Founder's Story - The Future of Medicine: Exploring AI's Impact on Healthcare with Adrian Aoun and Forward | S2: E16

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

On today’s episode of Founders Story, serial tech entrepreneur and innovator Adrian Aoun discusses the rise of AI in various industries, but underscores how slow the healthcare industry has been in catching up with and leveraging thes Speaking to host Daniel Robbins, Adrian points out the wide reach of technology that today reaches the most remote areas of the world, but surprisingly, basic healthcare remains a dream to underserved communities globally. With a team of former executives and engineering leaders from Google and Uber, Forward, led by Adrian Aoun, is positioned to fix this problem and deliver healthcare across the globe.  Forward’s latest product, CarePod™, combines advanced diagnostics, personalized health plans, and a premium in-person experience putting you in the driver’s seat of your health. Subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss out on exclusive interviews and special content: https://foundersstory.beehiiv.com/subscribe For more info on guests and future episodes visit pix11.com/impact and https://fox5sandiego.com/fox-5-partners/impactful/Our Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Founders Story. The future of healthcare might be one of the most important topics that we ever talk about. I'm also very, very interested in how AI is integrating into the future of healthcare. That's why today we have Adrian Aoun, who is the serial entrepreneur. He's the CEO and founder of Forward, a company that I experienced many years ago, but he was the right-hand man of Larry Page, the founder of Google, and he was running special projects, AI. I can't only imagine what you were doing there, but Adrian, welcome to the show. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me, man.

So I know Ford has raised over $300 million to really find and create the future of healthcare. Before we dive into all the things that you're doing, what was that moment that you went from Google, the right-hand man of Larry Page, doing all these incredible things to now wanting to do something on your own? You know, ever since I was a kid, I always have been, you know, interested in building things from scratch. I started a company in AI that Google ended up buying. I was really lucky. I had a great few years there, but I knew that I had to get back to my roots of kind of building companies from scratch. So after a few years of actually starting companies for Google, starting kind of the alphabet companies, I said, you know, I think it's time.

As Larry was transitioning out, I said, you know what, I'll transition out as well and kind of get back into the game with Forward. Wow, that's amazing. Why healthcare? Yeah, so like many of us, I had the personal experience. My brother had a heart attack a few years ago, and I went from like not ever thinking about health care to overnight being super laser focused on. And honestly, Daniel, like think of my experience, right? Like on a Monday, I'm at Google trying to like solve AI, right? On a Tuesday, I'm like in my brother's exam room, and I swear on my life, like there's

a doctor like standing over him with like post-it notes. And I'm sitting here, I'm like, this makes no sense. Like, where's all the AI? Honestly, you just quickly realize like health healthcare is kind of a pile of crap. What's worse is it's not even an evenly distributed pile of crap, right? There's 8 billion people on the planet. Less than 2 billion of them have access to anything you and I would call like a real form of care. So I'm an engineer, right? I'm sitting here in the year 2024 with like smartphones in everybody's pocket. I'm like, wait, we can get smartphones to the

entire planet. You mean to tell me we can't get basic healthcare there? And I started to ask myself why. And I said, maybe this is the problem we should go work on. Maybe this is the defining problem of our time. Yeah, that's amazing. It is true. And it's crazy how even in the US, how backwards some things are. But I'm always surprised when I first heard about Forward because of your preventative approach. It's wild to me thinking that we have only just begun thinking about preventing things before they happen. So let's dive into how you are seeing then AI integrating with healthcare. Yeah. So look, you take a step back and you realize that like healthcare, we have all this data, but we're doing nothing with it. Right. And so we started to

ask ourselves, well, wait, maybe what we should do is we should put AI kind of at the center of healthcare. So what we did is we started by building these doctor's offices. We've got some near you in Orange County, but we're alive in about 25 cities. These are really high-tech doctors offices. But obviously you're thinking, wait a minute, a high-tech doctor's office? How's that ever going to scale to the whole planet? How's that going to bring about your AI future? What are you doing? But think about what we're doing. Every day we watch what's happening inside of our clinic. So you come in, you sit in the exam chair, you talk to your doctor about the flu. I go, wait a minute, why did he even come in? Let's just build that into mobile. Next guy talks to the doctor about skin issues, we build a skin scanner. Talk to your doctor about the flu. I go, wait a minute. Like, why did he even come in? Let's just build that into mobile. Next guy talks to the doctor about skin issues. We build a skin scanner. Talk to your doctor about heart issues. We build a body scanner and you get it slowly,

but surely we've been migrating every single thing from kind of doctor and nurse to hardware and software at the limit. What you realize is we're only building hardware and software. We don't even believe a doctor's office should exist. And that's kind of the phase we're in now. So we've started rolling out that our kind of next generation product, what we call the Forward CarePod. It's awesome. It's kind of this futuristic kind of pod cube looking thing. You walk into it. It's fully powered by kind of LLMs and AI.

