Next Level Pros - #80: How To Turn AI into a Money Making Machine: Adrian Aoun, Former Google Director to Entrepreneur

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Join us in this episode of The Founder Podcast as we explore the world of AI and entrepreneurship with Adrian Aoun. From his experiences at Google to pioneering ventures in healthcare, Adrian shares his insights into problem-solving, innovation, and the importance of commitments. Highlights: "Make sure that you're doing a hell of a lot more good than harm because the reality is when we make these inventions that are incredibly powerful, they will harm people." "We're doing this because like, honestly, there's people who need real help. And if we can go help those people, by God, it's a life worth living." "Choose something that is an important problem that you deeply care about. And just commit to it and just see it through until it's fucking solved." Timestamps: 02:42 - Understanding Problems First 04:06 - AI's & Real-World Problem Solving 07:52) -Forward's Mission 08:40- Innovative Healthcare Delivery 09:24 - Aligning Healthcare Incentives with Consumer Needs 13:04  Accessibility of Forward's Care Pods 14:46 - Global Expansion Plans 16:18 - Solutions in Third-World Countries 17:57 - Questioning Conventional Wisdom 20:39 - Vision for Healthcare Innovation

So if we can turn healthcare into this kind of infrastructure problem where there's just a forward care pod, just in kind of every neighborhood, always around you, it's kind of like you pull out your app and you're like, where's the nearest Bank of America ATM? I know there's one near me. So where is it? Right? Like, I kind of want healthcare to be that easy to access. Yo, yo, yo, yo. Welcome to another episode of the Founder Podcast. Today, I am joined by Mr. Adrian Aoun. He said the way that you pronounce his name is like a wolf howling at the moon. So Mr. Adrian is an AI enthusiast, sold his business back in 2013 to Google, was one of the very first in the industry, the ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence. No, we're not talking about artificial insemination we're talking about artificial intelligence and he has been a part of the industry for a very long time back before

Chad GBT was well in advance where it is Adrian welcome to the show thank you for having me excited to be here I'm a big fan so Adrian tell us So it's 2024. Artificial intelligence is taking over the world. We've seen, Chad, GBT over the last 13, 14 months or however long it's been around, just literally, I mean, go from zero users. I don't even know the number. Is it 100 million, 200 million? How many users are there today? The better part of a billion, I think. Oh, that's so crazy.

I think it was like the fastest ever to 100 million users of any type of platform ever. So tell us in 2024, who should be using AI and how in the business industry? Yeah, it's a good question. It's a little like saying who should be using a hammer or who should be using a nail, right? It's like, well, I'm not sure I would start with that. I always start with, you know, if you walked around Ford and you kind of asked anybody, like, what is the one thing that Adrian always drills in our fucking minds? It's that the problem is more important than the solution, right? It's always try to understand your problem. We love,

especially as engineers, we love to be like, we've got some new technology. Now what? Yeah, that's usually not the way the world works. Usually the way the world works is you've got a pretty, pretty real problem in search of some solutions that can solve it. And when you miss this, you get crypto. And when you nail this, you get some of the AI changes that are happening today, right? So we don't want AI to go the way of crypto. That would be really bad. So let's really deeply try to understand what are the problems in the world. And there's some huge problems out there that I think AI can make like a pretty damn big change, whether it's energy, whether it's life extension, whether it's who knows, even poverty, maybe I think that AI can like really put a dent in these things. But I'm always going to start with the

problem and work backwards towards the solution. It's so interesting. There's two sides of the fence. I'm a firm believer like you that AI has to be integrated to solve all the different problems out there. This last week, I was actually speaking on a panel, a big conference. It was a marketing panel, and there was five of us. The question was, what tools are you using with AI? How are you implementing in, in the industry? And there was actually somebody that ran a marketing agency right next

to me. And she says, I don't think people should use AI. And I was like, my, my, my eyeballs like popped out of my head. I was like, are you kidding me? Like, are you really going to tell the reason the, the reason why she wanted to be different and that she couldn't see the practical application of how – like my – like once again, I was just like dumbfounded. And so clearly there are solutions for AI. What do you think are – I mean lots of problems out there. You're right now addressing the health aspect. You recently founded a few years ago. What was the name of your company again? Forward. Forward. So Forward is a new way to

completely transform the health insurance agency or that whole aspect of the business. And you're using AI. Tell us a little bit more about that. How are you using that in regards to like health and insurance and those types? Yeah. So basically a few years ago, I was at Google. I was kind of working, uh, working over there on the leadership team. And one day I, you know, I'm like not thinking about healthcare. I'm like everybody else, right? Like whatever that healthcare is somebody else's problem. One day I'm kind of on my way into work and I get this phone call and it turns out that my brothers had a heart attack. So I went from like not paying attention to healthcare to overnight being super laser focused on it. How old is he at this time? He was, he was maybe early thirties at the time.

