KCBS' Jason Brooks speaks with Forward CEO Adrian Aoun on this week's episode of CEO Spotlight.
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00:00KCBS presents CEO Spotlight, a weekly conversation with Bay Area's business leaders in discussion
00:07with KCBS business reporter Jason Brooks. Thanks for listening to the CEO Spotlight. I'm Jason
00:13Brooks. Our guest today is Adrian Aoun, CEO of San Francisco-based Ford. Now, Ford has a mission
00:20statement that it wants to rebuild a broken health care system. Adrian, thank you for joining us. And
00:27boy, that seems like a massive task at hand. What is Ford all about? And how are you going to
00:33accomplish that task? Yeah, so we started with the very simple kind of insight, which is health care
00:38is broken. And like, that's easy to say, we all kind of know that. But in my case, I kind of went
00:43through that pretty viscerally. My brother had a heart attack a few years ago, and I was just
00:47watching what he went through. And, you know, my background, I'm a tech nerd, right? I'm the guy
00:51with like the big bottle glasses, big thick pocket protector. And so I just think everything's got a
00:56bunch of technology to it. And I'm sitting here in like exam rooms where people are pulling out
01:00post-it notes, not pulling out, you know, like Star Trek tricorders. And I'm like, what is going
01:05on? Like, where's all the technology? And you quickly realize that like health care today,
01:10just for some weird reason, hasn't gotten all the tech that like every other industry has gotten.
01:15Now, you peel back all the layers of the onion, you quickly realize it's based on incentives. And
01:20it's like, your employer's paying for your health care, not you're paying for it. So they don't
01:24really want you to, you know, they don't care about your health as much as you do, all that
01:27sort of stuff. And what we quickly realized is like, well, maybe we can realign those incentives
01:32and build the health care system that you and I want, not the health care system that your insurance
01:37company wants, right? And so we start really simple. And we said, well, I think I learned in
01:42like third grade that knowledge is power. And so we just said, okay, well, how much can we learn
01:46about your body, from body scanners, to blood tests, to sequencing your DNA, to scanning your
01:51skin, to looking at your eyes, I mean, we try and do every single thing that that technology
01:56allows us to do, to go deep and understanding what's going on with you. And we take all that
02:02data, we put it into our systems, we have our doctors look at it, and they just come up with,
02:06hey, here are the most important things for you to work on, right? And we basically have
02:10health programs that help you with each thing. So if you're like me, and you've got this family
02:14history of having heart attacks, we're going to go really deep on making sure that your heart's in
02:18as good a place as it can possibly be with the technology we have today. Maybe you know,
02:23my girlfriend, her family's got a bunch of kind of history of skin cancer, it's actually the most
02:28popular, it's weird way of saying it, but the most frequent cancer in in the United States.
02:33So in our case, we're spending a lot of time thinking about what can we do to kind of detect
02:38moles and protect her skin. But every person is different. And so the key idea for us is,
02:44can we just bring to bear all the data, all the technology to provide you the best healthcare
02:49possible. So we started doing that a bunch of years ago, we're now live in order of I don't
02:54know, 2025 cities across the United States. And then we started to kind of have this feeling like
02:59we want to go even faster, we want to kind of get to more and more people. I mean, there's
03:03billions of people on this planet. Last I checked, there was over 8 billion people on this planet.
03:07And this crazy stat that I read was less than a third of them have access to a doctor. I'm sitting
03:12here as an engineer, like this makes no sense, right? We get smartphones, the entire planet,
03:17like, what do you mean we can't get healthcare to people right in the year 2024? Like, that's insane.
03:22And what we realized is that technology can not only give us better care, but it can also just
03:28make healthcare super accessible. So what we did is rather than just building high tech clinics,
03:33we started moving to saying, can we just build a piece of hardware that can almost serve as the
03:38clinics. And so we built this thing called the forward care pod. It's the most futuristic little
03:43cube that you've ever seen. It's about the size of a small room. And you can walk into it and you
03:48can get all the care and the doctor doesn't have to be there. The doctors are behind the scenes,
03:53but you're now in control. And you can do everything from and you're not even going
03:57to believe me when I say this. You can do everything from drawing your own blood,
04:01to getting your DNA sequence, to scanning your skin, to doing full body models, to doing blood
04:06tests, urine tests, I mean, you name it, we can do all these sorts of things inside this care pod.
