 When I grew up I was fascinated by snow and when you take a ball into snow and you roll a ball then if you start rolling it in only one direction the ball becomes a wheel but in the middle you will find the ball but it will grow really fast high because it only rolls in one direction and it will become very good in rolling in one direction but then when you use an analogy with your life and you roll always in one direction and you have changed or you took the wrong values which mostly do when you are young then that wheel will fall and then you will need years to find that ball again to roll in all directions and what I tried to do is I always was curious and that ball always rolled in all directions and if you do that you don't grow that fast but you grow stable and you you have a ball that can't fall so whatever happens with you you are still able to roll and and and that's some life philosophy that I created for me 20 years or 25 years ago because I'm a huge addict on snow and mountain sports I lived in Switzerland for a while but I think that is something that people forget because they all want to go and be a wheel and be fast and go and hyper focused but then you're going to fall and the the higher that wheel is the bigger your father will be if you have never fallen before. Bart de Wit is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Bart is one of Europe's leading and awarded experts on the digital transformation of healthcare and one of the most progressive forward thinkers focusing on finding alternative European strategies for the current post-modern world to create a more desirable future with greater social benefits. He is the initiator of the HIPPO AI Foundation in Berlin which aims to make artificial intelligence and medicine a common good with his mission to use technology for the greater good or has been on this mission to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help to solve current and future inequalities in healthcare. He wrote his first paper on artificial intelligence in 1989 while he was in grammar school and restarted his interest in 2010 while working for IBM. He is involved as a mentor for dozens of digital health startups and lectures at various universities throughout Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and China. He co-founded the Digital Health Academy where he shares his knowledge to improve digital literacy. In the show notes we're going to put all his links and websites. I want my listeners to know how I know Bart. We know each other through mutual friend Harold Nighthart and our passive cross at numerous conferences and on and offline before but we're both members of the Faculty of Future IO. We're both featured in the book Moonshots for Europe and Bart has a wonderful section in the book. The case for open source medical AI a foundation for global universal digital health and there's a good brand and also a brand new papa congratulations he just had a wonderful baby and so during the pandemic so that's absolutely fabulous. Welcome Bart to the show. Thank you Mark for having me and I hope nobody minds sometimes the screaming baby in the background we are in a lockdown so I don't want to lock him down. Absolutely not we don't mind at all that's real life we've had dogs in the backgrounds and kids in the background and all sorts of other things so it's just beautiful to know that life's going on regardless of the craziness surrounding us. This year really started out as a bang Bart I mean we're in the decade of action a lot of positive things we're moving forward as far as sustainability moving into the true digital transformation and and new things just on the horizon and bam we were hit with tons of craziness besides the U.S. election that set our world out on a different course or or has kind of put us in turmoil. I for one thing have been busier than ever during this time because of what I've talked about in the past and from what I've seen from afar you also in the in the beginning of this were on numerous panels talking about COVID talking about AI and health and things because it's really applicable to what you've been doing and so my first question is one how have you weathered the pandemic has any of this in the past helped you to prepare a little bit better or to be aware how to deal with something like this because you're kind of this futurist thinking about the future of health and just besides the beautiful baby how have you guys been how have you weathered this. Yeah thank you Mark. On regards to your first question yeah although everybody knew that we were going to have a pandemic there were papers published in 2008 that were predicting this we always surprised perhaps in my industry that our governments were not that prepared so my initial focus was to see how can we at that at that moment it was still a big unknown because he saw these images from Bergamo people had fears and we were talking about the lack of supplies medical supplies human supplies in terms of do we have staff nurses bed ICU beds so of course I stopped all my activities and saw I could help and I started and I tried a few projects some of them failed but others were really things that are co-initiated really became global movements and it all focused on the things that I already was working on open source that accelerates innovation using digital collaboration tools using digital manufacturing so it was for me a very learning full period because certainly the things that I talked to could be applied and to give you one example a friend of mine in Berkeley started a group to the original idea was to open source a ventilator and at the beginning everybody was kind of laughing then we changed it into open sourcing medical supplies and within eight weeks we formed a community of 80 000 people that produced over 25 million goods produced in over 42 countries all on open source eight weeks I've never seen something like it it was pretty amazing and it showed the power of open collaboration without boundaries and although our governments were benchmarking each other which I have the less debts and my policies are better people haven't been more open to collaborate and there was more unity between people than unity on a governmental level because they were mixing it up with ideologies which I personally disagreed on because you can't compare and benchmark countries based on very different metrics I totally agree thank you for sharing that I I I do you know we do without throughout our discussion today we definitely want to focus in on how your thoughts and ideas are of what you've progressed up until this point but mainly about open source transparency you know using things get bringing it down to the bottom up giving it making it open for everybody and available so that we can start solving some of these growth global grand challenges that that is something that's not only a selfish but also a different way of looking and thinking at things but it's also this global view of the world and how things work and as we pull others out of poverty or give them the same basic resources we may have here in the developed world that it changes the way our world functions in the way we have this long-term effect so the question I guess is do you feel like a global citizen how would you feel without nations borders and divisions of humanity where we're not only you know not this this opposite of open source that we're kind of closing off and dividing ourselves from each other and saying my my view my system my government's better than yours well that there's a lot of questions within that question but I'm and I think we need to we know when we can talk later on that that we have different views on universal basic income we had a few