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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

You're about to unleash an entire revolution. Hi everybody. Peter Diamandis here and welcome to Moonshots. Today's episode is perhaps one of the most important episodes I've recorded in recent past. It's with an extraordinary entrepreneur and engineer, a designer, someone who is transforming our medical future. She is the CEO of Open Water, an advanced medical technologies company that's not only developing diagnostics, but incredible therapeutics to fight cancer, to fight mental disorders, to fight addictions, to fight strokes. Her name is Dr. Marilu 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, she developed a hundred dollar 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 hundred 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 impact a billion plus people. Dr. Marilu 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 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 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.

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 really, we're gonna unveil some stuff today that no one's seen.

Yeah, you've been. You're welcome. You've been on an incredible mission. I mean, you have had incredible positions around the world. If I were to lay it out, 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. You ran the largest consumer product development ever, and you gave that up. You transformed yourself from that into what, what, what's your mission and passion today?

Using all the stuff that's coming down the pike for next generation consumer electronics, be it VR, AR, LiDAR, and using the fact that both infrared light, ultrasound, and electromagnetics penetrate our body. 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, fix the stroke, fix the neurodegenerative Disease. 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.

For anybody listening, what we're about to go on is a journey, a revolutionary journey, on how the technologies that Marilu has been pulling together, 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. I talk about the six Ds, Mary Lou, that when you digitize something, it dematerializes, it demonetizes, and it democratizes, and that's exactly what you're doing to, shall we say, billions of dollars worth of healthcare tech.

Yeah. I mean, this laser, for example, was the size of a room and 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. It literally makes holograms. It records the phase of light. Here's the eight camera chips, the lasers in there, 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.

And I want to go into this technology, but I guess I want to. I want to preface this. If you've ever had anybody, for our viewers, viewers and listeners, ever had anybody who has had a debilitating stroke, 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 an aggressive cancer like a glioblastoma, the work that you're doing is the chance to provide not just treatments, but effectively cures for these things, potentially a cure.

I mean, we have results just from this week looking at amyloid microplaques with ultrasound at certain frequencies. And one of the issues is that the microplaques are too big to go through capillaries, so it kills off whatever is close to the capillaries that get clogged up with these microclots. It happens with aging, it happens with neurodegenerative disease. It happens with acute Covid. It happens with type 2 diabetes. We're clearing 80% of them and we're reducing the size from an 8 micron diameter to a 4 micron diameter. That's a really big deal because capillaries are 5, 10 microns wide. And so if it's 8, it may not get through. If it's bigger, it can't get through, it's clogged. 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 and you're holding up something the size of a cigarette pack. Basically.

Yeah. It has a transducer, an ultrasound transducer. That's an eight by eight array. 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.

So I want to slow this down.

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

I want to slow it down for everybody because there's so much here. But what you're about to hear is 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 not the goal. So I want to start change healthcare I know it is put it on.

This track of other things. The 20 to 40 year moats are anti innovation for the thing that kills us. 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 this suite so we can do.

More and we'll get there. So I want to tell your story. To begin with. You're a brain tumor survivor, right? How much of that is your motivation? Would you mind telling that story and where does it begin?

Oh yeah, 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. Was finally diagnosed. I dropped out of my PhD in physics in Ivy League school because I was in a wheelchair. I was really sick. I couldn't move half my face. I was sleeping 20 hours a day. But then it got really bad because I couldn't even subtract. And so I didn't think I deserved a PhD in physics from Ivy 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 come home and die because Brown had a medical school. They let me see the professors there. No one could figure out what I had. This is 1995ish. But as I was headed out, this professor said, 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.

Now MRIs back then. Let's describe what an MRI was for comparison because exactly the same size and.

Shape, it's just 10 times more expensive today.

Yeah, it's a giant room's law, which.

Is Moore's law spelled backwards.

It's a giant room. I would say it's like 20, 20 by 20 foot minimum shielded. An electric cage with a large electromagnetic and helium cooling.

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

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

Right. I didn't know we needed it. I would have. Sorry.

Go ahead. So it wasn't that you couldn't afford it. You didn't know that you needed it. And when something is.

Yeah, I didn't know that I needed it. They found it. Then I sprung found a really good neurosurgeon. Luckily only needed one. Have taken a dozen medications every day for the rest of my life and will. But I. I've, 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, you go from that recovery of a brain tumor. Where did you launch first into your career?