04:10And we can deliver it almost in the same way to use an odd example, almost in the same way
04:15that we delivered ATMs to this whole planet. So we're now on this march to say, can we just
04:21manufacture this pod at such scales that we can get them to every community in the US,
04:26and then every community in the entire world. So we're on a mission to make healthcare
04:30super accessible, help make the healthcare that kind of you and I actually want.
04:35Before we talk about scale, walk me through what it's like to get into the care pod the first time
04:41I'm a brand new user, I approach this very futuristic looking cube. What do I do when I
04:47go in there? And how does that work? How do I get my own blood in there?
04:51Totally. So we put these care pods right now so far in malls and in office buildings. So
04:56they'll be eventually popping up in kind of every neighborhood, just like you'll walk right by it,
05:01just like you walk by the ATMs or the vending machines. And what's pretty cool about it is
05:06it's pretty intuitive. So anybody who uses kind of a modern iPhone or Android, you're going to
05:11know what to do. You walk up to it, you unlock it with your phone and immediately it's like,
05:15hello, Adrian, welcome to Ford, please step inside, probably with a better accent, I'm not
05:19going to lie. And then when you do, it basically just starts talking to you and it's got a huge
05:23screen on the wall. And that screen immediately just kind of puts you in control. So it shows
05:29you a first non-boarding sequence so that we can say, hey, let's take the body model,
05:34let's take the blood, let's scan your skin. It'll actually ask you to stand still. It'll
05:39rotate you in a circle so that we can kind of look at your body from all directions with a
05:43bunch of sensors. For blood, this is one of my favorite things. Obviously, like asking you to,
05:48you know, stab yourself with a needle would be ridiculous. So we don't even go down that path.
05:52We use a newer technology that, believe it or not, just looks like a tiny little patch that
05:56you put on your arm. You hit a little button and you're not going to believe me with what I'm
06:01about to say, but what it does is it literally just uses suction to suck the blood out of you,
06:07which I know sounds ridiculous, but think back to when you were 16 and you had your first hickey.
06:11We've just used, you know, productized hickeys in the world of healthcare. And we actually get
06:16like a real vial of blood, you know, maybe 600, 700 microliters. Then you just put that into a
06:22little tray in the care pod and it will actually process the blood live. So you get your results,
06:27usually about five to seven minutes later. So from all of these kinds of sensors, we collect
06:32your results and we show you a dashboard of your health. And that basically says, here's the things
06:36you need to focus on. And here's the things that are kind of A-OK, right? And for the things that
06:40you need to focus on, what we do is we have apps that allow you to kind of work on each one of
06:45them. So now we just look like a big iPhone, a big iPad. We've got a bunch of apps, right?
06:50So I go in there, my thyroid's too low. Okay, fine. Here's the thyroid app. Your
06:55creatinine's too high. Here's the creatinine app. It just makes it really intuitive and easy. And
07:00each of those apps, again, will walk you through. They'll explain what your options are. They'll
07:05explain why this thing matters. And you can then, you know, get anything from a treatment like a
07:11plan, a diet, an exercise, maybe some prescription, whatever it needs to be that's appropriate for
07:17your kind of situation. And then when you go home, we continue to use the Forward app in your phone
07:23to kind of keep up to date. And we'll ask you questions, maybe invite you to come back in for
07:27more tests. If you have sensors at home, we're happy to use those. But the idea is now you have
07:32kind of almost this medical assistant by your side at all times, just keeping an eye on your
07:38health for you. And the kind of great part of this is it's now in the language that you're used to.