conversations in the past because I believe that we need to work on creating digital comments that means that we need to create as we progress digital goods that are free available to all we know Wikipedia but imagine having a Wikipedia on an AI level for solving medical questions and then giving access to everybody to these kind of tools so I think that in that sense I think I feel like being a global citizen but a global citizenship means as well having it connected to some sort of identity and I think in a certain sense that lots of the challenges that we have today is that we live in on platforms where there is like this global community but even these global communities are not united they are they are polarized and and and there are groups that find each other with the chair say same value so what actually happened into the physical world is is happening on a global scale but in a very different way so there is no unity on a global digital level there are there's a lot of polarization as we know so I don't think that it is realistic to think that we can destroy all borders that have to do with cultural differences and identity but I do think that we need to work on sustainability in a sense that we stop competing on different elements that are nonsense in that sense like and I think what what is happening through the digitalization is that we're going to go more and more into a localization because one of the things we saw in in Covid is that even in Germany that the ground substance to to produce medications were not available in Germany because they were all produced in China we didn't have masks like these global supply chains were completely failing where at the same time what we did is we created 3d printed open source designs that could be printed in a local maker hub in a village so I think we can start thinking about how do we globally connect globally share but at the same time again build local products the same thing as in agriculture but like on the on the digital way because 3d printing and digital manufacturing is exponential so that means that the things that we can do with these technologies today are in five years going to be very different but there's going to be way more complexity the price is going to drop and it's going to become cheaper as producing these goods here as importing them from China I absolutely am aligned with you I don't think we have ever disagreed I'm not a big fan of UBI and I kind of have a different look you and look at it but I also really I mean it's just the proof of the collaboration during the pandemic in those services that you were able to deliver and the products you were able to deliver is not only a kudos but it's a big way that how digital services open source collaboration on a digital commons really is a much better operating system and so I truly would like to see to kind of blend in what what your your answer was is the the what you mentioned as well this digital commons something that is a global type of operating system or ways of functioning that is available and accessible to all and that we have more maybe digital diplomats or people who are you know we're seeing some of those emerge as well that it's not divided by nations or borders but they're kind of there to represent us that that we can have sources and tools open and available for all of us I think that's a real nice move in the right direction and I'm also big on emerging technologies are you talking more AI mixed with blockchain so digital ledger technology what type of things are are are you hoping for can you give us more of a vision of what that would look like well yeah I think blockchain for me is we looked into that it's not a necessity in that sense because at the end it's things can be solved through licensing like we all know the creative commons license for imaging these are common goods digital commons so there's a lot what you can solve without technology because it's a legal topic and that's why we don't look too much in applying blockchain because blockchain goes down and creating data on the individual level and we are not there that we can use healthcare data from let's say thousand individuals that we then merge together because data has context and every data set has been created in a different context so if you would try to bring all these data sets together into one big data pool you get a lot of messy data because each data comes from another social cultural context it comes from another clinical context each each country has their own kind of healthcare system so we are looking more into creating digital collaboration platforms creating agency creating being vocal using all these kind of social media elements that give us a loud voice and create awareness and and help people to understand that we and that's kind of the change that we try to say is that we as humans we produce data that is extracted out of our bodies and that we are fighting a world where people starting to use that data and extract the knowledge out of the data and privatize the data where I think that the value out of the data is belongs to society and not to the economy it's a similar story like the privatized watery companies that buy land and they take the water molecules out of the soil regardless if people in the surrounding are dying from hunger and they privatize water they are companies now that are tapping on our bodies expecting the data and they are privatizing the life-saving knowledge and making it already available for a few others so that's a nice analogy so I started to play with to say like we as society are already a platform so we think in platforms so we we don't use like we're not too technology focused we are more in terms of changing the way how we look at things changing the way how we look at value changing the way how we license things instead of technology is an enabler for getting there of course but we don't start with technology and then go backwards to the problem we look at what is the core and the core is how we look at data I couldn't have set up more succinct and I appreciate that you've got some interesting things that you're working on that are planning for for launch for next year and things Victoria 1-0 can you tell us a little bit about that and your your original company Hippo AI and kind of how that has progressed not only during this time but what your overall mission and and goal is where where you want to go and what you're providing and maybe if you have some slides you're welcome to show and tease us with that as well yeah thank you for that as you know I've been I left my career at IBM I think one and a half year ago because I wanted to focus on changing the direction of the current progress which I don't think is progress at all because what we are seeing that is that the world is as I said before is looking at data as a tradable commodity and that means if you put data you equal data to capital that big capital will be able to buy the biggest data sets and the bigger your data sets are the more discoveries you will be able to get and and you will be able to privatize so that means that eventually if we keep on looking at data as a commodity that we will go into a kind of a centralization monopolization model and you see that happening with Google buying Fitbit and certainly they have data of 80 million people that were that Fitbit record they don't open that data that's part of the IP and so that's what I started to look at how do you change that and I was quite naive you have to be very naive to start something like that because you believe in a different future and I took me much more time to understand the problem and to understand how do you tackle that like and I was first initially focused