 Yeah, the band March is on. Here we are. I think they're kind of given Tuesday. This time we're Pat Sullivan of Oceanit and we're talking about technology. Think Tech Tech Talks. Pat Sullivan been involved in technology in Hawaii since the 80s since he took his PhD way back when and he's still doing it and he's running a successful company called Oceanit which is downtown. It keeps on trucking through thick and thin, through ideas, through innovations and through change. Hi Pat, thank you for joining the show. Thanks for having me. This is definitely an interesting time to be talking about this. Yeah, so we have a book, Intellectual Anarchy. Let me see if I can get that there. Intellectual Anarchy. It just came out. In fact, this is an advanced copy that you gave me and I find it a very interesting book, especially about you and Hawaii. Intellectual Anarchy, the Art of Disruptive Innovation, breaking the bonds of normal, to solve the impossible. Patrick K. Sullivan, why did you write this book Pat? Well, it answers a question I've been asked over and over and over but it really goes back to several years ago there's a guy we worked with at DARPA who was visiting and he was in the office and he said what you guys do is so different. He said you're like my special forces for tech. Nobody does the things you do. No one takes on these hard problems. He said you've got to have a book and I said what do you mean? He said you should have a book because there's nobody doing this around the whole country. He said I work with everybody. So I thought, well, that's an interesting idea but I don't write books, right? I mean, what the heck? But then what happened was as we've explored these different models to bring technology to market, corporal co-development in particular, things other than just private equity. Private equity is a model that has worked really well in Silicon Valley and Boston but it's really available in maybe four parts of the United States and it isn't available in other places. That's most of the country and it isn't available in Hawaii. And so then the question is why can't we innovate the impact of finance? Why do we have to only do it one way? Why can't we innovate that? Because when you really look at the history of finance, lots of innovation. Going back to the days of, you know, I think how do you buy a home? Well, they created these ideas of mortgages and these financing products that you could get to buy cars or houses or other things. So innovation isn't limited to technology. Innovation has to cut across to business, business models, finance, how you work with people. It cuts across pretty much everything. And what happens is as methods and materials change, what was maybe not even thinkable or possible becomes possible. Things that were not practical become viable. And I think, you know, those opportunities are there. They're among us today here in Hawaii. But I think it's hard to see them because we're so wrapped around one way of thinking. What I refer to as a group think and talk about it a little bit in the book. Because you get a bunch of people together. And they all talk to each other using the same words, the same language, the same ideas. It's kind of like saying, okay, the world is flat. But this guy says there's mountains. I've never seen a mountain. I don't believe it. How could there be mountains? Our world is flat. And you need to get it through your head that the world is flat. And that's all there is. So let's not waste any more time talking about it. We're doing a little bit of that here in Hawaii. So in every community is at risk of suffering its own group think, we find it, for example, we're doing a lot of work in the energy space. We're in Houston, but we're not in the energy business. And that gives us a huge opportunity to think outside of what normally people think about. Same thing in the Beltway, we've been in DC for years, but we're not really a beltway bandit like a lot of companies. So we're thinking outside of the Beltway. And that idea of group think first came to me from a guy that was he spent about four hours in the labs here in Honolulu. He was he ran the entire portfolio of all research and development for Department of Defense. And he's now the senior VP at IBM. And so he spent a bunch of time there at Ocean and he came, you know, next time I saw him, he said, never seen anything like this. The way you think about what to do is not anything like what we're used to. He used to be at the CTO of Lincoln Labs at MIT before he took this other job. So he was used to a certain way of thinking. And here we created something different without necessarily realizing that it was different. We didn't know why we couldn't. And so we Well, you described that in great detail in the book, you talk about design thinking, which has been a favorite thing of yours from back in the day when Stanford came up with it, you have design thinking people populating your company. And, you know, you don't accept the assignment as stated, you, you rethink the very assignment that is handed to you. I find that very interesting and important. But you're you're essentially giving up your secrets here. I mean, you're unique. Ocean is unique. It's, it's probably, to be generous, you know, in the legal sense, it's in its own category. And my question is, why would you give up all those secrets? Aren't those secrets important to you? Because at the end of the day, you have to survive, you have