Well, I'd already had some bit of career, but I went to finish my PhD, and myself and two other students got $4 million from DARPA to commercialize their PhD technology. So we started a company called Microdisplay. We were the first people to make microdisplays for. We were trying to make a wristwatch, video, VR, early smartphones, a lot of projection stuff. Had mass production, set up a manufacturing line in Richmond, California, just north of Berkeley and shipped in a few years. And we were shipping in all kinds of novel devices. Basically something that looks exactly like Google glass, but in 1998, looks the same. I mean, the software improved, but the hardware was there. Then, with a collaboration with an optical company called Micro Optical, I need to be clear about that. We made the screen part, they made the optics. I did that for a while and got recruited at intel to be the CTO of their division. 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 thought? The goals in big companies seem to be having, you know, how big is it means how many people you have working on it. Where the ideal for me is sort of like WhatsApp, $19 billion, 50 people? Like that?

Yes.

Like a much more interesting exponential company.

Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on 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 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine. After just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, VIOME is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.competer or 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@viome.com Peter but you ended up at intel and that was an extraordinary sort of resurrection from surgery to Intel.

Yeah, and Microsoft. Finishing the PhD even was a lot. And then I left because intel only has rail to rail processes. And I ran into the CEO, a new CEO just left. I heard and explain 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 of voltage. So I'm like, look, we could use anybody's silicon. We're Intel. Like, 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 could be in, could not be intel silicon. Everybody hated me. Anyway, I put, I put my resume online because 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.

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

Yeah, I only got a callback at one place. It was MIT, which is pretty good. I applied to like 35 schools, but I ended up with Nicholas Negroponte. I had been a student at the MIT Media Lab in the 80s. I did a master's degree there and made the world's first holographic video system with a team of graduate students and loved the place. And in the final interview, it was supposed to be like 20 minutes with Nicholas Negroponte, the legendary founder of the MIT Media Lab and many other things. We started one laptop per child. 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 the laptop. Kofi Annan and then head of the.

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 100 bucks? And you launched the entire like tablet industry as part of that netbook.

And tablet came after that became a bigger thing. I actually, actually have one right over here if you want me grab one. I can see it on the wall.

Yeah, the beautiful green one lap for one laptop design.

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 network laptop ever made. We wrote the first keyboards and Amaric and a whole bunch of other languages. No reading required to use it because it's for kids that don't know how to read.

How many of those were produced in total?

Millions. I mean we created a multi billion dollar, not for profit, open source. And the lasting legacy is a few things. We transformed what a minister of education could do for their children and their country. Intel and Microsoft nearly killed us. There was a 60 minute exercise, but they spent like exponentially more than we spent to stop it. But you know, eventually they joined.

Yeah, there's a lot of undue criticism on one laptop per child, but what you did was extraordinary.

But so we changed the equation of that. We also. Sundar Pusheth, the CEO of Google, cites this. I mean the Chromebook is its grandson, granddaughter, whatever, grandkid, in terms of what you can do for education to make something quite usable for children. So they cross the digital divide and also useful in pandemic.

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

Probably holographic video. I think like when the Nobel laureate stood up when I gave my first talk and said that's poppycock and it'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, 20 something.

This is the equivalent of R2D2 projecting.

And I remember I had the courage after sort of going back to my hotel room and not being happy, probably crying, I went up to him at the reception. I said, you know, we all think, 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?

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

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

A Nobel laureate stands up and says it's crazy, right?

It'll never work, it's impossible. And I remember talking to my advisor at the time, Steve Benton, who ran the holography group at the Media Lab and he said 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 of to keep going.

I think it means it's impossible for them.

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

So you actually went on to build that?

Yes, we did. Built the world's first fully computer generated hologram with a micron sized pixels in 1987, which was hard to do then. And computer generated on a supercomputer then, which looks a lot like Nvidia now, but it was a connection machine, which was earlier.

So that's your first moonshot.

Probably.

Would you consider one laptop your second?

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.

And durable.

It's incredible architecture. I designed it around the screen. Nobody does that. Who cares if the CPU is on the cpu? People like intel, they think they're the brains behind the operation. And there could be little green men inside the laptop the screens on. If it responds to a stroke, you can shut the whole mother bar down a vast majority of the time, then bring it back up in a single digit number of milliseconds and it seems like it's on. 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 better resolution than the Apple retinal display. Same time, 100 bucks laptop 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.

What kind of battery life did it have?

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

Wow.

Back then, ferro phosphate 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 there's out of this right now. But yeah, so there was a lot of innovation.

We're talking dozens of hours of battery life.

Oh yeah, it would last for a day or two, 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.

