36: Chronic Heart Conditions to the Worlds First AI Powered Health Care // The Story of Marie Johnson

For him, the fear that all this is just going to keep happening. A person who loved sport, loved running, loved, you know, all the outdoor activity, what was his life? And for him, that was very, very difficult. We could create a digital human cardiac coach on the basis of all the work that we've done over all these past 14 years. The convergence of the timing of the technology was right.

Welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. I'm your host, Eric Gilbert Williams and this is the podcast where we explore personal stories of people who hit absolute rock bottom, then got back up, wiped off the dust, kicked failure to the curb, and now they're rocking it like you'd never believe if you didn't hear it. Live right here we we cover subjects in business, sports and life in general. If you like this podcast, please share it. These interviews are intended to inspire, to motivate, to give hope and vision. So please share this episode with someone who needs it. Use your Instagram account, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Hand signals, trained pigeon. Send smoke signals up in the air, use morse code, whatever you like. Just share the love and share this episode. Also, email me anytime. Podcasterrickgilbertwilliams.com Send me questions you would like to have asked of future guests and I will incorporate them. Or just send me some suggestions on how to run a better podcast. Or just say hello, I'd love to hear from you. That's podcasterricgilbertwilliams.com I know you're going to love today's interview, so let's get started with us here today on From Rock Bottom. The Rocket is CEO of the center for Digital Business. None other than the crazy brave woman herself, Maria Johnson. And I met Maria through a interesting string of connections. As you guys mostly know, I was out in California last year in Silicon Valley doing my startup and I was living in this entrepreneurial house of amazing people and there was a group called the Tech Girls Movement that basically just helps young girls get into tech to help raise the bar, increase accessibility for females entering the tech space. So I volunteered a little bit with this Tech Girls movement out of Australia and it was a really fun show and experience. It felt like a show because these girls are presenting their tech ideas. Anyways, interesting tangent. We'll talk about that later. Through that connection, I met Maria because she's contributing and helping that organization and that's how we made this connection. That's how we met each other. Now she is the co creator of Nadia. Maria is the co creator of Nadia, which is basically the world's first AI powered digital human for service delivery in the healthcare space. And we'll talk about that a lot today because I'm fascinated by the subject and it's very important, specifically in this era of COVID Maria's left a huge wake of accomplishments in her past in awards, which I think basically just speak for themselves. So I'll just list them off, the ones that I know of anyways, and I think this gives a good perspective. The UN awarded her program of business entry point in 2005, 2006, and I think it was the very first time for such in Australia. In 2006 and 2007, she was awarded the Innovative CIO of the Year in Australia. In 2009, it was the Prime Minister's award for the basics card. In 2013, it was Australia's 100 Women of Influence. Back in 2005 and 2006, she took up the role of Microsoft Worldwide Executive Director of Public Service and E government. Obviously that's a huge deal. In 2019, she was awarded the Exceptional Woman of Excellence award at the Women Economic Forum. Mario, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Hey Eric, great to meet you and great to join you today. All the way from Canberra, Australia.

All right. Yeah, I'm out in Calgary, Alberta right now and then heading back to Silicon Valley pretty soon. The heart of tech, in my opinion. And on that subject of tech, from what I can see, is it fair to say that you're basically creating essentially a doctor experience, but with AI, so you could walk into your living room or just open up your phone or in your kitchen or in your bedroom, and through Zoom or through whatever video streaming system that you're using, you can essentially talk to a doctor that's not a human, it's actually AI. And it's AI that understands you and speaks to you to essentially solve the concept of public health care access for the planet, no matter where you are, as long as you have Internet access, whether that be by landline or satellite or through your phone, whatever it happens to be, as long as you have Internet access, you can now essentially have unlimited healthcare support via AI. It's early stages now, but it's making huge leaps and bounds and it's basically working. And to keep in perspective, there's so much of the population on the planet today that physically does not have access to healthcare, whether that be advice or a doctor, or just any sort of medical system at all. They don't even have access. And if they do, often that access is very limited or poor. And qu maybe it's not fair to look at the Western world or the first world countries of the world, I mean to say, and maybe the impact isn't going to be so noticeable with us. It's more going to be noticeable with say, third world countries that haven't really had this experience before. Like how about we start with this? How many people do not have access to a healthcare system right now?

Well, that's a very interesting question, Eric, because my approach to this is from a health illiteracy perspective. And health illiteracy affects in fact all populations, but it affects disadvantaged communities even further. Now what that means is that people don't even understand the concepts, have got no knowledge of concepts, so how can they even articulate a question? And so this really disadvantages huge percentages of the population. So to give an example, Even in Australia, 60% of the Australian population is health illiterate. The indigenous population, that gets up to 80% in the United States, very, very similar figures. And in some of the more indigent communities that can be up to 90%. So, and this is common across the world. And yet health information is presented in a very, very complex way. You know, it's great to be in a doctor surgery if you ever get there, but even when you're there, most people, even educated people really don't understand the conversation. And particularly if that conversation is a life and deaf conversation or at least a life confronting conversation. Now I've been there four times with my husband.

My assumption of AI powered healthcare is not going to impact first world countries all that much. That's not an accurate thing to say.

Correct. And it will be in deep pockets in all of those communities. So whether it's in first world countries or even developing economies, because the common theme, and this is where I think AI will be enormously powerful from a humanitarian perspective, the common theme that people have the common urge is to understand and to be understood. Right. So just moving into the, from the patient perspective to understand what is being told to you. I mean if you can't read, well, you know, you can't get that information. But even health information that is written on health websites, on the American Heart association website, on the, you know, Australian Heart association website, on the British Heart foundation websites, all these websites write health information for at least the grade 10 level literacy and often up to college grade. And yet with health illiteracy that impacts most people, most people can't read it. They'll have a reading age of about grade five or below. So there is, so that is in across the populations and it's far deeper in other communities. So what that means is people cannot even express what it is that they need to find out. Therefore they're not getting educated about their own health. Now what this translates to is higher rates of mortality. So if we think about heart health, which is the particular focus I'm taking, but in taking that focus on heart health, we see common patterns across the entire health ecosystem. And cardiac vascular disease is the biggest killer worldwide. About 18 million people die each year worldwide from cardiac vascular disease. In the United States, cardiac vascular disease affects one third of the population and of that a great percentage of those people are disadvantaged. And so the health system won't be able to cope, still can't cope with this huge demand.