on technology but then I learned that it's all about perception it is all about the mindset of people and as you know people are not really good in understanding a problem that will happen in five to ten years from now talking about climate change and we are really bad in predicting and behave changing our behavior and the problem that I try to tackle is not there yet like there is no monopolization of AI yet but it will eventually go in that direction and so what we started to do is to look at okay this needs to be a movement this is not a technology solution this needs to be driven by the people because it's about democratization of AI in medicine and I call this like Lincoln spoke on the Gatsberry address during the civil war that a democracy have to be of the people by the people and for the people so in order that AI serves us as humanity it needs to be of the people by the people and for the people and that means you need to create a people driven world and and that's why we started last year with and it's it's like an MVP our minimal viable product like a campaign and the campaign is called victoria10writtendown.org it is a website and Victoria is a person that I met a year ago she's a 32 year old breast cancer patient and then we started she wanted to change or use her disease to change her life and make something like this bad experience of having breast cancer for 32 year woman to turn it into something positive and she worked as well in in marketing and she was already connected to AI because AI was replacing a lot of the jobs in marketing so she started to look in that and then we are from one came the other and then we said like why don't you want to be the face and the name of our first campaign because then it's going to be a hundred percent people driven so Victoria agreed on that and we created a campaign where Victoria is the spokesperson and she tells a story and she calls everybody else to do the same what she did and and she donated all the data to our HIPAA foundation and she asks all the other breast cancer patients are not breast cancer patients to do the same so we can start collecting data sets that we then after cleansing and working with academic institutes but then release under an open knowledge license that means everything what is extracted out of that data that even derived data is going to be a common good. We know a mutual person who's also I guess working with you are I saw Dr. Carolyn Harth is also on your Instagram site for Victoria 10 and and I don't know if you want to show us if you'd like to show us a couple slides and maybe describe them for my audio listeners it's it's very interesting and if you want I don't know pressure. So let me first go to the to the slides itself because there were a few aspects that are because it's it is a really complex topic and people don't understand like why but like AI can't do much I don't know if you see my screen do you see it yes definitely so I think and that's where where like as a futurist and we both are in future I oh in the faculty and we talk about futures and a lot of the decisions that people take are quarterly driven and and I looked into the future of AI and medicine and what you start realizing if we get to the point of artificial general intelligence that probably we will create technology that is able to prevent and cure all diseases now we are far away from that but as we are building larger larger neural networks we are going to be able to simulate more and understand more and and we will eventually get there I'm at least that's my personal view on this and today we are already going from narrow AI to broader AI and but the foundation that we're going to build up that future on is that's what we define today and that's why I got active because if you start working on a data monetization driven data economy driven system that future will be the same as today where there was a lot of inequality in health because suddenly the data is going to lead to privatization of knowledge and privatization of knowledge already defines today if you are born in Africa you won't get access to that therapy because you can't afford it and so life-saving knowledge is a vault like if you are born in Switzerland you get access to the 2.2 million gene therapy for your children but if you live in Romania even you don't get access to it so I think now what we are building up that future of AI we need to think about okay how do we break down inequalities then let's do this differently this time and and not go on the foundation of what we have been doing in the past and so there was there's a lot too much slides here but what I started to do is as well I am is to look we live in Europe and and and if you look at the conditions the market conditions and that's what is my biggest fear in that sense and we in Europe have the worst conditions to build medical AI because we we don't have a healthcare system that is across Europe available so like it's federated like each country has their own healthcare system their own rules their own regulations each country has their own venture capitalists it's all federated and then you even have lower investments you don't have a european strategy I was sitting in a panel discussion two months ago and then somebody called for we need to create AI based from Europe and then four sentences later she told me we need to create AI made in Germany it's okay is it Europe or is it Germany like there was this french competition versus Germany we are federated federations makes us weak in that sense but we are human centered which is good from an ethical perspective we have very good quality on data we are still good in the research but our situation is really bad so the future if you know what's happening in China is that okay they collect more data they produce more data with their population they have more investments how do you tackle that how do you avoid for getting colonized by AI services that come from a country or a region that has very different values and it's that that value is that I started looking into quite a lot because if if you start creating or using values that are not connected to our current values here then we will get a different healthcare system and that the healthcare system will not be about that healthcare is inclusive it will be exclusive because it's going to be profit-driven and and it's going to be based on monopolies instead of plurality it's going to be based on a world where signs always were open where science is within the private premises of companies that is not open and we have to build trust to these organizations there's so much discussions on trust why do we suddenly need trust why don't they go just open but no they want to possess so they create this whole thing about trust and so this is kind of the the the basics that are looked into and also looked into the things of can we look at in the future what's going to happen with our fundamental rights in Europe and and there are quite some infringements that are coming like one of the infringements is that article two the article three is a right on integrity physical and mentally that there are already AI services out there that can take all your data and they create a digital replica of yourself the problem is you don't own that replica you can own the data but you don't own the AI model that is the replica of yourself that means you could use my mark you could use my voice and then I give you a specific algorithm that I found on GitHub you can you only need five seconds of my voice and you can let me say whatever I want to I didn't want to say but I would say it you could even there was somebody who called that algorithm to open X or to give access to a bank account and