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

I start a company called Pixel Qi because I thought I sort of gave up my job thinking that the laptop's built. Why don't we get somebody that knows about education coming in? Here's where being a woman in tech, they think I know 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 with the multi billion dollar fabs of Asia, despite the best postdoc I could get, maybe make one thing once but then not be able to repeat it for a year because the contamination and whatever happened in the beautiful MIT labs. I moved to Asia, started a company called Pixel Qi and made really innovative screen technology as the first Fabless screen maker and made a lot of screens for tablets and laptops and smartphones, but then other unique screens until Sergey, kind of Sergey Google fell in love with it. Also I was trying to work on brain computer interface and as they were starting Google apps.

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

Hired the whole company.

So you end up with Sergey at Google in their moonshot factory.

Right. Because 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 not supposed to ever say what I did there. You can read about it.

I know what you did there. Yes.

So there are some very cool projects.

And, and then large, large holographic walls included.

Yeah, sure. And you know, screens on every surface. How do you do that? And then why would you do that? 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 at optical infinity. Meaning and then anybody could feel like they were someplace else when they got home. A lot of people spent time.

I was just at a friend, I was just at Mark Pincus home and he has a beautiful home overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge there. And it was floor to ceiling, 30 foot, 40 foot wide windows and it was breathtaking view. And I was like, I would love that on a screen.

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

Yes.

Screens are now about $10 a square foot. Windows are more expensive. It's amazing what's happened. Morphous silicon. It's also what the substrate for solar panels. It's just mass abundance. So if you've got that, how do you use that? And our tools, the software, the AI, but we have all of these photos of everything and yeah, you can have updates.

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

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

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

Yeah, I'd love to do it and like as an art project and then just get it into. Get someone else to the startup, honestly. Or maybe you can think of somebody.

But you know, I've got someone in mind.

Yeah, no, I mean this is side project. I have a little studio. I work on that sometimes on the weekends just to clear my head.

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

Wherever the Eiffel Tower. It's much easier if you're at optical infinity, meaning if you close one eye and the other eye you see a disparity, a difference between the views. But if something's far enough away, it's easier to compute.

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

It's easier. 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.

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 it did overlap a bit with Astro. Yeah, yeah.

And then on to Oculus from there.

Yeah. Mark recruited me. He had bought this company for a bunch of money. They'd Never shipped anything. Particularly 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, despite.

I love Google as a culture and I mean, they've done so much better. People don't know how much Google has done for the world in so many ways. The investments, the projects they've done.

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

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

It moved around. They called me Game Changer. Whatever. I had another title too, but I was supposed to sort of figure out how to change the game from what we were doing. But it was. It was. I knew that it was a rocky road. I mean, it would. They were, you know, they'd just gotten bought. They were 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.

So let me take an aside there one moment, because you are the. The screen goddess and the miniaturization goddess. How far do you think we are from wearable AR VR specs like you're wearing right now that are light and enjoyable?

It's a matter of. Well, I mean, they've spent $100 billion.

I know it's a lot of money.

And it's surprising how little of whatever they have in the labs, if they've pursued that, has seen the light of day. It's not that efficient. I mean, I think Reed 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. I think I would. Didn't like the face bug.

I don't, you know, like covering you. Like covering your face with a giant mask. Ski. Ski Golf.

That's why I want the Million Dollar View. I don't want to wear it. I want, like so. But different. You know, all of this is true of any technology. A bunch of different opinions and they mix and match. And this has been going on since the late 60s with VR and AR in different.

Since the Human Interface Labs up in Seattle.

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

So I want to set the picture here. You have been at the top of the entire tech stack, the industry, at intel, at Google, at Facebook, and you witnessed digitization, dematerialization, demonetization, democratization. You've seen the power of these technologies. What was the moment that you decided, I need to focus on reinventing healthcare because it's so broken.

When I left intel in 2004 and pitched at the media Lab and got the faculty position, but I got distracted with $100 laptop and thought, well, I can get that to work faster, even though everybody thinks it's impossible. I thought it was much faster. Then I got hooked into that and when I went into Google, I was supposed to work on this. But then when I got in, Sergey said, no, we just wanted to know you were creative. I had all these ideas for brain computer interf and healthcare. And when I got in, he really needed me to do other things. I was actually pretty happy to be working there on the things that I was doing. So that took a backseat when I went over to Facebook and interviewed with Mark. I swear his feet didn't touch the ground. When I started talking to him about brain computer interface. We had a whiteboard in the room 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 gotta fix his VR thing first.

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

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

A year later, 2016, I left. You left? What was that? What happened? You said it's time for me to go and build my dream company.

Well, it's the fourth company and I've been in startups now for, you know, half of my life, so I'm good at the startups. I think 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, because let's Face it.

Sad to say that, yeah, it's true.

Or whatever, Gmail or like getting social, a lot of things like that. But it wasn't on these new technologies. 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. It's just frustrating because educating 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.

Yes.

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

Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. 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 when 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 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 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. You 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 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 LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will 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 onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com 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 does the name Open Water come from?