Oh my goodness. Like really young. Now, now think of my experience, right? I'm an AI guy. I was at Google working on AI and like on a Monday I'm at Google solving AI on a Tuesday, I'm at Google solving AI. On a Tuesday, I'm like in my brother's exam room. And I shit you not, there's like doctors standing over him with like post-it notes. And I'm sitting here and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Like this makes no sense. Like where's all the AI? And honestly, you quickly realize like health care is just a pile of crap. What's worse is it's not even an evenly distributed pile of crap, right? There's about 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 sitting here and I'm like, this makes no sense, right? In the year 2023, we can get, sorry, 2024 now,

we can get smartphones to the entire planet. Like why can't we get basic healthcare there? Now I was trying to understand this. And so when you go peel back the layers of the onion, one of the things you quickly realize is healthcare is basically a labor-based business based on doctors and nurses. Now, I love doctors and nurses. They're awesome. But the reality is you're never going to scale doctors and nurses to the whole planet. There's not enough of them. They're too expensive.

So I asked myself, well, what would it look like if we rebuilt healthcare not as a service but as a product? In other words, could we take every single thing that doctors and nurses are doing and just migrate it over to hardware and software? Because if you can, like, holy shit, you can scale healthcare up to the whole planet, apply all the AI you want. It's going to be awesome. Now, it's one of those things that's a little easier said than done, right? And so, you know, you got to ask, okay, well, when you want to boil the ocean, you got to start somewhere. You know, Tesla starts with their Model S and goes to their Model 3. So what's our Model S? Well, our Model S is we basically started by building what you can think of as a really high-tech doctor's office. We built one in San Francisco. It's done pretty well. So we've scaled it up. We're live, I don't know, in about 20,

25 cities all across the country right now. But immediately you go, okay, Adrian, but a high-tech doctor's office? Like, how's that ever going to scale to the whole planet? How's that going to bring about your AI future? So like, what are you doing? Well, in some ways, you kind of get what we're doing. Every day, we're just watching what happens inside of our clinics. You come in, you sit in the exam chair, you talk to your doctor about the flu, and I go, wait a minute, why'd Chris even come in? Let's just build that into the mobile app. Next guy talks to his doctor about skin issues, I build a skin scanner. Next guy talks to his doctor about heart issues, I build a body scanner. And you kind of get what I'm doing. Slowly but surely,

we're just migrating every single thing from kind of doctor, nurse, to hardware and software. And so what you realize is that the limit, we aren't building doctor's offices. We don't even believe doctor's offices should exist. At the limit, we're only building the hardware and software. And what's kind of interesting is that's kind of the phase that we're in now. So I talked about this Model S and the Model 3. Well, we just started launching our Model 3. We've started turning it on in a few cities and it's going wide all across the country right now. And basically what we did is we built what we call the Forward Care Pod. Now, the Forward Care Pod is awesome. Maybe you watched a little Star Trek growing up or some Elysium. You remember the Med Bay? It's like it's a pod you walk into and it's super futuristic. You walk up to it, you unlock it with your phone.

Then you walk inside. It's like, hello, Chris, welcome to Ford. Please step inside. And then as you do it, basically just has a big screen where it shows you a bunch of different apps that you can play with. You choose something like the body scan app. It's like, please stand still. And then it rotates you in a circle, takes a whole bunch of readings, shows you the results on the screen, explains them to you, and then tells you what you need to do next. Like, gives you your treatment, whether that's a prescription, a plan, you name it. So you're saying this is the Model 3. Is this something that's popping in the middle of a mall on the sidewalk? That's right.

We've been rolling them out in malls and office buildings all across the U.S. Our first few ones are out, and now we're just kind of scaling that up. We're launching, I don't know, a city every few weeks or so. It's pretty exciting. But the thing kind of does, it's like, I don't know, it's like a big iPhone for healthcare. So it does all sorts of things. You choose the heart health app. It's literally going to open a tray, hand you a sensor, show you how to hold that sensor against your heart, take the readings, show you the results on the screen. Explain what to do next. You can literally now do everything from your own blood test to COVID test to genetic sequencing to all sorts of kind of eye scans, brain scans. All these sorts of things are coming.

This is where we want to go. Does that kind of give you a sense of it? Yeah, it does. So actually it brings up a few questions. Like, you know, I'm diabetic. And so I understand the health care industry pretty well. And like the different incentives, a lot of times incentives don't align. Right. Like actually solving health care issues aren't necessarily the goals of big pharma. Maybe maybe the goal is to keep somebody like me constantly on insulin and taking – I got these blood sugar things that are always – so they continue to make money there, right? What you're doing is eliminating a lot of the need as far as doctors and whatnot.