using that synthetic voice and it worked so we are getting synthesized like in voice in behavior in lifestyle all these things and then we need to talk about ownership and and then that's why I said like a lot of the things that I'm confronted with is legal and then you talk about okay if somebody owns an AI model not the data but the AI model and it behaves exactly like you and it looks in a VR world exactly like you but you don't have ownership you will lose your right on integrity and you see it already happening in the porn industry where celebrities are being copied as the fakes on porn movies uh celebrities have really good protection of their identity because they have super lawyers that can control it we don't so there's a lot of infrequent so but I don't want to go there there was some actually there was some touches on this on that new documentary social dilemma that was mainly kind of uh from the Center for Humane Technologies and a lot on Facebook that what's going on there and some other platforms so it talks about that as well I would recommend my listeners go out and listen to that as well or watch that but yeah I I love what you're telling us so that's perfect and so what we said okay what we wanted to do is and the main question is how do you want to create economical value when you open source that like I met politicians and they're all um yeah they're all are super scared that I'm going to destroy the economical value and it's like just wait if you don't act differently we will be colonized by companies not coming from Europe anyway so what value are you talking about like I think we need to act very differently and based on our fundamental rights so and then they asked me like okay how do you create value because normally open source communities are being created after the product is kind of commoditized like when the price drops to zero then you see replicas in open source but like the question here is can we open source something that is not there yet and not commoditized so can we create open source communities that then lead to the creation of commons so these communities are all following a same similar purpose to build a different future together and I think when we do that um we can create and and make these AI tools available for companies that still because you still need to build a medical product we don't we're not going to build end devices that we're not going to build all these solutions we are giving the intelligence as a common good but then people need to create an experience and engagement tools so they engage with patients or with doctors or with nurses yeah and then what happens is we don't if we make AI a common good we will not have competition on life saving information anymore so because the competition today in pharma is based on I have the knowledge that saves your life and I own that IP and I put a price on it because I'm a monopolist on that knowledge so if we create it as a common we should really eradicate competition on life saving information and then we can and I make this comparization to let people understand that imagine Mark that because you're not in the food and agriculture imagine that you would have there's a lot on a lot of lab grown meat and and 3d printed food that comes from plant-based or meat-based cells but imagine the price from that technology would be completely open the technology would be completely open source and the price nearly drops to zero you would probably solve a lot of the hunger problems but you won't destroy the restaurant business you will see more restaurants because suddenly people will pay for an experience it is like nobody wants to always eat in McDonald's to get just food you you you go into a restaurant because you want to enjoy yourself so and that's what what is really difficult for people to understand if you destroy IP on life-saving knowledge that you still will have a flourishing economy that people can build products on but you will not have an economy that defines you're going to die because you were born in that country that can't afford it and you're going to live because you were born there and I think it's something from old century thinking we need to think differently it's not a sustainable model so that's the kind of economical thinking and I think that's important to mention that we want to create what I call the digital commons that are commodities out of a data and AI models and then we can create an economy that builds applications user experiences and that that can be a competition people can invest in these companies I have nothing against people investing companies in the country I think I love the innovation that unhappens but let us stop driving innovation or competition based on something that saves your life I think that's that's similar I'm telling you we're gonna we're gonna privatize all recipes to bake food or to bake a bread and we make it only available to 40 percent of the people how you bake a bread so it's sense everybody can break a bread and but some people do that more expensive as the others and and and I think we need to rethink that so yeah there's definitely so much rethinking in that out-care industries that we need to do and I think this is beautiful I really appreciate you showing us the slides yeah and and so what what came out as a result is that I there is this book that influenced me it's from Gustave Le Bon he's a french psychologist of 200 years old book and it's about the psychology of the masses how do you create mass movements what actually Gustave Le Bon describes in that book is that mass movements in history always were connected to images visualizations not words not text it's an image it's a strong image everybody thinks about the french revolution about that image of that woman standing on top with the flag it's an image we know when you think at 9 11 we change the whole world you think of these images you don't think about history of these people or whatever you think you think in images people think in images so if you want to create a mass movement you need to visualize and how do you create visualize that the data of us belongs to you and and we humanity are the platform and we can decide who uses our data not them deciding how to we can use a service derived of our data no no we turn that opposite way around so we created this campaign now which that's I'm going to share now again so what we did is start working with our campaign which was unite data defeat cancer now we what we learned is well we need to change this because it's a unite data defeat inequalities but we started with cancer because we could tap into the cancer movements we learned a lot about all the other cancer movements and then we had like for example Victoria I hope you can see Victoria now is it yeah we can yeah so Victoria telling about her disease and and how AI is going to change it so really she's the person that is speaking and that's Victoria using the eski filter so we started to work with visualizations and this is the eski code where we said okay this is about your data this is about cancer awareness but as well using that data to analyze and train it for AI services so we created a lot of these already techie designs and people asked me like but what is that what you're doing and I said like well I'm applying Gustav Le Bon's movement it didn't work that well because we don't have a movement yet but we didn't want to engage that much yet because this was a test campaign we're going to launch a super large campaign in April next year with like 30 times the budget of what we have now I learned that you need to buy influences to first get out there yeah which I didn't want to do because I'm an idealist but then I learned well you