Peter Gabriel.

Tell me about that. Peter's amazing.

Peter Gabriel, the rock star, human rights activist extraordinaire, started calling me. I knew him from my art school multimedia days in the 80s and 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 all the. The issues that one has, if it was transparent. So he. He really strongly encouraged me and kept calling, and we had all these great conversations. So I said, okay, great, let's do it. Can I use the name? And he let me use the name. So he's. He's got sweat equity. He's also an investor.

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

I stun some.

All right. One of his.

He continues to.

So what was the vision Here. So let's now dive in, because the tech you have built and you are now rolling out is going to save millions of lives. Just to put a number on this, I don't think people realize that near 25% of the U.S. economy is going towards health care expenses.

Right? 30% for hospitals, another 20% for doctors. That's half of it. 6% for R&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.

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

It's, it's the cycle time. I mean, there's some good cures, but, you know, you get 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 treatments don't change that fast. It's now 26 years and close to $3 billion for a new drug approval capitalized cost. The shocking thing for medical device, a novel medical device, it's close to $700 million in 13 years. Capitalized cost to get, to go from.

An idea to, to developing it and getting it approved by the fda just.

Just for approval, let alone reimbursement and becoming standard of care, which takes you out to about $1.5 billion. So say you do that for a single rare disease because it's faster, costs less because you don't need as many patients. You spent a billion. Let's say you save some money, call 700 million. Few thousand people have it. What do you charge per patient? Yeah, so, you know, a few thousand.

People divided by the 700 million or 700 million by the.

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&D, nine out of every 10 healthcare dollars in the US comes from NGOs and GOs, and they're funding things that's like, you know, maybe trickle down economics works eventually.

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

Oh, oh, yeah, the numbers quite low. I don't take 20% for me personally. They work. I check that because I. Yeah, but it's.

You assume that when the doctor.

In that case, I'm missing part of my brain. It's a pituitary gland. I molecularly replace the 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.

Yeah, for sure.

And you know, like it's, it's 50, 40 to $70,000 per patient in a clinical trial and it takes years to get them through. For a bigger disease like mental disease or neurodegenerative disease, you got to do 10,000, 100,000 patients. The cost becomes, and the time becomes prohibitive. 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. There's others as well which you can list for us because I list them all the time. But clinical trials, they're exponentially slower and exponentially more expensive over time as it's been well graphed. And they call it Moore's Law backwards Eram's law. That's the big problem that I think you have to change, which enables you to enable low cost but also get more data. If you can get more data than we've ever had before, 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 to make a decision for their health care. Why not just collect more data? We're really good at crunching data. We're going to learn even more through crunching the data with the AI tools than we have. But for that it's very hard if you're making a new drug that's never physically existed before and putting it in somebody's body to get that kind of scale quickly because you gotta go through some tests first.

We're gonna 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, it is, it is 60s. It is dramatically dropping cost by not 10x. We're talking about potentially, you know, hundreds and thousands of X reduction in cost and putting this technology in potentially Every village throughout Africa.

Mary Lou, 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, despite economic level and borders. And it's like consumer electronics, we all have, like.

So, Marilee, 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's as impactful as the mobile phone has been.

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.

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

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

How big were these things before? Because they're the size now of something like a headband. Right. They were before.

That's what we started with in 2016, with the size of the room in manipulating the phase of light and sound, so we could steer it wherever we wanted to in the body. 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 does, but like using various voltages and frequencies.

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

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

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

These are multimillion dollar systems. We went down to the carts, which were a hundred to five hundred thousand dollars, and then we went down to this size. So I have it with me. Like, here is the console. Yes, the cart.

Okay.

That starts production next. This Month. 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 microclot removal. We have some very good results in research for that right now. There's that. And I've shown you the box for our imaging system is. This is the console for it.

So it looks like 100x or 1000x reduction in volume and the cost.

We're selling these for 10k, but at volume. This goes to the cost of a smartphone.

So what would that give me a number here? 1000x reduction in price.

Oh, sorry, the actual device.

No, but from where it was in 2016.

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

Wow.

Which becomes really interesting as you think of cost structures. And there's no, like, shortages, which are really a huge problem also right now in, in medical. So, yeah, it's a device with pan disease impact.

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

Yeah, we can show you some of that. Sorry, I've got. Yeah, so this is the waves and we steer the waves. So here's like cancer cells in glioblastoma. We did have some great results with glioblastoma. And the problem is a surgeon can't get the whole tumor out. Some cancer cells hide out amid the neurons. You can't scoop out all the neurons.

But just so people to know, glioblastoma is right now a death sentence. 100% 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.

