5. A pill-sized robot used by doctors to travel inside your body. Feat. Torrey Smith – creator of PillBot™, Endiatx.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Torrey Smith: What if we could take the entire ecosystem that delivers that kind of robotic surgery and shrink down to pill size to the point where a patient could swallow it in their own home or anywhere on the planet or maybe even off the planet. What if you could put tiny surgical robots inside the human body that could go find problems and fix them? And the crazy thing is, what if you could do that really cheap?

Our current iteration of PillBot today costs about $50

[00:00:28] Mizter Rad: Torrey, are you still having technical issues?

[00:00:49] Torrey Smith: How about now?

[00:00:51] Mizter Rad: Yes. Now I can hear you. Perfect.

[00:00:54] Torrey Smith: There you go. Modern.

[00:00:54] Mizter Rad: Thank you so much.

[00:00:55] Torrey Smith: Modern technology...

[00:00:56] Mizter Rad: I know

[00:00:57] Torrey Smith: In nine minutes we're able to cross a couple of platforms and, you know, the funny thing here is we are going to be using the iPhone platform in iOS to control PillBot. So I imagine, at some point I'll be up on a stage doing a demo and we're gonna have the exact same kind of hilarious connectivity issue. But...

[00:01:20] Mizter Rad: I know that's why we need brilliant minds like yours to solve all these tech issues.

[00:01:26] Torrey Smith: And ultimately I think it's worth pushing through some of the hassles because, with regards to telemedicine, if we can do this, if we can actually work through the challenges, figure out how to get these connectivity things sorted out, what we're really doing is we're letting a patient just with their iPhone and a little package we could send 'em in the mail, avoid months of hospital visits. You could be in your own home, connecting with your doctor over a call just like this, but your doctor's driving a robot pill around inside you and doing some really advanced procedures.

[00:01:57] Mizter Rad: Absolutely. I think you are, you're absolutely right. And happy to jump right away on the topic. But let me push back a bit on that and, maybe, give a round of intro to my audience that, maybe haven't heard about PillBot or Torrey Smith or Endiatx, your company. And start by Torrey, maybe if you are so kind and tell us, you know, when I was going through your background. Studying what you've done before, I couldn't help myself to wonder: how do you go from building a three story, 15 meter tall structure, in a festival like Burning Man? Cuz that's, that's the other company you have, and the company that you built before, before this one, right? It's called, Sextant. And basically what you guys do is,you are an art collective that builds large scale interactive works, of science and engineering, for festivals like Burning Man.

So I guess my question is, and that's where I wanna start talking to you cuz I think this is super interesting. How do you go from building 15 meter tall structures to a pill size bot that goes and travels inside of your body?

[00:03:09] Torrey Smith: I tell you what, it starts when you are young, right? when I was a kid, I was exposed to a lot of science fiction and aviation, and I was very interested in what was going on in outer space.

And I asked myself, how do I participate in that world? How do I make some of that stuff become real? And so, I went off and became an aerospace engineer and, I did start designing medical devices, but I was really drawn to the art world, initially, because, you know, everyone has some kind of a job, right?

And when you have a job, you have responsibilities. You have to do what you, what your boss tells you, of course. And so, many people feel like they're put in a relatively small box, creatively, so to speak. And when I discovered, the festival known as, or the event known as Burning Man, it opened my mind a little bit because I saw people building giant, huge art, much of it, very much informed by the science fiction that I had been interested in.

And so I felt like Burning Man gave me and my friends an opportunity to take a deep breath, ask ourselves what we really wanted to do with our lives. And the answer was we wanted to go really big. So giant Tesla coils in the desert, was a perfect, segway into going back to Silicon Valley, going back to work. But this time going back with, with the feeling that like we had a license to really push the limits.

[00:04:34] Mizter Rad: And,why do you think everyone is put in a box? why do you think society takes us humans, and tells us, you know, you have to go, if you're an engineer, you have to do this. If you are working in an office, you have to be from X time till X time working in front of your computer.

Why do you think, in your experience as an engineer, but also as a member and founder of an arts collective that works in such renamed, renowned, festivals like Burning Man building, gigantic art engineering structures? Why do you think we have that situation nowadays in our world? Is it because we are used to certain kind of education that sort of puts everyone in a box from early on in our lives or, what's your experience?

What's your take on this?

[00:05:26] Torrey Smith: You know, if you had asked me this question when I was in my teenage years or in my twenties, then my answer probably would've been, you know what? Someone else is putting me in this box. Society is putting me in this box. But now, uh, as, as, as a founder, as a ceo, as someone who ultimately has to take responsibility for not just myself, but the overall organization, I think I finally realized that it was myself putting. I was putting myself in that box.

Once I was able to stop assigning blame to anyone other than myself for where I was in life or where I wanted to go, that I hadn't yet achieved. Once I stopped putting that blame on anyone but myself, I finally started to get the kind of power to actually go where I wanted to go. So slowly, slowly, I started to learn to just take a hundred percent responsibility.