So if we pause just for a second here and I can give some perspective to listeners just so that they know what we're talking about right now. Because, you know, I've seen the TED talk, right? I've seen the video, I've seen the demo, I've seen this AI in action. But if you haven't seen this before, when we say that healthcare run by AI is gonna impact the world, what does that even mean? Well, what we're talking about is literally on your mobile device, on your laptop, you turn on the camera, you turn on the microphone and there's what appears to be a human looking at you. It's blinking, it's moving, it has expressions, the face looks like skin and it's moving and asks you how you're doing, right? As a respondent, as a person. If I say, oh, I'm doing okay, you know, like, obviously I'm not doing okay when I say it that way, right? It's like Igor and Winnie the Pooh, I'm alright. That's an indicator that there's something not right because of the tone of voice, the pitch, the type of words, the pauses in between them. Is it on a positive or negative key? Like all that information is being harnessed and gathered by this AI to interpret what might actually be going on behind the physical words themselves. And then we can take that information and connect it with other data points. For example, how was my medical history over the past X amount of time on any given subject? When was the last time I went to the doctor? What kind of lifestyle do I have? What's my eating habits? And all this data that we are now tracking through a variety of. This is the age of Internet of things. All this data can be plugged in to an AI driven healthcare professional essentially to come to some Conclusions and at least guide us in the right direction. And of course there's certain points where we have to speak with a human, but a, a lot of this red tape and this getting stuck and not having any access at all can be solved and is being solved by AI. And this is the type of experience that is available right now and the direction that we're headed to as a race here on Earth, right? There's advancements on every front right now. There's so much innovation. It's really inspiring to me. Anyways, I'm ranting now. I just wanted to make sure people understood what was meant by AI driven healthcare. And anyways, please continue. Sorry about that.

Great. Correct. And that's our vision and it's all possible now. In fact, it's happening. So for example, person gets discharged from hospital, that's if they get to hospital, right? You know, that's one of the issues. Person gets discharged from hospital, say with having heart surgery, right? We call that falling off the cliff because you, you know, who do you go to for help? So you get discharged from hospital. The research that has been done is that the discharge process itself takes eight minutes. Now that's to turn a person who's in hospital from being totally dependent on everything. Their food, you know, their bathing, all their food, their medication. And in that eight minutes to educate that person, they walk out the door. Here's your 10 meds and your 10 appointments. Good luck. Right? And the person is so traumatised, and I know this, they're so traumatised, they don't remember things. And there's decades of research on this. So they get home and what happens? They forget to take their medications. They don't understand what their medications are for. At high risk of readmission from either injury or some other misadventure. Now that drives a lot of costs for the health system. And there's been research on that as well as bad outcomes from the person themselves. So our vision, and we've got a number of these already up on the web, is to be able to have a conversation in your home with your digital human. And by the way, my vision is not just to have like young female Personas, right? But to have digital humans that reflect the community served. So, you know, if you're an indigenous person, it should be appropriate for you to be able to engage with a digital human of your community, for example, right? Because that is so important for trust and engagement. So we can talk a bit more about that. But the idea is you can't remember all of these things. So in the quiet time when you get home, when you are so afraid to be able to open up your computer or your iPad or whatever, and to be able to have this conversation, a guided conversation with your digital human cardiac coach that says, hey, Alan, how are you going? I can't remember a thing that I was told, okay, I'm going to guide you through five important things or four important things. Just in this immediate time, you will need to know. Most important thing is make sure you keep going to your doctor, etc. So this reinforcement is so necessary for the person to build their knowledge, to build their confidence, to keep going on their journey. So that's in that immediate period. But our vision is to have this as a lifelong coach. A lifelong coach, because particularly in some of these chronic diseases, the risk of readmission or secondary events is very, very high. And in our case, we had four. And that's from people who are reasonably educated. So the idea is you've got this digital human, which is an avatar. Other work that I've done previously, people have also said I might prefer to have a non human looking like avatar. So if I'm a person with disability or in the autism community, I'm like a superhero. But the mannerisms, that engagement with that conversational dialogue is what really drives that engagement. So our vision is to be able to have the digital human health coach to be with a person throughout their life. Now, you can imagine a person perhaps, whether they're living at home or they might just have their partner with them, but to have senses in the home, right, that can trigger these conversations. And I've had conversations with some groups actually in the United States about this. So a person gets up five times during the night to go to the bathroom. Well, that might be if you like, indicate that something is not right. You know, there's a health issue emerging. So that can trigger our vision is that that will trigger a conversation with the digital human. Hey, Al, how are you this morning? Went to the bathroom five times last night. Can we have a conversation about how you're feeling? The vision might be. Perhaps we should set up a call with your doctor. Right. So the interconnections with systems and sensors in the home is really, really important here. What we can do, and this is on our development path, is also to do things like hold up your medication box or your medication little jar to the webcam. And with machine vision, object recognition, for the digital human to be able to say, hey, Al, they're statins. And I can explain really simply what those are for. But you can imagine someone, most people, you can't even read, you know what's on the medication label, the print's too small. And of course, people with health illiteracy simply don't understand. So this omnichannel interface, if you like, really helps everybody at different points through their health journey. So that's part of the vision and we would say that it is not about diagnosis and treatment. This is actually an important area for the healthcare professional to remain front and center. This is to be, if you like, a companion for the person in all those other times when they're not interacting with their health professional. So that's an important thing.

