novel medical device, it's close to $700 million in 13 years capitalized costs 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 disease because it's faster cost less because you don't need as many patients who spent a billion.

43:08Let's say Yeah, so you know, a few thousand people divided by the seven heart million or just seven million by the things like it's an understatement to say the vast majority of humanity can't afford that cost. So what are we doing? Why are we funding this? The biggest funders of healthcare R &D nine out of every ten healthcare dollars in the US comes from NGOs and GOs and they're funding things that's like, you know, maybe trickle down economics works eventually. But the saddest thing, and I know you've said this, is what percentage of drugs they're a prescribed prescribed for you actually work?

43:50Oh, oh, yeah. The numbers quite low. I don't have it. Yeah, it's like 20%. For me personally, they work. I check that because I don't. But it's, you assume that when the doctor, in that case, I'm missing part of my brain. It's a pituitary gland. I'm a lecularly replaced at age and sex proferatosis. 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, it's 50, 40 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 neurodegenerative disease. You've got to do 10 ,000, and 100 ,000 patients.

44:32So the cost becomes in the time becomes prohibitive. So we have to somehow change this. If we want more innovation until leverage the tools of our time, yes, AI, but also Moore's Law are two of those big exponentials. So there's others as well, which you can list for us. Because I list them all the time. But clinical trials are, they're exponentially slower and exponentially more expensive over time, as has been well -graved and they call it Moore's Law Backwards, the E -Room's Law. So that's the big problem that I think you have to change, which enables you to enable low cost, but also get more data.

45:24If you can get more data than we've ever had before, or you can, it's less risky for a regulatory to approve a new treatment or medical device or so forth. But it's also safer for a doctor and patient to make a decision for their healthcare. So why not just collect more data? We're really good at crunching data. We're gonna learn even more through crunching the data of the eye tolls that 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.

46:01We're going to use, so what Mary Lou is talking about is using physics and AI and chip sets to just not only diagnose but treat disease. It is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is dramatically dropping cost by not 10X. We're talking about potentially, you know, hundreds and thousands of X reduction in cost. Yeah. And putting this technology in potentially every village throughout Africa. Mary Lou, I've been with billionaires all through my, it's interesting and 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 why I spent my Thanksgiving weekend.

46:46It's everybody, like, it's by economic level and borders. And it's like consumer electronics. We all have like, you know. So Mary, let's jump into some of the graphics you have here. I want people to internalize and understand the incredible tech you have built and what the implications are. Because people need to see this to understand it and believe it because it is impactful as the mobile phone has been. Yeah, we started in labs like these and worked to develop different designs, modulating the phase of light and sound and and then came to build out these carts and about the year 2020 and get them in hospitals and we got nearly great results and sensitivity and specificity, we were able to...

47:40So slow down here one second because what you've been doing is utilizing and miniaturizing ultrasound and lasers and cameras to be able to impact things. Yeah, so I'll show more a little bit later. Like we've got a great result, and I can go about that. But so we've now shrunk these down. How big were these things before? Because the size now of something like a headband, right? They were the size of the room. The thing like that. That's what we started with in 2016, with the size of the room, in manipulating the phase of light and sound. So we could steer it wherever we wanted to in the body.

48:25We 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 tip design, not the digital stuff I'm gonna tell you what that means. But like using various voltages and frequencies and so this desktop image you have here is basically the breadboard, the proof of concept that 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.

49:11And if you had to say how much it got miniaturized in scale and price between 2016 and today will give me some orders of magnitude. These are multi -million dollar systems. We went down to the carts, which were 100 to $500 ,000, and then we went down to this size. So I have it with me. Like here is the council. Yes. The cart. Okay. That starts production next to this one. And here's, you know the headset for it that comes in different sizes. We have a six pack of ultrasound for the abs, 3D print, whatever you want, strap it to the part of your body. We envision this going on the back of your knee to do both pathogen deactivation and also senescent cell rejuvenation as well as emaloid microclot removal.

50:04We have some very good results in research to that right now. So there's that and I've shown you the box for our image system is this is the console for it. So it's a it's looks like a hundred X or a thousand X reduction in volume. And the cost we're selling these for 10k but at volume this goes to the cost of a smartphone. So what would that give me a number here? thousand X reduction of price. Oh, sorry. The actual device. No, but from 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.