07:43It's in the language of using my smartphone. It's in the language of using a smart screen. It's not
07:48in the language of waiting in a waiting room for an hour and getting these ridiculous bills that,
07:53you know, three months later for $5,000 that you don't understand anyway. So we just said, let's
07:58kind of bypass the way the healthcare industry does things. And let's just build the product
08:02that consumers want. You just mentioned a big part of healthcare and the problem in the U.S.
08:07It's the cost, the insurance, the co-pay. Forward has a very different model. Talk to me about that.
08:14So let's talk not only about cost, but let's talk about incentives, right? So I'm going to give you,
08:18I'm going to digress a little and give you this weird little story, which is after World War II,
08:23and you're like, why is he talking about World War II? But after World War II, we had a whole
08:26bunch of people, you know, in the U.S. were trying to rebuild the country. And it turns out we didn't
08:31have, honestly, we didn't have that many employees. We lost a lot of people in the war. And so the
08:36government was like, saw that companies were starting to just raise the salaries, raise the
08:40salaries to try and compete for talent. The government was like, no, no, no, we don't want
08:44you to do that. And they did this thing called the salary freeze across the whole country, right?
08:48Now, employers being like, you know, competitive, they want to go get people. They said, okay, you
08:52know what we're going to do? We're going to start giving perks. Fine. I can't raise your salary,
08:56but I can give you healthcare and he's not giving you healthcare. Okay. And then after a bunch of
08:59companies did that, the government was like, actually, we kind of like people having healthcare.
09:03And so they said, you know what, now a company of a certain size, you're 75 employees and up,
09:08actually, you're required by law to give healthcare. And that is the beginning of the
09:12end, as far as I can tell, because now our employers are in the business of our health.
09:17But there's a key problem, which is the average person in the United States is with their employer
09:22for about two to three years, not two to three decades and not two to three lifetimes, just two
09:27to three years. So you ever notice your employer comes up to you once a year and they go, hey,
09:31you know what? Time to get your flu shot. Time to get your flu shot. Time to get, I mean,
09:34they beat you over the head with these flu campaigns. Well, can you name a single person
09:39that, you know, who has died of the flu? No, it just turns out we don't have some huge rash of
09:42flu deaths. It's actually one of the kind of smallest killers in the United States right now,
09:47but you know what? All your friends are dying up. They're dying of cancer. They're dying of heart
09:50disease, but my employer doesn't care about that, right? Because cancer and heart disease,
09:54that's going to happen in 20 years and 30 years. So, you know what, when I go to the doctor for
09:59my checkup, they're like, oh, Adrian, you look fine. They're not going deep on the cancer. They're
10:03not going deep on the cholesterol and the blood pressure and working on these things. And what
10:07we realized is we've created a healthcare system that's focused on keeping you at work, not keeping
10:13you alive. They care a lot about the, oh, you got the flu. You have a cold. Let's fix you up so you
10:18can get back to the office. But they don't care about what's going to happen over the next 30,
10:2140 and 50 years. So the first thing we said is let's go ahead and just go direct to consumer.
10:27Let our members pay us. So we charge 99 bucks a month, right? Honestly, less than even using the
10:33deductible on your healthcare plan. And all of a sudden we said, well, because you're our customer,
10:39now we have the right incentive. Now we're going to talk about the long-term health. We're going
10:43to bring up the things that the normal healthcare system isn't willing to bring up, right?
10:47But we have this other kind of crazy incentive, which is now a lower price is better for us,
10:53right? If we can lower costs, we can get more customers. That's good business, right? That's
10:57what you've seen with every single tech company, right? The first iPhone was, I don't know,
11:01a thousand bucks. Now I think they're 400 bucks. Why? Because they say, hey, we can get to more
11:05people. Whereas the normal healthcare system has the exact opposite incentive. In fact,
11:11in this litany of stupid laws that we passed, we also passed a law that said that insurance
11:16companies can only make a maximum profit amount and it's a percentage basis. So maybe on every
11:21dollar, they can make 30 cents on the dollar. So if you're an insurance company and you want to
11:26make more money, what do you do? You're like, I need more dollars running through the system,
11:29right? So they're going to figure out every single way to jack up the prices. And if you
11:33don't believe me, go look at United Health Group and what their stock is. It's on an absolute tear.
