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

In this episode, Mary Lou and Peter discuss how Openwater is using AI and exponential technology to cure strokes, Mary Lou’s trajectory in big tech companies, and how technology has the power to democratize healthcare for humanity. Recorded on Dec 4th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. 11:53 | The Birth of Open Water 21:04 | The Future of Medical Technology 01:01:31 | Open Source Revolution in Healthcare Mary Lou Jepsen is a renowned technologist, inventor, and entrepreneur who has made groundbreaking contributions to display technology, consumer electronics, and medical imaging. As the founder and CEO of Openwater, she is developing advanced imaging technologies to revolutionize medical diagnostics. Jepsen has held key roles at major tech companies, including CTO of Intel Display Division, Head of Display at Google, and Executive Director of Engineering at Facebook and Oculus. She co-founded One Laptop per Child, designed the $100 laptop for children in developing countries, and founded Pixel Qi Corp to advance display innovations. With over 250 patents, her work spans display technology, virtual and augmented reality, and medical imaging. A Brown University and MIT alumna with a Ph. D. in Optical Physics, Jepsen has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People, CNN's Top 10 Thinkers, and Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Technology, receiving numerous accolades for her pioneering contributions to technology and healthcare. Learn more about Openwater: https://www.openwater.health/ Get my Longevity Guidebook here: https://qr.diamandis.com/book-audiopodcast ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  You have had 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?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Using all the stuff that's coming down the pike, maybe we could affect, on a cellular level, disease states.

• 0:29Peter Diamandis?

  These are converging exponentials. This is the intersection of physics and AI and chipsets.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  This laser, for example, was the size of a 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 multimillion-dollar MRI machine or CT machine or anything else we can find published in the literature.

• 0:48Peter Diamandis?

  So Vitalik says, listen, if you open source this, I will give you $50 million.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  All 68 of our patents, all of our software, all of our hardware. AGPL, continuous open source.

• 1:01Peter Diamandis?

  You're about to unleash an entire revolution.

• 1:07Peter Diamandis?

  Hi, everybody. Peter Diamandis here, and welcome to Moon Shots. 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 diagnostics, but incredible therapeutics to fight cancer, to fight mental disorders, to fight addictions, to fight strokes. Her name is Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen. 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 and Oculus. Along with Professor Nicholas Negroponte,

• 1:52Peter Diamandis?

  she developed a $100-one laptop-per-child program. A bachelor's in engineering, a master's from MIT, a PhD in optical physics from Brown, professor at MIT. Jepsen was named one of 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. Mary Lou Jepsen 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

• 2:37Peter Diamandis?

  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 Lou Jepsen. 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, a lot of the approaches are in fact, cheap or even free. And I want to share this with you. I just wrote a book called Longevity Guidebook 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 longevityguidebook.com, you can

• 3:19Peter Diamandis?

  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, and disruptor. And I want the world to know what you're doing because you're about to change healthcare 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 healthcare, how you're using exponential technologies to transform our lives. Honestly, how you're making the impossible possible. So thanks for the time today.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  So thank you for featuring us.

• 4:12Peter Diamandis?

  You're welcome. 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, Google and Facebook, the head of engineering there, the Intel CTO, you were reinventing everything from holography to VR screens. I mean, 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?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Using all the stuff that's coming down the pike for next generation consumer electronics, via VR, AR, LiDAR, and using the fact that both infrared light, ultrasound, and electromagnetics penetrate our body. And with the manipulation we can now do, using Moore'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 affect, on a cellular level, disease states, like kill the cancer cells without killing the healthy tissue,

• 5:38Speaker 01

  fix the stroke, fix the neurodegenerative disease. And now, it's really eight years into this, feels like 10 though, 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 disease states, including pathogen deactivation, like COVID or other diseases.

• 6:01Peter Diamandis?

  So, for anybody listening, what we're about to go on is a journey, a revolutionary journey, on how the technologies that Mary Lou 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, into different therapeutics that are, you know, I talk about the six D's, Mary Lou, that when you digitize something, it dematerializes, it demonitizes, and it democratizes.

• 6:45Peter Diamandis?

  And that's exactly what we're doing to, you know, so we say billions of dollars worth of, worth of healthcare tech?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this laser, for example, was the size of a room and a million dollars, and this is allowing us, with camera tips in your smartphone. To see blood flow twenty times better than a multimillion dollar MRI machine or CT machine or anything else we can find published in literature. It literally makes holograms. It records um the phase of light. Here's here's the eight camera chips, the lasers in there.

• 7:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  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 and the waves of 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.

• 7:46Peter Diamandis?

  And I want to 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 users, viewers and listeners, ever had anybody who has had a debilitating stroke, um, which is the second leading cause of death in the world, if you've ever had anybody with mental disease or addictions, or have had anybody who has a, uh, you know, an aggressive cancer, um, like a glioblastoma, uh, the work that you're doing is the chance to provide not just treatments, but effectively cures for these things.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Potentially a cure. I mean, we have results just from this week, looking at amyloid microplax with ultrasound at certain frequencies. And one of the issues is that the microplax 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 in neurodegenerative disease. It happens with acute COVID. It happens with type two diabetes. We're clearing eighty percent of them and we're reducing the size from an eight micron diameter to a four micron diameter. And that's a really big deal because capillaries are

• 9:07Speaker 01

  five 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. 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 knee.

• 9:23Peter Diamandis?

  And you're holding up something the size of a cigarette pack, basically.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this, and it has a transducer, ultrasound transducer, that's an eight by eight array. And we're able to focus wherever we want to using antenna theory, but we're able to make resonant frequencies that allow us to selectively attack the microclots, like an opera singer can stimulate or even break a wine glass, but harm nothing else in the room when she sings.

• 10:00Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to slow this down.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Doing this, by the way, this is a diagnostic level of ultrasound. So yes, you want to slow it down.

• 10:06Peter Diamandis?