50:58So yeah, it's a device with pan disease impact. Well, let's dive into the major ones here because let's start. Well, I can show you some of that. Sorry, I've got... This is the waves and we steer the waves. So here's like cancer cells in glioblastoma. We did have some great results with glioblastoma. And the problem is a 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 just so people to know, glioblastoma is right now, Well, it de -sens, 100 % of people do not survive it. I had a friend recently who passed. And if you've ever heard of someone having a deadly brain cancer, it's the last diagnosis you want to hear.

51:47And 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 aggressive cancer cells share a mechanical property that normal cells don't have, which is 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.

52:26So we did that first with 16 different types of glioblastoma and grew them up in organoids and went through sound swaves over many octaves and many rhythms to find the ones that killed the glioblastoma cells and didn't harm the healthy tissue. So you found the resonant frequency? Yeah and then we did that in mice. So here are the mice. This is the size of the tumor without treatment. Here are a few minute dose at a diagnostic level. That means lower than used on pregnant women and their fetuses in the Western world on billions of them for the last 50 years. Diagnostic level, destroyed the tumor, needed another dose at day five, two minute dose, 10 % duty cycle, 150 kilohertz.

53:17That'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 in the death sentence. That kills me. I hate that part. You said 10 billion people. Right. Okay. So we switched it up to 400 kilohertz overfiring neurons. Like a lot of things caused severe depression. These people, we did a study of 20 people at University of Arizona, was severe depression, really severe depression. And we took FMRIZE of them. We saw the overfiring neurons here in the front. You can see the overfiring neurons.

53:56FMRIZE shows the use of oxygen and that correlates to overfiring neurons. And we quelled them. And nearly half of our patients just for study, not even tuning the dosages right went into remission with their device. 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? We did it for five minutes a day, every day for the first week, five days, and then the second week, three days, and the third week, three days. And the three days are still in remission. So you could have this device at home and do it that way.

54:42We also showed on stage how we make sure that we align it, because what we're doing is focusing sound to that exact place. I'll show you how we align it a little bit later. We take a cell phone, take a lot of pictures with your face, and then make that into a mesh and register the bone structure onto the MRI. 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?

55:18We can see the overfiring. I want a glass of wine in the evening. You know what I'm saying? I'm working on it. It is not a bad, but still, you know, like whatever it is that your addiction is, like, how do you, how do you, how do you downregulate it? But also, I mean, this basically leapfrogs transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is also a proof for neurodegenerative diseases and other things. And then we're also now, I mentioned, have some early preclinical work showing amyloid microclots and sort of ability to just go around. So it just goes on. It's a multipurpose machine. But yeah, it can take, it can do this also, we think, neurodegenerative disease treatments as well as other mental diseases.

56:08So the results are pretty spectacular. And you developed this early on for strokes as well. It's a stroke detection. So let's not forget about your first application. Right, so the stroke detection, that's this unit, that's the optical laser with the high quantum efficiency camera chips that are shipping and smartphones that cost a bucket piece. And with that, we took these. Can we set this up a little bit? So the second leading cause of death Worldwide world wide is strokes and a stroke is inclusion the stroke 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 So by law you go to the nearest hospital.

57:02See your odds are 5 % So I'm getting to the right hospital for the treatment you need to live. So for heart attack, there's an EKG. Put on your test, 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 cell collision stroke. So we created a system so far with 151 patients at Pan and Brown in the cath lab, that's what they call the place they do, they run back to me. A thrombectomy is basically you snake a catheter up your carotid 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.

57:40And the implications of that large vessel being included for too long. If you've got it to our window, if not, if you do live, you're probably not gonna walk or talk again or have a job in the middle of it. Yeah, the brain tissue dies. Yeah, the brain tissue, you lose a third of a hemisphere on it easily. And so your device there can actually determine whether there's a clot, where the clot is. We're able to see it with this specificity and sensitivity, 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, different mimic.

58:16We're also looking at capillary blood flow as well with this because we can see blood flow very accurately. So we funded that for a few years. The vision here is put this device in every ambulance because it's true. 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 Save minutes in process like seriously those doctors know more about their uber eats orders than when they're gonna get the Nexation like a living treatment. Yeah, so we can use technology to improve that So yes, we've got that working to that extent.