There's so much innovation on every front. This is a fascinating time in my opinion, for the entire species. The entire human species is going through a massive evolution right now on almost every front. Elon Musk doing his work with extending brain power beyond the physical limits and going to the Mars. And we have Bitcoin revolutioning the financial system. Never mind speculation and price movements. The concept of Bitcoin liberating and eliminating corruption and overhead to having a financial strong, foundational, economical system in anywhere in the world. Things like this that are just revolutionary across the planet. I have some friends that work for Google X, which means they can't tell me much. And they have one of them working on project title. Basically, go and clean the world's oceans. Here's a big giant wad of money. Go do it, tell me when you're done. Or project sustenance, I think it's called. Basically go automate food production to the point where there's more food created by robots than there are humans to consume it. Let's go solve world hunger. These are the types of revolutionary things happening right now. And here's AI. Let's give healthcare at a basic level to everyone on the planet instantly right now. And this opens an interesting subject, the subject of AI and what the heck is it? I feel like we're in this era. It's like the dot com bubble where any company right now that puts AI into their business name all of a sudden becomes more popular and their pitch deck sounds more attractive to investors. Like, oh, I make tables with AI. What does that even mean? Right? I'm a mug manufacturer with AI. What do you mean? How does AI have anything to do with tables or mugs? But having AI in the name is this buzzword. How do you differentiate between crap marketing, AI that actually isn't AI at all. It's just a buzzword. And the true AI, the impactful, global, changing AI that you're doing, how do you siphon through the crap and differentiate?

Well, there's clearly a lot of marketing spin, right. About all of this.

Yeah. And blockchain AI, and you're at a.

Whole new level for me. There's no escaping the hard work. Right. You know, so you're talking about your colleagues at Google doing these amazing things, you know, cleaning the ocean. That doesn't happen overnight. Right. So we have been working this for 14 years. Right. So, and what that means is we have mapped all because of our lived experience, we have mapped all those conversations that happen across a person's lifetime in their health journey, and in this case, with cardiac care. But mind you, with comorbidities, a lot of these conversations are the same. And Alan's background, he was working in expert systems some 30 years ago. So we've got this fortunate convergence, if you like, of life skills and, you know, a lived experience to really accelerate in this field. So when I say there's no shortcuts, there's no shortcuts in some of these really deep, hard areas. Now what we work on is bounded domains. So not like Siri or Alexa, where you can ask it pretty much any thing, right. From the general population, and it will learn those things, will learn anything, including racist or bad things. But our model is bounded and it's bounded for depth in cardiac health care. Right. From a patient's, from a patient's perspective. And what we've done is, particularly from a health illiteracy perspective, there's some, there's some problems with big data, the big data model, and one of the problems is if a population is across the board, so health illiterate, then crowdsourcing content or information from a health illiterate population will skew the results. Similarly, crowdsourcing from a expert populations, such as health practitioners also skews results because those people aren't speaking to the health illiterate population. So what we've done in our development is the model of bounded domain for healthcare in guided conversations. So navigating between what a patient needs to know but doesn't have the, even the conceptual understanding to express something. And so this is where information transference happens. So that's how we've developed the corpus of this. So the common patterns, what people ask, how they ask, it varies between communities and cultures. And for example, in some cultures, they won't look a person in the eye directly. And we have that in our indigenous population, and that happens in many Populations. And so the nature of a conversation needs to take into account all those local idioms, behaviors, and so forth. So the bounded domain, what we've done is really the hard. The hard work. We know that some people try to stick AI onto whatever they're doing and say, oh, we're developing a digital human health coach. And when you look at it, some of these other models, they don't break through the healthy literacy. So what is the purpose of these has to be really clear, as you're saying with your colleagues cleaning up the ocean and so forth. So our purpose is bounded domain with depth and with a model that can replicate. So a person in Australia, for example, would use different words, and I know there's different words to what happens in Wilmington, North Carolina, but yet the health information that needs to be conveyed is the same. But there is this context that is absolutely necessary. So contextual AI, I guess, is really what we're really talking about here in what I do.

So basically we got to look behind the curtain and do the whole wizard of Oz thing, you know, blow away the smoke and mirrors and let's see what's actually happening, you know, under the hood. Is there real work happening or is there just a whole lot of marketing that's happening?

Well, you know, what we did, I want to accelerate this so much. Right. Because you know where we are in our arc of life. Right. You know, millions of dollars doesn't mean anything to us. Seriously. So I've published everything on GitHub. And so, yeah, but it's not just something that you can pick up and automate. They have to go through this co design because something that I've developed here in Australia would not be appropriate for, you know, a Native American community. The model is. But the co design would need to be led by people in those communities. So that's sort of really what needs to happen. Now. I can't scale. Right. But the model can. And so that's why I published.

Yeah, this isn't a copy paste. This is like, here's the starting point. And with the starting point, let's look at what are you actually trying to accomplish, whoever that happens to be. And all right now you got a whole lot of work ahead of you. To just go with my current team a couple times now, we've tried to just equal incorporate old code. I'm not a coder, so I'm a little naive sometimes. And I go, look, why don't we just take this code and plug it in over here. It should be fine, right? Yeah. No problem, you'll have it done tomorrow. And then my team just looks at me and says, look, there's a lot more to it than that. It's incompatible. The structure's different, the languages are different, there's a thousand questions that we're going to have here. It's doable, but be aware. So there's the warning I get sometimes. I want to dive deep into the subject of the show, which is on this journey that you've been going through, both in developing this AI and there's a deep connection with your husband here. The rock bottom and the rocking it moments throughout your story that as soon as we come back from this short little break. Thank you everyone for checking out the show today. Remember to please subscribe to the channel and share this with your friends and share it with people that you think need to hear what we're talking about today. Now, right now, I get to talk about a, another nonprofit organization that I'd like to support. This one's called the Tech Girls movement. That's techgirlsmovement.org and I love them because I got an opportunity to interact with them live in a session that I held when I was in California. And basically, it's young girls that are getting interested in technology. Specifically, it's getting young women interested into stem. S T E M, which stands for science, technology, engineering and maths. It's super important. We know that females are very underrepresented in STEM areas right now. It's a very male dominated industry. Not because of anything about talent, just because of glass ceilings or whatever you want to call it. This is designed to change that, right? We do need to change that. We need more smart people in stem. We need more females, we need more women leading in leadership roles in STEM to help this planet survive in climate change, in technology, advancements in energy and cost savings in social media, in everything that's related to what we're doing as a human species right now. We need more females, we need more smart people in general in here with no red tape, no barriers to entry, in a very welcoming environment. What I love about this group is that. And again, it's techgirlsmovement.org, definitely check them out. I got to sit there and listen to the pitches presented by girls that were like, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, 11, 12, I think the oldest was 13 or 14 at most. But it was so cute to sit there and listen to these young girls who are fascinated with technology, present their ideas and present their phone apps and present the technology that they're designing to solve real world problems. Literally 8 year old girls presenting solutions to real world problems. And it was fascinating to see it. And this is a program designed to just get that interest garnered to be a on roading ramp to bring on future talent to help us go in the right direction as a species. Check out techgirlsmovement.org and now back to the show. Okay, we're back now here on From Rock Bottom to Rockin it with Marja Johnson. And Marja is an AI expert. Truly revolutionary, revolutionizing the field of healthcare. And I'm just fascinated by this whole subject. If you're listening, if you're just tuning in now, please remember to subscribe to the channel. Share it with your friends. Most importantly, just share this episode with someone who you think would benefit by hearing it. Someone who needs to hear it. Someone who would benefit by hearing it. Please do that. I really appreciate it. And where we left off was starting to go into the subject of Maria's journey through rock bottom to rockin it in her life, in this whole career, in this path that we talked about with AI. So you can make any assumptions, I'm going to just let you take the floor here. Please tell people who are listening what your absolute rock bottom. I know this is an easy question, right? Super easy. What was the rock bottom moment you've had so far with your journey up till today?