Yeah, it's not long. But all aggressive cancer cells share a mechanical property that normal cells don't have, which is the definition of metastasis. They've got a big nucleus, a small cytoplasm, the big nucleus, because they're growing.

So fast, they divide.

The DNA is in there fast because they want to grow and kill you. We exploit that. Like an opera singer can ping this wine glass, match the frequency and destroy that wine glass and harm nothing. Else in the room. 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.

So you found their resonant frequency.

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 2 minute dose at a diagnostic level that means lower than used on pregnant women and their fetuses in the western world on billions of them for the last 50 years. Diagnostic level destroyed the tumor. Needed another dose at day five. Two minute dose, 10% duty cycle, 150 kilohertz. That's the frequency of a fish finder. This is the best one. We tried a bunch of them, but then we had some trouble getting into humans because safety and whatever. Safety, literally people. That a death sentence.

That kills me. I hate that part.

10 billion people, right? Okay, so we switch it up to 400 kilohertz. Over firing neurons. 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 fmris with them. We saw the over firing neurons. Here in the front you can see the overfiring neurons. FMRI shows the use of oxygen and that correlates to ultrafine neurons. We quelled them. And nearly half of our patients, just for study, not even tuning the dosages right, went into remission of severe depression, of severe depression.

What's the best drug do for us today?

Much, much less. Much.

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

We did it for five minutes a day, every day for the first week, five days. And then the second week, three days, and the third week, three days and five minutes are 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 cell phone, 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.

I was going to say. I heard you say that. I mean, so someone who has an addictive personality, addicted to drugs, addicted to gambling addictions, all addictions, we can see the over firing.

I want a glass of wine in the evening. You know also I'm working on it. It's not that bad but still, you know, like whatever it is that your, your addiction is, like, how do you, how do you, how do you, how.

Do you down reg. How do you down regulate it?

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 slow down. So it just goes on. It's a multipurpose machine. But yeah, it can do this. Also we think neurodegenerative disease treatments as well as other mental diseases. So the results are pretty spectacular.

And you developed this early on for strokes as well. Stroke detection. Let's not forget about your first 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.

Can we set this up a little bit? So the second leading cause of death worldwide, worldwide is strokes.

It's 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% getting to the right hospital for the treatment. You need to live. So for heart attack, there's an EKG put on your chest. Find out if you've got a heart attack stat. You can put an EKG on your forehead that won't tell you if you're having a large vessel occlusion stroke. We created a system so far with 151 patients at Penn 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 and the brain tissue dies.

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

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

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

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

Right. And call the cath lab while you're at it. So they can set it up while save minutes, process. Like seriously, those doctors know more about their Uber eats orders than when they're going to get the next patient life saving treatment. So we can use technology to improve that. So yes, we've got that working to that extent. We finished that level of clinical trials. We send it to the FDA, they want 10,000 more patients and you're like, it's 40 or $70,000 per patient. That's a lot of money. So what do you do? You get stuck on this. That's why I say we've got great technology, really great technology, but the business model is also necessary. Maybe all startups are great technology combined with a new business model.

So how, you know, let's talk about that because. So first of all, I just want to frame this. The technology that you have, you brought together, it's converging exponential technologies. This is new chips, cameras, AI 3D printing. 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 gonna impact stroke, the number two killer in the planet. It's gonna allow us to address glioblastomas and other aggressive cancers. The cancers that are killing us very rapidly, that we don't have cures for. It's gonna now enable us to support those with mental disorders and with addictions. I mean that's a massive moonshot, my friend. And you've made it.

Harming healthy cells all went through autopsy at Charles river. And unlike chemotherapy or radiation therapy or even surgery, they could find no healthy cells harmed because they don't have the same resonant frequency. So you're selectively picking up the cancer cells or the neurons without selecting the others. And of course, we can also focus where we wish to in the body. Unlike a drug that spreads all over.

I love that. And what people don't know is one of your early visions here, and we'll get to that eventually, is that you can use this technology to read and write onto neurons. So it is a version of brain computer interface without drilling holes in your head.

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

I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino 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 a. You recently took in a large grant from a well known crypto technologist.

Right?

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

He reached out.

He is who?

Vitalik Buterin, who is the founder of Ethereum and a math genius. And it's a very successful cryptocurrency. He's the most visible person, the guy Satoshi with bitcoin, he's disappeared. So Vitalik is a face of it. He had a bunch of Shiba 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 up like, if I could have done any help on Covid, I would have dropped everything. In early 2020, he's like, no, I think you can do it. 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 re. It's amazing. The risk of neurodegenerative disease doubles if you've had long Covid. The risk of heart failure goes up 173%, stroke 164%, et cetera, et cetera. And also we think we can help with long Covid because we can see blood flow. If you drop Covid into vial of blood, you get these microclots. Those are probably not. Since they're 10 to 100 microns in size, they're not making it through the capillaries. Again, I'm just a physicist, but seems to make sense to me. There's an issue there. So any rate, so we decided to open source the company and we took a $50 million.