How is this being received by the healthcare system? Well, it's kind of a little across the board, but I'm not sure that's what I spend my time thinking about. I spend my time thinking about consumers and what do consumers need? Like, what do you, at the end of the day, need at home? I'm not sure. Like, I don't lose any sleep over a big pharma exec being mad at me. So I'm going to go ahead and just ignore that and instead say, like, I do care about what, know chrisley or chrisley's kids what do they need and what can we do about it see somehow we've iterated to a healthcare system that is

totally up in this country right like think about think about what we did i'm going to give you a maybe a little history lesson here if you'll forgive me so you know world war ii it all comes back to world war ii for us here so world war ii was pretty rough on the us you know after world war ii there weren't that many people who came home right we sent off all comes back to World War two for us here. So World War two was pretty rough on the US. You know, after World War two, there weren't that many people who came home, right? We sent off all these kids to battle. A bunch of them died, mostly men, right? And it turned out that mostly the workforce was comprised of men at that point in time. So when people came back, there wasn't anybody to go hire for their businesses. So you know what businesses started doing? All of a sudden they were like, we got to compete. We got to get these last few people of talent. So they started raising their salaries and raising their salaries. You'd compete, you'd price higher. I'd compete, I'd price higher. And

we started getting this like crazy, crazy wage inflation. So then the US government came in like, this isn't sustainable. This is stupid. So they put a salary freeze on the whole country. And they're like, nope, no more salary increases. So then you got these enterprising entrepreneurs who are like, no, no, no, I just got to work around this stupid law. And so what they did was they said, fine, I can't give you a salary increase, but I can give you benefits. And so, you know, it turns out there was this guy named Henry Kaiser who's sitting there and he's like, I can create a health care system and I can just give it to my employees. And now you'll come to me instead of somebody else. Now, all of these things so far mean well. He's just trying to help people. That's awesome. But then what happened was after a little while, we started to have a bunch of

companies offering healthcare. And the US government sat there and they were like, we kind of like the fact that people have healthcare. In fact, we're going to make this mandated by law. If you're a big enough company, you have to give healthcare benefits. And thus starts the modern system that we have for healthcare. But here's the problem. So at first, this all sounds amazing. This sounds fantastic. But there's one key problem, which is you got to ask yourself, what's the average tenure or the average lifespan of somebody with their employer in the US? Turns out it's about two and a quarter years, two and a quarter. So think about it, right? Think of how your employer always comes up to you and they're like, you know what, Chris, time to get your flu shot, time to get your flu shot, time to get... It's like, are you fucking

kidding me? Is there some huge rash of flu deaths going on that I don't know about? Like, no, right? But they don't ever come up to you and say, hey, Chris, can we talk about your cholesterol? Can we talk about your heart disease? Actually, can we sequence your DNA to understand the cancers you're going to have in 20 years? Why? Well, if they figure that shit out now, they're going to start spending money to prevent it. And frankly, it's the next guy's problem. So what we've done is we've created an entire health care system that's focused on keeping you at work, not keeping you alive. See, if you get the flu, you're out some work.

The cancer, eh, that's the next guy's problem. So we've iterated to the entirely wrong healthcare system. And this is bad. This is why we're all doing the wrong things. So that's one of the things where we said from day one, we need to figure out how to solve this. If we can't solve this, we're nowhere. And so what we did is from day one, we said, let's go ahead and align directly with our consumers, right? You pay us. And the cool thing is, because you're paying us, we've got massive incentive to lower that cost as much as possible. When we started for it, it was $149 a month. Now it's down to $99 a month.

Can you guess where I'm going next? $79, $59, $49. I'm just going to keep dropping that price until I can get to every single person on this planet because that's my incentive at the end of the day. Make sense? That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome.

So you have these different pods that you're starting to roll out or whatnot. What capabilities do those have as far as like the amount of people that they're able to see and diagnose and like what kind of efficiency are we talking there? Yeah, you're talking pretty massive efficiency. The normal person's in there for a few minutes to like 10 or 15 minutes. Because again, it's almost like when you walk around your neighborhood and you look at ATMs, are you like, oh, there's a big line at the ATM? No, like ATMs are wildly efficient, right?

Like I don't think I've ever waited in line, maybe once, you know what I mean? Like we launch more ATMs not because they're at capacity, but because we want them to be convenient to people, near people, et cetera. So if we can turn healthcare into this kind of infrastructure problem where there's just a forward care pod, just in kind of every neighborhood, always around you, it's kind of like you pull out your app and you're like, where's the nearest Bank of America ATM? I know there's one near me. So where is it? Right? Like I kind of want healthcare to be that easy to access. And then I want it so that when you go in, just think of the experience. So like you walk in today,

you literally get your blood drawn. Five minutes later, you see all the results on the screen. You're like, oh, my creatinine is low. Here's the creatinine out. My thyroid is high. Here's the thyroid out. Like now all of a sudden, healthcare isn't weeks and appointments and thousands of dollars and trying to decipher the voodoo that your doctor happened to tell you.

