Adrian Aoun - Forward & Rebuilding Healthcare

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over three years and running. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Please stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. If you are a consumer-focused health and wellness company, you know that acquiring and making use of that health data is traditionally expensive, complicated, and full of friction for the consumer, but not anymore. Thanks to the good people at Sprint, a camera-enabled digital biomarker platform that connects any app to the human body. Formerly known as Elite HRV, the patented technology behind the Sprint platform leverages a decade of research into physiology, behavior, and health insights, including collaboration with 117 universities, analysis of more than 4 billion biomarkers across 20 million user sessions. Using the smartphone as the sensor, Sprint's evidence-based machine learning algorithms deliver actionable biomarker insights such as body composition, HRV, stress, recovery, progress tracking, and more, all through an easy-to-integrate STK and API. Health and wellness companies are integrating Sprint to better understand their users' holistic health, make their apps more personalized and adaptive, demonstrate measurable progress, and empower their members to understand their bodies and make well-informed decisions for their well-being. Go to Spren.com and learn more. That is Spren.com. To live your healthiest, longest life possible, you need to understand what's going on inside your body. People age at different speeds, and generic annual blood work doesn't properly evaluate your biological age, but Insight Tracker does. InsightTracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system designed to extend your health span and slow down the aging process. Created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics, Insight Tracker analyzes your blood, DNA, and fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized and where you're not. You'll get a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition, and supplementation for your body. Add Interage 2.0 to any plan to calculate your true biological age and see how you're aging from the inside out. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire Insight Tracker store. Just go to insight tracker.com forward slash future. That's insight tracker.com forward slash future. All right, we are live. Adrian Aoun, welcome to the future of fitness. Not at all, man. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on. This is gonna be fascinating. You know, as we were talking about before, this isn't a problem that you're solving. I think it's the fucking problem that you're solving. And uh I know you're going with a lot of uh going at that problem with a lot of thought, consideration, and patience, uh, and also a lot of energy and passion. So uh I think people are gonna learn a lot. I know I will. I'm very eager to learn about what you're doing uh on top of the things I've already read and listened to on what Ford is and your background. So before we get into the media of it, Adrian, just please give us a little bit of your background, how you got to be one of the founders of Ford.

Yeah. So whenever people ask my background, it's a little like I don't know where to start, right? Do I start with like the resume? Do I start with the life? Like, you know what I mean? It's like what defines you. But uh, but I imagine people care a little more about the resume than the life, sadly. But um, but look, I, you know, I'm your I'm not like a healthcare guy. I don't I frankly, I know like pardon my language, but fuck all about healthcare. I really don't. Um I'm your standard tech nerd. I just don't have the like the the cool bottle bottle cap glasses and the pocket protector, but you know, picture it as if I did. Um I've started a bunch of different tech companies. I did uh one in the AI space that Google ended up buying, worked a bunch on their AI division over there, and then you know, kind of helped build a lot of it basically before it even existed. And then I spent a few years, this is actually pretty cool. Our CEO at the time was Larry Page, the founder, and he asked me to come kind of be his right hand man. And so I ran special projects for all of Google for a few years. Um, this was pretty awesome. We created Alphabet, and then my job was kind of creating the Alphabet companies. So think of this as like, I'm basically a kid in a candy store, right? I'm like, you know, Google makes billions of dollars and I spend billions of dollars. Whatever idea I'd have, I'd, you know, pitch Larry, pitch the board, get billions of dollars to go after these ideas. Um so I started companies, companies uh like Sidewalk Labs out in New York start uh that's focused on creating cities, literally full-scale cities from scratch and some others. And so I was doing all that, and then um I had the kind of you know unfortunate experience that I think many of us can relate to, which is my uh my brother had a heart attack. And so, you know, all of a sudden I went from like not paying attention to healthcare to being like, holy shit, what the hell? Like this thing matters, and I gotta pay attention, right? And everything I saw was just like appalling. It's literally like insane. First off, the experience of healthcare is crap. And you know this, right? Because like none of us go to the fucking doctor, and why do we not go? Well, it turns out because it's it's the most unpleasant thing you could possibly do. Well, it also turns out that if you don't go, there's no chance they're gonna help you, right? But even if you do go, and even if they do help you, well, it turns out that they're helping you when it's too late, right? So so in my brother's case, it's like they were all there by his side after the heart attack, and all I could be thinking was, like, guys, it would have helped me if you were here before the heart attack, you know? Um, but then even worse was like, we, and this is more on us as engineers, is like we just have not set doctors up for success. Like, you wouldn't go up to like one of your software engineers and just be like, hey, will you build me a website and not hand them a laptop, which is like the some culmination of all human advancement in a fucking two-pound device. But for some reason, it's totally okay to go up to a doctor and say, save my life, and you start by handing them a stethoscope, literally a hollow tube invented in the 1800s. You know, when you were a kid and you wanted to hear what your parents were saying in the other room, you like held a little glass to the door? Like it's the same damn shit. I was like, really, really, this is how you're gonna save his life? Like this. So I just I see all this, all this crap. And then I realized I started learning about it, reading, and I was like, wait a minute. All this crap, and it gets even worse. There's 8 billion people, and less than 2 billion of them on the planet have access to any form of real care. So you're telling me like all of this, and we couldn't even get it out to the planet, right? And so, so imagine I walked up to you and I was like, here's the deal, Eric. I want to get, I wanna get doctors to the whole planet. I want to get doctors to billions of people, right? To the middle of India, to the middle of Rwanda, to billions of people. You're gonna come to me and you're gonna be like, Adrian, where are you gonna get all these doctors and who the hell is gonna pay for them? But imagine if I walked up to you and I was like, Eric, I wanna get smartphones to the whole planet, to the middle of India, the middle of Rwanda to billions of people. You're gonna be like, well, Adrian, not only do I think it's possible, I think you're a little late to the game, buddy. I think it's already happened. So immediately you realize like there's some big difference, right? Like you quickly realize humans don't scale in a way that technology does, right? Or another way to say it is doctors don't scale in a way that hardware and software does. So immediately I had this realization, it's like we've been doing it all wrong. Healthcare should be a product, not a service, right? We should just take all these things that doctors and nurses are doing and just migrate it over to hardware and software. And once you do that, like everything changes. You can scale it all the way up to the planet. It becomes modern engineers, can build the latest tech. And that's that was kind of the realization that I had. It's almost like it's almost like when Elon said, Hey, wait a minute, what would the world look like if uh if we were driving electric cars, not driving gas cars? You start to look at the world really different, right? You're like, holy shit, like that's a gas station, but it should really be an electric station. That's an oil mine, it should really be a lithium mine. Well, once you start thinking about healthcare as a product, not a service, you start to think of it really differently. Today you think of things as specialties. It's like, well, specialties make no sense. Why aren't they apps, right? Today you think of, today you think of every part of healthcare as just costing more and more because it's labor-based instead of like, I don't know, every piece of technology that costs less and less every year. And so this was this was the stuff that was kind of going through my mind. And I was like, holy shit, man, there's something here. So, you know, glutton for punishment, I said, you know what, let's let's leave the cushy job over at Google at Alphabet and you know, decided to start this uh company called Forward, grabbed uh grabbed some of my closest friends uh who it turns out are smarter than me, which is a good thing because it means we have a chance of success. And uh and we started with a really simple mission, which is we just want to get healthcare out to billions of people. Uh we're gonna be the first first company on the planet that truly, truly gets healthcare out to this planet. Um and we're you know, we're early. We're we're five years in, and you can almost think of us as like we're in the Model S phase, right? We've uh we're live in about 25 cities or so. Um, and uh, but we're you know, we'll we'll get to our model three soon, but we're we're you know, it's a good start. So that's a little where we are.