11:37Most of the economy is getting crushed right now and they're on an absolute tear because they
11:40figured out the world's biggest scam at the end of the day. And so we said, well, because you're
11:47our customer, because you're the one paying us, we've got tons of incentives. Just remove all
11:52these extraneous costs and extra bloats. And so all of a sudden you realize our product is really
11:57damn cheap because it turns out that what you're normally paying, I don't know, $400 for a blood
12:02test at your normal healthcare system. Well, we're just including it because actually that blood test
12:06might've only cost us $7. And so it's all about fixing the incentives. And once you fix the
12:12incentives, using technology to lower costs for consumers. You're looking at healthcare
12:18more as a product than a service at this point. That's right. Because if you think about it,
12:22healthcare today is mostly what? Doctors and nurses. Now I love doctors and nurses. They're
12:26all great people. They got into the business to help. But the reality is that we don't have
12:31enough doctors and nurses. And even if we did, dear God, they're super expensive. Somebody's
12:35got to pay for all those med school bills, right? And so what we set it for it is, well, can we
12:40start taking all these things that doctors and nurses are doing and just take the rote routine
12:46parts of it and convert that to software and hardware. The reality is like you go in, you
12:51have high blood pressure, you get some meds. We didn't need a doctor. You weren't that special.
12:55We could productize that. We could put that in your own hands. Keep the doctors for the complex
13:00cases. You have cancer. You know what? Start talking to a doctor because this is going to
13:03get pretty sticky. But all the preventive stuff, all the rote routine, at the end of the day,
13:08we can make that super accessible. We can make that super, super cheap. And so we have doctors
13:13at Ford, but we save them for the parts that matter. We don't put them at the front door to
13:17our doctors aren't dealing with your flus and your colds and your rashes when technology can
13:21be dealing with that. How key of a role does AI play in Ford's plan? AI is the ballgame.
13:28And in some ways, AI is really scary, right? Do I really want algorithms like deciding my
13:34healthcare? I don't know if I'm super comfortable with that, right? But in some ways, AI can kind of
13:40democratize healthcare in a way that we've never seen. So what some companies are doing out there
13:45is they're saying, we've got, you know, chat GPT, and we're going to make the chat GPT doctor. And
13:49honestly, I'm a little nervous for that world right now. I don't think the technology is quite
13:53there yet. I think it'll get there, but it's not quite there yet. So what we do is we use AI to
13:58kind of assist our doctors, right? To make them more efficient and to give them better tools.
14:04So think of it as you're kind of in the cruise control phase. You're not in the self-driving car
14:08phase, but similar to how self-driving cars are finally starting to be, you know, around us on the
14:12streets of San Francisco. Well, eventually, you know, the AI doctor will get there. And that's
14:17part of what we can do with a thing like a care pod is we can say those become the arms and legs.
14:23They provide the actual care and they're powered by algorithms behind the scenes,
14:27but we're inching our way there. So slowly, but surely, but carefully, but surely.
14:32And Adrian, you have a background in AI. How key is it for Ford that
14:38this has been a large language model developed by Ford?
14:41Yeah. So at the end of the day, I think that, you know, I was lucky enough to work at Google
14:46and I was lucky enough to work in Google's AI division. They actually purchased an AI software
14:51company that I had built. And one of the great things was that you realize that, you know,
14:56a company like Google, who's at the forefront of technology, they're also doing this amazing
15:00service, which is their publishing. It's almost like their university, right? They're like,
15:04we have this thing called an LLM. And by the way, here's the paper of how we did it.