Wow, Eric, in some ways easy question.

It's simple stuff, right?

In some ways I've always thought there are for me a number of rock bottoms interspersed with a number of rock highs. Rock rock highs. Perhaps the first rock bottom was when I lived in Seattle with my husband Alan. And that's when I was heading up Microsoft's E Government business worldwide. And he is a runner. Never smoked, never drinked, healthy sort of guy, ex military, running up the side of a mountain in Nevada, working in Nevada and had a heart attack. Well, experience problems first up. So back in Redmond, in Seattle, in Kirkland, where we lived, one Saturday morning went to the doctor saying, look, I've had a bit of a problem. And that Saturday night at the age of 47, he had an emergency five way bypass. Nothing that we could plan for, nothing that could be scheduled for the Monday morning. It had to be done. And it was Saturday evening, right, like.

Right now, drop everything. This is it.

Yeah, we're in a new country, you know, we both got these really amazing jobs, you know. And then Saturday night it all changed. And he, you know, if I didn't do it, then he would have died. And that's what he was told. So that was sort of the first rock bottom. And his recovery was quite difficult because within a few months, even though he had a five way bypass, he was experiencing further angina pains. And what happened? So this was in the United States. What happened? The grafts that they used to bypass the blockages had collapsed. So the bypass had failed. Right. And you know, over the months, you know, this was getting worse and worse. So we knew that, you know, this amazing life would take another direction. So we returned to Australia and within two weeks of us being back in Australia, I left Microsoft. They were amazing people, but had taken up another awesome job in Australia. But within two weeks we were still in service departments. And he underwent two further heart surgeries a week apart. And that that resulted in four stents being used to open up the blockages. So emotionally for us both, that was really, really hard for him. The fear that all this is just going to keep happening. A person who loved sport, loved running, loved, you know, all the outdoor activity, what was his life? And for him, that was very, very difficult. So, you know, had to keep working and help him recover to enjoy life and to enjoy fitness and sport again. So we're getting in a moment to the where we start picking up again. And his recovery included getting back into running, even with all that work on his heart. And he did that in a very safe way with his cardiologist over a period of like three years. He went back into the gym, was fitness first here. And he went from someone who was very ill and very afraid because of what he'd just been through, to facing life front on in a completely different way. So he qualified as a personal trainer. Right. Someone who's an engineer.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah, that'd be a good decision. Right? Personal trainers out there that shouldn't be trained. I go to the gym and I look around and there's this person wearing a personal trainer shirt. And I'm watching what they're doing. I'm like, you are not a person on their phone while someone working out. Two more. They're on their phone. Like, come on. Okay, so I get you. I had to say that because those people drive you crazy.

They drive us crazy as well. So together we decided to have another joint mission. And that joint mission was to run a marathon. And when Alan had the discussion with his cardiologist, the cardiologist said, why do you want to do this? Right? Why do you want to do? Was so important for his feeling as Though he could once again fully engage in life. Right.

I love that question. Why? By the way, he asked, why do you want to do it? Not, you can't. It was an exploratory question. That's really cool.

Yeah. And the Kant question is also interesting because nobody told us what we could do or what he could do. Right. What was the. Where is your boundless limit? There is none. Right. So for three years, look. And I'm not a runner, right. You know, I sort of. In my history, I've been a swimmer, but we decided to train together, and we did 5 kilometer runs, then 10 kilometer runs, then we did a half marathon, so 21 kilometers. So over three years, on the weekends, we would run. We'd run during the week before work. And in 2011, we ran the Melbourne Marathon, full 42km. It took us some six hours. Right. And along the roadway, there were all these poor people who were collapsed, injured, you know, vomiting.

Oh, no. Yeah.

We just kept our pace, which is steady and slow. He had to keep hydrating, and, you know, we had all our heart monitor devices on, but we finished.

All right. All right. That's awesome. That's amazing.

So in that instance, the high was running across the finish line in Melbourne, holding hands together. Right.

And this is something you get to do together. Now. You can support him through this. I mean, obviously, running is really good, I think, for physical wellness and for heart and blood flow, but more than that, it's psychological healing. You know, life is going on, it is moving forward.