Nice. So I want to start kicking in in into the details here by just painting a picture. Well, it's not painting a picture, it's anecdotal. Like this just happened to me uh a few days ago, and it's something I think everybody uh who's US based can can relate to. Uh I have my annual physical coming up with my doctor. Right. Uh last year we met for 15 minutes. Uh he asked me, um, I don't know, if I've had my flu shot. Uh he asked me if I had my COVID shot and uh a couple other things. And then I told him some things that were I'm like, you know, this isn't normal. This is and he's like, hmm, okay, took a note, that was it, right? This year it's coming up again. And I called the the nurse. I'm like, listen, I'm not doing this unless I at least get some blood panels done. And I snapped at her, poor young lady, my apologies to her, but I was like, listen, I'm not doing this, so I can just show up for 15 minutes and tell me I I gotta get a flu shot. I I want my blood panels minimum. And we're getting it, we had to push back the appointment. But I was frustrated, right? And I think a lot of people do get frustrated with it. So, what is wrong with that scenario in all of its layers?

Totally, totally, totally. So, so I like you're you're touching on exactly the right problem. Like you've you've absolutely nailed it. So just think about like oh last five times you gone to the doctor, and this is basically for almost everybody. It's like you go to the doctor when something's wrong. Like, oh, I got a stomach ache, oh, I got a rash, oh, I got the flu. Okay, but but really what you mean to tell me is that like, you know, the the the valuable five minutes you spent with a doctor over the last, you know, few like year or two, like you were talking about the flu. One day you're gonna die of fucking cancer and heart disease, and you just spent your five minutes talking about your fucking rash? Like, what the hell is going on? Look, when I was at Google, there was this funny thing, and every company does this, right? They come up to you and they're like, once a year, they're like, oh, it's time for your flu shot. Like, and everybody does their damn flu campaigns. Well, you know what, dude? Like, let me just ask, how many people do you know who've died of the flu? Like, is there some huge rash of flu deaths that I don't know about? Like, like, what the fuck? Why is everybody so goddamn focused on the flu? But you know, when I take a step back, it's like, hold on. Like, we know, we know for a fact, like the probability is pretty damn high that we're gonna die of heart disease, we're gonna die of cancer. How many people can you name who died of heart disease or cancer? Like a hell of a lot. But you know what? Google never walked up to me to be like, Adrian, let's talk about your blood pressure, let's talk about your cholesterol. You know what, Adrian, wouldn't it be awesome if we sequenced your DNA and really understood the the cancers that you're at risk for? Not a chance. So why? What the hell's going on? And you realize it's one simple thing, right? Most people, they're in jobs for a few years, right? So Google, like if you get the flu, Google's out some money, right? You're gonna miss work, maybe even take some other people with you. This is bad. So they don't want that to happen. But cancer and heart disease, you're gonna develop that in 30 years, 40 years. Google doesn't fucking care about that. In fact, they don't want to know about it because they're gonna start spending money now to prevent something that's the next guy's problem. So, what we've done is we've literally created an entire healthcare system that's focused on keeping you at work, not keeping you alive. Like, this is fucking insane. Imagine you were buying a house, right? You you went, you got a building inspector. The building inspector comes, they inspect the house, they look over the house, and they're like, okay, you're good. So you go buy the house, right? Then five years later, ten years later, I don't know, a windstorm comes in, it blows your house down. You call up the wind, the building inspector, and you're like, dude, what the fuck? Like you said it was good. And he goes, no, no, no, no, I meant it was good that year. Like, are you fucking kidding me right now? Like, what the hell, right? Like, seriously, this is insane. That person better go to jail, right? Well, like, think about it. You went to your doctor, right? And your doctor, your doctor, you're like, okay, give me the checkup. And what'd your doctor say? Your doctor's like, oh, you're you're fine. What do you mean I'm fine? Ask your doctor next time that happens, ask your doctor, what's my probability of death? If your doctor doesn't say 100%, your doctor better be fired. Because you're definitely gonna die, right? Like, we know you're gonna die. So now it's a question of like, no, no, no, what should I be doing, right? There's always something I could be doing more. There's no question about it. So now tell me what to do. But this is how little they care, right? They don't care because the incentive isn't there. Now it's not the fault of the doctor, it's the fault of the system. So, what you need to do is you need to align the incentives. So the first thing that we did at Ford was really simple. We said, fuck insurance, man. We do not work with insurance. Insurance is the root of all evil. We work with the consumer, we work directly with you. Because at the end of the day, you want to stay alive. You're not focused on like, oh, I need to get to work tomorrow. You're like, no, no, no, I want to see my grandkids, right? That's what matters. And so, yes, you absolutely nailed the problem in.