Now it's just right there in your hands, super easy. And that's the world that we should not only be building, but that's the world we should be demanding. Like it's a bit ridiculous that we don't have that at this point. You know what I mean? I love it. I mean, yeah, we have the technology, we have the abilities, just now the implementation. And so where do you see this growing? Like, are we talking five years timeframe that this is accessible to the majority of the world? 10 year? What was the vision for it? Yeah, it's a good question. Look, I think at the end of the day, one of the things that people often forget is that real change takes a little time, right? We're like, oh, Tesla came out of nowhere. Really? It's like 25 years old at this

point. You know, oh, the iPhone, it just sprung up on us. I don't know. It's like 15, 16, 17 years old at this point. So the reality is like guys like you and I, we're fortunate, right? Like like America, major cities in America, we always get things before everyone else. I remember when I was at Google that this really smart guy, Hal Varian, he's the chief economist over there. He always told me something. He said, Adrian, whatever you have, the rest of the U.S. will have in five years and the rest of the world will have five after that. Now, look, let's be real. Sometimes Hal's a little off on timing, but the sentiment's roughly correct. Right. Which is like at some point technology trickles down. That's the cool part about technology.

It's this beautiful thing called Moore's Law where it starts expensive and a few years later, it's, you know, it's cheap as all hell. Right. And that's the world that we're kind of pushing towards every day. We're just making our product cheaper and cheaper and have more and more value until a point where it's like at some errand. Good luck, dude. Who's going to pay all that? But if I told you I want to do it based on some hardware and software, all of a sudden you go, hey, man, I'm not sure. That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe that can be done. And that's kind of the world that we're banking on and we're trying to build towards. Interesting. So I come from the energy sector. I built a large home solar business and sold it off to private equity so my my question would be like you know in these third world countries say like in africa or whatnot how do you how do you envision something like this being available to them

as far as being able to be powered and uh you know i mean this is a beautiful thing solar power is everywhere and it's basically free at this point. You know what I mean? Like, like between solar power and Starlink, like, why can't I just go put any piece of technology anywhere on this planet? Like we often forget how advanced all the kind of building blocks have become. And so when you're somebody like me, you're like, I want to build this AI doctor's office, this AI kind of powered pod. That sounds crazy. But the reality is like, I don't know. Some people are building AI. Some people are building hardware. Some people are building sensors. Some people are building diagnostics. Some people are building energy. Some people are building connectivity. And I get to be the guy who just comes in and puts icing on the cake. I'm like,

oh, I just put it all together. I mean, remember, when the first iPhone came out, they got a lot of crap from people being like, what did they even do? It's Corning Glass, it's LG screen, Samsung hard drive, Leica camera, Broadcom chip, and Apple's sitting there in their arrogant self and they're like, yeah, fuck you, we built the iPhone, right? Well, it's like in some ways they're right. They built the damn iPhone and you didn't, right? But at the end of the day, they built what users need and they built the thing that has real impact. And that's all we care about. We don't get out of bed in the morning because we're trying to build the like the next hot startup. We're not doing this for any press. We're doing this because like, honestly, there's people who need real help. And if we can go help those people, by God, it's a life worth living. You

know what I mean? Well, and the cool thing is whenever you go and solve like this type of issue, right, money is always a derivative of it. It doesn't need to be the focus, right? The focus is going and solving the problem. You're going to make a ton of money doing it. Yeah. So, so what? Adrian, you're clearly a big, big dreamer. What, what like instilled that, like what life experience got you thinking, like, I want to go and solve the world's health problems or, or ultimately what ended up leading you to sell your business and end up in the office of Larry Page? Like, I mean, tell us, tell us what was the background that in your life that led to these type of dreams? Yeah. So maybe, maybe there's probably kind of two things. So one, I grew up to, you know,

immigrant parents who, who, uh, they're both kind of academics and they came to this country. Uh, I wasn't even born here. I was born in France and then kind of academics and they came to this country uh i wasn't even born here i was born in france and then kind of came over and you know when i was growing up i was kind of this little like outsider guy growing up in la um and i by that what i mean is like french was my first language i had a very thick french accent i didn't fit in my parents were like super nerdy and academic in a cool in a school where like being cool was the thing and i was definitely not cool still still, still definitely not. And so, you know, what happened was like, I don't know, part of the culture of academia is you kind of just question everything. So my parents taught me at a pretty young age,

just go question things. You know what I mean? And so I always like, I remember I got, I think I was like sent home from school at one point in like third grade because my teacher told me to do something. And I was like, who are you to tell me to do that? Like, like why? Like who, who bestowed this authority upon you? Now I'm not recommending that that was not exactly the winning strategy, but the point is if you start questioning everything, eventually you start to look at the world a little differently. I think one of the, I think one of the kind of lines that I love was this quote from Steve Jobs said, one day you'll realize that every single thing, like look around you, every single thing that you see was created by somebody just like you and me.