  I want to slow it down for everybody because there's so much here. But what you're about to hear is what I think is the most important revolution in healthcare that we're going to see over the next few years with a chance to really democratize this at a extraordinarily affordable cost. I mean, this is, and I'll ask everybody to put in the comments here if you agree, this is so revolutionary that I want to get your name out there before you win your Nobel Prize. So that people know about this.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  That's the goal.

• 10:42Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to, I want to start.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  The goal is to change healthcare.

• 10:45Peter Diamandis?

  I know, I know it is.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Sort of put it on this track of other things. The 20 to 40 year moats.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Our anti-innovation for the thing that kills us and and we got to speed it up. And yes, we've got great technology. I think the business model we're using to speed it up is even more compelling. And we want to bring other technologies into the suite so we can do more.

• 11:07Peter Diamandis?

  And we'll get there. So I want to tell your story to begin with.

• 11:13Peter Diamandis?

  You're a brain tumor survivor.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:16Peter Diamandis?

  How much of that is your motivation? You mind telling that story? And where does it begin?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Kid, I was pretty sick and in the hospital a lot. And that got me really good at being on time because I knew I likely end up in the hospital. Anyway, it was finally diagnosed. I dropped out of my PhD in physics and I believe 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 Navy League School. I had already worked. I'd been a computer science professor. I had a degree from MIT. I was at Brown doing my PhD. And I called up my parents and asked them if I could, you know, come home and die.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Because Brown had a medical school. They let me see the professors there. No one could figure out what I had. This is 1995 ish. But as I was headed out, this professor said, you know, you've got really bad headaches. Right? Like, yeah, very bad headaches. So he sprung for the cost of an MRI. They found my tumor.

• 12:30Peter Diamandis?

  Now, MRIs back then, let's describe where an MRI was for comparison. Because this is.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Exactly the same size and shape. It's just 10 times more expensive today.

• 12:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Best to call it room's law, which is Moore's law spelled backwards.

• 12:44Peter Diamandis?

  It's it's a giant room. I would say it's like 20, 20 by 20 foot minimum, shielded in an electric cage with a

• 12:55Peter Diamandis?

  a large electromagnet and helium cooling.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  A power center by the most expensive room in hospitals and also the highest margin, 90% gross margin. It's where hospitals make their profit.

• 13:06Peter Diamandis?

  And so they're charging thousands of dollars for this MRI.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:11Peter Diamandis?

  Um.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  I didn't know I needed it. I would have.

• 13:14Peter Diamandis?

  Huh.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Sorry. Go ahead.

• 13:15Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I didn't know that I needed it. They found it. Then I sprung, found a really good neurosurgeon. Luckily, I 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 and 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.

• 13:52Peter Diamandis?

  You go, you go from, you go from that recovery of a brain tumor. Um, where did you launch first into your career?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'd already had some bitter career, but I, um, went to finish my PhD and myself and two other students got four million dollars from DARPA to commercialize our PhD technology. So we started a company, uh, called Microdisplay. We were the first people to make, uh, microdisplays. For, uh, we were trying to make a wristwatch video, VR, early smartphones, um, a lot of projection stuff. Padmas 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.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  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 then got recruited at Intel to be the CTO of their division. Um. I I I like smaller companies better. I don't like the sharp elbows as much. I like everybody sort of in the same little rowboat, helping each other to do the impossible rather than, I don't know, like, why do you need a thou- the goals in big companies seem to be having, you know, how big is it? It means how many people you have working on it. Where the ideal for me is sort of like WhatsApp's nineteen billion dollars, fifty people like

• 15:28Speaker 01

  that.

• 15:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Like a much more interesting.

• 15:31Peter Diamandis?

  Good 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 biodefense 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 microbiome and the RNA 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 seven hundred thousand individuals and used their AI models to deliver

• 16:15Peter Diamandis?

  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 six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following: a thirty-six percent reduction in depression, a forty percent reduction in anxiety, a thirty percent reduction in diabetes, and a forty-eight percent reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome

• 16:57Peter Diamandis?

  is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. But you ended up in Intel, and and that was an extraordinary sort of resurrection from from surgery to Intel.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, and Microsoft finishing the PhD even, you know, it was a lot.

• 17:27Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And then I left because Intel only has rail to rail processes and I ran into the CEO. The new CEO just left.

• 17:37Peter Diamandis?

  I heard.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And explained why we could never make as good silicon 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 radiation voltage. So I'm like, look, we could use anybody silicon. We're Intel. Come into my office. So anyway, I effectively pointed out in two sentences, literally in an elevator with a CEO, the fundamental flaw. And so anyway, I needed a job. I was happy. I saved them, you know, a few hundred million dollars a year of something that couldn't be in, could not be Intel silicon. Everybody hated me. Anyway, I put, I put my resume online because

• 18:22Speaker 01

  I did have that PhD in physics and I'd already been a professor. I had taken a break after my master's degree and was a computer science professor in Australia and then worked as an artist, a multimedia artist in Germany.

• 18:34Peter Diamandis?

  I want to get back to that later. I want to hear about your art career, your music career.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I only got a call, a call back at one place. It was MIT, which is pretty good. I applied to like thirty five schools.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  But I ended up with Nicholas Negroponte. I had been a student at the MIT Media Lab in the eighties. 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 interview, it was supposed to be like twenty minutes with Nicholas Negroponte, the legendary founder of the MIT Media Lab and, and many other things. We started one laptop per 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 Nicholas while we made a prototype of a laptop, copia non, and then head of the UN.

• 19:27Peter Diamandis?

  And for those who don't know, One Lap Per Child really, it was the objective of how do you get a thousand dollar laptop down to a hundred bucks?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:37Peter Diamandis?

  And you launched the entire tablet industry as part of that.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Netbook and tablet came out, so that became a bigger thing. I actually have one right over here, if you want me to grab one. You can see it on the wall.