It's pretty cool. You walk up to it and immediately it's like, hello, Daniel, welcome to Forward. Please step inside. You walk inside. It's got a whole bunch of apps that you can play with. You choose something like, you know, the body scan app. It'll spin you in a circle, take a whole bunch of readings, show you the results on the screen, explain them to you, then give you any sort of treatment you need.

You choose something like the heart health app. It actually opens a tray, hands you a sensor, again, takes your readings, explains them to you, gives you your treatment. And we're now expanding this so you can do all sorts of things in there. You can literally do everything from drawing your own blood to skin scanning, to sequencing your DNA, all this sort of stuff right there in the CarePod, right on demand, all AI powered for you.

When I first saw this, I thought this is like far into the future, but I didn't realize you have them open currently right now. That's right. That's right. Well, sometimes you have to create the future, not just wait for it to happen. You know what I mean? So, yeah, we've started rolling them out.

We've got tons and tons launching all over the country as we speak right now. So it's a pretty exciting time for us. I think we're turning live one every kind of couple of weeks or so. That's amazing. So I think you've coined the term the world's first AI doctor's office. We have, we have. Again, the idea is pretty simple, right? Like just think of, think of what, if you wanted to go train a self-driving car, well, what do you do, right? Well, look at what Elon does. You start by looking at what the drivers are doing and you try and copy it into

the, you know, into the car. And then you put a million cars on the road and every day you say, can I just make this a little better and a little better? And you start working your way up kind of the stack. Well, for us, it's the same thing. We have I think over 100 doctors at Ford right now. And we're just letting our system kind of learn from the doctors. Hey, you did that? Okay, we can go ahead and kind of replicate that and carry that care out.

But now we're starting to kind of be at the beginning of, well, maybe the AI should be suggesting things. Maybe it can kind of take us to the next level, kind of discover its own science. That's the world that we want to get to. We know that that world's not here today, but we know we can build that world if we try really hard. So are you finding that people are receptive to it? Are they concerned by it? Are they thinking, oh, wait, where's all the staff? Like, what are you finding that people are? What's their perception about this before and then after they experience it? I mean, I'll tell you, you can go watch the videos online. I'd encourage you to. It looks pretty. Honestly, those videos do not do justice. You go walk through one of these things, you're going to be like, that is so. But think about it this way, right? Like in the world of healthcare, they're like,

what are you talking about? You put a screen on the wall, you show them their body and all the data is overlaid on top. But in the world of like just being a normal consumer, you're like, yeah, we did that at McDonald's like 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Like we're used to technology, right? We all walk around with these little four inch pieces of glass called smartphones. At this point, I think healthcare is like the only industry in our lives that hasn't for some reason been hit by technology. So it's not so much that we're we're building the future. Sometimes I feel like we're just bringing health care from the 1800s back into the present day. I mean, yeah, if you ask anyone under the age of 30, like they live and breathe by their phone, no matter what. And then everyone

else is already, you know, keeping up. Everyone's on social media 24 seven. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're like 99 years old. So I am curious though, around what you're seeing when it comes to, is this more of like a preventative thing or is this finding things in the moment? Like what's, what's the, I mean, the goal, the goal is that you prevent everything. So we, we try to put as much as possible into prevention. We sequence your DNA, we process your blood. We're looking at trying to predict like, what are the cancers that might, that might kind of affect you? Not just tomorrow, not just a year from now, but maybe 10 years from now, 20 years from now, because the best

time to solve these problems is today. We've got all sorts of preventive plans from everything around, you know, the longevity sort of world to weight loss, to diabetes management. All of these are just in service of helping you live a happier, longer life and not sitting there waiting for kind of the anvil to drop on you. And oh my God, I just found out that I have something. Let's go ahead and deal with it before it gets here. Are there any tools that you have or are you linking it to anything like the phone or watch or any wearables that people can then take that information and continually check the progress of their health? Yeah, that's right. Whether they're in the pod or not. Yeah, that's right. So we connect live to all sorts of wearables.