So like when I was at Google, one of the companies I started was building cities. We build cities from scratch. And everybody looked at me like, you can't build a city. That's absurd. That's ridiculous. And I looked at them. I'm like, wait, you mean to tell me there's 10,000 cities in the United States and you think building the 10,000 and first is ridiculous? Like, of course it's not. Like, people build cities all the time. Like, there's a million cities on this planet. Literally, like the next one is the ridiculous one. But do you see how easy it is for us to take the world for granted and just kind of accept it as it is? And that's kind of the point. Let's just stop accepting it as it is. And let's instead focus on first principles reasoning. If you can truly from first principles say this is the way it

should be, then I'll shut up. And if you can't, then you know what? Maybe start asking yourself, well, why is it that way? And you know what? Maybe, maybe we shouldn't just accept it the way it is. Maybe we should push for it to be better. I love it. I love it. So you, you know, you had a lot of different experiences working for Google, which prior to Google, you built a business. Tell us a little bit about building tell you, Microsoft at that time was one of the coolest companies ever. And I will tell you, I wanted to slip my wrist working there. I lasted 11 months, which is pretty bad when you consider that I promised myself I would be there for at least 12 months. But I couldn't do it. And it was too big for me.

So then I left and I was like, okay, I'm going to start something. I don't know what, but I'll go figure it out, blah, blah, blah. And I went and I was like, okay, I'm going to start something. I don't know what, but I'll go figure it out, blah, blah, blah. And I went and I started this company in AI. Now this was before AI was like all hot like it is now. So I'm sitting here and I'm like, you know, I grew up, I told you my parents were academics while my dad was a linguist. And so I grew up around, you know, around the dinner table talking about language and how we learn language. And you know, when you're growing up, they give you this like third grade English book, fourth grade English book, and all these textbooks teach you grammar and all this nonsense. And I remember thinking to myself this one key insight, which is like, if the books teach me language, but I need to know language to teach, to read the books, like something is bullshit

here. Something makes no sense, right? Like how do you learn language? Because it's clearly not from these books. And what I realized is actually the way you learn language is kind of just by listening to it. As crazy as that sounds, you pick up a bunch of books. And what I realized is actually the way you learn language is kind of just by listening to it. As crazy as that sounds, you just, you pick up a bunch of patterns. And you know this, because every time they teach you a rule, they're like subject, verb, predicate.

By the way, there's 4,000 exceptions. It's like, okay, your rules are just full of shit. Like, can we just agree these are like made up? And so then what I realized is, okay, well, maybe what we can do is we can teach computers to understand language in the same ways. Like just give them a hell of a to understand language in the same ways. Like just give them a hell of a lot of language and see what happens. This is a very math approach,

very statistics approach. That's all the modern machine learning and AI is, just a bunch of math. You know, when you were in like third grade, maybe fifth grade, I don't know. And you remember these things called logistical regressions. All we're doing right now is very fancy logistical regressions. Our math has gotten fancier. We're doing a lot of data points, but it's the same damn shit. Okay. So what I did was I said, okay, let's crawl the internet, take all the text, feed it into some algorithms and see if it can learn language. And you know what? It was pretty damn good at it. Right. And so all of a sudden- Is this just you or business partners or like where- No, I had a company. No, I started a a company it's a bunch of us god i don't

know 50 60 of us i don't even remember at this point i'm getting old um but uh but yeah we we were a bunch of really smart folks uh and me um and you know we just basically tried to teach computers some language and turned out it worked pretty well so then google came up to us and they're like we have this awesome ai division you should totally join us and we're sitting here and we're like eh leave, leave us alone. Stop pestering us. Stop pestering us. But frankly, they kind of just kept pestering us.

So then what happened was we said, fine, we'll kind of sell you the company. We sold it to them. And I remember showing up on my first day. I walk up to my boss, the guy who runs engineering of like all of Google. And I'm like, okay, like introduce me to like all your AI guys. He looks at me deadpan in the face and he goes, nah, I was just fucking with you. We don't really have an AI division. I was like, excuse me? And he goes, well, yeah, I was hoping you guys would build it. So me, some other people, we basically got together and we kind of built this division. We took it from not existing,

I don't know, order about a thousand people over the course of a year. I mean, this is when we bought DeepMind out of London. I think we spent about a billion dollars in 12 months. We put AI back on the map. I mean, it was real. Now my mom's calling me, are the robots taking over next week? I'm like, yeah, mom, you got it, you know, like next week. But you get it. Like we created the insurgence that there is today. And I'm proud of that.

And so that's a little of kind of my story with going in the trenches to AI. Awesome. So you had the opportunity to work with Larry Page directly over the next few years or whatnot. Tell us, like, what were some lessons or principles that you learned from Larry just as far as success and building businesses? Yeah, so basically what happened was after I built kind of that AI team, Larry came up to me.

He and I were pretty close, team, Larry came up to me. He and I were pretty close. And so he came up to me and he was like, look, why don't you come be like my right-hand man? Why don't you come work for me? So I basically spent the next few years. My title was technically head of special projects of all Google. Honestly, who the hell knows what that means? It was kind of make it up as you go along sort of thing. But the first thing we made up was a doozy.