Correct. And when he had his first heart surgery, the doctor said to him, because he had actually been a runner, he'd been very physically fit, that that created, you know, a network of capillaries in his heart that actually. Actually kept him alive. And so this. This physical exertion, when it's monitored and controlled, is actually a really, really good thing. So we learned a lot about. Even more about heart health and not even what you can't do, but what you can do, you know, so that was a high. That was a phenomenal high. And so you can see for me that there's been, you know, a few ups and downs, but with sort of this consistent theme, if you like. So that was 2011, and we did the Melbourne Marathon. In the intervening years, there's been a number of things that I've personally been involved in, as has Alan, both separately together. Alan's, as I said, gone on to be a personal trainer. He's a heart health ambassador with the Heart Foundation. He lectures at university in both the Pharmacy. So anything to do with health, he's an ambassador and he lectures and he's very philanthropic that way with his time. So other things that I've done in the health field also have extended into the field of disability. And obviously with everything that Alan's been through, he also has a number of other comorbidities now and some physical limitations. So our ability to run like that anymore is not there. But that doesn't mean we can't do other things. So while Alan was continuing his advocacy work in cardiac healthcare, I had continued work in another health domain in disability. And there's material sort of on the website and a lot has been written about Nadia, the first AI digital human for service delivery, which had been co created by people with disability. And so what I was seeing with what Alan had gone through and with people with disability, very common themes about being able to access and understand bureaucratic and health information and how artificial intelligence and the development of a conversational corpus can really help overcome some of these barriers. And so for a number of years I had worked on Nadia and delivered that short, and I'm more than happy to talk more about that. But shortly after delivering Nadia in 2017, Alan had another problem and he had to. He was readmitted to hospital and had to undergo his fourth heart surgery, so another full bypass. So as a result of that, he has eight cardiac bypass grafts and four stents. And so through his recovery on that surgery, we were walking, which is now what we do. We do long walks actually now, you know, 20, 30 kilometer walks. We were walking and we started a conversation and we both at the same time said the idea with Nadia, we together could do that for cardiac health. We could create a digital human cardiac coach on the basis of all the work that we've done over all these past 14 years. The convergence of the timing of the technology was right. And so our paths came back together, if you like, in the R and D on the digital human cardiac coach or health coach more broadly. And so coming back up on another high. So the fourth heart surgery, I have to say to both of us was truly devastating. Truly, truly devastating.

Right. So you said four heart surgeries, right?

Because yourself become traumatized from the process.

Do you mind if I ask a little more? So people that are listening can probably relate. Every show is a different subject, right? And right now we're talking about being the significant other of someone else going through their rock bottom moment. And usually it's the person themselves that are going through it. I like this angle because it's not something we've really explored on the show before. It's to be supportive. And also, how do you do that simultaneously while living your life and living your passions? And I remember a lot of conversations I've had with some of my friends where they give up their vibe, they give up their passion, they give up their initiative, or they don't start their initiative or passion because of. Fill in the blank. Oh, I can't because, you know, my mother's really ill or, you know, someone passed away, or there's a fear of something bad happening medically. Or maybe it's not medical at all. Maybe we're having a rough patch in our marriage, or how do I keep going forward despite drug addiction or despite inequality, whether that be, you know, color of skin or gender or whatever it happens to be. So I want to make sure we touch on this a bit. But before we do that, you said that this fourth one was extra traumatizing, more so than the first three. Why?

It's sort of. You re experience the trauma. Each trauma is almost additive. You get to a safe place, particularly after the third one, and things are going swimmingly. So life continues on. And then on this fourth one, for both of us, it was sort of. You experience a trauma again, you know, and it's sort of additive to what you've been through. And in life, this is, I guess, my interpretation. It's easy to feel as though things are slipping away. Right. When you're in that moment, you think.

You got through it and life hits again.

Yeah, that's right. And it's about once again, finding the confidence, you know, to enjoy life in whatever dimension that is. So, you know, and that's. And that's. That's. You have to go through that. That is why rehabilitation actually so important. That is why what we're doing, it accommodates and incorporates not only the person, the patient, but their families as well. And look, there's actually great reference that people who are listening might look to on this particular topic, and that is called Sim Coach, which is an initiative run by the U.S. veterans Affairs. And it is a virtual being, which is what they call it. Not a sophisticated human like, but it is human like, but smaller gaming. And it is used to monitor for signs of PTSD in service personnel and veterans return from active duty. And it specifically incorporates not only the person, the returned person, but their families. Because in all of this, to become well again and to stay well is not just an individual journey, but it is a journey that you take with others. And this is such an important point.

Yeah, when you're in it together, you're in it together. That's the whole concept of it. How did you stay focused on these projects throughout all this?

It's an interesting question. It's a really interesting question. The way I look at things, I quite look for and I feel like are attracted to challenges on the edge of whatever it is. You know, certainly my work with Nadia on disability was very much co design that was driven by the extremities of accessibility, you know, to come up with that thing similarly here. So, you know, both Alan and I are problem solvers, he's an engineer, I'm more creative and, you know, it goes together. So staying focused for me was really about it's not just any more making a difference in our life because we've sort of come through it again. But there's a higher purpose that comes from saying now with where technology is going, it actually liberates human limitations, if you like. And so for me it was a real. The focus was almost, we call it here in Australia, a wicked problem. And I don't ever step away from wicked problems. Right. If anybody ever steps away from wicked problems, that's fine. But for me it was nothing cannot be solved. And how do you design something that has never been designed before? You know, so for me it was. Whilst in reality, perhaps there's some things which this life experience might have taken away from us, other people might have thought that certainly it's not something that we thought about. We saw it the other way is that we've been given actually a gift of experience and the focus was really turning that into a benefit for more people. So, you know, do I.

So we're talking about higher purpose. It sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong here, if I translate this from my own brain. It's like if I am struggling to get through, fill in the blank problem or massive life challenge that I'm experiencing and there's been many. If I'm struggling to do that on my own, then it sounds like what you're saying is reach for that higher purpose and understand what the broader impact could be. If you can't do it for yourself by solving this and by getting through, you might actually. Or I might be able to affect countless people that I just don't even understand what the impact is going to be. Could be millions, could be thousands, could be just one person that ends up having their life change in a positive way if I can't do it for myself. And that's not enough of a motivation. Maybe I can draw on a broader purpose. If we go in spiritual for a second. If I'm drawing from a broader purpose, the energy source is now exponentially larger to the degree that that broader purpose extends to. Tell me in your words, if you can solve this cardiac challenge for yourselves, then you're also solving it for untold millions of people through generations forever. And that's something that potentially can be like a fifth wind, because of course, you've already been through your second and third window. When you're down, down, down, all of a sudden you find this Red Bull at the right time, Boom. Red Bull in. Okay, there's an energy source here. Am I using the right words?