58:59We've finished that level of clinical trials. We send it to the FDA and want 10 ,000 more patients. And you're like, it's $40 ,000 or $70 ,000 per patient. That's a lot of money. So what do you do? You get stuck on this. 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 high. Let's talk about that because, 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 new chips, cameras, AI 3D printing.

59:41It's basically the materialization of physics that enable you to see and manipulate what's going on inside your body, inside the brain. That's going to impact stroke number two killer in the planet. It's going to allow us to address glioblastomas and other aggressive cancers, the cancers that are killing us very rapidly that we don't have curious for. It's going to now enable us to support those with mental disorders and with addictions. I mean, that's a massive moonshot, my friend. And you've made it... healthy cells. Without a doubt, yes. It 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 frequencies.

1:00:32So 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 what 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 holes in your head. Right. What you're doing, we're writing neurons now. We're writing them for mental disease, but we go to thoughts, you know. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin.

1:01:12Truth 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 syndolytic that kills senile 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. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. Alright, let's get back to the episode. So I think the business model which goes to the name Open Water is you recently took a you recently took in a large grant from a well -known technologist.

1:02:00Talk about that. Talk about this new approach to business that has really given you wings.

1:02:09He reached out. He is. He is who? Vitalik Bitterin, who is the founder of Ethereum and a math genius. And it's a very successful cryptocurrency. He's the most visible person, the guy Satoshi with Bitcoin. He's disappeared. So Vitalik is a face of it. He had a bunch of Shibu Inakoi and he sold it when Elon went on Saturday Night Live in in 2021, because he realized he had like $10 billion worth of it. And he dumped a lot into dead wallets. But anyway, he was looking for help on COVID. So he called me and I'm like, like, if I could have done any help on COVID, I would have dropped everything in early 2020.

1:02:52And he's like, no, I think he can do it. So it just started talking to him like 10 o 'clock, Friday nights, my time zone. I don't know where he was. And you know, he'd ask these really good questions. So I'd end up spending the weekend thinking about it right 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 some of the early data that has come in like a study of 54 ,000 veterans, it's amazing. The risk of neurodegenerative disease doubles if you've had long COVID.

1:03:29The risk of heart failure goes up 173%, stroke 164%, etc., etc. And also we think we can help in long COVID because we can see blood flow. If you drop COVID into a viral blood, you get these microclots. 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 it makes sense to me there's an issue there. So anyway, so we decided to open source the company and we took a $50 million. So you decided, I mean, it's very important here. This is going open source with your fundamental technology. Right. All 68 of our patents, all of our software, all of our hardware, open source, So it continues open source.

1:04:20And what I think that does is break this $658 million as 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 in 2024 dollars. 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 -class platform that we could so we had those carts a year ago. We've now reduced them to this size and cost those carts were 100 to a half million dollars.

1:05:04These are $10 ,000 going to a thousand dollars. People can buy them. Open Source is a distribution model, but it's a trust model. We have lots and lots of people buying these things for R &D to get their regulatory approval. The regulatory approval becomes like apps on an Android phone. Those companies can make some money on it, but everybody keeps everybody honest. They make any money. like guess what? Consumer like Chinese and technology make money like literally 20 years ago the top five companies in the world were oil and gas. They're now tax the Magnificent Seven. We can make money on it but why not make it up on volume and save more lives for less money?

1:05:50So Vitalik says listen if you open source this I will give you $50 million. Essentially although there is a lot more discussion of how we could help in COVID and other things And it was a long discussion. I went to, these are a couple times, that was his, anyway, it was fantastic, but he just, Shibu Inekoi, that's super key, didn't sell any Ethereum. He just, people had gifted when you're sort of 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 think like one of the reasons since one laptop per child couldn't succeed as we had no way to make money because we sold it at cost.

1:06:38So 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 than 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. 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 in September at dinner.

1:07:18It feels like Logan's run. Like nobody actually makes it. Like it takes too long. Everybody dies. Like getting these things out if you're a small company, but a metroniker, GE or, you know, Phillips, they can take 100 -1 ,000 shots on goal. So even if somebody has trouble, like, 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 1345 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.