So you just, you decided to, I mean it's very important here. This is a, this is going open source with your fundamental technology, right?

All 68 of our patents, all of our software, all of our hardware, open source agpl. So it, it, it continues open source. And what I think that does is break this 600 and this is $658 million is the average capitalized cost to get a new device. Just a regulatory approval in the US as averaged over every single one that's done it in the last 30 years. But in 20, $24, it's staggering. And what's really interesting here is that 85% of that cost is actually the device development, it's not the trials. If you take that, there's another 7% if you share safety data. But if you can create a platform, a low 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 100 to half a million dollars. These are $10,000 going to $1,000. People can buy them. Open source is a distribution model, but it's a trust model. 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, those companies can make some money on it, but everybody keeps everybody honest. They make any money. Like guess what? Consumer electronics and, and technology make money. Like literally 20 years ago the top 5 companies in the world were oil and gas. They're now tech 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.

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

Essentially. Although there was a lot more discussion of how we could help in Covid and other things. And it was a long discussion. I went to Zulu a couple times. That was his anyway. It was fantastic. But he used Shibu Inu coin. That's super key. Didn't sell any Ethereum. He just people had gifted when you're sort of famous crypto. He had gotten it and he wanted to use it for his charities. We're not a charity but we are open sourcing all of our technology. So. But I, you know, I think like one of the reasons one laptop per child couldn't succeed is we had no way to make money because we, we sold it at cost so we couldn't sustain where if we just added an extra $10 that could have solved it too. But I think a for profit entity that's open source is maybe a better solution and I wanted to try that and I convinced all my investors to say yes at the same time. And at the beginning I literally had to hold the phone really far away because they thought open source equals charity. Yeah, but it's not any way I could do the business model. It was a 10x to 100x more revenue with this 10x to 100x more margin than any other approach I could find. Because I mean it feels like we were talking 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 Phillips, they can take 100, a thousand shots on goal. So even if somebody has trouble, some of them get through and I think through the regulatory process because biology is unpredictable. We want more data about biology. This is a way to get more data on the same platform. ISO 13485, low cost right now people make a cart, get regulatory approval on it and then have to shrink it and then they have to go through the same process again. They go through like 20, 30 years.

I love a few things you've said. I've heard you say that you're basically about to use silicon and software to replace drugs.

Yeah, Silicon Hospital, we think Silicon Hospital within reach. And we've got some good data on cancers and mental disease and neurodegenerative disease, also longevity stuff and chronic diseases like diabetes and so forth by basically being able to activate certain cells and also monitor and see. We have some imaging technology we put on the back shelf for a while because we could realize we could ship these faster. But we also think ultimately we can replace the MRI machine with also a wearable that's low cost, that leverages a lot of the technology we're building out in these two units right now.

So I want to set a vision of where things are, are going because I think what's beautiful here is the same technology, the same physics, the same chip sets that are in those materials, in those devices you've identified with different software can give you different therapeutics and different diagnostics.

Right, exactly.

And so if you can put those, your tech, Open Water's tech into the hands of thousands of labs and scientists around the world, they'll find novel uses for it, new approaches 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. If we overcharge or try to gouge them for us, they can go to another manufacturer and get it made. We still have a really good business. You know, right now nobody can make these. We've made the plans. But you know, Elon open sourced his patents for the rockets. Like go ahead, spend the money and.

Open sources for the charging stations for Tesla.

Yeah. Or you know, just Boeing could open source all of its stuff. Like it's still hard to make this stuff and design it. So we're just pushing the envelope. But the problem is people are dying in the process. 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 0, 0 get into the health care system. And that's because of the $658 million in 13 years. And so we have to break that mold too to move it onto a different pathway. I'm from consumer electronics. We ship every year or two. Honestly, a complex project is a two year project.

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

We'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 on them the reservations on our website. The first one will ship out this month.

So end of 24 in Q2. Amazing.

Of the shrink. Thanks to Vitalik's gift, we were able to take the money and shrink it down. We thought it was important because it is seems like a general purpose platform.

So I love, remember the, the movie Brainstorm?

Yeah, I do.

And they had this giant device for being able to read and write onto neurons and they shrunk it down to some small device you'd stick on your head. And I viewed that as what you're doing. I mean you're about to unleash an entire revolution.

Yeah. So this is.

What else haven't we covered that you want to. Because I have a few other things in the personal project.