to make money, have to come up with ideas that are patentable and marketable. And here you are, you're telling everyone in the world, how to do that at a tech at your own expense, no? Well, that's one way to think about it. But we came to the realization that what we do is hard to do. And it's hard to do because most people are socialized into thinking about technology and everything else differently. And so what we discovered was the question that happens over and over and over from these companies we work with is how do you do this? And so we spend, we kind of mapped out what we do. So we work with like a lot of Fortune 100 companies, some Fortune 10 companies. And it goes through this process, it always starts out with disbelief. And then you go to credibility, then you go to advocacy. And so we work with a lot of big companies that are actually advocating for us, which I find hard to believe sometimes. It's wonderful, I think. But what happens is the the time it takes to go through disbelief is a lot of time and effort. So we thought, if we can reduce the amount of time on disbelief, to get your credibility faster, we can move faster. So the whole idea is how do we go faster? How do we accelerate and what we're doing and scale it? So we believe what we do, we can scale faster. And so my thought is, okay, if we talk about what we've learned, and we try to share it with people, some people will pick up some of these things. And there's an infinite number of things to innovate and problems to solve. So it's not like there's a shortage of things to do. So it's a bit of a blue sky, kind of an environment. Because see, a lot of, like in Silicon Valley, a lot of, you know, one guy's got an idea, 50 guys chase one idea. And that's the business model they put together, because Silicon Valley really excels at finance and creating wealth. That's their number one innovation. It's not really technology, although they get a lot of credit for that. They're really good, though, at the methodology they put together on finance and exiting, going IPO. You see the edges of that cracking with companies like WeWork. Because they're a real estate company. They still are a real estate company, like A&B and a lot of other companies. But they said they're a tech company, and they kept repeating it. And at some point, people started believing it, and they were going to go public in an enormous valuation. And all those investors would have had a massive payday. And then all the people that bought stock would of course lose their shirt. But you know, that's a model that Silicon Valley has perfected. And they chalk up the fact that people would invest in and lose their money to, you know, creative destruction or something. But the fact is, there are innovations going on in Silicon Valley and in places all over the world, and in Hawaii. The real question is how do you bring them to market? So we thought, okay, the book is something that we share with people we work with. And it also helps to create brand awareness for Hawaii a little differently than just visitors. Because then the question I get, and I've gotten over and over, if you're so smart, why are you in Hawaii? Why aren't you in Silicon Valley? Why aren't you in Boston? Why aren't you some other place? Because that's where all the smart people are. Nobody's in Hawaii. And you know, I take exception to that question, because it's bigger than that. It's really where you want to live. It's about who you are and what you care about in a community you care about with people you love. That's what life is about. That's what Hawaii is to me. But see, if you really drill into it, it's not new. This idea where, for example, Bill Gates moved from Los Alamos, New Mexico, when he started his IT company to Seattle. If you looked at Seattle back then, timber, Boeing had gone through some ups and downs. Schools were not that great. The economy was not that good. But he grew up there. It rains a lot. But it was home. That's why he went there. And whereas Los Alamos had probably the more computer scientists supporting the National Lab than Seattle had by any stretch, but it wasn't home. And home matters. Well, you know, but years ago, I remember, and not that many years ago, say 20 years ago, I'm sure you were there. Everybody said that, oh, venture capital is the ones in Silicon Valley, the ones who specialize in innovating ways to do venture capital. They like to have their the objects of their affection within a stone's throat. They like to have them in in San Francisco. And Hawaii is not an object of their infection, their affection. We'll talk about infections in a little while. Hawaii is not on their radar because it's too far away. They're not going to come out here. They're not going to they can't monitor. They can't supervise, you know, the companies in which they invest at such a distance. And as a result, we strive, we struggle to get capital from San Francisco and in the in the odd years, we never really got it. So yes, I totally agree that now technology can be anywhere. It is everywhere. In fact, you remind me of all those Israeli companies that are incredibly innovative. They come up with stuff nobody comes up with. And they're able to, you know, market it to the world successfully. And I would love to see Hawaii do that too. I'd love to see you do that. But query before you get mine to market, don't you have to have capital? Well, so it depends on when you need capital. So what we