Yes, that's right. Yeah, you are. I guess in some ways we're inventors. You know, thinking about the old fashioned sort of concept of an inventor.

Well, you have to, because he's a runner, he's a physically fit person, like you said, and the odds of this happening should be low to none. Like these are all the right things you do well, your exercise, particularly long distance running, from what I understand, as my AI device keeps telling me every day, do more long distance running. And you'd think that by following the formula and following the stats, that wouldn't be a problem. Never mind that it did pop up as a problem anyways. It popped up as a four times substantial problem. That shouldn't happen. So I feel like us as humans, when stuff happens to us, we get to choose something. We can't choose it. We can't choose what happens to us. But in my own perspective, we can sure choose what to do about it. And we have to be inventors at that point because following the rules didn't work for you. And Al, you followed the rules. The hurt thing wasn't supposed to pop up. It popped up. Okay, that's there. Now what do you do about it? Well, you got to invent a solution, literally from the ground up. What are you going to do?

I take a lot of inspiration from my lifetime interest in space. You know, as a kid, I wrote to Neil Armstrong and when I didn't get a response, I wrote again to say, like, as a kid, right. I'm disappointed I didn't get a response. And I got a response.

Neil, come on. Smart note.

Yeah, I've got it on my.

Stop focusing on these trainings.

I got a photograph.

Love it.

Signed a letter from him apologizing. But what that was was when you look at the challenge that existed at the time, the Technology didn't even exist to get to the moon. The bureaucrats that had advised Kennedy said, the technology doesn't exist. Like it doesn't exist. This is madness. And Kennedy said, well, it will exist when we need it, right? So that sort of catalyzed a whole bunch of things. The whole model of what they had to do was completely upended. So I take a lot of inspiration from that. How do you design something that's never been designed before? And you know, when you talk about devices and watches and so forth here in Australia and I know over in the US there's a lot of talk about medical records, like, you know, here we call it my health record, a centralized database. Billions has been spent on it, right? But over the years, I mean, we've had many, many, many trips to hospital, like with the emergency ambulance. Not once has that centralized health record, billion dollar investment by government ever been used. What has saved Alan has been his Apple watch, his iPhone, which he has all his almost biometrics going through it. What's the air quality like? So the air quality app, what he's sleeping has been like, he has all his medications on it. How has his diet been? So at times when the paramedics have come and they've asked, how's it going? I just get his Apple iPhone and open it up and they can see it. And then the paramedics communicate that to the hospital. We're on our way in, got this gentleman and this is the situation. We get to the ER and again the doctor's there. They don't have time to go into their systems to look up, you know, his records. They look at what's on his phone there and then they see this is what his heart rate, his sleep, what the air quality has been there. And then so by flipping it and saying the human experience actually drives innovation, you know, not a bureaucrat, unfortunately or fortunately. I mean, we don't have any association with Apple. But I love them to bits because, you know, we trust, we trust what this ecosystem has, has given us and what it has done for us. And in some ways when we look at the help the space program, that very complex system of servicing, you know, a human in space, when you think of that human in space is fragile. They actually have limitations on their movement. You can take innovation and inspiration from those tangential domains. So that's what I do in looking and looking at what we've got when we're doing Nadia. So co created by people with disability, a gentleman who was deafblind, a young guy with cerebral palsy, people who are deaf, people who have psychosocial disability, people with intellectual disability. What all that said was the cut through is simplicity in a conversation. So take that into the digital human cardiac coach. What I want is to be able to have this model, this corpus, being able to interface through the digital human. I want to be able to provide people with the opportunity to hold up their meds bottle and for that to be easily interpreted by the system, can easily be done for systems and sensors in the home to be able to interact with this, for this platform to be able to be used as a new telehealth servicing platform. I've done the business case on this for the United States with all the new health codes that are there to really enable not just a zoom conversation with a health practitioner, but to really enable remote monitoring. So if you've got a person, they can send their vitals to the doctor, their physiological monitoring. So really it takes it to the extreme, but it's not really the extreme because they do this in space already. We need to bring that to Earth, right?

And on that note about, you know, space as being extreme, and there's a subject that came to my attention here before we started chatting, which was the concept of extreme conditions teaching us about innovation. And if we can tie that into the show subject here about, you know, there's people that are listening to the show that are having a deep rock bottom moment in their life and it's dream right out on the street, stuck with drugs, going bankrupt, going divorced or big serious medical issues, Just broadly speaking, just talking to listeners at this point, how would you suggest listeners can use innovation to not only work through this extreme rock bottom they're going through, but to have a positive impact, perhaps on a broader scope of people, not just themselves, but in the world. What sort of suggestions would you have here about taking these extreme rock bottoms and using them as fuel for innovation?

So I believe that you don't have to change everything for everything to change, right? And when you're in this rock bottom moment, it's almost inescapable in how you feel. Whether I can imagine whatever circumstance it is and what gives people hope is that even if in that moment I don't have the wherewithal to do anything else but survive, to have the confidence just to know that there are others in that same moment whose situation might be just a little bit different and in time can drive change for everybody. So, you know, I provided some comment to a group who were doing a hackathon on homelessness okay, that's interesting. I was commentary, I wasn't involved in it. And I asked, was there anybody involved in that hackathon who was homeless? Right. The hackathon was done in the center of Sydney in one of the beautiful tall buildings, gleaming, you know, beautiful building. And it just.

There's a detachment here going on. Correct? Yeah.