Yeah. And you know, in contrast, I when I lived in Santa Barbara, I had a doctor that I paid all cash for. I think it was like $350 for my annual physical. Annual physical was two hours long, right? He sat down and two, and out of that two hours, about an hour, hour and 15 minutes was us just talking. We reviewed all of my family history, all the charts, how are you feeling? What's this going on, right? Then he wrote all these voluntary tests, EKG, all these things. And then at the end of the day, I felt really good. I felt like, hey, someone listened to me. And he was someone who was really taking a bold step and just doing what you're doing, but he did it on his own. He just he punted the system, essentially, right? And was like, you know, screw it, I'm just gonna go all cash. Um, and I paid for it, right? So we realized that it doesn't really work. The current healthcare system doesn't really work for patients, it doesn't work for doctors. Who is it working well for?

Oh, it's working well for the insurers. So look, I'm not the I'm not the expert on the current healthcare system. I know this sounds really odd. I don't try like I'm gonna I'm gonna give you actually uh a funny story. The other day, I was on this, um, I was I was uh on this conference panel um with some other kind of healthcare system CEOs, which is like a really odd way to describe myself. Um, and uh and one of the folks on our team, this you know, person just finished up college a few years ago, she's really smart. She's like prepping me. She's like, okay, I'm gonna educate you about these other healthcare systems, et cetera. And she's telling me one of them covers Medicare, one of them covers Medicaid. And I sit there and I pause and I go, hey, what's the difference between Medicare and Medicaid? And she just looks at me and she's got this like like you know, her face is like pale white, and she looks and she goes, Oh my fucking God, he doesn't know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid. Like, how is this guy like running a national healthcare system? And I'm like, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. It's like going up to Larry Page and being like, What do you mean you don't know, you don't know how the Dewey Decimal system works? It's like he doesn't fucking care. I'm not trying to rebuild the existing system, I'm trying to build a new system. So the reality is I spend literally zero time trying to understand how the current system works. I don't know where, like, honestly, I don't know. You know what I do try and spend time focused on? Do I spend time focused on what I can do to literally help you live a longer, happier life. Now take a step back and let's look at the healthcare system. Everybody in the United States, every single person I talk to is like, I want, you know, I want Medicare for all, I want universal healthcare. But like, wait, take a minute and just think about that. Think about all the innovation that we've had in the world of healthcare over the last whatever years Medicare, Medicaid, ACOs, high deductibles. Do you realize all of this is financial innovation? Literally 100% of it is we're just changing who the fuck is paying for the thing. Hold on. You know what we do in the world of tech? We actually just innovate on the damn product. So just tell me who is innovating on the actual care, right? What I want to talk about is what we can be doing with your genetic sequencing to understand what's going on inside your body. What I want to be talking about is what we can be doing with these wearable sensors to catch things earlier. But that's not what the healthcare industry is talking about. In fact, you know what's pretty amazing is like we literally like you cannot name a healthcare system to this day, literally cannot name a healthcare system to this day where it is like just standard issues, standard par for the course, that something like gene sequencing, genetic sequencing, which let's be real, is not that new anymore, is just par for the course. Like, of course, you join, we sequence your DNA. That's just what we do. Nope, nope, nope, not a single person. You cannot name a healthcare system where it is par for the course. What they do is literally just connect all your data sources. Like, of course we want your wearables. Of course we, nope, not a single one. It's like, why? Why? Oh yeah, because that's not what you're in the business of. I forgot. So everybody talks about these like EMRs, these electronic medical records, and you know, Epic's the big one, et cetera. And it's like, they're not electronic medical records. These are fucking invoicing tools, right? We're like, we just built the world's big, it's like QuickBooks for doctors. You know what I mean? Like, and so once you realize this, you quickly realize that like the the problem is that we've literally created the wrong incentive. The incentive is how do I extract money from the healthcare system, not how do I keep people uh alive longer. And that's what you have to do.