do is we reduce risk as we move toward the market. So for example, we're working on a test in potentially a therapy for COVID-19. The risk we're taking is built on risk we took over the last six years, way ahead of COVID-19. But we created a platform to be able to do this. I was reviewing some of the notes the other day, because in February, I believe, we had a team in Washington presenting to an off-sided DARPA on using grammar to address HIV and cancer, which then DARPA presented to National Institutes of Health as, you know, somewhere down the road, this is a technology that's going to have a place because here's how you can bring causality to biology versus correlation, which is where everybody focuses. So that is something that an investor would never fund, because there's no clear economic outcome in the next couple of years. I mean, a VC wants to make a 10x in a few years. So they put money in to get money out. Period. That's what it's all about. Now, as we're developing this, for example, we got some really good progress yesterday. One of the guys, he's a virologist. And Mondays are full of meetings. I was in the office, he was in the lab, and he runs upstairs and comes in, bangs on the door and he says, look, I've got it, right? And so he shows me the fact that this test that we had outlined, which is a designer molecule would in fact link onto this protein, like the COVID 19 protein, specifically and uniquely, so that it only links on that and that it produces a signal on the signals readable. And that was a big milestone. Now, as we further reduce the risk, at some point, then we get into this question of scale. So we're already talking to people on scale. So if you look at the report that came out from Harvard last week, I think you need five to 20 million tests a day. And we're building what we call a spit in a cup test, you spit in the cup, you mix it, pour it in this thing, and it gives you like a pregnancy kit. So you can, you know, sell them at longs, a lot of places that be cheap, you can mass produce these things. We're not ready, but we've already started talking to people that could throw in a bunch of capital. But they want to put in capital when there's no risk. See, it's totally contrary to what people think venture capitalists do not take risk. They want to make money. And there's different kinds of risk. There's technology risk, execution risk and market risk. So half of the risk is in the market, roughly 50%. Execution risk, you could argue maybe 15%. The rest is in technology. So a lot of people focus on technology risk. And they don't really understand how to address execution. And of course, market risk. And in this case, there's a market that's there right now, and it'll be there for the next couple years. So if we could get up to this number, you could calculate the return. That is a financial deal. But the technology that we're doing now, very, very few people would even consider that something worthy of taking a risk on. Doesn't mean there isn't like Gates Foundation and a few organizations trying things. But what we happen to do is we took up a plan that I had mapped out in December for a platform for digital medicine, literally kind of put this whole thing together as an idea. And I was looking at long term institutional funding in DC that would reduce the risk. It's easily a 10 year stretch and maybe $100 million. And when this thing happened, we took a pivot and said, let's take what we learned. And let's look at this one element, one element of the whole platform. And can we do this? And we had kind of mapped out roughly five years. And we said, okay, can we do this in a few months? If we just focus on this, if we just put the team and focus on this. So we have a dozen super talented, bright people focusing on this one thing. And I was talking to somebody just before this meeting. And he said, yeah, we're looking at one of the results yesterday, where we literally have a designer molecule. And we would have normally taken almost a year to do that, just because it's a hard problem. And it looks like it's it works. Now, we got several steps to go. But we pivoted because of the crisis, which we also see as, for example, in Hawaii is an existential threat. If you can, if you can measure if anybody's expressing virus when they get on an airplane and when they get off an airplane and get a result in a matter of minutes, and you could have them for peanuts and do this on a daily basis, you can significantly reduce the risk of anybody infecting anybody else with COVID-19 until a vaccine is ready. Vaccine is probably 18 months to 24 months out. I've heard it could even be longer. So right now it's a missed risk mitigation. And we think this is a tool that can be used in reducing risk, but not just for Hawaii. Anybody in the travel industry, it's roughly 10% of global GDP, 300 million people work in that industry. It could be a big help for the rest of the planet. And on top of it, with a designer molecule, we think we could also develop a therapy, but that'll take a little more time. Wow. Wow. What is a designer molecule? It sounds like a designer molecule comes out of design thinking, eh? Well, design thinking, yeah. I'm just playing with the words. No, no, no. But it's it's safe. See, the way medicine is done is, and you got to step way back in history to Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was really more about, you know, you fast forward to today, modern