So there has to be a level of authenticity, not just feel good for people who are actually doing it in that moment. So the advice would be to be truly authentic and to truly drive change, you have to go to the edge. You have to go and not only involve people, because involving people is not enough. They have to drive the design themselves. And for people who are involved in doing this means that you have to let go and let the people who are experiencing whatever that situation is, whether it's homelessness or drug addiction or deep trauma from, you know, war service, or deep trauma from a health experience, those people have to be the leaders, if you like, in co design, which means not leading the project necessarily, but their insights have to lead it. And again, if I can just go back to the NASA program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, the way that NASA found its way back to launch, the very next one was co design with the people who had the most to lose or most at state, and that was the astronauts. And the astronauts who were on the very next shuttle were the people who drove the co design and the, if you like, the remediation of everything that need to happen. So if you don't have that level of skin in the game, then the results won't be there. And that is a big difference. That is a massive, massive difference. And I guess that's what I feel, you know.

And the word you had was radical inclusion.

Radical inclusion. Radical inclusion.

If I take this concept and apply it to some situations, let's say I'm addicted to drugs and I'm homeless on the streets and I look around and I think, oh, there's nothing I have to contribute, this problem can't be solved, I'm stuck, life's over. And if that's how I feel, which to my understanding happens, could it be suggested that no, no, no, no, no. You actually have the seed that could actually solve this for everyone, which no one else has. You might actually be in possession of the information or the experience or the firsthand knowledge that's absolutely essential to solving drug addiction and you just don't realize it yet. Or if I just went bankrupt in a company and my wife or my husband left me and my kids don't want to talk to me. And I'm stuck at home trying to figure out how to buy some apples. And I think that I'm at the absolute rock bottom financially and there's no way out, is it to suggest that maybe because you've been through this and because you're having this experience, you have a new perspective that was absolutely required in order to fill in the blank, in order to break through on the next one, or to teach someone how to avoid it the next time, or to persevere in and find happiness that maybe was missing throughout all that whole experience. So if anyone that's going through a rock bottom moment right now, I'd like to twist that around for a second. And I challenge you guys to ask yourself, what about your experience gives you an insight or a perspective or a piece of information that could revolutionize and potentially solve whatever it is that subject of your rock bottom moment is for everyone, not just yourself. Because when I'm having my rock bottom moments, I don't know about anyone else, but when I'm stuck. When I was a teenager and I got arrested, I ran away from home and, and drop out of school and all that stuff. When I'm sitting there looking around my surroundings, I'm like, you know what, I'm too small, I don't have the education, I'm too young. And there's all these reasons on why something might not work. But those reasons come from external. They're not what I believe. It's what other people are telling me and it's what I'm seeing. If I can detach from that for a second and be like, wait a second, here's a situation where I've broken all the norms. I'm no longer restricted by fill in the blank pressure by peer or society, whatever it happens to be. And from this new place we can actually think outside the box. From deep recovery of drug addiction, we can have this outside the box perspective that no one else can get. Anyways, I'm going on a rant here. Is this resonating with your thoughts? Am I on the right track?

Correct. And if I may use two examples to illustrate the very point that you're making. And sometimes the opportunity exists at some point in the future, right? Alan And I was a teenager when I was married, right? We met at school and while he was at university we lived in a caravan, you know, the back of his parents place in the western suburbs of Sydney. And we had our first daughter, right? So were we poor in the van.

Or did you go to a hospital.

By that time, we'd already had her. Right. You know, so we're very, very young. He. He went on to what we call ducks top his. His engineering course. You know, we lived in this. We lived in this van in the western suburbs of Sydney already with a baby. Now what that says to me all these years later is that that's a reality for a lot of people today, right? And I mean, that's. That's who I am. Right? You know, that's. At that moment, it was all about surviving. We had this vision for Alan to finish his degree. I hadn't started my study yet. So people would look at us and I'm sure that they would say that we were, you know, poor. Pick a description. But that's the reality for a lot of people today. So I have been there and I understand that, you know, I know. So that's the first example. The second example would be, I talk about Nadia. And one of the groups of people who were involved in co designing Nadia was a group of people with intellectual disability. And we had this process supported by university psychology faculty because clearly that's not my expertise to, you know, to provide that support to that community. And we had like face to face work, right, in their place, not sort of, you know, in the government building. And one of the women, and there'll be a lot of photos on this. One of the women, she was sitting down at the table in their kitchen and we had the laptop open and she said, we being the community, we usually only get asked if we'd like to do bowling or go to the mall. She said, now you're asking us to design this avatar. So people would say, what did that group contribute? What could they contribute? You know, and that's a very patronizing, almost bigoted view of what this group of amazing people contributed.

It says a lot of things. It says that you're better than them. It says that they have nothing to offer. It destroys equality. It destroys the concept of perspective. Effective. It's completely naive and hubris.

So what they contributed sort of been contributed. The design determinant of simplicity, right? Cut through all this, you know, bureaucratic crap, you know, that is a barrier to access. And the design determinant of simplicity came from that group. So. So what you've expressed in terms of upending things, radical inclusion on the edge. These are just two examples, right?

And they're infinite, they're limitless.

And I want people to have confidence.

Yeah. And as we wrap up, there's two questions I'M here, I'm wondering here, what would you say to people on this subject? What would you say to people right now that are going through a rock bottom moment, that are listening to this? Is that really true? How does that apply to me? Or how can I find that? Or what would you say to them, just broadly speaking, someone having a rock bottom, and they're listening to this, and now you get to speak to them. Three, two, one, go.

You can always listen, right, when you're in that rock bottom moment. Programs like this, phenomenal to listen to. You know, when I was in that caravan, there was not, you know, there was television. I guess we could, we read books, engage through just knowing, like through these, through these sessions, through these programs, because through that you learn that you're not alone, right? And over time, it might just give a person a little bit of confidence, a little bit of insight. So I don't know whether you can cut this from their dialogue, but.