Right. Yeah, you know, it occurs to me as I as you're talking that, I I've interviewed and I've talked to different companies who are doing amazing innovations when it comes to technologies for health, right? Preventative, um, even areas of health that we haven't really explored yet. Yet it just never seems to get to the mainstream because, you know, like as a couple, my wife and I pay $800 a month for health insurance. So we're like, well, why I can't I'm not gonna pay more, right, for something else that my health insurance doesn't cover. So then it gets this, it's this weird thing. It's like, well, I'm spending so much money over here, but I don't actually use this, right? I'm just I mean, have this here because like what happens if I, God forbid, you know, I drive out in a car and then there's an accident, or you know, I have heart disease all over my family. You know, something happens there, like, well, okay, it's peace of mind. Maybe you sleep a little better. But meanwhile, it's just sucking money, right? And you look at like the fitness industry and what's the holy grail that we're all talking about, and I'm just as guilty as anybody else is like, well, how do we tap into healthcare money? Right, how do we get into insurance money? Sorry, like that's that's what everyone's trying to do. And maybe that's the wrong is what you're saying.

Don't do it. No, literally don't do it because you'll stop innovating. So so here's here's actually the deal. The reason it's a lot of money, well, first off, that money at some point's gonna come crashing down because technically the world is eventually is an efficient market, right? So let's just take a step back. Let's pretend that Uber launched ambulances, okay? So you open up, you open up your little Uber app, right? And you got Uber X, and you're like, oh, from here to the hospital, it's like, okay, 20 bucks. Uber black from here to the hospital is 40 bucks, and then Uber ambulance from here to the hospital is $3,000. And you're like, what the fuck just happened? Like, what is the like, why did it go from 20 to 40 to 3,000? Like, just take a step back and try to understand this just from first principles. Okay, okay, well, hold on. What's the cost difference between an ambulance and like the black SUV? Is it like $9 million? No, they're roughly like, come on, they're basically the same thing. Like, okay, maybe an SUV is like $80,000 and an ambulance is like, I don't know, $140,000. Okay. Maybe that, maybe that $40 should become $60. It should become like $3,000. Okay. But then you're like, okay, Adrian, but that's not fair because you know what? I'm sure you're using using a million dollar kind of consumable piece of equipment. No, it just doesn't exist. You know what I mean? Yeah, Adrian, but you know what? I use some I use some pills while I'm in there. Okay, add $3. You know what I mean? And what you quickly realize is like there is no material cost. Like, okay, but hold on, Adrian. I'm sure that paramedic is, you know, highly educated, went to school for 20 years, and is making way more than that Uber driver. No, sorry. Nah, I hate to break it to you, but no way. They're actually massively underpaid, and they didn't go to school for that long. And no, they're making not that much more than that Uber driver.

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Imagine if your employer paid your cell phone bill, paid Verizon, you know what I mean? And like every year Verizon was like, I'm just raising the bill, raising the bill, raising the bill. And there's this law that says, you know what, employer, you have to pay either Verizon or T-Mobile or ATT. Well, you know what Verizon, T-Mobile, and ATT are gonna do? They're gonna fucking raise the price every year because you have no choice. You know what I mean? And you can't go anywhere else. So this is why the price all of a sudden becomes $4,000. And you see this in every part of healthcare. Like, just take a step back. Ask yourself like, imagine you landed on this planet. You literally landed on this planet five minutes ago from outer space. And I'm just describing to you one of two concepts, okay? Concept number one is the iPhone, okay? It's built in a factory by robots. It has AI processors and microchips, it has enough storage to store literally every book ever written on this planet. It can take photos, photographic memory, it can connect you to any person on this planet in under two seconds, and literally connect you to any piece of data on this planet, any piece of information in under one second. This is called the iPhone, okay? This other thing is called open hard surgery, okay? And open hard surgery, it's a little like you know when you're eating like a steak knife and you got like a fork in one hand and a knife in the other, um, uh and you're eating your steak dinner? Um, well, it's kind of like that, except that the fork and knife, they're really clean. And instead of a white tablecloth, it's usually a blue tablecloth, okay? But it's basically like eating a steak dinner. Okay, now I tell you one of these, one of these costs $100,000. And one of these, one of these costs $400. Now remember, you just landed from outer space. You know what you're gonna say? Say, well, obviously the iPhone costs $100,000. The fucking thing connects me to all information on the planet in under a second. And I'm gonna tell you, no, your steak dinner, your steak dinner. Oh, sorry, no, I sorry. Uh I apologize, I misspoke. We call that open heart surgery in this context. But let's be real, your steak dinner just costs $100,000. And you're like, the fuck? Like, how did we end up here? Literally, I didn't. When you have open heart surgery, was there a three million dollar machine? No. Well, you know what you spent it on? You spent it on cotton swabs. Let me be super clear, right? You spent it on a really clean knife. You know how much a really clean knife costs? I don't know. Go take your knife and put it in a fucking microwave, right? Like, it's just not that hard. And so now you you quickly realize is you're like, what am I paying for? Like, where did this all go? And now you quickly start to understand that what we've done is we've created the wrong system. And so when you create things as a product, you get the iPhone. And when you create things as a service, you get the healthcare system. So now I just come back to what would it look like if we didn't do it that way? And we've seen this. So a bunch of years ago, um, you know, the healthcare companies, all these insurance companies got together. I don't fully understand this process, but they got together and they decided the powers that be decided that um that LASIK is not gonna get covered by insurance. I don't know why, but you know what? This is an elective thing, you don't really need it. Laser eye surgery, we're not gonna cover it. So, so um LASIK um went all of a sudden from whatever it was costing before, $20,000 or something crazy like that, all the way down to $1,000, like overnight. And that's what happens when you go direct to consumer because you're like, oh shit, I have an incentive to be really cheap. I have an incentive to innovate, I have an incentive to be really accurate. And you know, you know what it takes to use a LASIK machine? It takes all of like six seconds of education. Like, let's be real. The machine just kind of works on its own, right? And like that's technology. So where's my fucking LASIK for everything else, right? Like, how am I in the year 20, 2020? And like, like literally every single like the flu is not a solved problem. Imagine I went up to, imagine, imagine you were a forward, you were a forward member, okay? And you had a bug in your mobile app, right? And it's kind of annoying you. So you walk up to you walk up to Jess, one of our engineers over here, and Jess, just really nice, and you say, Hey Jess, will you fix my bug? Jess is nice, she fixes your bug, she sends you on your way. Then uh the next day, uh, you know, I have the same bug. I walk up to Jess, she fixes my bug, she uh she sends me on my way. The next day, uh, my mom, she has the same bug, she walks up to Jess, Jess fixes the same bug, she sends her on her way. At some point, I'm gonna fucking fire Jess. Like, goddammit, Jess, like just fix the damn bug once and for all, right? Now imagine you have the flu. You walk up to your doctor, hey doc, fix my flu. Doc fixes your flu, sends you on your way. The next day, I have the flu. I walk up to the doctor, they fix my flu, send you my, send me on my way. The next day, my mother has the flu. They walk up, fixes the flu, sends her away. At some point, can we just fire the damn doctor? Like, why have we not just fixed the flu? We've seen it billions of times, right? And now you realize, like, well, hold on. I make money today in the healthcare system by billing people for my hours. If I fix the flu, I stop making money. That's a terrible incentive. Terrible. So nobody's building the product. Now you get the problem.