15:08Now, hopefully that doesn't change right now. There's a lot of competition. So people are
15:12starting to pull back on that. But what has that done? Well, that's kind of been the rising tide
15:16lifts all boats, right? Google has cool AI, but every single company from us to everybody else is
15:21like, wait, we can use LLMs. That's amazing technology. I was lucky enough to be there.
15:27I was actually still at Google when we came out with the Transformer paper, which is the paper,
15:31the kind of seminal paper that created this new insurgence that we have. And folks like us at
15:35Ford, who maybe don't have, you know, 20,000 engineers working on just pure research,
15:40we get to take advantage of not only what Google has done, but what Meta,
15:45what Nvidia is doing with chips. And we get to take all this and say, we can bring this
15:50to healthcare specifically in a way that you wouldn't otherwise have access to. So for me,
15:54it's an incredibly exciting time. And frankly, it's the reason we started this company.
15:59The care pods look incredibly complex. They're very powerful.
16:03They must be pretty expensive to produce. Talk about scale and your plans for the next few years
16:09and how far you think you can take forward in the care pods.
16:13So one of the cool things about technology is it always looks really expensive. And then you
16:16realize it's like actually pretty cheap, right? I've got the new iPhone, which I don't know,
16:21cost me maybe four or 500 bucks. And if you told me, if you like sat down and described what this
16:26thing can do, it's like, well, this is going to be your music player and it's a mini TV and it
16:31allows you to talk to China. And by the way, it's got a flashlight and you can order food and it's
16:36video games. And at some point you realize like, dear God, is this a $50,000 device? And you're
16:40like, no, it's 400 bucks. Right? So I love hearing you say, wow, care pods look really
16:44expensive. Cause I'm going to tell, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Care pods are
16:47almost a 10th the cost of building a normal doctor's office. So if you think about getting
16:52healthcare to the whole planet, all of a sudden you realize like, man, I probably want ATMs more
16:57than banks, right? I want the thing that's truly scalable. The thing that comes off a manufacturing
17:02line, the thing that's produced like a piece of hardware all around us. It's easy to take it,
17:07take for granted how much hardware we rely on, on a daily basis. You see those little kind of
17:12boosts at the corner of every sidewalk while they're, they're running the streetlights, right?
17:16We don't even notice them. We ignore them, but man, I'm really happy that they're running the
17:20streetlights, right? We all, when we're driving around, we see these little things called cell
17:23towers, right? We always see them sticking up above buildings, right? Well, thank God for cell
17:28towers. They've brought internet to the masses. And there's almost this idea that like, if I can
17:32turn something into infrastructure, it becomes a commodity. And one of the things that we think
17:38about is healthcare today isn't infrastructure. It's a couple of doctor's offices in a city,
17:42but what would it be like if healthcare was on every street corner? Healthcare was literally
17:47all around us at all times. All of a sudden you'd have a different relationship with your health.
17:51You wouldn't wait just until you're sick to go to the doctor. You'd be like, actually, I think my
17:56healthcare system's just keeping an eye on me at all times and proactively telling me when something
18:01is going wrong. And so we think that the world's going to really change because technology is
18:06allowing the cost of these things to be driven down in pretty serious ways. How many cities do
18:11you think you can get to in the next couple of years? They're already in a couple of dozen
18:15locations already. Yeah. Well, I'll give you some weird numbers for a sec. You know, there's,
18:20and it's been a while since I've looked at these, so don't quote me on these. But last I looked,
18:23there were maybe 2,700 Chevron gas stations, maybe 3,200 Bank of America ATMs. I think there's
18:303,900 kind of Walmart. So what you quickly realize is, okay, you know, most people, if you
18:36want to get to the whole US, I don't know, maybe you need 3,000, maybe you need 4,000, right?