• 19:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, beautiful green, one lap per, one laptop design.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  So this thing, and it wasn't just a stripped down laptop. It was lowest power laptop ever made, lowest cost laptop ever made, first mesh now work laptop ever made. We wrote the first keyboards in Amric 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.

• 20:12Peter Diamandis?

  How many of those were produced in total?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Millions. I mean, we created a multi-billion dollar now for profit, open source.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  And the lasting legacy is a few things. We transformed what a minister of education could do for their children of their country. Intel and Microsoft nearly killed us. There was a 60 minutes, I was gonna say, but they spent like exponentially more than we spent to stop it. But, you know, eventually they, they joined in.

• 20:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, there's a lot of undue criticism on One Laptop Per Child, but what you did was extraordinary.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  But so we changed the equation of that. We also, you know, Sundar Pichet, the CEO of Google cites this. I mean, the Chromebook is its grandson, granddaughter, whatever, one kid.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  In terms of what we can do for education to make something quite usable for children so they cross the digital divide and also useful in pandemic, right?

• 21:14Peter Diamandis?

  When did you get addicted to moonshots? Because that was probably, was that your first moonshot?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Probably holographic video. I think like when the Nobel laureate stood up when I gave my first talk and said, that's poppycock and I'll never work. And, you know, and it felt, it was probably just two minutes of insult. It felt like I was yelled at in front of everybody. First talk, you know, twenty something.

• 21:38Peter Diamandis?

  And this is the equivalent of R two D two projecting.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 and I said, you know,

• 21:56Speaker 01

  we all fit, you know, we all, you've done impossible things in your life. And like, 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?

• 22:09Peter Diamandis?

  So let me, let me understand. Let me set the setting here. So you're giving a presentation on holographic video.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  My first presentation on this research project I'm undertaking for my master's degree at MIT as a first year student.

• 22:21Peter Diamandis?

  And, and a Nobel laureate stands up and says it's crazy.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Right. It'll never work. Impossible. And I remember talking to my advisor 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 and we keep going.

• 22:47Peter Diamandis?

  I think it means it's impossible for them.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right. They tried before, but you can look at it with a new eyes and find new ways through it. And so, so, yeah, so that's, uh,

• 22:57Peter Diamandis?

  So you actually went on, you went on to build that?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yes, we did. I built the world's first holy, fully computer generated hologram with a micron sized pixels in nineteen eighty seven, which was hard to do then. Um, 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.

• 23:22Peter Diamandis?

  So that's your first moonshot. Um, would you consider one laptop your second?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we 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 so low power, too.

• 23:43Peter Diamandis?

  And durable.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  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. And like, there can be little green men inside the laptop. You care if the screen's on, if it responds to a stroke. You can shut the whole mother don't bar down a vast majority of the time, then bring it back up in in 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, had a screen. I'm a screen designer. That was the res better resolution

• 24:27Speaker 01

  than the Apple Retinal Display, same time.

• 24:31Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred bucks.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Laptop and and the computers at the time cost two laptops cost $2,000, and you had to buy $2,000 of software for them. People forget. So it was a massive change in cost structure.

• 24:42Peter Diamandis?

  And what kind of battery life did it have?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Oh, extraordinary battery life and the life of the batteries. We were the first ones. I went to BYD.

• 24:52Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, back then.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Lithium ferrophosphate battery. Because the lithium ion batteries were burning and lithium ferrophosphate burns at 100 degrees C. And we conditioned it 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 here is out of this right now. But yeah, so there was a lot of innovation.

• 25:18Peter Diamandis?

  You're talking dozens of hours of battery life?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Um, oh, uh, yeah, we last for a day or two. Um, but you could hand crank it because it's so low power or a small solar cell would recharge it and we gave those out too.

• 25:33Peter Diamandis?

  What a beautiful design. Um, uh, so thank you for that work. So after one laptop, where do you go next?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  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 tech, like, they think I know about education, like, well, you know, I know children, I was, I did go to school, but it's time to bring in 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 of the multi-billion dollar fabs of Asia, despite the best postdoc I could get, could maybe make one thing once, but then not be able to repeat it for a year because of the contamination or whatever happened in the beautiful MIT labs.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I moved to Asia, um, started a company called Pixel Chi and made really innovative screen technology as the first fabless 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. And also I was trying to work on brain computer interface and as they were starting Google Labs.

• 26:47Peter Diamandis?

  We'll come back to BCI for those listening. There's a, there's a BCI story here.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Google App hired the whole company in bits and starts.

• 26:53Peter Diamandis?

  So you end up, so you end up, uh, with Sergey at Google in their moonshot factory?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Right. Cause Sergey wanted a lot of stuff, but I'm working on innovative consumer electronics, levering Android and many other abilities of Google. So I'm doing things that Larry and Sergey 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.

• 27:21Peter Diamandis?

  I know what you did there. Yes.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Um, so there are some very cool projects, uh, and, uh, and then, you know.

• 27:28Peter Diamandis?

  Large, large holographic walls included?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  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 time.

• 28:01Peter Diamandis?

  I was just at a friend, um, I was just at, uh, Mark Pincus's home, and he has a beautiful home overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Great Bridge there. And it was, you know, floor to ceiling, thirty foot, forty foot wide windows, and it was breathtaking view. And I was like, I would love that on a screen.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Why can't anybody? And the 3D is very important.

• 28:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Screens are now about $10 a square foot. Windows are more expensive. It's amazing what's happened. Morphous silicon is 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, AI, like, but we have all of these photos of everything. And yeah, you can have updates.

• 28:50Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think you could create a, a, a large scale video wall that looks identical to a view out the window?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Well, you, I, yes. And that's like a side project. I call it my Venice Biennale project. I don't know if I'll get into.

• 29:10Peter Diamandis?

  Can I join you on that one? I love that idea.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd love to do it. And like, as an art project, and then just get it into, get it someone else to do the startup, like honestly, or maybe you can think of somebody, but you know, it's a lot.

• 29:23Peter Diamandis?