1:07:55They go through, like, 20, 30 years. I love a few things you've said. I've heard you say that you're basically about to use silicon and software to replace drugs. Yeah, silicon hospital. We think it's in reach. And we've got some good data on cancers and mental disease and neurodegenerative disease, also longevity stuff. And chronic diseases, like diabetes and so forth, by basically being able to activate certain cells and also monitor and see. We have some imaging technology we put on the back shelf for a while, because we could realize we could ship these faster. But we also think, like ultimately, we can replace the MRI machine.

1:08:37We'd also aware of all 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 vision of where things are going because I think what's beautiful here is the same technology, the same physics, the same chipsets that are in those materials, in those devices you identified, with different software can give you different therapeutics and different diagnostics. Right. Exactly. And so if you can put those, your tech, open water's tech into the hands of thousands of labs and scientists around the world, they'll find novel uses for it, new approaches.

1:09:24Right. And governments. So we're working governments, the ministries of health, and big companies and little companies. And they can trust it. Like, whatever, if we overcharge to try to guide to the forest, 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 open -source his patents for the rockets. Like go ahead, spend the time. And open -source his patents for the charging stations for Tesla. Yeah, or, you know, just Boeing could open -source all of its stuff. Like it's still hard to make this stuff and design it.

1:10:03So 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 papers, scientific papers published in the last 20 years about using infrared light ultrasound and electromagnetic to treat hundreds of different diseases. It's literally a rounding error to say zero, zero, get into the healthcare system. And that's because of the $658 million in 13 years. And so we have to break that mold too to move it on to a different pathway.

1:10:45I'm from consumer electronics We ship any every year or two A complex project is a tier -year project So when will we see when will we see these being sold to labs and governments? They're they're taking order reservations on our website because we can't sell a non FDA approved thing without a document and because this is a research device, but we're selling them the reservations on our website, the first one we'll ship out this month. So it was in the 24 really good production. And Q2. Amazing. Of the shrink. Thanks to Vitalik's gift, we were able to take the money and shrink it down. We thought it was important, because it is seems to the general purpose platform.

1:11:30So I love the member, the movie 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 which stick on your head. And I viewed that as what you're doing. I mean, you're about to unleash an entire revolution. Yeah. So this is still... What else happened we covered that you want to do? A few other things in the personal. Yeah, I've got this presentation. I can sort of get rid of it. but I think this is the idea, flip it on its side. So many people like a different company, it's different organizations, healthcare, it's country, hundreds of diseases in parallel.

1:12:11That 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 volume. We make money, it's a craft thing. People ask, they're like, you're nuts, And I mean, like, well, if you make more of something, it's cheaper. It's approximately for every 10 X more, you make something. It's it's it's light exaggeration to say it's 10 X cheaper. We enjoy a portion of that savings as our profit. That's it. It's Android. It's Android story.

1:12:45It's what Android did. Yes. Yes. Or quality. Like there's nothing quality about a 10 unit bill. That's what the FDA considers a 10 unit bill literally 20 years ago. As you mentioned, I was CTO of a division didn't tell. our minimum sample size bill was 10 ,000 units. 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. Yeah, so we get to use the tools of our time for AI too to see more things and different people will do better and we'll move back and forth.

1:13:23but we break this cycle, this anti -innovation cycle of 20 to 40 year moats 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 this? So yes, Fatale 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 water's open source. How appropriate. That's great. Yeah. I'm trying to think what else I have. Yes. So here's one. I want to have a couple of personal questions here if you don't mind.

1:14:02Sure. I want to know about your childhood. Your dad, I heard you say once your dad hope you learn how to fix things, how to build things. Or you had to open up on. and that wasn't enough money, so my dad started this automotive repair business. 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, we plowed a group in New England, we plowed the neighbor's driveways when it snowed and that ended up me, me trying to figure out how to get the tractor to start up and get the plow on and all that.

1:14:45You know, just all that stuff. So you just sort of learn how to do that. You learned how to tinker and build. Yeah, my dad was that. He grew up on a farm. You know, like everybody didn't have jobs there. So he was in that transition as Americans went out of many of them in Switzerland and England, you know, the Midwest lasted longer. We didn't have. Who taught you art? Mary Lou was in a long time. A lot of art. To me, it was the same thing. and that's where I came to in engineering. I just loved it. There was actually literally the governor of Connecticut's sister was my art teacher in elementary school, random Eligraso, it just come in.