Yeah, so we definitely harped on the problem, and I think it's it it it should be infuriating to people if it isn't already. So let's talk about what you guys are doing because I really want to hear about the client member. I guess member is how you would address the people going through your clinics. I mean, it sounds like something from a really scott movie, right? Um so walk me through it. It's really cool, and I think we want to hear what that what that looks and sounds and feels like.

Okay, so you know what's really funny? The the forward experience is um in some ways, I'll I'll kind of uh give you a little description. So you walk into any one of our locations and you start by walking up to this like iPad to check in, it pulls up your account. You know, you can it asks you a bunch of questions, like where are you traveling to, just so it knows if you need any vaccines. It asks you whatever, whatever surgeries you've had, your family history, just so it can kind of figure out all your risks. Then you walk up to a body scanner, it's pretty cool. It takes a whole bunch of readings um in literally about 90 seconds. Um, then we we draw your blood, we process it right there on site um in something like uh, I don't know, about like 11 minutes, 12 minutes or so. Then we uh we sequence your DNA, and then all this information, you walk into an exam room and there's this huge touch screen on a wall that we've developed, and it's got a model of your body, and all the data has been overlaid on top. All the suggestions are coming up. It literally shows you everything that's going wrong with you. And what's pretty at badass is literally any sensor the doctor uses in the exam room. So if they want to look at your heart, they take a stethoscope to your heart, boom, the data, you see it right there live on the screen, it gets recorded into your profile. They want to look at your skin. Uh, we have this thing called the dermatoscope that scans all your skin, again, puts it right there on the screen, kind of tracks, tracks what's happening to your moles, your lesions over time. But you know what's kind of funny? I'm gonna give you a uh a kind of interesting story. You know, right when we launched for it, so we started the company and 12 months later we launched for it. I brought the CEO of Kaiser through. Like the CEO of Kaiser, you know, it's kind of a big deal, right? Like Kaiser is like kind of the shit in in healthcare, right? And I bring him through and I and I show, I show him, and mostly I just was like, okay, well, what do you think? And this dude goes, This is the most advanced healthcare system that I've ever seen. And I'm sitting there thinking, of course, because I'm all badass and I'm full of myself and I'm so smart. And then I pause and I go, wait a minute, Adrian, you can't be this badass. You it's not like you've you've been in the world of healthcare for 12 months, like, right? Like you're not that smart. And so what I realized is it's not that we're actually that modern. It's that the existing healthcare system is so backwards that we literally all have Stockholm Syndrome. Think about what I just described. I literally described a TV on a wall. Like you walk into fucking McDonald's and there's a touch screen on the wall. But for some reason in healthcare, everyone's like, this is the future. I'm like, really? Because when I walk into McDonald's, I literally order my Big Mac from a fucking screen, right? Like at this point, it's literally the only industry that has like abused us so much that we for some reason think it's completely acceptable to live in a world where the way somebody provides medical care is so antiquated. Imagine, imagine telling your kids one day what it was like to go to the doctor. Wait, wait, wait, Dad. So you're telling me you walked into a room, there was this dude in a white coat, you told him what was going on, and then he just kind of divined what was wrong with you. Wait, Dad, you went to a fortune teller? Like basically, doctors are like the fortune tellers of our time. Now, now why? It's not their fault. They they went to fucking like 15 years of school. It's our fault because we built them shitty tools. So then I immediately asked, well, okay, great, what would the world look like if we didn't build them shitty tools? So if I took those those thousand engineers over at Kaiser that are working on new ways to bill you, and instead I said, okay, now let's take a hundred of them and let's have them build the world's best application, literally the best software around understanding your genetics. Let's take another hundred of them and let's say the world's best hardware and software about lowering your blood pressure. Then let's take the next hundred of them and say the world's best hardware and software about lowering your cholesterol. Well, fuck, at some point, like I'm gonna go to I'm gonna go to Kaiser. They're gonna have the world's best technology. Like, how would I ever not go to Kaiser? That's the world that I want to create. I want to create a world where we're literally bringing everybody together to get really damn good at working on these problems that matter the most. Does that kind of does that kind of make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense. Uh it makes a lot of sense. And I gotta imagine, I mean, uh, that the the medical industry is ready. I mean, it just seems like there's so much advancement. Like I'm just talking about, it just seems stunted. And you know, what what's it gonna take to get insurance out of the picture? Like it seems like a monumental tax that most people have probably just given up on, right? What's it gonna take?