medicine, modern medicine is all about correlation. If I get a million people, and this million smokes, and that million doesn't, and I correlate the data, I get a statistic that says you're going to lose so many years if you smoke, and we make decisions on that. And that's a tool. Plato argued that there's a causal connection, that there's, there's a, there's a mathematical connection in how things really work. Well, that isn't used in medicine like this. So when we started this program six years ago with this new kind of AI, the idea was to, to deal with small data ambiguity, a general intelligence platform. And then we started applying it to things. So the DARPA program, for example, was really driven by this idea of causality in biology. And why can't we cure cancer? Because it's totally random. If you look at what goes on with cancer, you know, you have people that are a picture of health that die miserably from some version, and people that are drinking and smoking every day of their lives that live to be 120. And, and so why does this happen? And so we're thinking, okay, is there a causal connection? So what we developed with our AI was in the, in the, in the sort of biology piece is grammar. So the grammar of, of RNA, basically. And with that, you can then calculate things based on a set of rules, kind of like building a sentence using grammar. So grammar generalized to science versus just language. So we, we literally put that together. And the idea then is to say, and kind of stepping way back and say, well, look, Einstein did this amazing thing, he said, energy equals mc squared mass times the speed of light squared. Yeah, there's three letters. And now you know, energy. Okay, if you want to do that with correlation, you might measure thousands of experiments and come up with lots and lots of plots and data, a lot of work for statisticians. But he was able to come up with a causal connection. And the causal connection makes it simple and elegant, easy to calculate and fast and easy to use. So we thought, why can't we do that in medicine? Why is it that, you know, in medicine, what we do today is we, we just don't know. So you try something, try something else. So now back to this question of the molecule. So the way it's done today is they discover the molecule. So how do you do that? Well, you look under a lot of rocks. So the machine learning that's used today is to look at the science that we know that works for all kinds of applications. We first got into this conversation years ago with NASA on this question of mission of Mars. And so they wanted an AI medical assistant. And we argued that, okay, so the lookup table that you're going to build works great on Earth. But on the way to Mars, you got a whole bunch of different conditions, you're gonna have medical situations you've never even seen before. So how the heck can you look up something that's never been seen? That's exactly what we have today. We have a virus where there's no cure. There's no vaccine. It's, it's a new it's something quite new. So you can't just look it up, you actually have to either experiment through hundreds of millions of trials and things, or you have to design something specific for the outcome, which is what we're what we're doing. Okay, well, that's very exciting. So this teacup thing, you have you have virus in the teacup, or rather, you spit in the teacup. And the designer molecule looks at what's in your spit. And it turns, it turns pink, or whatever. And it tells you that there's some virus in there's some COVID virus in there. And then, of course, then we can plan a whole whole community, a community response using that information. And that would be immediately, that would be like a pregnancy test. And so then you could have people coming off a plane, people in any population. And you can find out immediately who's on what side of the coin. And that includes people who are completely asymptomatic, because it's looking for the virus only on a molecular level. Exactly. You know, Pat, I hope, I hope, after you do this, that you'll still talk to me. Well, thank you. You know, I think what this demonstrates demonstrates tremendous creativity. It demonstrates that yes, here in Hawaii, you know, we can do things. It reminds me of Ed Cadman's dream for the medical school that would be surrounded by a big pharma, and it would become a kind of San Diego doing big pharma, an ideal. And but you know, it's always that there's one idea that could change everything. It could change the way Hawaii works. It could change Hawaii's reputation. It could change Hawaii's economy completely. This one idea. And it sounds like, you know, this is a fantastic opportunity. I wish you well on this. We all do. We're all behind you. This is it's a it's a culmination of all of your effort. If you can take this opportunity and make it happen, Pat. Well, it's we realize it's a moonshot. As I told the guys, this has never been done like this. It's a really hard problem. But it's the right problem for us to do what I call a worthy problem. See, you only have so much time to do anything in the world. And we have the luxury of focusing on things that we believe are worthy problems we care about that are interesting and important. That's how the stuff starts. And that's something that it's more than just a job for people when that happens. There's a connection when the heart and the head come together. The way they focus is more than just a resume. It's