No, no, keep it. What I'm hearing you say is that. And it echoes my belief, anyone that's listening to this right now, if you're having your rock bottom moment, if you've even go to the extreme, if you've attempted to commit su, you're trying to recover or you're thinking about it, or it's drugs, or it's bankruptcy or divorce, fill in the blank, whatever it is. I believe, and you know this because I say this almost every show, I believe that there's something inside of you that's a positive, beautiful spirit. It's a flame and essence of life that's always there. It's never going away. It's right there, right now. In your own body, in your spirit, in your soul, wherever you want to call it. It's right there. And you just got to look at it. We got to find it. Maybe it's covered, maybe there's a door closed, maybe there's a blanket on it, you know, who knows, for some reason, maybe you haven't seen it yet, but I leave it's there, otherwise you wouldn't be here. And we gotta find it. And I challenge you to find it. I challenge you to ask a friend to find it. You can send me a message, you know, if I can get your message, just send me a message. Well, I'll see if I can send back a suggestion or a resource. Seek help for it. Like try and ask someone else if they see it. Here's a random thought in the rock Bonna moment. Ask some people that you trust what's really cool about me and then shut up and just listen. Let's see what that brings to the table. So anyways, I'm going on my own rant here. That's what I heard you saying. And I don't know if that's what you meant to say or not. Sometimes I do weird tangent stuff because it's who I am.

But you captured it perfectly, absolutely perfectly, you know, within everyone, you know, and there's always a timing issue, right? You know, and I say this to my daughters and to other young women. There's almost an urgency these days for people to. They might feel that they've got to do everything at the one time, you know, and if all that can't be done at the one time, then somehow, you know, I'm not as good as someone else or I'll fail. And I think it's a similar sort of sense. So in the rock bottom moment that you're in, know that you are essentially, you know, an amazing soul, right? By listening to these type of programs I love ask a friend to tell you all the good things about me is reassurance. You don't need to do anything with that at that point in time. Just let it soak in, right? Because over time it will help build you. And as I said, it's a similar conversation I have with particularly young women to say, a moment in time is not your whole life. Life is a checkerboard. It's not even a path.

I believe that we have multiple lifetimes in one lifetime. So this is the wrap up note. Between the ages of one to five, we're learning to walk. We don't speak yet, we don't understand anything. To me, that's an entire lifetime. Now from 5 to 10, we start to learn our words, we start to figure out what we like and don't like, start to make our first friends. But that's a completely different lifetime when we couldn't walk and speak. Now let's go from like 10 to 20, right? Our teenage years and our learning and puberty and first love and dad in school and all these things and getting exposure to me, that's in a completely different lifetime than the two that already happened prior. And 20 to 30, same thing. Move out, get your first job, you know, whatever it is, do your first ventures, succeed, fail, everything in between. That's a completely different lifetime than when you were in high school. So I'm of the belief system that in any one lifetime is actually about maybe 10. We're more like cats, right? We're like Cats here, we got nine lives. And if you don't like the life you got right now, don't worry, hang in there. Because there's a new lifetime coming and we don't know where it's going to go. And you're never going to find out if you don't hang in there. So hang in there and we'll find out and it could do the next revolutionary thing. Maybe you're going to lead the planet in the next positive direction, just like Mario's doing and has done and other people that have been on the show and are out there in the world. So that's going to be my takeaway message, to hang in there and find what it is that you want to do in your next lifetime. That's coming up really soon in this lifetime. Because I think there's something pretty interesting for all of us and I love that you've come from this caravan to hitting these types of achievements that I listed at the beginning to inventing this AI and being able to go through these challenges together as a couple with your husband. And thus far coming through successfully with challenges and huge scars, both literally and figuratively, I'm sure, because I saw the photos. Right. And so congratulations on you for doing that. I really appreciate what you're doing, both from a psychological, spiritual perspective on motivation for others, but also on just global impact. It's a phenomenal subject and I could keep talking, but I definitely need to stop. Do you have any parting words? I'm going to put some show notes here. Probably your TED Talk, I think that was a pretty cool, broad subject here that I think people should have a look at. Look at Marja Johnson's TED Talk. You can YouTube it. Just YouTube her name and put the letters AI beside it. That was the easiest way I found to get to the right one. And TED Talk, I'll have the link on the show notes as well. Is there a way that you would want someone to reach out to you or somewhere to go? Maybe your website, perhaps? Mario, that's Maria Johnson.com, right.

Go to the website. You know, there's a ton of things there. I publish everything there. That would be the first thing that I would say. It's just been phenomenal to be in this conversation, Eric. In fact, an honour, right? I sincerely mean that. I really sincerely mean that. And given the caliber of the other awesome humans that you've had on this show, and it just goes to show wherever we are. I'm in Canberra today, literally, you know, fairly limited in what we can do. But through your amazing work, you know, we can contact others. You know, we can communicate, Communicate with others. So have a look at the material on the website. That would be the first thing. There's a bunch of stuff. There's a bunch of stuff there. And any questions, I guess, you know, via the website would be awesome. But I just want to thank you for the opportunity. A final call out for tech girls or superheroes. You know.

That was so fun. Those girls were passionate.

So look, the awesome thing is Janine has now given me my own superhero avatar. So my avatar is called Mentoria.

I wasn't gonna ask. Do you have like a character? Have you like, drawn up what the superhero looks like?

She just put it up the other day. So I'll send that through to you. I'll send that through to you.

Yeah, yeah, I wanna see it. I'm a huge comic book and Marvel freak. I can't help it. I've been actually just drawing or I had a guy helping me draw up a bunch of little designs for a comic book design I want to do because I'm crazy and silly. So I want to see yours. I want to see your superhero, Maria. And anyone listening, remember to check out the show notes to the episode. Maria-johnson.com is the website. Go to YouTube, type in her name, Maria Johnsonai Ted Talk. You'll see it. It's 11 minutes. You won't regret it. It's fascinating stuff here. And anything else you want to wrap up on or are we done?

I think way done.

Until next time.

Definitely until next time. Thank you, Eric.

Hopefully it's not too far in the distant future. I would love to keep connected. Guys, thank you for listening. And gals, thanks for listening. Remember to share this show with your friends. Share it with someone who needs to hear it, subscribe to it. It really makes a difference. I don't get paid for any of this. I love doing it. That's why I do it. So just to share the good vibe, share the love and talk to you later. And that's it. My friends, for this episode, we will see you next time. Please send me an email, say hello, give me some feedback, let me know what you think, give me some tips and suggestions. I'd love to hear from you. Also, please share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, doesn't matter, just get it out there. I really appreciate it. And we'll see you next time on from rock bottom to Rockin it. Have a Rockin it.