So, you know, again, I don't know anything about the world of insurance, but what I do know is I'm a pretty reasonable first principles thinker. And here's what I think. Okay. Um, so let's just take a step back. So let's look at the existing healthcare industry and let's just look at what they're doing. So healthcare today in the United States is 20% of GDP. Now, whenever I hear 20% of GDP, that sounds like this super like intellectual economic phrase that economists use. So let's go ahead and just let's make it really visceral. They're taking 20% of my fucking paycheck, okay? So what am I getting for 20% of my paycheck? Well, kind of fuck all. Let's be real, right? I'm getting like colds and rashes and flu. Like fuck all. Um, and you know this, right? Because let's pretend one of your one of your like closest friends in the world, your best friend, your loved one, your wife, whomever it is, walks up to you and says, Hey, I didn't go get a checkup this year. You don't go, oh fuck Molly, Molly's gonna die. You go, I'm not sure it fucking matters, right? Like whatever, like you're fine, right? And so, so at the end of the day, you kind of know they're not really making a difference, but they're taking 20% of your paycheck. But it gets worse because every year the healthcare industry is going up 7% in cost. Now that doesn't sound like much, but if you do the math, that means every decade it's doubling. So right now, it's right now it's 20%. 10 years from now, it's 40%. Okay, so they're taking a lot of money. But what's worse is they're giving you less and less every year, right? So between these co-pays, these high deductibles, like literally you're getting less and less. So every year, what are they doing? They're literally charging you more and giving you less. Now, let's look at what Forward's doing, right? Because we're built as a product. So we look a little more like your iPhone, right? Where every year we're just launching more and more and more apps, right? It's like you just get more and more and more. We're not changing our price because, again, we're not using labor, we're just using technology, right? So it doesn't cost us more, but it actually gets better. Because again, as a tech company, what do tech companies do? They lower their price over time. You ride this curve called Moore's Law. So think about what I just told you. I told you they're increasing their cost and giving you less. We are lowering our cost and giving you more. So at some point you say, well, hold on. Isn't everyone just gonna switch? Like, why on earth would you stick with the old world? At some point it becomes absurd. So it's just a matter of when, not if, right? And so I'm actually not worried about like, can we take down the healthcare industry? I just focus on can we build the world's best product? If we build the world's best product, you're never gonna fucking look back.

Yeah, you know, it it I imagine there's some similarities to like the the cable companies, right? Everyone hated the cable companies. Everyone hated it. We just didn't have a better option, right? Yeah, and then streaming came along, right? Like YouTube TV to me, like as an NFL fan, like I don't give a shit about TV unless it's the NFL. I don't care. And I was paying, I had to pay what thousands of dollars every year for cable just so I could watch 12, 14 games. That's ridiculous. And now you have the options to do it because that's what the consumer wanted, right? That's what we want. And I see the same thing with healthcare. Like, I think about just this, I'm like, what if we just stopped paying for healthcare? Uh, Eric, and we, you know, as a family, and then uh I just save that $800 every month that we pay, and then we can use it when we need it. Like, what is what's wrong with that? Or what if I did something like this? So one of the things I want to jump on, because I know it's important with what you guys do, describe the importance of outcomes within the world of Ford.