need to do that so we can accelerate growth and so we're going to work a lot with the visual stuff and I'm also in connection with an art collective in Austria these were the ones that built these firework drones in during the olympics it's our arts electronica they're quite famous and we are now thinking about how can we create art that represents that we as society own our data and how can you make people attach emotionally to a very mathematical dry economical topic that is perfect I absolutely love how how how you're combining those things and I have a lot of listeners on my show that are not only artists and authors but I think that they you'll have some people reach out to you and definitely see how they can help and join your movement to create the movement that you want to have I I want to get into some more questions you know um there there is uh this general belief in our world of neoliberalism neo-darwinism and you know only survival of the fittest only the strong survive natural selection you know I wanted to get your thoughts and feelings on how aligned you are with this severe competition obviously from what I hear and what you've told us so far open source creative commons that goes totally against that that type of thinking and I'm wondering if if you've also with many other greats have come to the realization that there are some better ways to get us a lot further in the future with different types of thinking and and the way we use our data yeah thank you for bringing that up mark I definitely don't believe that the markets are self-regulated I think the best example in healthcare is the US where the healthcare costs are 18.6% of the GDP but 40 million people don't have access where the price of insulin something that was invented in 1922 in the last 10 years went up in the US by 800 percent the price which is completely ridiculous because it was invented in 1922 um the market one regulated because the market defines if you have something that saves somebody's life it's like that somebody hangs on a cliff uh with one hand and then a pharmaceutical company or another one comes to you it's like I will save you but please give me all your money and and people will give all their money like I think I read this number recently that over 50 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the US are related to healthcare costs people get bankrupt people have to sell their house uh you do co-payments and and even during COVID a lot of people in the US who were bad insured or not insured didn't went to the hospital because there was if you if you are two weeks in intensive care units in a hospital you have a half a million dollars in cost um you are bankrupt for your whole life um so can I give you an example of that real quick yeah so I'm I'm originally from America but I live in Hamburg Germany um I was born a lot of people don't know this I was born with a genetic heart defect um genetic and I needed to get a surgery but I it wasn't discovered until uh uh I was in almost in my 40s it wasn't discovered until I was almost in my 40s and when it was discovered it was an immediate threat needed to be uh operated on and um I had a very expensive very rare operation uh it's called alcohol septal ablation and um I before I went in for that that operation I got pre-approval for my American health insurance company right they approved it I went and had the surgery came out I'm still alive do you know recovered great but then my after I had it my insurance company denied it and said it was pre-existing because it was genetic heart you know heart defect genetically received and I had a pre-existing condition that bill was over $780,000 um I I can not tell you the pain the heartache the after just recovering from a heart surgery to see that bill come and um I about passed out and then I was in I kid you not uh almost eight months worth of battles within with lawyers and these insurance companies to get them to accept the claim that that I had a pre that I had a letter of approval beforehand to get them to pay for that now now I'm on the German health care system by no means is it perfect but it's a hell of a lot better um uh system than what is in the US and uh so I totally know what you mean and and to be in that position is the most horrific thing to go through and so I I I really know what you're talking about you're not just speaking from you know giving us data as in fact there's people and lives and a common good here that we need to serve and give that to every human being on on on earth uh in a much better system so I just wanted to share because it really tied into what you're you're talking about some of this data from the US I'm sorry I had to go through this and and and unfortunately I heard quite a lot of these stories working 20 years in that industry um it it is what it is like people um if it's poorly market driven will um rationalize on how much is somebody willing to pay like um there is um something that upset me I had a I had one of the the most controversial discussions this summer uh on a conference um in Austria in August with the CEO of Roche and it's like there was a one-to-one kind of battle discussion closed versus open so it's already that far that I came that I'm allowed to have these kind of discussions which is good because I think these are companies have a very old mindset and um I I said to him that um at the beginning it got really defensive in the argument and I was like pushing me in the corner of a communist and everything else and no no no so I I don't I don't believe in communism because it never worked in any of the countries but um and I say like perhaps there are different ways or forms of capitalism in a sense like in Germany we talk about socialist market fair shaft and which is nothing has to do with neoliberal capitalism there are very different forms um of this and and I said to him well I'm a conscious capitalist as a provocation and um and and because he was pushing me in the corner I think said but you forget like we are I'm also a believer of the economy and everything else but I think I'm a conscious capitalist so I put it into the extreme corner of being a neoliberalist and um at the same time we had discussions as well about open sourcing drug development because that's I just mentioned before that the price of diabetes went up 800% in the US as something that was developed in 1922 but we are today living in a world where we are going through the technology in an era where we're going to have a lot of solutions for gene related diseases like you you had yourself and there is an example now there was a gene therapy for a rare childhood disease a musculoskeletal disease where normally these kids when they grow up they get completely paralyzed and need to be 40 60 years in a wheelchair and and and that generates a lot of cost for the system they don't pay taxes so the pharmaceuticals view is um well normally that person would have paid taxes and so he would create income for the government for society so they kind of added to the calculation of the price of the medication and then they say like and it would have cost in terms of care special cars transportation it would have cost him his all life that kind so they come up with a price of that medication for 2.2 million US dollars for treating a rare childhood disease where in fact most of the funding and the initiators of that therapy were parents who started an NGO and and then the biotech that was created after the parents kind of initiated that whole treatment the biotech was financed of course by investors because I don't think it's the the pharmaceutical company itself that is evil it's the system the finance system behind it because they these investors