The Achieve Podcast - Dexter Hadley (Canonic Foundation)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. We're excited to have Dexter Hadley with us today. He's the founder of the Canonic Foundation. Dex, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Thank you, Jesse. It's really an honor and a privilege to be able to talk about what I'm doing.

So our audience can get to know you. Can you give us a quick backstory of your business? What do you do and how did that all get started?

Yeah, gladly. So I am a physician and a scientist. That means I have an MD and a PhD. It's a good indication I have commitment issues, but I've been in academia pretty much my entire life up until maybe 8 months ago. I was the chief of AI at UCF here in Florida, University of Central Florida. Before that, I was at University of California San Francisco. That's UCSF. UCSF wins the most grants of all of the universities. You may not have heard of them because there's no undergrads, so A lot of the taxpayers' money goes to UCSF to do research like what I'm trying to commercialize today. Before that, I was at Stanford for residency. I did a residency in pathology at Stanford around 2012. And before that, I was at med school at Penn University of Pennsylvania when the genome was being sequenced. And I got a PhD along the way for good measure. So, yeah, so this work is really I don't know, 14, 15 years I've been on Git. I guess before that, I learned to program at age 10 back in Trinidad. So, you know, you combine a history like that with a love of programming, and you're going to get quite a remarkable story. So we think, and we have this idea that AI now is such a common commodity. I mean, it has been commoditized like electricity, like the internet. There's absolutely no reason anymore to be prompting or programming. What we have developed, and I think pretty robustly over that length of time doing what I've been doing, is a governance framework for AI. And I want to tell you about some of the things you can do with the governance framework for AI with a background like that. Okay, great.

So the foundation— how old is the foundation?

I discovered sort of this idea again over 14, 15 years of building systems that interrogate bioinformatics. My PhD is in genomics and computational biology. I studied the neurosynapse as a foundational unit computationally for autism 20 years ago.

You've been doing this for a long time. And how big is it? Is it just you or do you have a team? What does the, the current company look like?

So we filed patents within 2 months of sort of the discovery. We think we have 8 dimensions that can be used to do certain things. And the main thing we do is we put a contract with the AI itself, right? I was writing a book about precision medicine and sort of the economy of molecular biology, you know, using AI to keep track of, you know, economics and biology and a lot of complex things. And somewhere along that line, I wrote canon as the laws that the, you know, when you write a book, you need an emotional spine, you need an, you know, you need a chapter map of types. I don't write books, I write, you know, academic papers. And you send that to the publisher. It's a contract with the publisher to write the book. So I've abstracted the publisher and write contracts for the AI directly. I mean, that is the real innovation. And what that means is we no longer program, we govern, right? So I govern systems over time. And this is incredibly important for things like HIPAA and GDPR and doing research, right? So we have governance of AI, and it allows us to work in, in places where there is no governance. It allows us to treat, you know, blockchain as governance of a transaction. It's a transaction between you two. You have no idea what that transaction is for. So we put a contract on a blockchain, so you do have an idea what that transaction is for. This is how pathology labs work in real life without the AI, right? This is how your system works. You had a constitution, right? We have a constitution that applies everywhere, and that constitution is amended and amended and amended. So that was all before AI. Humans enforce that constitution. Now that we have AI, we have a— we've taken this approach to governance very precisely to build communities that can learn, right? So, we have, we won the Casey DeSantis Award. I live in Florida now, right? Casey has got cancer in 2021. So, we won the award to develop AI to navigate cancer that will not hallucinate, that will not lie, that will explain mammography screening, that will explain what BI-RADS means, that will explain, you know, all the complexities in plain English and follow the guidelines. You know, that was Mammochat. That was the original idea. And what we've done is kind of abstracted that idea to any guidelines now. So we have, you know, so we build contracts that the AI will not lie. It will follow the guidelines. And if it doesn't know, it will tell you. That's how it started. And then we build contracts that if you ask a question we don't know and somebody answers it, that's community learning. If enough people do that, That's community learning. And mind you, because, you know, like blockchain, you don't know who these people are except the, you know, except the interacting parties. I don't know who these people are, but we can build communities that learn about breast cancer in this community or breast cancer in that community. Does this drug work for this genetic defect? Right. And that's kind of the idea. If you govern AI, you have an ecosystem of governance that evolves over time. Right? Much like genetics evolves over time, governance itself evolves over time. And I think that's the insight. And I would love to talk more about these applications that we're doing. Breast cancer is the first use case of that.