Yeah. Outcomes are the ballgame. Outcomes are why you get into the game, right? Like, this is why we're all here. There's this really funny thing, which is go up to any healthcare system today and ask them their outcomes. I did this because obviously, like, you know, I'm an engineer, I'm a scientist. Like at the end of the day, I'm like, well, obviously, like we just need to know their numbers so that we can go do better. And man, I it will blow your mind, blow your mind how shady this is. Okay. So if you walk up to uh you walk up to Kaiser and say, what are your outcomes? They'll say, Oh, we're best, literally, Northern California Kaiser, we are best in the nation. We have the best out. Okay, fine, fine, fine. Show me the metrics, show me the metrics. And they use this thing called HEDIS scores, H-E-D-I-S. I forget what it stands for, but HETIS scores. And then I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna go look at these metrics. And you know what's really funny about HEDIS scores? They are input metrics, not output metrics. So you, you and I, what like we're not experts, so what do we expect to see? Well, how long do people live? That's kind of all that matters, right? How long do they live not using you, how long do they live using you? I'm not sure what what else matters. Everything else is kind of bullshit, right? But that's not what it is. And think about why. I'm gonna explain this. If you're Kaiser, you have no fucking clue how long your people live, because when you go to the doctor, you see the doctor, they give you some, I don't know, some intervention, a prescription, a treatment, whatever, and then you leave. They don't know if you got better, they don't know if you got worse, they don't know anything, right? So all of their metrics are based on input metrics. So let me give you an example. Um, one of the metrics is um uh what percentage of your population did you suggest gets a mammogram? I'm like, yeah, but that's not what I care about. What I care about is did they get cancer and did they die, right? Like a mammogram might be like the way you're doing that, but there might be a hundred other ways and those might be better. But what you realize is they don't have they have no fucking clues, so they can't keep innovating. So they're really stuck in the past, right? And so so if I want to go game those metrics, well it's easy. I just write a little bot that says, fine, send 100% of my members at all times a reminder to get their mammogram. And this is stupid. That doesn't mean that their lives were saved. This has nothing to do with saving lives. And so what you actually realize is that forward not only has to improve outcomes, we literally have to go set the standard of how outcomes are even measured, right? And this is appalling. This is literally appalling. The other thing that's kind of bullshit, if you take a step back and think about it, is the existing healthcare system, one of the ways that they try to game their metrics, this is kind of bullshit, is um is they just say, oh no, no, our metrics on on our surgeries are great, our metrics on this are great. And then they just refuse to bring people in that won't do well. So like if you're super sick sometimes, they literally won't treat you because they're afraid it'll fuck their metrics, right? And so it's like, I mean, this is this is like super, super, super bad. Um uh, but again, it's the the healthcare industry is just filled with people gaming metrics. And like what you realize is again, it's all about making the money, it's not about doing the right thing. Now, when you focus on doing the right thing, what you start to realize is that actually the number one problem in healthcare is that the rate of innovation is incredibly low. So, one of the things that I often take a step back and I think about is like, you know, we live in this world, ooh, sorry about that. Uh we live in this world of mobile phones, right? And mobile phones are obviously like pretty badass, and we all live and die by them, and they've got these thousands of apps. But like, why did the mobile computing revolution take off? Well, I using like one of one of the examples I always use is, you know, um, uh, you know, take Kevin's sister. Kevin's sister walks around and he says, like, I built Instagram in a weekend. And in some ways, like, that's kind of the craziest statement you've ever heard, right? It's like, well, sure, dude, after 10,000 engineers built the world's best glass, the world's best camera, the world's best operating system, the world's best cell tower, dude, you came, you built a fucking camera app, you don't even know how the camera works. Like, how insane is that, right? But but in some ways, this is why the mobile computing revolution took off, right? It's because a 22-year-old at Stanford could have an idea, push it out to the world, and a day later learn. Was it a good idea, was it a bad idea? And they could iterate and iterate and iterate. And so the idea is rather than uh uh going along incrementally, we start to go along exponentially, right? Innovation starts to take off. And overnight you go from Instagram to Snapchat to TikTok, and literally you go to thousands and thousands of apps on your mobile phone. Now, in the world of healthcare, that doesn't exist. If you have an idea, I shit you not, go get your PhD, go write a paper, you know, do a clinical trial, write a paper, push it out to a journal, wait, I don't know, wait for the FDA somewhere in there for a few years, push it out to a journal, hopefully doctors read it, hopefully 20 years from now it's in the education system. I mean, literally, it's like in one of these, the cycle time is like a day or two, and in one of these, the cycle time is like a decade or two. This is insane. You want to innovate on healthcare a decade or two at a time? Great. Well, I'll be dead by then, right? So now you have to ask yourself like, how do we move to a world where the cycle time, the rate of innovation, the amount of kicks at the can that we get comes massively, massively down. And you have to turn this into a problem of tools, right? So why can engineers sit there and write code that goes out to the world so quickly? Well, it's easy. It's like, because we built the damn iPhone, because we built laptops, because in Apple's case, we built this thing called Xcode, which is their development environment. And so it's a little like, well, where is all that for the healthcare system? Like, where where do those things, who's gonna go build those? And that's why we started forward because frankly, I'm not a doctor. I don't know the right answers. Like, I couldn't tell you the best way to solve, said to cure cancer or or prevent prevent heart attacks. But I can build you those tools, right? I can build you the tools where you can take your idea and you can push it out into a healthcare system tomorrow. Think about that. Imagine having that 22-year-old at Stanford not waste their time on fucking photo sharing apps, but instead say, I've got an idea for for literally preventing cancer. Or better yet, I've got an idea for open heart surgery. Like if we get to a world where your idea goes from I've got an idea of open heart surgery, to we can try it in a safe clinical trial in 24 hours, that's when the world is gonna take off. That's what we need, and that's what we're working on. That's beautiful, man.

And so let's get back to this member experience. So I join, right? I join, uh, you don't have one in northwest Montana, I assume, right? Not yet.

Uh not yet, man. Not yet. But you know, give me, give me, give me time.