  I've got someone in mind. Yeah. No, I mean.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  But yeah, this is a side project. I have a little studio. I work on that sometimes on the weekends, just to clear my head.

• 29:30Peter Diamandis?

  And you can flip the switch and you can be on the surface of the moon, or Mars.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Right, wherever, looking over the Eiffel Tower. It's much easier if you're at optical infinity. Um, meaning, um, if you close one eye and the other eye, you see a disparity, a difference between the views. But if something's far enough away, um.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It's easier to compute.

• 29:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. Everybody's winking their eyes right now, left and right.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  It's easier to compute. So anyway, there's all this stuff, but I walked away from screen technology. I just miss it sometimes, particularly in the isolation of pandemic.

• 30:05Peter Diamandis?

  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 just before?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  It did overlap a bit with Astro. Yeah. Yeah.

• 30:18Peter Diamandis?

  And then on to Oculus from there.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mark recruited me. He had bought this company for a bunch of money. They'd never shipped anything, particularly distinguished 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 at 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 quite lucrative to go. I probably shouldn't have gone. I liked Google better.

• 30:53Peter Diamandis?

  I love Google as a culture and I mean, they've done so much.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  It fits with me better.

• 30:58Peter Diamandis?

  People don't know how much Google has done for the world in so many ways, the investments, the projects they've done.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I liked and I loved working for Sergey. He was fantastic to work for.

• 31:08Peter Diamandis?

  Hi Sergey.

• 31:11Peter Diamandis?

  Anyway, so you go and you join the team at Oculus. You're reporting directly to Mark? Were you in the, in Facebook?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  But it was, it was, I knew that it was a rocky road. I mean, they were, you know, they'd just gotten bought. They're trying, you know, whatever. So I did what I could and invented some very cool sunglass VR, AR systems and a bunch of things that hopefully will see the light of day.

• 31:45Peter Diamandis?

  So let me, taking a side there one moment, because you are the, the screen goddess and the monetization goddess. How far do you think we are from wearable AR, VR?

• 32:00Peter Diamandis?

  Specs like you're wearing right now that are light and enjoyable.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  It's a matter of will. I mean, they've spent a hundred billion dollars.

• 32:10Peter Diamandis?

  I know, it's a lot of money.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  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, Reid Hoffman wrote a book about it, blitzscaling, like when you spend a ton of money, it's not that efficient. It's not maybe supposed to be. Makes their 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 didn't like the Facebook. I don't.

• 32:43Peter Diamandis?

  You're like covering your face with a giant mask, ski gloves.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I want the million dollar view. I don't want to have to wear it. I don't want, like, so, but different, you know, all of this is true of any technology. 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 AR and different.

• 33:02Peter Diamandis?

  Since the human interface labs up at Seattle. Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  They were, yeah, but, you know, Scott, boy, I can't think of his name. I'm thinking of guy at MIT as well. But, you know, and Jaron Lanier and, you know, the different waves of it and move for it. And what we did in holography, too.

• 33:19Peter Diamandis?

  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. And you witnessed digitization, dematerialization, demonetization, democratization. You've seen the power of these technologies.

• 33:44Peter Diamandis?

  When, what was the moment that you decided, I need to focus on reinventing healthcare because it's so broken?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  When I left Intel in 2004 and pitched at the Media Lab and got the faculty position. But I got distracted with a hundred dollar 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, 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 I said, all these ideas for brain computer interface and healthcare. And when I got in, he really needed me to do other 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,

• 34:36Speaker 01

  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 in, he's like, well, you know, he kind of fixes the AR thing first and.

• 34:52Peter Diamandis?

  I spent a lot of money. I spent billions of dollars on this.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I know, but this is before. This is like, whatever. This is 2015, um, like nine years ago, I think.

• 35:01Peter Diamandis?

  So a year later, 2016.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  I left.

• 35:05Peter Diamandis?

  You left. Um, what was that? What happened? You said, it's time for me to go and build my dream company.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  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,

• 35:27Speaker 01

  when you have 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. Cause let's face it, that makes money.

• 35:43Peter Diamandis?

  Sad to say that, yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, moonshots, you know, you could call NASA a moonshot, but it was like part of the Cold War. The Wright Brothers was a moonshot.

• 36:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  The invention of the birth control panel was a moonshot. There are small teams that did it, you know, somehow. And I think it's just easier, honestly, to do it that way.

• 36:37Peter Diamandis?

  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. The 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're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in 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

• 37:21Peter Diamandis?

  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 vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, 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. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics

• 38:05Peter Diamandis?

  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 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. Really, it's 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 on to our

• 38:47Peter Diamandis?

  healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. 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 found Open Water, which is the extraordinary company we're about to dive into. Where's the name Open Water come from?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Peter Gabriel.

• 39:11Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm. Tell me about that. Peter's amazing.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Peter Gabriel, the rock star, human rights activist, extraordinaire, started calling me. I knew him from my art school multimedia days in the 80s, 90s. 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 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,

• 39:59Speaker 01

  all the issues that one has if it was transparent. So he really strongly encouraged me and kept calling. 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.

• 40:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And I have to say, full disclosure to everybody listening and watching, I am an investor through my venture fund. I'm a proud advisor of Open Water. So I'm totally completely

• 40:30Peter Diamandis?

  And I'm sharing this with you because of the extraordinary work that Mary Lou, as you shall soon see and have seen, is doing. So I want to make sure that disclosure is 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 going.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  I stunned so much.

• 40:49Peter Diamandis?

  All right, one of us.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  It continues to.

• 40:52Peter Diamandis?

  So, 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. Just to put a number on this, it's, I don't think people realize that near 25% of the US economy is going towards healthcare expenses.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:16Peter Diamandis?

  Insane.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  30% for hospitals, another 20% for doctors, that's half of it, 6% for R and D. Insurance is only like 8 or 9%, but it's, it's huge. And it doesn't move forward. Like, as you say, so articulate, sick care, you know, it's, 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 that die every year globally.