So, Dax, I want to, you know, our listenership is entrepreneurs, right? They're business owners looking to kind of move past the growth phase, growing revenue. Obviously, your journey is a little bit different than a lot of people I talk to, right? You're come from a little bit more academic. You've got some foundations. You're on a lot of boards. You're doing— you've been in AI clearly for a long time here, right?

Sure.

And it's changing, changing all of our worlds, right? So thank you for being a part of that. And also there's some cautionary tales there too, right?

Um, sure.

But, but I love what you're doing on the medical side of this, right? Let's talk a little bit more about how you're using AI automation. You explained a little bit of it. Talk about how you're applying it and solving some real problems.

So, so I'm from Trinidad. Trinidad has no HIPAA, yet every study that's run in Trinidad— Trinidad has oil, we have actual infrastructure and hospitals, but we share Venezuela. So, but it's interesting, there's no law in Trinidad. That's why drug companies go to Trinidad to do their clinical trials, right? Because there's no actual law of enforcement. It's a lot cheaper to operate. So we are taking the AI idea to Trinidad. Now, the guidelines in America don't apply to Trinidad, right? Obviously, um, different genetics for cancer, different culture. Uh, we have something called bush medicine in Trinidad. There's a different level of trust, and that's fine. So we take the same Mammochat that KCD Sciences funded us to, to build, right, a governed AI for Florida. We take it to Trinidad and we extend it, just like the law. We amend it, right? We amend it to consider what bush medicine is. We amend it to consider the local population. So Trinidad is resource constrained. That's a different problem than America, right? And we're able to build a learning community so you can learn, you know, what the old folks say. Is ginger actually good for breast cancer? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Who knows? But we can find out from community learning. That knowledge can percolate into Florida if you're interested in ginger and your breast cancer or whatever the case may be. right? This is fine and well, this is the flow of information. How do you make money? Well, there's massive need, right, for, you know, for a couple things, right? So there's massive need, I think, in the drug and the pharmaceutical industry, getting this information, building better drugs for people because you can access them, right? So, you know, instead of, you know, instead of drug discovery being sort of at Harvard and it's Stanford and at some of the places I've trained at. It is certainly not in UCF, for instance, in Orlando, Florida. Now, it could be because we have a genetic defect. We've learned from the community. We know a certain population might have it. We know what environment, you know. So there's massive deals, I think, to be made with pharma. But even beyond that, my background is in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology depends on the mutation rate of the genome. Guess what? The violation rate of HIPAA is as constant as the mutation rate of the genome. Which means Advent Health is a top 10, top 20, you know, health insurer. They were 120 with an M, or is it with a B? But massive amounts of violations with HIPAA. This is the mathematics of the patents that we've proved. We have it under FRAND licensing. Our goal is not to hide it. It is to share with the community how to build AI that has institutional memory, that that is moral, that will follow guidelines, that will not hallucinate. You follow? So, so, so to answer your question, how are we going to make money? We're in Trinidad. We're partnering with the local Cancer Association of Trinidad to build the first AI-driven registry of cancer in the Caribbean. We have no laws, right? We have no laws. And then bring that to America, take that to EU where you have too many laws. It's the same structural solution for both of those problems. Right? Uh, it's the same structural solution for those. But I happen to be a doctor. Fantastic. I have realtors that are interested, uh, in an app on a blockchain. Again, why? Because you can govern the economy on a blockchain. You can have sales, you can give tokens, you can, you can govern, um, whatever it is your business needs. Um, and they're interested in, in, in basically developing a DoorDash for realtors. We're calling it GoRunner.pro. Pro. So it's, you know, it's a certain economy to put signs down or to put a lockbox down. What that means is eventually I put your entire mortgage on a governed resource, right? Just like we cut out the publishing company with a book spine and a chapter map or an emotional arc. I think that's what the term is. That's what you send to the publishing company. AI is obsoleting all of these things. I mean, in a and of one type of way. So to answer your question, I mean, I'm a founder of one. I have collaborators in Trinidad who write the guidelines for Trinidad, collaborators in Malta who are on the EU board for Malta and the WHO, have collaborators obviously in America. UCF runs the trials. The entire operation is distributed because of the way we govern. And I think, I mean, I think so I have thousands of agents that support me, but I'm a founder of one.