pushed money into that to get to phase 3 clinical trial and then that's how this drug is really going to work and then that company where they invested in total it was 350 million on investments they did an exit of 8.8 billion for a rare disease and but they knew they could do that because they calculated that they could sell it for 2.2 the only problem is that only 20 percent of the world get access to that and even in Belgium where I come from mother started doing crowdfunding campaigns to get access to that treatment because our Belgium health insurance can't afford 2.2 million and and I said like this is completely nuts and this is the first gene therapy and we have so many so many diseases to solve but as we're going more and more precise you can't sell that a million times a year you have thousand clients a year so they think we need to uplift that price and I think that is that is nearly criminal like that is has nothing to do with neoliberalism in a sense because you are you're mobilizing on something that was initiated by parents suffering really criminal and well I was just in an event in Denmark it's called La Futura and they had a gentleman from the future of pharmaceuticals where they were using 3D printing technologies where they would open source or deliver the recipes to different types of pharmacies that printed on demand pharmaceuticals through 3D printing technology they download the recipes have the certain chemicals and then just print it there on demand so I'm hoping we're thinking more open source and how do we drive the price down how do we make it more affordable and accessible to everyone around the world instead of you know this this polarization and distancing of humanity and and the basic needs and services just to to remain alive and and that's also in the when we talked about earlier about this universal basic income I absolutely am not a proponent of that and it's actually failed back in Nixon's times but there's got to be a different way that humanity as a global humanity has this thought process that the basic needs just by being born and living as a human being that your basic needs are covered or met and that we're all on the same playing field that the global operating system is one that works for us all because as we see today all over the world we're seeing civil unrest or dis-ease where our current civilization frameworks are no longer working for us you know there's the Bolts and arrows the Putin's the Shays the Trampocalypse's the Duarte's the Erdogans and these crazy systems that are going on that are just seem to be failing us and we need to get up to speed with our exponentially growing world and come up to apply some of these wonderful ideas and technologies and and you know open source that you're discussing I think that's a step in the right direction to get us there. I'm going to challenge you a bit on what you said because everybody is now celebrating Biden it's a good thing that Trump got the electorate but I don't celebrate Biden because in the sense it is still the old system and the electoral system in the US is corrupted like what we call in Europe corruption is called campaign funding in the US and the reason why Obamacare didn't touch on the price like if you look at the price of insulin everything nothing happened with Obamacare the prices of the industry they're always flourishing and the profits are there the farmer but what happened is that okay you have mandatory insurance and then there was more contribution so people are included in that insurance but as these politicians take money from the industry from before they even can say one word and that system is already corrupted and I think looking at there was this website called opensecrets.org where you can look and drill down into the GOPS and the foundation and who is funding and I have a big fear that even now with Biden he will not be able to act not because the republicans in the congress but because the money is already tied to an agenda and it's like the weapon industry and that has a huge influence and that's why we can't solve the issue of weapons being sold to people and I think that is what I challenge to you because you have quite a lot of hope in that I don't like I don't have hope as still when capital can corrupt and influence political decisions I actually I'm not sure I have hope in in the Bidens I think it's a definitely better choice than Trump apocalypse but what what here here's the true proof in the pudding so to say if in his first year he he not not only for the United States fixes all the the issues around the COVID and things but first and foremost that they should have the entire world but the United States should have learned that the electoral college the process of voting and politics in the United States is something from broken that it needs to be fixed that there whether it's digitized or made in a trustless system that there is no accounts there is no issues like this it's like we're in the dark ages again reliving what happened in 2000 with Al Gore and the dimple chat I mean my god how hard is it to figure out you know who who won an election and that there's so much as you're say corruption issues in that they need to fix that they need to get a new system where they need to fix the one that they have so that at least we can't see all the damn corruption right up front and the polarization of the world one thing that came out of that that I was astounded with is that 21 million United States Americans who are of voting age don't even have an identification card they can't vote because they don't have an ID to vote I mean Jesus in the United States they don't have an ID to vote because it's too expensive because there's other things in place that is just one of numerous things around the whole process that are just unfathomable wrong and corrupt and that you know wow the greatest voter turnout in history everybody should be voting everybody a voter age who should be voting because otherwise you're just saying you don't believe in that system then let's get rid of that damn system and so I mean I think you and I are more aligned on on different thinkings I might be a very polar when I come out with the true feelings and beliefs of on what I think are some global operating systems that would work for us all in the world and some of those ideas that I have are actually a little bit and I don't want to get too off topic but just to touch on it are based on kind of a sustainability a model or one that we use around sustainability and that's the earth overshoot day it's based off of a global hectare that is replicable and that's how we calculate the day earth overshoot day how we've gone beyond our finite resources it's based off of a replicable global hectare and I believe that every human being could be entitled to that global hectare and that stewardship themselves so long as they're living and through that stewardship that's a hell of a lot better than a universal basic income because it guarantees you enough food water security shelter resources to live a ripe old age if you have good stewardship over it whereas today that 1.6 global hectares that we have that are calculated that earth overshoot day we're using per person something like 2.98 global hectares per person that's why it's an earth overshooter or deficit and so I have this idea that if we did a twist on UBI and use the global hectare and gave everybody that as an agreeable right that that that could possibly change some things and that it's there's a lot more to it than that but that's more my thinking and I think you are touching the comments again and I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Eleanor Ostrom which is one of the scholars yeah