• 41:43Peter Diamandis?

  Can you describe the state of, of the medical industry today? I just want to have, I want to set the, the comparative objective that you're about to crush, kill, destroy. It's, um.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  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, 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, the treatments don't change that fast. It's now, um.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Twenty six years and close to three billion dollars for a new drug approval capitalized cost. The shocking thing for medical device, a novel medical device, it's close to seven hundred million dollars in thirteen years capitalized cost.

• 42:42Peter Diamandis?

  To get to go from an idea to developing it and getting it approved by the FDA.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Just, just for approval, let alone reimbursement and becoming standard of care, which takes you out to about one point five billion dollars. So, so you do that for a single rare disease because it's faster, costs less because you don't need as many patients. You spent a billion, let's say you save some money, you save seven hundred million, few thousand people have it, what do you charge per patient?

• 43:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  That's zeros in it, doesn't it?

• 43:12Peter Diamandis?

  Few thousand people divided by the seven hundred million or seven hundred million by the few thousand people.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  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 biggest funders of healthcare R and 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.

• 43:41Peter Diamandis?

  The saddest thing, and I know you've, you've said this, is what percentage of drugs that are subscribed, prescribed for you actually work?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah. Um, the, the number's quite low.

• 43:56Peter Diamandis?

  It's like twenty percent.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  For me personally, they work. I checked that because I.

• 44:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but it's, you assume that when the doctor.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Literally in that case, I'm missing part of my brain. It's a pituitary gland. I molecularly replace it age and sex appropriate doses. But, but for most people, yeah, do they work or not? And do they cause harm? It's a thing.

• 44:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  For sure. And you know, like, it's it's fifty, forty to seventy thousand dollars 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 got to do ten thousand, a hundred thousand 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 Moore's Law are two of those big exponentials. So there's others as well, which you can list for us, because

• 44:54Peter Diamandis?

  I list them all the time.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  But but but clinical trials are, they they're exponentially slower and exponentially more expensive over time, as has been well graphed, and they call it Moore's Law backwards, Evers 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's it's it's less risky for a regulator to approve a new treatment or medical device or so forth. But it's also safer for a doctor and patient

• 45:39Speaker 01

  to make a decision for their healthcare. 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 or 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.

• 46:01Peter Diamandis?

  We're going to use, so what Mary Lou is talking about is using physics and AI and chipsets to just not only diagnose but treat disease. It is

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:13Peter Diamandis?

  It is, it is six D's, it is

• 46:18Peter Diamandis?

  It is dramatically dropping costs by not 10x. We're talking about potentially, you know, hundreds and thousands of x reduction in cost.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:27Peter Diamandis?

  And, and putting this technology in potentially every village throughout Africa. Mary Lou.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Despite economic level and borders and it's like consumer electronics. We all have like.

• 46:55Peter Diamandis?

  So Mary Lou, let's, let's jump into some of the, 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, it's as impactful as the, as the mobile phone has been.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  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 build out these carts in about the year 2020 and get them in the hospitals. And we've got really great results in sensitivity and specificity. We were able to.

• 47:40Peter Diamandis?

  So slow down, slow down here one second because what you, what you've been doing is utilizing and miniaturizing ultrasound and lasers and, and cameras to be able to impact things.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'll show more a little bit later, like we've got great results and I can go about that. But so we've now shrunk these down.

• 48:06Peter Diamandis?

  How big, how big were these things before? Because they're the size now of something like a headband, right?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  They were the size of the room, the thing blacked 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 stuff that Intel does, but like using various voltages and frequencies and.

• 48:54Peter Diamandis?

  So this desktop image you have here is basically the breadboard, the proof of concept that the physics works.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are big optical tables that float in nitrogen gas and allow you to do experiments where you can see the phase of light, which is.

• 49:11Peter Diamandis?

  And if you had to say how much it got miniaturized in scale and price between 2016 and today, well, give me some orders of magnitude.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  These are multimillion dollar systems. We went down to the carts, which were a hundred to $500,000, and then we went down to this size. So I have it with me, like here is the console.

• 49:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  That was the cart.

• 49:33Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  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. 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 pathogen deactivation and also senescent cell rejuvenation as well as amyloid micro clot 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.

• 50:18Peter Diamandis?

  So it's a, it's looks like a hundred X or a thousand X reduction in, in, in volume.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And the cost, we're, we're selling these for 10K, but at volume, this goes to the cost of a smartphone.

• 50:30Peter Diamandis?

  So what would that, give me a number here.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Thousand bucks.

• 50:34Peter Diamandis?

  Thousand X reduction in price.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, it'll, the, the actual device.

• 50:39Peter Diamandis?

  No, but from where it was in 2016.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  But you can treat something for the cost of a phone call then.

• 50:45Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  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 panda disease impact.

• 51:02Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's, let's dive into the major ones here because let's start with.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  I can show you, yeah, I can show you some of that. Sorry, I've got.

• 51:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  So 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 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.

• 51:27Peter Diamandis?

  But just so people to know, glioblastoma is right now a death sentence. A hundred percent of people do not survive it. I had a friend recently who passed. And if you, if you've ever heard of someone having a deadly brain cancer, it's the last diagnosis you want to hear. And there's very little you can do. And from the time of diagnosis, typically it's months, maybe a year that you have left.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:10Peter Diamandis?

  Because they're growing so fast.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  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, mesh the frequency and destroy that wine glass and harm nothing else in the room. So we did that first with 16 different types of glioblastoma and grew them up in organoids and went through sound sweeps over many octaves and many rhythms to find the ones that killed. The glioblastoma cells and didn't harm the healthy tissue.

• 52:43Peter Diamandis?

  So you found their resonance frequency.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then 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 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.

• 53:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Diagnostic level destroyed the tumor, needed another dose at day five, two minute dose, 10% duty cycle, 150 kilohertz. That's the frequency of a fish finder.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  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 know the death sentence.