1:15:27My parents hated Eligraso. They didn't like the art teacher either. I like the art teacher and I thought it was fun. I went to one of these schools that not to date myself, but I started I think kindergarten 1970, I'm sorry, 1965. Literally, 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. Was a continuous progress. You could just do what you wanted, be how you feel, and I just did math and art. And that's what I wanted to do. So I was doing like, I think, calculus by 5th, 6th grade, but then I'd spend a lot of time in the art room because I enjoyed that too.

1:16:12Like, because math is visual. I know there's the music genius, music, math geniuses that think of it in terms of music. I just really like you. But you also were, you played in a band, didn't you? I did, but not I wasn't good. What did you play? Were you a singer or were you playing instrument? I was in a couple of small punk rock. Punk rock, I can see you as a punk rocker. Well, it's the rage of fun. And then I heard you met Andy Warhol. When was that? Oh yeah. Well, I took all these art classes when I started college. My parents didn't grow up rich and they wanted me to be able to support myself.

1:16:53So they said they'd help me get pay for the best college I could get into if and only if. I made it in electrical engineering. I thought, sure. I don't know. 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. Like incline planes. It's just so, it's like you spent a whole semester on F equals zero. Then you spend the next semester on F equals M A and it's just, it's boring. I found it very boring, very dry. So I started taking these art classes. I was at Brown as an undergraduate, RISD's next store.

1:17:33Everybody says the best part is of famous art school. The best part about Brown is RISD. The best art RISD 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 a 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 because I had to pay for five years. I only paid for four. But later, after I got the PhD, I then got an honorary PhD. And they gave me the art to give me that. I didn't have to pay for it.

1:18:06And I got the honorary PhD. I think that was well. Because I already had a real PhD. It's not a big risk. Well, well deserved. One of the things I talk about is going from success to significance. And so much of entrepreneurs measure themselves by their stock price or the amount of money they raised or a bunch of different elements. Can you just speak to the entrepreneurs who are listening, who are want to do big, bold, significant things in life? What's your advice to them? Figure out a new way to do it. I was just thinking about people keep asking first principles. I always thought it was the first principle thing, Masel's equations.

1:18:49But I think maybe the bigger answer to this is read history. Read history of science. To fund my PhD was totally unfundable. The stuff I didn't explain I did, but it was unfundable. I had to get whatever R .A. I could. I got one with a history of science professor for a while. And it was building equipment, creating kits for the students. And then later, got NASA to do this for elementary schools in Rhode Island, etc. Of like a Newtonian telescope. A Galileo 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 Rosalind, you know, both of them.

1:19:37Like, you 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 gonna die if you don't and if you don't go there because I do think that if you're gonna Do something that's big bold and significant, you know, I like to say they're overnight success after 11 years of hard work You have to love it and you have if you don't love the job You should do something else because you do have to spend all your time on it see you know I can't sleep.

1:20:16I get up to work and love the work. So 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. It's hard to stop even working. Well, you're not working. You're playing. You're having fun. You're fulfilling your purpose in life. Right. 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 Aristotelian theory at the time that Galileo and Newton were making their breakthroughs, good thing they weren't at Oxford, right?

1:20:51We 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. It's sort of looking at what's been overlooked. So when I work at something, I look at the way back as far as I can, go to the present day, go back 50 years and see what people have missed. The first principle thing, well, there's a lot of principles and so which one's deep 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.

1:21:29Can we pick that back up, 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. I just tell them, but it is the wrong answer. It shouldn't be the number of employees. What should it be? How big you are? Is it the scale of your desired impact? Number of people you're touching. Yeah, how big? Maybe they want to know, I suppose if they're interested in the company, they'd like to know revenue and income should be the total shareholder return, you know, if you're on a board or something.

1:22:19But in terms of the start and the potential, I suppose it should be measured in the potential and what the roadmap 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 Straight out of Intel or straight out of one laptop and you waited till now 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 gonna be on stage with me at the abundance 360 summit March which I'm excited about and the theme this year is convergence and if I think about a technology which is the embodiment of convergence.