that I started reading she's a Nobel Prize floret and she talked about the tragedy of the commons because it was how do you divide land and the usability of land to with different people and and with with with land it was difficult because it was there was always like powerful people that were over using it and people are just stupid but like that's why I applied it on data there is always more and more data so you don't have that problem of overuse in that sense and that's why digital commons probably going to work and and the comments was difficult but what you're explaining is actually the whole idea of commons like how do you create common goods and land and water and air these are all common goods like how do you go into that direction that you really define common goods and and and if we start now creating digital replicas of our physical world then we in the areas where it's highly regulated and protected by politicians industry lobby or whatever then we need to see like that in healthcare we definitely need a common strategy I agree and it's it's it's like an education healthcare education food water these are the basics and and like Gucci now released a ten thousand dollar dress as an instagram filter I have nothing against that that people spend their money for something idiotic as a filter that everybody looks like hey I can spend ten thousand let them spend that let them flow let the money flow and instead of people sitting on it but it's it is not hurting anybody but if you're going to start creating and using you wanted to create intellectual property on something that saves anybody somebody's life and you don't allow people to have access that's where you put a border and say like you don't and I do and I think in healthcare that that is absolutely wrong yeah I totally agree on my hardest question for you today is going to be next and that is the burning question WTF and it's not the swear word that we're all thinking about this here it's actually what's the future Bart? Well there are different futures out there so I can only kind of and I believe in in a pluralistic worldview so I think it's really dangerous to have a forcing everybody together into going into one direction but I think that's not the idealistic future but I think what we'll see is that there will be more and more communities global communities or physical communities that are following specific ideologies and some people will be completely disconnected from technology others will be completely connected brain computer interfaces are getting real what happens if somebody is attached to a brain computer interface and and he is more powerful in his thinking as the other because he's like as the ability to access as well he has a bironic eye and he can watch much further I think that will drive a competition between these humans most probably in China first where people are going to even augment themselves or they're going to mutate themselves use technology to get better as a human you have now in Silicon Valley this whole hype on longevity where people are spending billions on investments on to to not die and begin and and and they are targeting the billionaire so I said okay this is funny like we have now over 2000 years try to dissolve inequalities and now we're going to give the billionaire the possibility to live 300 years I think this is completely ridiculous so I think there will be unfortunately more and more of these groups that are driving specific targets but at the same time I think and that's I found a sentence that I was lecturing on a Chinese group at a business school and then somebody of my students told me you know he said like we humans because I was surprised how similar we were thinking and you always think Chinese are very different and and they said like we you and I are more connected than each of us to our own government and I said like I didn't even expect that to hear from you from China because that's not how our stereotypes world look like and and I think the the big hope that I have is that we build more global movements that have more purpose that are connected to United Nations sustainability goals that will get more traction and and and that these other groups that I talked about will be niche groups but I don't believe that we will get rid of them but and I don't have a problem with it because it's otherwise you becoming totalitarian until you have to live in following my views that that's I'm not a totalitarian person at all but I I respect people opinion even if I completely disagree with it but I think yeah I think we will see more collaboration on shared values shared beliefs and if these beliefs are about creating a more sustainable planet and you see that with the younger generations that are much more purpose driven I have hope that we can switch it into another direction yeah what I hear out of that is just a little bit more of this balance than this polarization until this unbalances it seems like there there will always be that you know the the good and the bad it just if we can keep it within a workable balance for us all would would be nice yeah are you familiar with Plato's cage no I'm not so Plato as a philosopher he there was a story about prisoners being in a cage and they were chained and they could only see to a wall and behind them was a fire and then in front of the fire there were people walking so the only thing that these prisoners saw their whole life with shadows on that projected on that cage and then one was able to escape and then he came out of the cage and he saw real people instead of shades and he believed that the shades were real the real people were like shades because he was grow up in that cage and and I think that's kind of what he wants to tell that with that philosophy is that everybody has their own view on reality and and and that's what what is the problem that we are this global unified thing but we all have a different view on reality and and and that's based on beliefs culture and all these things and and and I believe in multicultural societies and I think that is beautiful that's what makes humanity but we should get more acceptance of different views and I think that there is no monopoly on on moral which I found a bit difficult because people are judging more people based on morals but that's quite difficult like what is what is what is the best moral compared to the others that what religion did before and and we know how that turned out in a sense they were like preaching things and then we had the Spanish Inquisition and they were like you don't follow our moral standards you get you like chopped off like that doesn't work like we need to accept people as they are and and and I think that that I'm like me with me I'm not fighting against big pharma and big corporates I just want to create a new ecosystem and if I find followers then we will create a new ecosystem and and and if people believe in a certain thing then they will follow what I really hear out of that as well as not not only the pure goodness of what your message and what you want to achieve is but the biodiversity I hear a lot of not just diversity but it's a biodiversity it's we're all on the same spaceship earth and in this during this COVID time honestly we've dealt with some biome issues of our our planet suffering and the biome of our planet suffering but then we're also dealing with all the biome issues on our body that our gut health our immunity is not where it is or where it should be as strong as it should be and that those two are kind of need to be very diverse but also they operate in harmony with each other and that they need to kind of work together that you know the reason I asked in the beginning was about the global