Yeah, no, that's okay.

Right.

No, you're, you're, you're a You've got the, the entrepreneurial spirit. You see a problem, right? You want to go out and solve it. There's people that are willing to pay to have it solved, right?

That's right.

And in this case, you're looking at governments in a lot of ways.

Developing countries have no clue. They don't know what to do. They're not America, and they— but all they have is these American guidelines that don't really apply to our people, right? So we've discovered we can solve this problem. If we can solve this problem, we can solve GSK's problem. We can solve Roche's problem, etc., right? So it's a— it's just a really a way to build trust. We all trust Bitcoin. If I gave you 100 Bitcoin today, you would trust you were rich. You would trust that. You would not know how you got rich. That what I'm saying is now I would tell you how you got this Bitcoin. Is it— did you kidnap somebody for it? If it— I mean, maybe you did, but no, we— it is— you trust the Constitution, don't you? Why? Because it is public. And it is ledgered. And that's what we're bringing to the world of AI. AI now is ephemeral. It's always there, right? Why are we still programming? It makes no sense. AI programs better than me. I know this, right? So this framework brings a very different lens into how I see, I think, the future of work itself.

Contract. Let's talk about some of the challenges you've had as you've tried to take this to market. What are some of those constraints that you're seeing? Where do you The challenges.

I anticipated this one too. So like I said, I looked at all your podcasts, I governed all the captions, I said go predict all the questions this guy's going to ask me, let's come up with some answers, right?

Um, way to use AI against me, or for me.

Not against you at all, but I will answer your question precisely. I moved from the NBA of what I do to high school. That's California to Florida, okay? Uh, I went to an Ivy League undergrad, cutting edge. I did my residency at Stanford. I actually dropped out, if that matters, to join the faculty, well, to join a research lab that was doing really cutting-edge stuff. I became faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, won $38 million in grants, all on the ledger, all provable. Why? Because University of California is one health system, okay? Politically, for whatever reason, there's one UC, there's LA, there's SD, there's 5 or 6 different med schools. That's one governance system. My boss, the Atul Butte, uh, he was the Mark Zuckerberg Professor of Pediatrics, past tense, because he passed away last year. Um, but he had $60 million from Mark Zuckerberg to govern the entire health system. That's how you win $38 million from the NIH, right? You have all the data in the world flowing freely. Florida is the exact opposite. Every Florida The institution is independent. The laws in Florida that come from Tallahassee are just absurd and political. Tenure is not even a thing in Florida. So it's just interesting, the contrast that I've lived. Why did I move to Florida? My mom has Alzheimer's and she lives with me now. I had to move to Florida, not because I wanted to move to Florida, but it was the best thing that could have happened actually for this innovation. Because in Florida, you could have the best ideas in the world. I was the chief of AI of UCF College of Medicine. And I did nothing for 4 or 5 years, not because I couldn't, because the laws were not— you were not able. The lawyers would shut down any collaboration with anybody just because of what it is. And that is not blame. That is just an observation. So, you know, I started this in California a long time ago, 2018. I was on Bloomberg the year ahead talking about this 2 or 3 Bitcoin waves ago. And the only thing missing was the AI, right? So You know, I think ChatGPT has provided exactly what I thought we would be doing almost 10 years ago right now. And I'm telling you, this is the only way AI can become institutional memory, right? A prompt is ephemeral, it's lost. You know, Oracle just fired everybody. I mean, it's insane what is going on in the world right now, and AI is taking over. And AI today is a prompting library. That is absurd. AI has to be built into the infrastructure of these organizations. I don't care what the infrastructure is. I don't care who the governing authority is. It is the same problem we all have. HIPAA, GDPR, SOX 2, defense, they're all the same thing because the compliance is what, you know, we work in and compliance is governance, right? So Florida was both a blessing, both a curse and eventually a blessing because Florida is a good place to make a lot of money, right? It's a good place to conduct commerce. And $120 million in violations for some of these large health systems that exist down here, and they cannot do anything about it, otherwise they would. So we've, you know, so it's just interesting how these things work over time. And if you've been doing this long enough like me, you start to see patterns, and I'm seeing a pattern that I really think I can impact here. And I'm super excited to get the opportunity to talk to your audience about it.