• 53:31Peter Diamandis?

  That kills me. I hate that part.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  10 billion people. Right. Okay. So we switched it up to 400 kilohertz, over firing 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 FMRI's of them. We saw the over firing neurons. Here in the front, you can see the over firing neurons. FMRI shows the use of oxygen and that correlates to over firing neurons. And we quelled them. And nearly half of our patients, just for study, not even tuning the dosage is right, went into remission.

• 54:12Peter Diamandis?

  Of severe depression?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Of severe depression.

• 54:15Peter Diamandis?

  What's the best drug do for us today?

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Much, much less, much.

• 54:20Peter Diamandis?

  That's crazy. How long did this treatment take?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Um, we did it for five minutes a day, um, every day for the first week, five days, and then the second week, three days, and the third week, three days.

• 54:34Peter Diamandis?

  Five minutes.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And they're still in remission. So you could have this device at home. And do it that way. We also 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 cellphone, take a lot of pictures of 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.

• 55:10Peter Diamandis?

  I was gonna say, I heard you say that. I mean, so someone who has an addictive personality, addicted to drugs, addicted to gambling, addictions, all addictions?

• 55:18Speaker 01

  We can see the overfiring. I want a glass of wine in the evening.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  I'm working on it.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  But still, you know, like whatever it is that your addiction is, like, how do you? How do you?

• 55:33Peter Diamandis?

  How do you downregulate it?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  But also, I mean, this basically leapfrogs transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is also approved for neurodegenerative diseases and other things. So we're, and then we're also now, I mentioned, have some early preclinical work showing amyloid microclots and sort of ability to destroy them. So it just goes on. It's a multipurpose machine. But yeah, it can take, it can do this also, we think,

• 56:05Speaker 01

  neurodegenerative disease treatments as well as other mental diseases. So the results are pretty spectacular.

• 56:11Peter Diamandis?

  And you developed this early on for strokes as well?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 56:16Peter Diamandis?

  Stroke detection. Let's not forget about your first.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Right, so the stroke detection, that's this unit. That's the optical laser with the high quantum efficiency camera chips that are shipping in smartphones that cost a buck apiece. And with that, we took these, put them on heads.

• 56:35Peter Diamandis?

  Can we set this up a little bit? So the second leading cause of death

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Worldwide.

• 56:41Peter Diamandis?

  Worldwide is strokes.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  It's large vessel occlusion, the strokes 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. So your odds are 5% of 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 stat. You can put an EKG on your forehead. That won't tell you if you're having a large vessel occlusion stroke. So we created a system so far with 151 patients at Penn

• 57:24Speaker 01

  and Brown in the cath lab. That's what they call the place they do the thrombectomy. 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. And the implications of that large vessel being occluded 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.

• 57:50Peter Diamandis?

  And the brain tissue dies.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the brain tissues, you lose a third of a hemisphere on it easily.

• 57:55Peter Diamandis?

  And so your device there can actually determine whether there's a clot, where the clot is.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're able to see it with this specificity and sensitivity, this, this purple line now, using AI, 151 patients, Brown and Penn in the cath lab with mimics. We can also see seizures. They have a different, different mimic. We're also looking at capillary blood flow as well with this because we can see blood flow very accurately. So we, we funded that for a few years.

• 58:25Peter Diamandis?

  And the vision here is put this device in every ambulance because it's cheap.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:30Peter Diamandis?

  And the ambulance can know this guy's got a stroke going, take him to this other hospital that can put him in a cath lab.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Right. And call the cath lab while you're at it so they can set it up while

• 58:43Peter Diamandis?

  Save minutes.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  in process. Like seriously, those doctors know more about their Uber Eats orders than when they're going to get the next patient.

• 58:50Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, God.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Life-saving treatment. So we can use technology to improve that. So yes, we've got that, that working to that extent. We finished that level of clinical trials. We sent it to the FDA. They want 10,000 more patients. And you're like, it's 40 or 70 thousand dollars per patient. It's a lot of money. So what do you do? You should 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.

• 59:22Peter Diamandis?

  You know, 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, this is new chips, cameras, AI, 3D printing. It's, it'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, the number two killer on 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 cures for.

• 1:00:06Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  And you've made it harming healthy cells. So these lines 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. 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.

• 1:00:46Peter Diamandis?

  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 holes in your head.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Right, which we're doing. We're writing neurons now. We're writing them for mental disease, but we go to thoughts, you know?

• 1:01:08Peter Diamandis?

  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 OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic 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. All right, let's get back to the episode. So I think the business model, which goes to the name Open Water, is you recently took

• 1:01:49Peter Diamandis?

  a, you recently took in a large grant from a well-known crypto technologist.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:00Peter Diamandis?

  Talk about that. Talk about this new approach to, to business that has really given you wings.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  He reached out.

• 1:02:10Peter Diamandis?

  He is, he is who?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Vitalik Buterin, who is the founder of Ethereum and a math genius and very success. 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 Inu coin and he sold it when Elon went on Saturday Night Live 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, I'm like, if I could have done any help on COVID, I would have dropped down everything in early 2020. And he's like, no, I think you can do it.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  So I 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, 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 some of the early data that has come in, like a study of 54,000 veterans. It's uh, it's uh, amazing. The, the risk of neurodegenerative disease doubles if you've had long COVID. Uh, the risk of heart failure goes up one hundred and seventy-three percent, stroke one hundred and sixty-four percent, et cetera, et cetera. And also, we think we can help with lung COVID because we can see blood flow.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  If you drop COVID into viral blood, you get these microclots. Those are probably not, since they're ten to a hundred 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 um, to open source the company. And we took a fifty million dollar.

• 1:03:58Peter Diamandis?