We obviously we created Alphabet. And so my job became creating the Alphabet companies. So think of this as like whatever idea I'd have, I'd pitch Larry, pitch the board, usually get a couple billion dollars and be off to the races. And this is this was the fun times of Google. This is when we're doing everything from like rockets to self-driving cars to building cities. I mean, you name it, we were having fun over there. And so the nice thing for me was, you know, Google's a big place, but now I got to be in this world where it's like, actually what I'm doing is mostly just working kind of directly with directly with Larry. And that was pretty awesome. That's great. Good experience. He's a

very impressive engineer at the end of the day. So what, I mean, what would you say some of the things that he taught you? Like that you say, larry stands for this like he's yeah so so i think maybe two or three things that stand out the first was that larry's an incredibly good first principles thinker you come to him and you say like whatever this product uh costs five thousand dollars and he'll just immediately look at it and be like it's three pieces of metal and two pieces of glass why the fuck is it five thousand dollars right so he immediately says i'm going to ignore all the constraints that you have. And I'm just going to get down to the first principle's reasoning because he doesn't know your problem intimately, but he knows first principle's logic. And the second you have that, he's like, I can kind of analyze most problems

very quickly. And that worked incredibly well. The second thing that I saw was Larry is really, really good at saying, look, we only have so much time and so much resources on this planet. Let's not work on small things. It's just as easy to work on something that's enormous as something that's tiny. If you said tomorrow, I'm going to start a new company and we're going to build the world's best, I don't know, fork. What are you going to do? Raise a little money, get a few people in a room, come out with your first version a year later. But let's say instead you say, I want to put people on Mars and make us multi-planetary as a species. You can get some people in a room, work on it for a year, come out with your first

product a year later. At the end of the day, if you're going to go put in all these hours and brain damage, work on something big, work on something that's meaningful. We're literally trying to get healthcare to the entire planet. We literally want to solve death. If that's not meaningful, I don't know what is. If you got something bigger, call me and I'll work on it next. But like this one's a pretty important one, right? And then I think the last thing that Larry taught me was almost the inverse of the first, which is actually it's very easy to pick up patterns across industries.

I'd go to Larry and I'd be like, hey, we can't get this. I don't know. This one project we were doing was trying to build the world's largest building. I'll explain why later, but we're trying to build the world's largest building. And I was like, we can't get these structures to hold, et cetera. And Larry knew nothing about building construction, et cetera. But he did know about all sorts of other problems. And he was like, well, wait, why have we been able to literally in the world of fashion be able to do literally in the world of fashion, be able to do this in the world, the food, be able to do this in the world of this, be able. And he's like, look at the parallels. And it was just really good at carrying you through

that. And once you realize that you go, well, hold on, maybe, maybe I'm just not thinking outside the box enough. And I, and I think that stuff really stuck with me and I think it served me well to this day. So I'm very thankful for my time there. That's cool. Yeah, I love just the principle that principles govern all industries, all businesses, and there's parallels across the board. Absolutely. So you mentioned there you guys were trying to build the world's largest building. You said you'd get to it later. What was that about? Okay, so one of the things that we were working on is building cities.

And if you think about cities everybody says how would you improve a city well i'm going to get a little meta for you for a sec and say actually the best way to improve a city is to make a city easy to improve like i live in san francisco and tons of things are fucked up tons of things are good tons of things are fucked up and everyone's like we should change this we should change that and you know what we do we mostly sit around and talk about changing things. We don't actually change things. What makes startups so great is their rate of innovation, their rate of iteration. At Forward, we constantly say the most valuable thing we can do is just literally be the world's fastest learning healthcare system.

If we can launch iterations on new things 10 times a day, not 10 times a decade, all of a sudden we're going to win. Because you know, this is your classic compounding interest curve, right? It just increases exponentially. But the problem is cities, that's really hard. Why is it hard? Well, first off, we build shit. We build a building. Nobody wants, once you build a building, nobody wants to fuck with that. Imagine you build a building and then a week later I go, yeah, you know that park right next to it? I want to turn that into the dump. I want to turn that into the crematorium, the sewers. You'd be like, no, don't do that.

So we all start getting into fights, right? In this classic not in my backyard sort of thing. So one of the things I ask myself is like, well, could we make it that building buildings was just incredibly fast and cheap? Not it cost millions or tens of millions, but instead it was like, whatever, it takes two days to build a building. And once you start diving into that from first principles, you realize that actually what a building is doing is mostly protecting you from these like outsized events, like torrential downpours or, you know, blizzards or wind at a hundred miles an hour that you might get once every hundred years, right? And that's what causes buildings to need to be so damn safe. So we asked ourselves, well, maybe we can just control the