18:41Well, I don't know. How hard is it to build 3,000 of a piece of hardware? I think Tesla's rolling
18:46Model 3s off the line with more than 3,000 a week right now. I don't know what their numbers are,
18:51more than 3,000 a day. So you realize is like, you know, if we put our effort behind this,
18:56getting to the US, that's not going to be that hard. Getting to the world might be a little
19:00harder, but we're up for the challenge. Ford is a private company. Any plans eventually going
19:06public or perhaps even looking at a bigger company, such as an Alphabet, coming along and
19:11leading the way? Yeah. You know, a lot of people start companies because their goal is the IPO,
19:16their goal is the acquisition and power to you if that's why you did it. That's not why we started
19:20Ford. We started Ford because we want to help as many people as possible. That's why we show up to
19:25work every day. I will tell you of startups to start, this is not one of the easy ones. Don't
19:30get into health care unless you really, really care about it. And so I'll be candid. Like, we
19:35just don't spend that much time thinking about, oh, can we go IPO one day or can we go get acquired?
19:39Like, that's just not what we wake up in the morning thinking about. What we wake up in the
19:43morning thinking about is how many more people can we help and what's it going to take for us to be
19:47able to do that? Adrian, I wanted to ask you also about security, data, privacy. These are critical
19:54questions in health care, and we've already seen many problems in those regards. What is Ford doing
20:00to make sure that its members, patients are protected? So the first thing that that's here's
20:06the good news. The good news is that hackers honestly just don't care about your health care
20:12data as much as we all think they do. Right. It turns out that your rash and your flu, you know,
20:18those those funny bumps in funny places. Those aren't that interesting to hackers. You know what
20:22they want? They want access to your bank account. Right. So so we've seen actually in recent memory,
20:28some some of the very large companies got hacked. All your kind of health care data got sent to
20:33random hackers. And you know what? They didn't even know what to do with it. They're not like
20:36posting it on the Internet. Right. Nobody can go see what rashes I've had. Right. Like it's it's
20:41that's the good news is just not that interesting. But the better news is, is that if you think
20:46about your choices, your choice today is I don't know, you walk into a Kaiser and you've you've
20:50done this. Right. You're kind of at the desk and the person's behind the desk and you see all those
20:54like manila folders and those have your records. Well, that doesn't feel like the most secure thing
20:59I've ever seen. Right. So we have engineers from the Googles and the Facebook's and the Amazon's
21:05and we're securing your data the same way that we secure your your text messages and your Gmail.
21:09Right. And so the thing that I would ask you is, like, well, do you feel pretty safe putting things
21:14in text and in Gmail? Because that that's the standard of technology that we use today. I don't
21:19know. Personally, I put my my innermost thoughts in text message sometimes right to my girlfriend.
21:24Maybe I shouldn't. But but I do. But I feel pretty secure in that. And and so we just think like
21:30let's have the same standards for our health care data that we do for everything else. It's kind of
21:35modern in the world of tech. What's the reception been like from physicians that you've approached
21:39in bringing them on to Ford with a very novel approach to health care? I mean, physicians
21:44by and large pretty much love love what we're doing, because think about it like
21:47physicians. These are these are good people. You don't go to school for like 10 years because
21:52you're like, oh, here's a quick buck. Go to school for 10 years because you want to help people.
21:55Right. And then after after you finish med school, you've got all this study. You have all this
22:00knowledge. You're an expert on medicine. What's 80 percent of your day? It's like seven minute
22:04appointments dealing with colds, rashes and flus. And you're like, seriously, can I get to the that
22:08matters? And like the reality is like, no, you can't, because the health care system wasn't
22:12built for you. Right. And so they come to us and they say, oh, wow, you mean I can actually do what
22:18I what I went to school to work on, which is to help the people who need us most. And they get
22:22really excited by that. And by the way, if you're a physician listening like hit us up, we're always
22:27hiring and we want we want the best and brightest out there. And our physicians don't just kind of
22:33serve our members one to one. But they're also the people who are building out these apps,
22:38building out these clinical protocols that help our members. So imagine you're a physician.
22:44You've seen a flu a thousand times and you're like, wait a minute, you mean I can just build
22:48the world's best kind of flu care protocol like that's amazing. Right now I can deal with it once
22:53and for all and I can look at the data and I can continually improve it. And so I think so far that
22:58we found that, you know, physicians tend to like what we're doing. Adrian, when you got into A.I.