  You decide to, I mean, it's very important here. This is a, this is uh, going open source with your fundamental technology.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Right. All sixty-eight of our patents, um, all of our software, all of our hardware. Um, open source AGPL, so it, it, it continues open source. And what I think that does is break this six hundred, this is six hundred and fifty-eight million dollars is the average capitalized cost to get a new device, just a regulatory approval in the US, has averaged over every single one that's done it in the last thirty years, but in twenty twenty-four dollars. It's staggering. And what's really interesting here is that eighty-five percent of that cost is actually the device development. It's not the trials. If you take that, there's another seven percent if you share safety data.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  But if you can create a platform, a low-cost 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 a hundred to half a million dollars. These are ten thousand dollars going to a thousand dollars. People can buy them.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Open source is a distribution model, but it's a trust model.

• 1:05:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  So we have everybody, lots and lots of people buying these things for R and 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 tack, the magnificent seven, 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?

• 1:05:49Peter Diamandis?

  So Vitalik says, listen, if you open source this, I will give you $50 million.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Essentially, although there was a lot more discussion of how we could help in COVID and other things, and it was a long discussion. I went to Zuzulu a couple of times. That was his, uh, anyway, it was fantastic. But he's Shiboo Eunin Coin. That's super key. Didn't sell any Ethereum. He just, people had gifted when you're sort of, uh, famous crypto, he had gotten it and he wanted to use it for his charities. We're not a charity, but we're 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

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  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, hold the phone really far away because they thought open source equals charity.

• 1:07:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  But it's not any way I could do the business model. It was a 10x to 100x more revenue

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  with this 10x to 100x more margin than any other approach I could find. Because, I mean, it feels like we were talking in, 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 you're a small company. But a Medtronic or a GE or a, you know, Philips, they can take a hundred, 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 thirteen forty five, low cost. I mean, right now, people make a cart, get regulatory approval on it and then have to shrink it.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  And then they have to go through the same process again. They go through it for like twenty, thirty years.

• 1:07:57Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, Silicon Hospital, we think.

• 1:08:06Peter Diamandis?

  Silicon Hospital.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  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 because we could realize we could ship these faster. But we also think like ultimately we can replace the MRI machine with also 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.

• 1:08:45Peter Diamandis?

  So I, I want to set the, a, a vision of where things are going because I, 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 you've identified with different software can give you different therapeutics and different diagnostics.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:09Peter Diamandis?

  And, and so if you can put those, your tech, open waters tech into the hands of thousands of labs and scientists around the world, they'll find novel uses for it, new approaches.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  And governments. So we're working with 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 gouge them first, they can go to another manufacturer and get it made. We still have a really good business.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  You know, right now, nobody can make these. We've made the plans, but you know, Elon open sourced his patents for the rockets. Like, go ahead, spend the money.

• 1:09:52Peter Diamandis?

  And open source his patents for for the charging stations for Tesla.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  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. 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 papers, scientific papers, published in the last 20 years about using infrared light, ultrasound, and electromagnetics to treat hundreds of different diseases. It's literally a rounding error to say zero, zero. Get into people, get into the healthcare system. And that's because of the $658 million in 13

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  years. And so we have to break that mold, too, to move it on to a different pathway. I'm from consumer electronics. We ship them every year or two. Honestly, a complex project's a two-year project.

• 1:10:53Peter Diamandis?

  So when will we see, when will we see these being sold to labs and governments?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  They're, they're taking order reservations on our website because we can't sell a non-FDA approved thing without a document, because this is a research device. But we're selling the, the reservations on our website. The first one will ship out this month.

• 1:11:14Peter Diamandis?

  So end of 24, early June, 25.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  In Q2.

• 1:11:19Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  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 like a general purpose platform.

• 1:11:30Peter Diamandis?

  I love, remember the, the, the movie, Brainstorm?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:11:36Peter Diamandis?

  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'd stick on your head. And I viewed that as what you're, what you're doing. I mean, you're about to unleash an entire revolution.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Peter Diamandis?

  What else, what else haven't we covered that you want to go a few other things in the personal?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got a few that I've got this presentation and I can sort of get rid of it. But I think this is the idea is flip it on its side. So many people like different companies, different organizations, health cares 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 volume. We make money. It's a craft thing. We make, people ask, they're like, you're nuts. 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.

• 1:12:43Peter Diamandis?

  It's Android's story. It's what Android did.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Or quality, like, there's nothing quality about a 10-unit build. That's what the FDA considers a 10-unit build. Literally 20 years ago, as you mentioned, I was CTO of a division in Intel. Our minimum sample size build 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.

• 1:13:11Peter Diamandis?

  And you get a massive amount of data, just a massive amount of data.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  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'll, you know, it'll move back and forth. But 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, Vitalik 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.

• 1:13:54Peter Diamandis?

  Open waters, open source, how appropriate. That's great.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm trying to think what else I have. Yeah, so here's.

• 1:14:00Peter Diamandis?

  I want to, I have a couple of, a couple of personal questions here, if you don't mind. I want to know about your childhood. Your dad, I heard you say once, your dad helped you learn how to fix things. How to build things.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:13Peter Diamandis?

  Talk to me about that.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  And he, uh, 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, I, we plowed, I grew up in New England. We plowed the neighbors' driveways when it snowed and that ended up me and 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.

• 1:14:48Peter Diamandis?

  You learn how to tinker and build.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  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, especially in New England. You know, the Midwest lasted longer. We didn't have.

• 1:15:04Peter Diamandis?

  Who, who taught you art?

• 1:15:07Peter Diamandis?

  Mary Lou, was it your mom?

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  I loved art. It was, 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, the governor of Connecticut's sister was my art teacher in elementary school, random, Elagroso had just come in. My parents hated Elagroso. 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 that, not to date myself, but I started, I think kindergarten in nineteen seventy. It was already sixty five.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  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. It 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 fifth, sixth grade. But then I'd spend 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.

• 1:16:21Peter Diamandis?

  You also were, you played in the band, didn't you?

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  I did, but not, I wasn't good.

• 1:16:27Peter Diamandis?