citizen and your thoughts and beliefs on that is because really the only thing that's been divided by borders and nations and that is as human beings because species are COVID our biome earth air water and things that's all boundless without nations and borders and traveling spreading around the world and so we need to get into a world that's a little bit more in line with this homosymbiosis symbiotic earth you know this very diverse biome of ours I have just two more questions for you and then if there's anything you left out that you would like to address or speak on I'd love to hear that but they're more selfish takeaways for my listeners I want them to kind of be left with a nice takeaway of something that they could apply or that maybe had the power to change their life or to help them and what they're thinking about to research or read or to apply if there was one message that you could depart our listeners as a sustainable takeaway to have the power to change their life what would it be basically your message well one I find it always difficult to have one single message um you can if you have more you can give them what we love it yeah of course this last one and a half years since I left my career I went through a lot of learnings and and these are lessons in that sense and I changed my views on a lot of topics I did a lot of research and I went into specific scholars and their research and what I mostly when I started like with all I did I'm going to open source medical AI I didn't even know how but I had that vision and I said like I just don't accept that we just going to go blindly towards that future that is going to be about hyper inequality where we're going to import um um US based value systems on if it comes to healthcare which is going to lead to my son being surveilled by AI service that serve the economy and don't serve society and I said like no so I think that that that belief in that building that vision and then what my biggest challenge was is that even my closest friends they were like oh did you incorporate already I don't find a website and like everybody starts doubting even the best friends even the guys who tell that they want the better planet they all start doubting and and they all kind of are critical like like I think 99% of my environment got critical about I'm going to do something good I said why don't you get us critical to the others like why are you getting critical about me and why don't you help me so no one is going to help you at the beginning um and you need to be damned um um kind of focused hyper focused and you need a lot of um uh patients and you need probably 10 times as much time as you originally planned but if you want to really change them pick one single thing focus and don't stop and if you do that I think things will will change and I'm now getting out I'm I'm incorporating I'm building up a team next year um there was a lot of things happening in the plan but it took much more longer as expected and I was really surprised that quite a lot of people in my environment which I thought would be kind of excited they were alone apart um but I can't find their website and everything else so why don't you ask me a question how you can help why do you want to go on a website and read what I'm doing why don't we talk and have a conversation so you feel completely alone at the beginning yeah and you need the best lesson to everybody who is like um um it can be female or male but like you need the damn good wife in my case um partner that believes in you and you need a stable environment uh to be able to do that and I'm damn lucky to have that you are very lucky and I'm glad that you're persistent and dedicated and and sticking with that fight because I see the payoff and I followed you and you're wise beyond your years when you years ago when we first met but I've also seen that you're you're persistent and you're you're evolving to something very beautiful that's coming out for all of us so um we can only all benefit from from your success so the last question I have is more so I think I already know the answer from what we've discussed today but what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you said damn I wish I would have known that from the start or or is it more about the journey well it's definitely more about the journey otherwise I would have known that I would wished for that it would have known because you only know things that you experience and and I spent 19 years in in uh corporate afterwards now people say like how did you survive it's like well I was a wild duck at IBM I was always a bit like not the corporate person but be open to learning and I think that's that that was my big thing is like you need to you don't get there instantly like that's what I kind of have a bit of issues with the purpose generation they instantly want to become a board member with with 22 and I was like well that's a bit difficult yeah but we don't have young people on the board to think about the future so like well yeah sometimes you have to really start focusing on working and getting experience and I think um um experience is is is is important because experience is that what allows you to grow and I have a a beautiful metaphor to to share with with your audience um um when I grew up I was fascinated by snow and um like um when you are take a ball into snow and you roll a ball then if you start rolling it in the only one direction the ball becomes a wheel but in the in the middle you will find the ball but it will grow really fast uh high because it only rolls in one direction and it will become very good in rolling in one direction but then when it this you use an analogy with your life um and you roll always in one direction and you um have changed or you took the wrong values which you mostly do when you are young um then that wheel will fall and then you will need years to find that ball again to roll in all directions and what I try to do is I I always was curious and that ball always rolled in all directions and if you do that you don't grow that fast but you grow stable and you you have a ball that can't fall so whatever happens with you you are still able to roll um and and and that's some life philosophy that I created for me 20 years or 25 years ago because I'm a huge addict on snow and mountain sports I lived in Switzerland for a while but I think that is something that people forget because they all want to go and be a wheel and be fast and go and hyper focused but then you're gonna fall and the the higher that wheel is the bigger your father will be if you have never fallen before I love that that is that is the perfect wisdom for all my listeners and if unless you have something else you'd like to share or tell us I think we're done yeah but well to the audience if I can use the time like um uh follow us on uh if you're on social media on the hippo underscore ai uh on instagram or um victoria10.org I need all the support I can get to get there I'm I'm a meh which means I'm a non-profit um in Germany that is really well controlled um I can't sell data I've designed everything that the system is hackable so I can't in case of emergency sell the data um everything is like really well done so I would love to get support people sharing the story um yeah I think um I'm on a big mission and I really would love to get all your support and I would be very thankful for that thank you so much Bart you've got my support and I know a lot of my listeners as well so uh we'll we'll hear more from you and I'll put all your links and and things in the show notes thank you so much for your time Bart I really appreciate it you have a wonderful day and kiss that beautiful baby and wife for me I will thanks