We'll be there faster than you think. Faster than you think. I can't, I can't wait. So I join, right? Or I I show up. How much am I paying for month? What can I expect from the service? Uh give us like yeah, the the details.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So we charge $149 a month. And uh and it's kind of all you can eat, right? There's so there's no there's no hidden fees, there's no gotchas, there's no upsells, there's no co-pays. And the reason for this is like, you know, the current the current healthcare system is a little like they kind of bet against their own product, if you think about it. They're like, here's how you know, you're paying for your healthcare thing, but every time you come in, we're gonna charge you extra, which is the fastest way you know that they don't want you to use their product. It's like, well, could you imagine if every time you loaded Gmail, they were like, that's an extra dollar. It's like, no, fuck you. Like they think that's absurd, right? So, no, like all you can eat, whatever, whatever you need, we'll cover it. Like, as long, as long as we offer it, we cover it. We're good to go. Okay, great. Now, um, 149 bucks a month, like, think of that as our model. Like we're gonna go to 99. In fact, we're already starting to discount towards that right now. Uh we'll go to 99, then 79, then 59. Like, that's not a joke. We are we are headed there, right? We literally want to drive forward down to zero dollars. I know that sounds crazy, but then you remember that like literally some of the world's largest companies like Google and Facebook charge zero dollars. So I want forward to to get all the way to the middle of India and the middle of Rwanda, and I'm I'm gonna either uh get there or leave an enormous crater destruction in our path to do so. Now, once you walk in, you can think of it a little as like we start with like we started with simple primary care. And then we're just constantly looking at what we have to refer our members outside of our system for, right? Like what we haven't yet built. And then we're just kind of chugging off the list. So whatever's at the top of the list, we say, great, now let's go build that. So you know what? We saw that we were referring our members out for genetic counselors. And that was a weird one because honestly, we didn't even know where to refer them to because there basically aren't genetic counselors out there. So we started building some of that in-house. Then we saw we were referring people out for a bunch of like cardiology things, so we built that in-house, then dermatology, so we built a bunch of that in-house, then weight loss, and we built a bunch of that in-house, and you know, and uh everything from mental health to anxiety to to diabetes, like we're just we want to build every single thing in-house. I'm not joking when I say Ford literally wants to deliver babies and do open heart surgery, every single part of it. But we're not gonna do it the same way everyone else did. We're not hiring the dermatologist and hiring the cardiologist. No way. We're gonna do it by building, literally by building robots and building software and building AI to make it so that the doctors that we have can scale really efficiently, right? Because if we keep adding a new doctor for every single little service, we're never gonna be able to lower that cost. We're never gonna be able to scale it out to the planet, right? And so we try to augment everybody with technology so that we can get to a point where everybody can have the same product. I don't care who you are on this planet, we want it all to be democratized.

That's great. So who are the the early adopters as far as patients? Who are you seeing? Is there a certain demographic?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know what? Um, at this point, we're probably a lot beyond the early adopter, considering we're in like 25 uh sort of cities or so, but it's everyone, man. Is you know, when you think about healthcare, healthcare is like it's kind of the universal um equalizer in some ways. It's like you can't point to a single person who's like, yeah, I'm gonna opt out of this one. I'm like, really? You're gonna opt out of death? Let me know how that works out for you, right? So it's like, look, I mean, we've got people in their 20s, we've got people in their 90s, we've got people that are, you know, billionaires, we've got people that are Uber drivers. Like, I mean, you think about it. If you're an Uber driver right now, you go on to any one of these ACA plans, right? Like the uh the Obamacare plans. I'm gonna tell you, man, the the cheapest plan I think in California right now is like a $375 a month plan, and it has a $7,800 deductible. So you're like, dude, I can't afford it, and even if I could afford it, I can't afford to use it, right? Or $149 a month, and it comes with the blood tests and the vaccines and no copies and like holy shit. Like you're just like, man, this is this is just the way it should be done. And at some point you're like, man, I just want for it to do more and more and more. And that's the ballgame. So we're working as fast as we can to cover every single part of the healthcare industry. Now, I know, I know it's not gonna happen overnight. I know the healthcare industry is a lot of work, but you know, that's why, that's why I don't get any sleep these days. Because, you know, we can we got got a lot of needs to be and uh and a hell of a lot of ambition around here.

Yeah, it's it's exciting. I can't wait for you to get to Montana. Sign me up, man. You're got you got one client up here, right? So I don't know if that's enough. Two with my wife.

Our mission is to uh to be the first healthcare system that gets to a billion users. So I'm gonna go ahead and just be like, well, now it's uh for first healthcare system to get to 999,999,000, you know, minus two. We're we're good on on the first two. Uh we got a long way to go, a long way to go. But uh but it's a good start, you know?

Yeah, and there's just so many people that you know are already realizing they have to advocate for their own health anyway, right? Like paying out of pocket for different services, like you know, inside tracker or sponsor of the show, right? Like you can start looking at your own blood work and getting suggestions and DNA work and all those things. So this these products and these awareness is already out there. And I think that the demand is uh, I mean, you can probably tell me better, but it's I'm sure it's gonna be very high as you expand.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And every day it only gets higher, right? Because like think of it as like every single day we're just launching more and more services, which just makes us more and more compelling and more and more interesting to everyone else, which is uh which is always super exciting.

Right on. Well, Adrian, I I I love it, man. Um will you come back on in about a year and give me an update on how this is? I would love to.

I would love to. You say the word whenever you want, I'll be back.

Right on. And uh last question here, if if people are listening, um what do you need right now? Who who do you want to talk to? What kind of connections are you looking for? What when should people reach out and how do they get in touch?

Yeah, look, the number one thing we need, like our ambitions are huge, as you can tell. Like, we we we see healthcare as like probably one of the most important problems on this planet, if not the most important problem. Like, like if if if you ask what's the meaning of life, well, it starts by like actually living, right? And and that's something that like you can take for granted really easily when you're in when you're in a nice country like the US. But you know what, it's a hell of a lot rougher for other people out there. So if that's something that calls to you and you say, Man, I care about that. I want to help others, I want to live my life in service of others and do what I can to kind of make the world a better place for others, give us a ring and join our team because let me tell you, we need all the help we can get. Um, our website's goforward.com. I am Adrian at GoForward.com. Super easy to get a hold of. Shoot me an email, go to our website, we've got a careers page, whatever it is, but uh but hit us up and uh and we'd love all the support.

Right on. Adrian, thank you so much for joining us. Absolute pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, Adrian Ahun.

Thanks, man. Talk to you soon.

Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. We want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.