  What, what did you play? Were you a singer or did you play an instrument?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  I was in a couple of small punk rock.

• 1:16:35Peter Diamandis?

  Punk rock. I can see you as a punk rocker.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Well, it's their age. It was fun.

• 1:16:39Peter Diamandis?

  And then I heard you met Andy Warhol. When was that?

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  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. So they said they'd help me get pay for the best college I could get into if and only if I majored in electrical engineering. I thought, sure.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Like inclined planes.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  So like you spend 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 started taking these art classes. I was at Brown as an undergraduate. RISD is next door. Everybody says the best part, it's a famous art school. The best part about Brown is RISD. The best part of 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.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  But later, after I got the 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.

• 1:18:07Peter Diamandis?

  I think that is well.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Because I already had a real PhD. It's not a big risk, you know.

• 1:18:12Peter Diamandis?

  Well, well deserved. You know, one of the things I talk about is going from success to significance. And the, you know, so much 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 listening, who are, you know, want to do big, bold, significant things in life? What's your advice to them?

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  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 principle thing, Maxwell's equations, but.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  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 RA I could. I got one with a history of science professor for a while. And I 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 Roslin,

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  you know, both, like you have this impression that it was always, that it was easier then 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.

• 1:19:53Peter Diamandis?

  I hope you're gonna go there because I, I do think that if you're gonna do something that's big, bold and significant, you know, I like to say their overnight success is after 11 years of hard work, you have to love it.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  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 and 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 gonna do a good job on it. I work all the time. I love it. It's hard to stop me from working.

• 1:20:27Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  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 Aristotelian theory at the time that Galileo and Newton were making their breakthroughs. Good thing they weren't at 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, it's sort of looking at what's been overlooked. Like, and so when I work at something, I go way back as far as I can, go to the present day, go back 50 years and see what people have missed. The first principles thing, well, there's a lot of principles.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  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? Can, 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.

• 1:21:53Peter Diamandis?

  What should it be?

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  How big you are?

• 1:21:59Peter Diamandis?

  Is it the scale of your desired impact?

• 1:22:04Peter Diamandis?

  Number of people you're touching?

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, how big? 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 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 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.

• 1:22:37Peter Diamandis?

  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?

• 1:22:49Peter Diamandis?

  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. 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.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  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 other, the medications that I take and getting those right, it was a big fight.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  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 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 is, we've gotten more cycles of Moore's law. So it's easier to make these things. And also, the manufacturing infrastructure is easier to use than ever before, probably because I've been through it so many times. Like, you don't need actually

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:24:43Peter Diamandis?

  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 Open Water by going to openwater.com?

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Openwater.health.

• 1:25:05Peter Diamandis?

  .health, okay. Openwater.health. And are you on, are you on social media?

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  I'm on Twitter, X, Facebook.

• 1:25:14Peter Diamandis?

  And what's your handle there?

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Twitter, mlj, mlj, mlj.

• 1:25:18Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, mlj it is.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Three mljs.

• 1:25:23Peter Diamandis?

  Three mljs in a row. 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, the spirit, the 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.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  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 you're 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, 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 so.

• 1:26:10Peter Diamandis?

  It's an incredible world ahead. It truly is. 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 healthcare crisis. And yes, we have people and technology like you and Open Water that are giving us brand new tools, giving us wings.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:26:52Peter Diamandis?

  You're going to give, you're going to give the scientific crowd a new iPhone equivalent?

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing.

• 1:26:59Peter Diamandis?

  To build apps on top of.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  And that's another reason why it's open source. Cause they're like, well, I don't trust you. You know, like it's competitive. Like everybody has access. Everyone can use it.

• 1:27:09Peter Diamandis?

  And we haven't talked about the implications of AI on top of all of this, right? Because these, these systems are going to generate massive amounts of data.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  You might be able to understand a lot more about biology and you'll certainly understand a lot more about safety and efficacy.

• 1:27:24Peter Diamandis?

  And the brain, right?

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  And the brain and read, write, you know.

• 1:27:28Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred, a hundred billion neurons, a hundred trillion synaptic connections and it's still very much a black box. And you're building the telescope. I'm not going to call it, that's what I call Open Water, the telescope for the brain or the microscope into the brain.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  It really is. 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 stage.

• 1:28:02Peter Diamandis?

  And what does a micron buy you in terms of?

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  A single neuron, a single neuron. Uh, so or we can groups of neurons, groups of neurons are really useful for mental disease, which is 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.

• 1:28:24Peter Diamandis?

  I can't wait for my, I mean, I can imagine everybody having one of these systems at home and they can pine the app. I want to be happier. I want to get better sleep. I mean, there's going to be anything that your brain in, you know, implements or or impacts.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  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 microphones. So we can see how the effects are and and measure them and collect more like, you know, my watch tracker, my heart rate monitor, it's accurate to plus or minus 25%. But if if you 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.

• 1:29:20Peter Diamandis?

  It's same.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:29:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Like, how can you draw?

• 1:29:26Peter Diamandis?

  Meaningful conclusions, yes.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Right. Or have the impact, given, you know, how much they've spent, you know, whatever they spend $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 said, well, you're using a different frequency. You're only using one frequency. What 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 a hospital? Do we have to do this all in a university?

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  I mean, that's where you get to spending forty to seventy thousand dollars per patient. And then the numbers become astronomical. Or do you work with the Ministry of Health of a middle income country? Who's, who would like to own the regulatory?

• 1:30:21Peter Diamandis?

  Or do you get ten thousand of these? Yeah, ten thousand, a hundred thousand of these units out there and people say, I want to be part of that trial.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Right. And then they send 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.

• 1:30:50Peter Diamandis?

  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 reading onto neurons of your brain. So, openwater.health and on, on X, M L J, M L J, M L J, uh, is your handle there. Um, have a amazing day. Thank you again for everything.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Thank you, Peter.

• 1:31:15Peter Diamandis?

  Take care, my friend.