So anything that your phone connects to, odds are we connect up to it automatically, right? From your Oura Ring to your 8-sleep bed to maybe you've got a continuous glucose monitor. You've got a scale at home, all that sort of stuff. And we're hoping to push even further into that world. Today, you still have to go into a care pod to, you know, sequence your DNA and process your blood. But wouldn't it be awesome if you could just do that like once a week at home? That's the world that we want to get to. What do you see in like five years, 10 years from now, just how fast AI is moving and how many things are like it's AI is like the word, right? Like

the word of 2024 and beyond is AI. A friend of mine who's been in the industry for over 20 years, he was just telling me that we'll reach AGI in his opinion in less than three years. And then who knows from there? So how do you see with how fast it's moving, you know, five, 10 years from now, AI in healthcare or even just AI in general? Yeah. Well, the first thing is for you, it may be the thing of the year, but I've been starting AI companies for, I don't know, about 15 years now. And one of the things you learn when you're kind of, it's not the fly by night, you've been in it for a while, is that it's kind of this old Bill Gates phrase, like, people tend to overestimate the amount of change that will occur in one or two years and underestimate the amount of change that will occur in 10.

Like, I think it's going to be absolutely transformational. I'm not sure we're going to hit AGI in the next three years. I might disagree on that one. I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I do think we're going to get to a world where healthcare is democratized, maybe for the first time ever. Like, holy shit, right? Like, today, you're like, yeah, you know, whatever. Like, healthcare is like 20% Like, today, you're like, yeah, you know, whatever, like healthcare is like 20% of GDP. It's this thing that only rich people have. And even rich people barely have it 50% of Americans don't even have access to a doctor. Like, how insane is that? Right? But then again, you look at some things and you're like, well, knowledge, knowledge on

this planet has been democratized. Like, you know, 3040 years ago, it wasn't my idea. Some of us had libraries, some of us had books, some of us didn't. These know, 30, 40 years ago, it wasn't. Some of us had libraries. Some of us had books. Some of us didn't. These days, everybody has access to Google. Everybody has access to Wikipedia. Like the world has fundamentally shifted. And I think that when our kids are growing up, like they might look around and be like, what do you mean everybody didn't have access to health care? Or I go even a step further. And I hope one day my kids walk up to me like, what is this thing called disease that you idiots had? Like you really couldn't solve that? Like what?

Like how absurd, right? Like with modern AI and modern tools, I think we're getting to a point where maybe these things become an attractable problem for the first time ever. And I'm really excited for that. Yeah, it's amazing. I didn't realize that, you know,

artificial intelligence was created in the 50s. Like as I was starting to do research the last few months, like, oh, my gosh, we're just talking about it now. But there's a lot of people that have been talking about it for many, many years. So how do you that? That's very interesting about, you know, eradicating disease and all these things. How do you see or what age do you think people could be living for? I mean, 10 years or 15, 20 years, do you think many people could be living over 100, maybe 150, past that? What are your thoughts? I just think it's funny that we look at 100 and 150 as big numbers, right? If I look back 5,500 years ago and I looked at transportation, well, back then we'd walk around

on our own two feet, we'd walk five miles. Today, we have people being like, we're going to go to Mars 125 million miles away. Okay, look at the improvement in just 5,500 years, right? We regularly got on planes. We regularly go to outer space. Like, holy shit. And yet, if I look at life expectancy, well, 5,500 years ago, you'd live roughly to about 40, 45. And now you live roughly to about 70, 75. Why have we set our standards so low? Like, where's my 25 million X, right? Where's my rockets?

Where's my spaceships? And that's the world that I think healthcare is going to move to. I think that 300 and 500 are going to be numbers that seem very normal to us. I can't tell you how fast we're going to get there, but I think it's going to happen probably sooner than folks think. That's amazing. I can only imagine living at 300. Just the things that you'll see in your lifetime, it must be like mind blowing. Our mind probably at this point can't keep up,

but hey, I mean, there's Neuralink and other things. Who knows? There's Forward. There's CarePods. We can eradicate all these things. And a lot of the pain points of being a human, I mean, how much more of an incredible life that we could have. But Adrian, if people want to find out more information, they want to visit a CarePod, they want to visit Forward. GoForward.com. GoForward.com. Visit it or find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. I'm always happy to reply to anybody.

Well, Adrian, this has been amazing. I mean, my mind is blown right now. I need to go visit a CarePod. I have not been yet, so I can't wait to go. But I'm like living to 300. Wow. But Adrian, thanks again for being on the show. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Have a good one, Dave.