1:23:08I would say what Open Water does 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 medication, so they take and get in those right, it was a big fight.

1:23:37I could have started it then. It was such an opportunity to partner with Nicholas and then the opportunity to work with Sergei and Google and then with Mark were such big opportunities. And we were supposed to do it. It's just the realities of business where they run, they were responsible for these big business. So I understood. So I love, I enjoy the work. I just knew that it could be applied to the body. And I suppose, yes, by waiting, yeah, more, we've gotten more cycles of more law. So it's easier to make these things. And also, the manufacturing infrastructure is easier to use than ever before, but maybe because I've been through it so many times.

1:24:19Like, 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 in this communication that transcends, I think, the traditional build your own factory, build your own everything. It takes a long time to build those. And so you can turn it on and turn it off quickly and move to different factories to define issues. But that's a detail. Mary Lou, heartfelt thank you for all that you're doing. This is one of the many chapters in a multi -volume book called Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen. I'm excited. People can find out more about OpenWater by going to OpenWater .com.

1:25:04OpenWater .health. That health. OpenWater .com. And are you on social media? I'm on Twitter, X, Facebook. And what's your handle there? Twitter, MLJ, MLJ. MLJ, it is. 3 MLJs. 3 MLJs in a row. So again, thank you for your brilliance. Thank you for your perseverance. And thank you for who you are. I know very few entrepreneurs who've got the spirit mindset, the perseverance, and the brilliance that you do. So I'm grateful to call you a friend. And thank you for your time today. I'm, I don't even know what you're trying to say to such a generous thing. But I'm in awe of all that you're doing and a huge fan of what you're doing and keep trying to support.

1:25:55And a member of A360 and all of that. So I'm, I've learned so much from you, 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 is the world. It's an incredible world ahead. It truly is. A world, you know, I think people We need to see, you know, we hear about all of the problems and issues that are just plaguing society 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.

1:26:40Thank you so much for highlighting us. And I think it's going to be a much bigger story. we have those million papers. We need to bring them in and all this talent and just you know support them. You're going to give the scientific crowd a new iPhone equivalent. Yeah, that's the thing. To build apps on top. And that's another reason why it's open source because they're like, well, I don't trust 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 Because these systems are going to generate massive amounts of data.

1:27:18You 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, right? And the brain and read brain. You know, 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections. And it's still very much a black box and you're building the telescope. I don't know. That's what I'm talking about. The telescope for the brain or the microscope into the brain. And really, I mean, I show live on stage at TED, I think in 2018, focusing through bone and flash. We didn't get to use real bone and flash because there was a, it's in Canada, there was a role against it.

1:27:57So he's phantom tissue, but we focus to a micron, live on stage. And what is a micron by you in terms of, uh, uh, a single neuron, a single neuron? And so, or we could groups of neurons, groups of neurons are really useful for mental disease, which is an end 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.

1:28:33I want to get better sleep. I mean, there's to be anything that your brain implements or impacts. 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 surveillance systems in our home like cameras and microphones. So we can see how the effects are and measure them and collect more. Like, you know, my watch tracker, my heart rate monitor, it's accurate. it's a plus or minus 25%. But if you imagine that across millions, rather than you look at clinical trials, people do 20 people. I was looking at a company last night.

1:29:17They've done 10 years old. They've done 76 patients. It's insane. That's it. Like how can you draw as many? Minisol conclusions, yes. Right, or have the impact, given how much they've spent, 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 how do you make sure it's safe? I mean, I think there's many of these things that look safe. People say, well, you're using different frequency, releasing one frequency.

1:29:56What if, what if? And it's like, well, yeah, okay, great. What should we do? Should we, do we have to do this all in in the 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 a Ministry of Health of a Middle -Income Country who would like to own the regulatory? Or do you get 10 ,000 of people out there and people say, I want to be part of that trial and download software, and 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.

1:30:44So you know it gets interesting and a country can own the regulatory approvals. I can't wait to see where you are in March and then next year I want to come back and go deeper into the early results and talk about writing and reading onto neurons of your brain. So openwater .health and on xmljmlj is your handle there. Have a amazing day. Thank you again for everything. Thank you Peter. Take care my friend.