Let's talk about the future for a minute. You know, what are you most excited about? What is motivating? You know, wave the magic wand, a year, 2 years from now, you accomplish your goals. What does that look like? Talk to me about that future.

So, I mean, clearly I am not that typical founder. Okay, this is a, you know, necessity breeds innovation, I guess. But I really think The Third World, Trinidad, the Caribbean, these places that have no laws, they really have no bounds on what is possible, are poised to just explode. Okay, Trinidad has no health. Again, they, they, they're a higher income type of country. We have oil, we have, you know, we have business, we have manufacturing. I mean, Marco Rubio was just down there with the whole Venezuela drama and, and, um, And it's a flip of a switch before, you know, modern electronic healthcare systems are deployed in Trinidad, right? With agents that govern the interaction between them. What a concept! That does not exist in America, right? America did it exactly backward. They, much like Europe, all this HIPAA since 1988, all these regulations, and what does that end up in? You end up in Florida and there's no interaction between authorities because the regulation is territory, right? Or, or that's the excuse that's used for commerce, right? So, so, so I think I, I am most excited about places that are developing, that we can deploy these things at scale. Small islands, developing islands, they can be federated. We can show learning, um, and then go do it in developed countries that are overregulated. I think that is a model that I'm excited about because I come from these places. I would love to learn more about the genomics and the biology of people that look like me, that just does not exist today. And I think that is simply not possible without technology like this, without AI. Okay. America has, you know, Trinidad has resource— we're a restricted resource country. America has different problems, right? There's structural problems here that America cannot fix, right? Certain people do not go to the doctor. I'm telling you, this is not a question. And you can't even say that in Florida because the law says so, right? So, so how do you fix that problem? You don't fix that problem in Florida. You can't fix that problem, right? So I'm excited to be able to use AI as a, as a democratic multiplier. This applies to everybody now, right? Um, uh, and the— and there's a lot of work to be done. It is to be contracted, it is to be public, it is to be fair. Um, and I just, I just find that very satisfying as a clinician that's been doing this for so long.

So you've been doing this for a long time, a little bit new to— I know I'm not going to say new to entrepreneur, but, but the foundation's newer, you know. I mean, I think on LinkedIn it's showing 4 months, Mamochan 7 months. Talk to me a little about some of the learning, the lessons you've had in trying to get this out there and trying to get it to market? What lessons have you learned? What are some of your wins or maybe some of the mistakes you've made as you've tried to—

I think, um, I, I just think this is very different, right? So I think almost every other startup is rushing to get to market. I have the opposite approach. My business is compliance. I cannot be wrong, right? So once we are compliant, we will ship, not the other way around. I cannot be wrong, right? If I'm wrong, it is— that's the end of it, right? Right.

Because you're the one setting the rules, right?