23:03many years ago, did you ever anticipate that you would be using your expertise to try and fix the
23:09health care system? So funny enough, I've never thought about the health care system. And you
23:14know what? I don't care to fix the health care system. I care to help people. If the byproduct
23:18of that means we have to fix the health care system, then by golly, we'll do it. But I care
23:22far more about how many people we can help. And what I did think about when I got into A.I. like
23:28to give context, I got into A.I. when it was going through what most people call an A.I. winter,
23:34which is like, hey, don't go into A.I. It's never going to work. You know, it was actually
23:38really hard to fundraise for that last company. Nobody wanted what we were doing. I tell people
23:42if I waited 24 months, I'd be a billionaire. Right. Like then it took off right after.
23:46But what I saw was that A.I. is just it's just a form of math. It's just a modern tool.
23:53And if you can advance the science or the tools, you can apply that to almost every single
23:58industry from transportation with self-driving cars to health care with with A.I. doctors.
24:04But every single part of the world that you see is going to get transformed. And the thing that
24:09I think about is where can we transform in the way that it has the most impact on people's lives?
24:15So we went with health care, but we also thought about, well, maybe we should go spend time on
24:19climate change. Maybe we should spend time on poverty and violence and education. These are
24:24all great areas to go work on. But I think the really exciting part is that we're at the beginning.
24:29You know, everybody right now, A.I. is overhyped, overhyped. It's like, well, I always go back to
24:34this really great line from Bill Gates. Bill Gates said I was lucky enough to work with him at
24:40Microsoft for a little. So it was really stuck with me. He said people always overestimate the
24:45amount of change that will occur in one or two years, but underestimate the amount of change
24:50that will occur in 10. And so, yeah, OK, it's overhyped this. You know, it's not like all of a
24:54sudden all of us are out of jobs, not like all of a sudden we have no more chores. I'm still doing
24:59laundry at the house. I get it. A.I. hasn't changed everything. But you know what? Give it those 10
25:04years, maybe 20 years, maybe 30. I don't know what the number is, but give give it a little time.
25:08I think we're in for a world that's going to excite all of us. Patience is in short supply
25:13these days. Adrian, one final question. Where do you see forward in five years?
25:18The only thing that I think about on a daily basis when I try to project the future of Ford
25:24is really just this binary question of will health care finally go exponential or not?
25:30Today, health care has been on a linear trend, right? You look at, say, in the United States,
25:35we have Kaiser. Kaiser, 75 years old with 12 million patients. OK, well, how many? There's
25:40three hundred and thirty five million people in the US. How many more centuries is it going to
25:44take them? Right. Maybe we'll give them until the year 3000 and see what they can do. And you know
25:48what? We don't have time for that. On the other hand, you look at iPhones, right? Smartphones
25:53didn't exist 15, 16 years ago. Now there's billions of them sold. And so the only difference
25:59is that one of those curves is linear and one of those curves is exponential. And what you realize
26:04we're doing it for it is we're saying, can we make health care go exponential, a.k.a. can we
26:09turn health care into a hardware and software problem, not rely on finding, you know, millions
26:14more doctors that don't exist? And the more that we do that, the more that we know we can scale
26:19health care. And so if you can make health care go exponential and so far it looks like we can,
26:25it's starting to work. Then we think about a world where maybe it's five, maybe it's 10,
26:29who knows? Maybe it's 15. But a world where everyone has access to health care whenever
26:34they need it all around them. That's a world I wake up for. Adrian, thank you for joining us
26:39here today. Not at all. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. And thank you, everyone,
26:43for listening to the CEO Spotlight. I'm Jason Brooks. CEO Spotlight is every Wednesday evening
26:49at six fifty three p.m. and Saturdays at seven fifty a.m. on the Bay Area's news station,
26:55All News 106.9 and AM 740 KCBS and streaming on the Odyssey app and kcbsradio.com.