Yeah, I've got a few. I've got this presentation. I can 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, Healthcares 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 enables volume. We make money. It's a crafts thing. People ask, they're like, you're not like, well if you make more of something, it's cheaper. It's Approximately for every 10x more you make something, it's a slight exaggeration to say it's 10x cheaper. We enjoy a portion of that savings as our profit. That's it.

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

Yes, yes. Or quality. 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 at Intel. Our minimum sample size bill was 10,000 units like but this enables innovation because the best products go through the most iterations and you can leverage the product and it also engenders trust and you.

Get a massive amount of data. Just a massive amount of data.

Yes, we get to use the tools of our time for AI too to see more things and different people will do better and it'll move back and forth. But we break this cycle, this anti innovation cycle of 20 to 40 year moats in health care while people are literally dying by the millions of these diseases. So that's where I get to. And so there's so much talent. How do we try this? So yes, Vitalik helped us try it and I convinced all of our investors to say yes. At the same time. And we signed the deal. So it's done. We're open source now and forever.

Open water is open source. How appropriate. That's great.

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

I want to. I have a couple of personal questions here, if you don't mind.

Sure.

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.

Right.

Talk to me about that.

And that wasn't enough money. So my dad started this automotive repair business. He rebuilt car engines. So I was a little kid and I could shimmy under the car and probably get child protective services now. But, you know, you figure stuff out and you know, we plowed. I grew up in New England. We plowed the neighbors driveways when it snowed. And that ended up being me trying to figure out how to get the tractor to start up and get the plow on and all, you know, just all that stuff. So you just sort of learn how to do that.

You learn how to tinker and build.

Yeah. My dad was that he grew up on a farm. You know, like everybody didn't have jobs there. So he was in that transition. As Americans went out of many of them, especially New England, you know, the Midwest lasted longer. We didn't have.

Who taught you art? Mary Lou was your mom.

I loved art. To me it was the same thing. And that's where I came to in engineering. I just loved it. There was actually literally the governor of Connecticut's sister was my art teacher in elementary school. Random Ella Grasso had just come in. My parents hated Ella Grasso. 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 1970. This morning, 65, literally they had started this. The public elementary school in my district. And we weren't in a rich or fancy town. We weren't rich. Was continuous progress. You could just do what you wanted, be how you feel. And I just did math an art. And that's what I wanted to do. So I was doing like in 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.

You also were you played in the band? Didn't You?

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

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

I was in a couple of small punk rock band.

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

Well, their age is fun.

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

Oh yeah. Well, I took all these art classes when I started college. My parents didn't grow up rich and they wanted me to be able to support myself. 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 I started and I thought it would have killed any ounce of creativity I ever had. I might have had and I'm not saying I had much. It was so dry, it was so boring. Like inclined planes, they just go there. Like you spend a whole semester on f equals 0 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 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 I just did it to maintain my sanity. It's not like I could afford therapy or anything like that. I took art courses and I ended up finishing all of the classes for a second degree in art. But they wouldn't give it to me because I had to pay for five years. I only paid for four. But later after I got the PhD, I then got an honorary PhD and they gave me the art degree. Then I didn't have to pay for it and I got the honorary PhD.

I think that is well, well because.

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

You know, one of the things I talk about is going from success to significance and the, you know, so much of, of entrepreneurs measure themselves by their stock price or the amount of money they raised or you know, a bunch of different elements. Can you just speak to the entrepreneurs who are listening who are, you know, want to do big, bold, significant things in life. What's your advice to them?

Figure out a new way to do it. You know, I just was thinking about. People keep asking first principles. I always thought it was a first principle thing, Maxwell's equations. But I think maybe the bigger answer to this is read history. Read history. Of science. I. To fund my PhD was totally unfundable. The stuff I didn't explain what 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 Caleon 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, a Galileo, Franklin, Ben or Rosalyn, you know, both of them, 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. And if you.

I hope you're gonna go there. Because I do think that if you're going to do something that's big, bold and significant, you know, I like to say they're overnight successes. After 11 years of hard work, you have to love it.

And you, if you don't love the job, you should do something else because you do have to spend all your time on it. So, you know, I get up and I can't sleep. I get up to work on the thing. I love the work. So you just keep. If you don't like it, you're not going to do a good job on it. I work all the time. Time. I love it. It's hard to stop me from working.

Well, you're not working. You're, you're, you're, you're playing, you're having fun, you're fulfilling your purpose in life.