Well, that's right. So we are claiming we will be compliant mathematically. Okay. And we fight all— and to prove it, I have at least 3 or 4 fleets of software. We have MamoChat, Casey DeSantis. We have one called CaribChat we're going to release in Trinidad, endorsed by CARICOM. CARICOM has 15 member states. Trinidad is one of them. The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. These are real sovereign entities, right, that don't want to be a product for Google, to be honest, or for NVIDIA. You know, Caribbean has problems like brain drain. Like, look where I live. I live in Florida, right? But my heart is still in Trinidad, obviously. Right. So, so, so, I mean, I feel like this just is, uh, um, is the— is an intelligence layer that is quite open and transparent. Who knows how they train ChatGPT? Nobody knows. Like, can you tell me? Like, we don't know, right? Well, you know, they use your data to train on, on whatever you tell it, right? I'm telling you explicitly what I'm going to use your data for. I'm going to use your conversation. I'm going to cryptographically encrypt it. If we learn something for you, maybe you get rewarded, maybe you don't. But But this is completely transparent and is made to build trust, just like you would trust you were rich if I gave you 100 Bitcoin. You just would not trust the source of that money, but you would trust it's worth a good amount of money, right? So, you know, so that's, that's, that's what I think is really going to be the future, I think, of this space. And I am— yeah, I've just been a different— I've just been a different— I've just led a different road. So just to get back to your question. It must be compliant. Okay, so everything has been about computation. We compute this, you know, GPU that, and who cares? This does not matter for HIPAA. HIPAA only cares about the state of compliance or non-compliance. Now granted, it's a very complicated state. We have all these chats, we have all these variations of contracts, but that's what the law is. The law is a complicated state, and I guarantee if you show me the law over time, I could tell you a whole lot about that society and how it was governed. Right? Take America for instance. The law is historical. It's there for you to study. Take that same approach, apply it to AI. You have a very different future than what people are talking about today, right? A very different future. I, I think it cuts all of this nonsense about AI is gonna— no, it's not gonna take over. That doesn't make any sense. Why would— just unplug it. That doesn't make any sense. Like, like, that cannot make any sense. Like, so, so Yeah, so I don't know what's going to happen, but I have no expense, right? I sell the math of compliance, right? We— I mean, yes, I plan to do things, but my goal is not to go do things, is to teach companies how to be compliant, to provide— like Linux Foundation, right? You're compliant in Linux, you go learn how to run Linux. Linux has no risk, but they build a community that they can upsell enterprise tiers to. So that's sort of the idea. So we have very little risk, very little need to be anything that we are not, right? So we have to be compliant with our own self, right? So these apps have to work. They have to be tested. They have to be documented in a place with no laws where it is legal to do so before we go into a place with laws. Except, I mean, we all— everybody does this, right? Pharma does this. They just don't tell you. I am telling you this is what we're going to do. Because this is what we're going to do and it makes sense to do. And this is what I think has been missing. And this is why nobody trusts anybody anymore. This is why you don't trust your doctors, why you don't wear masks, why you don't take vaccines, because there's been a lack of trust as you move into the digital age. Doctors simply don't think like this. And I, you know, I mean, there's a small cadre of us that do. I happen to know almost all of them. And, you know, it's worth a shot. It's definitely worth a shot. you know, trying to execute this the way that I'm doing it.

All right, final question for you here, uh, Dax. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs or people in a similar situation to you? They're trying to take something big. I mean, you're talking about some big changes, some country-changing type things potentially, right, as you go out and create the governance around it. What advice would you give to other people that are kind of trying to do something.

Yeah, I was not wrong on my predictions, my friend. So you want to build the system you wish existed. I mean, that's what I pretty much did for the last 14 years. It is all on Git from 2013, okay? Uh, and I have had these roadblocks. I could not get through. I moved to Florida. I could not get through. I did not win a cent until I left UCF, and then I won this case, so they sent this money. That's because I built a system that I wish existed, and then I submitted to it. That's what I just said, right? I, I would not ship software that is not compliant with our own guidelines, with our own contracts, right? Um, so perseverance. I've been doing this a long time, right? So that's the first piece of advice: do not give up. Bureaucracy is your friend. Identify it and outrun it, right? That's the secret. Trinidad has no laws, right? We're gonna set the standard. I am a real doctor. I'm in real boards of real precision medicines, right? And we're going to set the standard to the best practices immediately. This is why I'm so excited about the Caribbean and the sort of up-and-coming developing nations. And once you build it, I mean, I'm not going to tell you what I did, right? Build a system and then submit to it, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. That's the definition of viral, right? An exponentially self-fulfilling feedback loop. Who knows? I might be wrong, but I I have very little to lose. I have very little to lose. And, you know, I mean, this is not the first startup. This is probably the 5th or 6th startup that I've been in. I've never really committed. I never quit my job to do it. So, you know, it's a very different motivation when this is going to be the sole source of income. Very different. So, you know, I am very thankful to you for the exposure and for being able to share my story.

Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, your insights with us. Definitely unique perspective, you know, as you know, your background in academia, in medicine, what you're trying to do with the tools that are available to you and actually creating new tools and creating the governance around that. Really impressive. Thank you for joining me. For those listening, if you want to learn more about what Dexter is building, you can visit visit his website, canonical.org, and it's the Canonical Foundation. I'm sure you can also reach out to him on LinkedIn. And that'll wrap the—

if you want to see the cool stuff, go to hadleylab.org. That's my workbench. That's where we prove what goes on in Canonical. Uh, we have— we're building partners. We're looking for partners. We're looking for people that, that, that don't want to prompt anymore and want some institutional memory, want some governance of your system, whatever that system might be. We're looking for partners that need any regulatory compliance. That's HIPAA, that's GDPR, that's etc., SOX 2, etc. It goes on any industry because it's a different way to think. And I think this is going to be the future. I hope this is the future.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. That'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, I invite you to follow the show, share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.