much more powerful. And we're very fortunate to have people that connect like that. And I think those people are here amongst us in Hawaii. Yeah, and some of them, to your credit, are a notion that, you know, I've met a number of your researchers, I've talked to them, I've interviewed them. And I must say, you have a way of finding people who are capable of tremendous science right here, laboratory science. And this is an example of that. It's an example of being nimble, and appreciating, you know, the times in which we live, and the needs we have, not only locally, but worldwide, to deal with problems that can be resolved by science. So we only have a minute left. And I did want to get to your book a little bit. So intellectual anarchy. How can I get this book? It's loaded with creative ideas. It's loaded with stories and tales of daring due at Ocean and over all these years. It's loaded with the possibilities of other inventions and scientific discoveries. It is really the kind of a Bible for somebody wants to get into the same same thing we've been talking about how do I get this book? Well, it should be available on Amazon, later this month. It's would otherwise be in bookstores, but I don't know when that's going to happen. The whole book business may get pushed back, but we were planning to have it in some local bookstores in a few cities as well around the country. But but Amazon will be able to take orders. It's also available on Apple, the nook. There's a bunch of electronic versions you can get as well. electronic versions. Yeah, that would be better than buying in the bookstore these days when the bookstores are not necessarily open. So could you, you know, you have a lot of, you know, important quotable statements in this book. I mean, it's loaded, if you will. And those the important statements have symbolic words that, you know, this in the world in which scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs live. So they're all touch points. But I was hoping that you could find a sentence or two or a short paragraph in the book that you particularly like that you can leave with our viewers as a pathway to the future as a point of wisdom that you would like to impart to them about your thinking. Well, what I tell new folks that join the firm that join Ocean it is that there are no rules. There's just moral and legal. So we need to do what we believe is morally correct. And we need to have a conscious a sense of values and of course be legal in what we do. But the idea that there's rules you live in a silo you only do certain things that's not how things really work. And so you can work across any fields or any areas. That's usually where the most interesting ideas come from is this collaboration of people from different fields. And we're just talking about this yesterday with one of the we got a guy that's just outstanding. He was at CDC and NIH for about 15 years local guy was a virologist. But over the last couple years, he's been working on a lot of we've done some big chemistry scale ups. And we there's a military project where we create this nanomaterial and they want more and more. And so we had to scale it from our lab, we took over a bunch of university labs. Now we're looking at a big facility on the mainland. You know, he can do all kinds of stuff. But it turns out, he's also really good in virology. So we also got pathologists who's doing something, we're bringing in, like to work on this problem, physicists, computer science, linguists, mathematics, virology, pathology, probably the bigger group of aerospace. It's learning to learn and working in this collaborative mode, because one of our guys, this is going back last year. As we're pushing this stuff with with DARPA, there was a discussion about this had more to do with with cancer. And this guy who's spent a career in NIH and CDC, he says, this guy's asking me these questions. And he just keeps, and I said, look, as long as you guys respect each other as people, you can ask any damn thing you want, because we got to have an open conversation. The fact is, these theories that we use in medicine fail all the time. So that's fair game. And so the guy asking the question, he's kind of pushing the limits of where the edge of thinking is. And realizing, guess what, we don't know. So let's create a theory. And that became some of the underlying theory that is what we're doing today. But but it's interesting because we said, look, respect each other. You can talk about anything and any field, you know, but you're going to be able to defend your ideas, you got to be able to debate, you got to be able to discuss, because that's where really interesting things happen. Yeah, very, very interesting country you've built over the last several decades at Ocean and calculated to bring out the best in people, the best in thinking, and that nimble as I talked about, you know, I mean, I wish there were 100 ocean it's maybe 200. Then Hawaii Hawaii could be a center as we have often hoped. And maybe it will be now. Thank you, Pat, thank you for coming down really appreciate the discussion, really appreciate the book, the message, the value of it. And and your thoughts and your thinking and I hope we can visit back with you again and see how you're doing on this and other projects that address that the problems that need to be resolved not not only in Hawaii, but around the world. Pat Sullivan, the CEO and founder of Ocean, thank you so much. Thank you.