environment. Imagine if we put a dome over a city, like an enormous dome, miles and miles, so big that if you look up, you wouldn't see it, right? Like Truman Show style dome, right? If you did that, then all of a sudden the building inside doesn't need to worry about wind. It doesn't need to worry about rain. It doesn't need to worry about any of these things. And now we can readapt a city on whatever schedule we want. In fact, you would go so far as to say maybe people can't own property in the city. Maybe you can only lease property and all leases happen to be done every two years on December 31st. We could just reconfigure a city. So these were some of the ideas we were playing with. And we actually got, believe it or not, some of the world's best engineering firms

and our engineers to start coming up with how would we build the world's largest building. We built prototypes of it and everything. So yeah, that's a little of what we worked on. So you guys were really considering doing a dome city, huh? Not even considering. We actually funded a good amount of the project, etc. And hopefully you'll still see it come to light. not not even considering we actually funded a good amount of the project etc and hopefully you'll still see it come to light oh that's that's awesome yeah these are the behind the scenes uh things happening at google and apple or whatnot that nobody's talking about so appreciate you giving us a little bit of a peek behind the behind the curtain so of course being being the guy that

understands how to apply ai into anything let let me give you a little something. So my background being in the home products, home improvement space, right? There's a lot of people in the space, men and women, that are kind of backwards thinking, right? Like blue collar, they think that, you know, you just kind of power through things or whatnot. How do you see AI playing in that field of home improvement? Because right now, AI is, you know, a lot of the stuff going on in computers, but it's not the robotics of, you know. Yeah, but that's probably just a slight matter of time, right? So look, I know nothing about home improvement. I don't build

homes. So I'm not going to try and opine and tell you I've got all the answers. That's your job. But here's what I can tell you. AI entering the physical world, for some reason, we as consumers tend to think that that's a much harder problem and we have no experience doing it. It's like, imagine I told you I built a new city and it's awesome. It's actually so awesome that we have no experience doing it. It's like, imagine I told you I built a new city and it's awesome. It's actually so awesome that we have robots doing most of the work. These robots are big. We haven't yet made them small. They're big, sometimes three, four, five, 6,000 pounds.

They're zooming around at, I don't know, 50, 60 miles an hour. We're not perfect at it. We actually zoom them around so close to humans that sometimes they hit humans and they kill humans. Do you want to come to my city? You'd be like, well, that sounds fucking terrible. You're killing humans with robots. And I would say, well, isn't that just the automobile? Isn't that what we do every day? We've had them for, I don't know, 100 something years or whatever. And so what you realize is actually like fundamentally, we're pretty good at robots. If you don't believe me, go get in a plane and fly it, you know, 600 miles an hour across,

across this planet. We, we understand robots. That's not to say that like we're using massive amounts of AI. Clearly AI is moving faster in the world, the software than in hardware. But I, I think that's a short matter of time. And when I say short matter of time, in the grand scheme of history, if it's five or 10 or even 20 years behind software, like who cares? You know what I mean? Like it's coming and it's coming fast. You know, it's interesting that you bring that up. Like there's this moral dilemma of, of like robot robotics and everything and, and death with human beings or whatnot. But, uh, it's funny. So I drive Teslas.las i love love my tesla i love love being able to pop that thing into auto drive not even look at the road and and have it drive itself and when i tell

people that they freak out they're like what what are you doing and and it's like and then the one death that that happens from somebody driving an autopilot you know the news blows out of proportion like oh tesla car kills somebody it's like well why didn't you report on the 10 000 other deaths that took place today because the human was behind it and uh yeah it's so interesting the moral dilemma or the moral you know how people look at things totally totally well you know it's okay sometimes that stuff's good i know like i'm the techie and i'm always like go faster go faster and people like slow down so you know, it's okay. Sometimes that stuff's good. I know, like, I'm the techie and I'm always like, go faster, go faster. And people like slow down. So, you know, sometimes that tension is healthy. Maybe we shouldn't move too fast. When we move too fast in tech, we usually do some dumb

things and we do harm people. And, you know, like we can point to real things in society that we haven't gotten right. Like, I think a lot of us look at social networks and go, oh, maybe we shouldn't have, you know, gone so fast on social networks. And I'm sure AI will be the same. But the key that I focus on is make sure that you're doing a hell of a lot more good than harm. Because the reality is when we make these inventions that are incredibly powerful, they will harm people. It's absurd to say that, I mean, clearly Google has changed the world for the better. Clearly it's democratized information. The farmer in the middle of Nairobi can sit there and say, holy shit, now I have access to everything from weather to commerce to information on how to farm. That's amazing. But it's also unfair to

not acknowledge that, well, I'm sure somebody is stalking their ex-girlfriend on Google. I'm sure somebody is figuring out how to make bombs on Google. The truth is we make inventions that are more powerful than we can fully control. And so the key is that it's really, really important that these inventions are massively positive for humanity. That's great advice. What advice would you give to just a typical entrepreneur who doesn't have any background in AI or technology or whatnot, what are like two or three guides that you would say, like, you need to start looking at your business this way, utilize AI, and this is how you can help improve? Yeah. Well, so the first thing that I would just encourage people is don't think about