Right? What can you do? So you should feel that way about it. And then I guess, you know another question. So, yeah, first principles. What are first principles? Like Oxford gave a fine. If you diverged from Aristotle, 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 look, I go way back as far as I can go to present day, go back 50 years and see what people have Missed the first principles, things. Well, there's a lot of principles. And so which ones do you pick? And which. How do you see it? Can you find a new way through it? Given what we have now, all that we have access to now, people abandoned it 20, 30, 50 years ago. Can we pick that back up, 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 problem. Wrong question. It's the wrong answer. You know, I just tell them, but, you know, it is the wrong answer. It shouldn't be the number of employees.

What should it be?

How big you are?

Is it the size, the scale of your desired impact? Number of people you're touching?

Yeah. How big? Maybe they want to know. I suppose if they're interested in the company, they'd like to know. Revenue and income should be the total shareholder return, you know, if you're on a board or something. 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.

Are you glad that you didn't pursue open water straight out of intel or straight out of one laptop and you waited till now or until 2016? It seems like the tech became enabled in the last few years. It's really the convergence, the theme. So you're going to be on stage with me at the Abundance360 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.

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 medications that I take and getting those right, it was a big fight. I could have started it then. I just. It was such an opportunity to partner with Nicholas and then the. The opportunity to work with Sergey and Google and then with Mark were such big opportunities and. And we were supposed to do it. It's just the reality is a business where they run they were responsible for these big business. So I understood it. So I love, I enjoy the work. I just knew that it could be applied to the body and I supposed, yes, by waiting, yeah, 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. Maybe because I've been through it so many times. Like you don't need actually a lot of people because you use contract manufacturing for a lot of it and you have these teams all over the place and this communication that transcends, I think the traditional build your own factory, build your own everything takes a long time to build those. And so you can turn it on and turn it off quickly and move to different factories should you find issues. But that's a detail.

Mary Lou, heartfelt thank you for all that you're doing. This is one of the many chapters in a multi volume book called Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen. I'm excited. People can find out more about open Water by going to openwater.com openwater health. Okay, openwater health. And are you on social media?

I'm on Twitter x Facebook.

And what's your handle there?

Twitter MLJMLJMLJ.

Okay, MLJ it is.

Three MLJs.

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 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.

I'm. 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, 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?

It's an incredible world ahead. It truly is a world I think people need to see. We hear about all of the problems and issues that are just plaguing society and all the epidemics and obesity and all. And yes, those things are true. And yes, we have to solve the health care crisis. And yes, we have people and technology like you in open water that are giving us brand new tools, giving us wings thank you so much for highlighting this.

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 just, you know, support them.

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

Yeah, that's the thing to build apps on top. And that's another reason why it's open source, because I'm like, well, I don't trust you. It's competitive, everybody has access, everyone can use it.

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

You might be able to understand a lot more about biology and you'll certainly understand a lot more about safety and efficacy and the brain answers and the brain and read, write, you know, brain.

100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synoptic connections, and it's still very much a black box. And you're building the telescope, I'm going to call it, that's what I'm calling the telescope for the brain or the microscope into the brain. 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 and there was a rule against it. So we use phantom tissue, but we focus to a micro. Micron live on stage.

And what does a micron buy you in terms of a single neuron?

A single neuron. 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. Can do lots of different things.

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

Right. And you can get through clinical trials easier because everybody can have this at home. So you can try it more easily. We have surveillance systems in our home, like cameras and microphones, so we can see how the effects are and, and measure them and collect more. Like, you know, my watch tracker, my heart rate monitor, it's accurate to + or -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.

Insane.

That's it?

Yeah.

Like how can you draw as meaningful conclusions?

Yes, right.

Or have the impact given, you know, how much they've spent, you know, whatever. They spent $100 million, they've done 76 patients and they've got a long road to hoe to get through approval processes which probably will need 10,000 patients. And so you're just stuck. We can't get new therapies unless we can get more people to try it. How do you make sure it's safe? I mean, I think there's many of these things that look safe. People say, well, 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 the hospital? Do we have to do this all in a university? I mean that's where you get to spending 40 to $70,000 per patient and then the numbers become astronomical. Or do you work with the Ministry of Health of a middle income country who's, who would like to own the regulatory.

Or do you get 10,000 of these? You get 10,000 100,000 of these units out there and people say, I want to be part of that trial.

Right. And then download the software homes and so forth and they can do the trial there or they can do it at the Ministry of Health, who then owns the regulatory approval. And then they do what they feel has been done to them by Big Pharma, for example. So, you know, it gets interesting when a country can own the regulatory approvals.

I can't wait to see where you are in March and then next year I want to come back and go deeper into the early results and talk about writing and reading onto neurons of your brain. So openwater Health and on X mlj, mlj, MLJ is your handle there. Have a amazing day. Thank you again for everything.

Thank you, Peter.

Take care, my friend.