the business. Businesses are these like kind of intermediary layer between humans and actual value creation. Right. And I'm not saying businesses aren't important. Of course they are, but don't start there. Start by asking yourself, what are just true fundamental problems of humanity? I always start there and I can list them out and you can, and I can, and they could be true fundamental problems for the things you're doing. You know what? We can't move fast enough. Materials are expensive. Whatever it happens to be, I don't know your industry, right? But if you start laying down those true fundamental problems, you start putting yourself in the mindset of this is where I need to spend my time. Then you want to ask yourself, okay, but what are the solutions that I have? And one of the quick

ways that I help people come up with solutions is I just say, just create a matrix, right? Where it's like, okay, you list out all the problems and then, and those can be your rows. And then your columns can just be like every technology that you have seen in products that you use every day. So let me give you an example. You have a Tesla. Okay. Tesla is over the air updates, right? Okay. Over the air updates. That's a technology. Another thing is, you know, we use, we use, I don't we use Instagram and Facebook. Fine, they've got social graphs. Cool. Another one is that we use, I don't know, when I log into my phone, it's different than when you log into your phone. In other words, it's personalized. So you just put personalized. And what I do is I just go list out like 20 or 30 technologies.

I don't know. It's mobile. It's, you know, whatever it happens to be. And once I've listed out 20 or 30 of these technologies, I just look back at the problem and I say, what would that problem be if I had a social graph? What would that problem be if it was personalized? What would that problem be if it was continuously updated? And what you'll realize is like half of those won't make any sense, but half of them will. And it just gave you the answer. In other words, what you realize is most technology is not actually a new technology so much as it's an amalgamation of existing technologies with maybe one new piece. I've been playing around for the last few days just because it's apropos with the Apple Vision Pro. And you know, it's an incredibly fascinating device. There's almost no part of that Vision Pro that I have not played with before.

You have FaceTime? Well, I have FaceTime, right? You have spatial audio? Well, I've got spatial audio in my ear. And what you see is like it's just taking a bunch of things and putting them together. And what you'll realize is that like actually, even though we think of technology as disruptive, technology is almost always incremental. Just turns out that that latest increment is a disruption when you put it all together. Ah, love that. Love that. Adrian, appreciate all the bombs and everything that you've shared with

us. There's a lot of good nuggets in there. Where is a good place that our listeners can follow you? Oh, I'm easy to get a hold of. I'm on Twitter with my like six followers, two of which are my mom. You know, I'm on LinkedIn. You can email me anything. Yeah, just go for it. Awesome. Awesome. It sounds like you've got some incredible things. Do you ever see yourself stopping or is this your life's work in the health industry or do you see yourself getting into something else in the future? I have like 19 other companies I want to start today. I'm pretty sure I would blow my top if I actually had to deal with more than one at a time. But yeah, I don't think I'm going to be stopping anytime soon.

And hopefully for anybody listening, you'll get in the game too. It's both incredibly satisfying and incredibly brutal. So be ready to chew glass for a couple of years. But if you get into it, I doubt you'll regret it. I think you dropped something there. Very important right there. I think as entrepreneurs, we have all kinds of ideas and shiny object syndrome, right? And all different type of things.

But you said, I got to go deep on one. Like, can you expound a little bit more on that? Like how that served you? Yeah. So now I'm going to sound like an old man, but, you know, kids these days, kids these days, we're all about the like immediate gratification. You know, in Silicon Valley, it's really bad. We go, we work at a company for 18 months and another company for 18 months and another company for 18 months. And maybe we go really deep and we go for two and a half years.

It's like, well, look, do you honestly think that like in a year or two, you're going to like actually do something meaningful on this planet? No. So you wake up like 20, 30 years later and you look back and you're like, you had jobs, but you didn't do shit that matters, right? Like it turns out every single thing that matters on this planet takes a hell of a long time, five, maybe 10 years at minimum to do anything that matters. Think about like, just look around you and be like, you know, San Francisco, was that built in a year? No, that took decades to build. This Apple Vision Pro that we were talking about, how long did that take to build? Well, honestly, they've probably been working on it more than five, less than 10 years, right? Like, you're just

not going to do anything that matters until you sink your teeth deeply into it. And so look, if you want a job, you want to make a paycheck and rise the corporate ladder, then yeah, hop around. It's a really smart way to go. On the other hand, on your deathbed, you're not going to be sitting there going, oh man, I really wish that I was a CTO or a VP or this or that. No, no one gives a shit about that. On your deathbed, you're like, I wish I did more with my life. I wish I did shit that mattered, didn't waste all that time. And so you know what? You want to not waste time, choose something that is an important problem that you deeply care about and just commit to it and just see it through until it's fucking solved. I love it. I love it. Adrian,

I'm super excited to see what you do with this business. Like, I mean, that's, that will impact humanity when you talk about like solving the world's problems. I firmly believe what you're doing is, is right up that alley. So appreciate your time. Excited to see what the future holds. Until next time!