Don't give anyone else the power. Give myself that power. And if I wanna build tiny robot pills and I'm gonna have to quit my job and go into the unknown and do a lot of scary stuff, I can ask for help. And that's where our ecosystem is so friendly. You can go to places like, the Founder Institute or Y Combinator.

You can go to institutions that will help you on your way with that kind of a journey.

[00:06:46] Mizter Rad: Yeah, definitely. I'm myself an entrepreneur as well, and as you get into this scary world in a way of entrepreneurship, and I say scary because if it's your first time doing something, that no one else has done the way you think you wanna do it before, it could be scary at first, but then you find all these people, this ecosystem that is super helpful. And I completely agree with that, that you need to realize that if you wanna build something, you'll need people around you that, complement your skills. You cannot do it on your own.

[00:07:20] Torrey Smith: Oh man, I waited for years and years. I'd say from about 2014 to 2018. There were about four years where I knew in my heart spiritually that I wanted to found or co-found Endiatx. I would sketch the logo in the margins of my notebooks. I would draw robot pills.

But I didn't know how to actually take the plunge because during those four years, I was convinced that I personally had to have all the skills. I'm a good engineer in mechanical terms, but I was trying to learn how to code. I was learning electronics. I was trying to learn about finance. Because I felt like if you're gonna be a great company founder, the people we all look up to, they seem like superstars.

So I, I felt like I had to be that way. It took me a long time to realize you don't have to know everything. You can actually ask for help.

[00:08:15] Mizter Rad: Absolutely. Absolutely. Definitely. And I think if you're an entrepreneur and, you start managing a company, you need to know how to hire the right people, how to get the right people.

Do you consider yourself more an entrepreneur or an inventor or an engineer or a mix of everything? .

[00:08:33] Torrey Smith: I think one of the biggest honors of my life is having people call me an engineer. that, that was a, as a young child, I really looked up to engineers in all forms.

Even the guys that wear the stripe hats and drive the railroad trains, right? I always wanted to be an engineer. Um, but sometimes I say, with a little bit of humor that if there was a job out there that said robot pill, I just would've applied for that job cuz I, I really truly in my heart want to make these robot pills real.

And, but that job was not available. There was no one building robot pills the way that I envisioned it. And I finally slowly started to realize: I would have to become an entrepreneur in order to be able to be a robot pill designer. And so I always felt like I was more of an engineer first.

But, I've come to respect the entrepreneurial community as this worldwide network of creative individuals that are dedicated to doing new things and also dedicated to helping each other out. So I'm very honored to consider myself part of that ecosystem now.

[00:09:31] Mizter Rad: Okay. So entrepreneur first. No, sorry, engineer first, entrepreneur then. That's like the path you took in your life, but I guess the fact that you were looking at science fiction films before. When you were a child. Also inspired you somehow to let your imagination go crazy and become an inventor as well. So would you say that you were an inventor or a creative soul from the beginning, early in your childhood?

[00:10:05] Torrey Smith: Ab Absolutely. One of, one of my fondest memories is when I was a toddler, my parents had me in Guatemala City, in Guatemala. We were just traveling through the area in a speed up old car. And I don't even know what my parents were doing, but they were going on some adventure in the jungle and they left me and my, my, my young siblings on this blanket on the street, with a bunch of street vendors.

And I just started making figurines out of like little leaves and twigs and selling them to tourists so I could get a few pesos to go buy some tacos. And, I don't know. I just, I love to make things, I love to create new things. I've always had visions in my head of, of shapes and objects. And so if you put me on a beach,I'll make you a beautiful arch, in the sand. I just, I think the greatest pleasure for me is just being able to pursue your aesthetic interests and share the results with the people around you.

[00:10:56] Mizter Rad: Beautifully put. And I think that's a super interesting story of, um, did you say Guatemala?

[00:11:02] Torrey Smith: That's right. Yeah. My, my father took a keen interest in what was going on in the late seventies and early eighties there, and he just felt like he needed to,be a part of some of those events.

And, and so we, we went down there initially to support him in his version of engaging in, the sort of the, there was some political activism, if I'm being honest. But very quickly, I think he, and then his family, my, myself and my brothers and sisters, we just started to feel a kinship with the people that we would meet living along the way.

and so we ended up going back to Mexico and Central America every year, un until I was a, a teenager in high school, and it was a little bit more difficult to take my schoolwork with me and it just became a part of our family's identity.

[00:11:46] Mizter Rad: All right. All right. that's a, that's an interesting story.

Tell me a bit more, Torrey about, or tell my audience a bit more about what PillBot is.

[00:11:55] Torrey Smith: PillBot is a moving eyeball in the human stomach. It's like a little drone that can swim around in your belly. and if you're willing to drink some water and get on a Zoom call and swallow this funny pill, it gives your doctor a chance to drive it around,like a little radio control submarine.

And in so doing it, it takes a hospital procedure known as the upper endoscopy, where they traditionally would sedate you and slide a tube down your throat. it takes that procedure out of the hospital and it makes it the kind of thing that we can do over a zoom call, from home. And so we're just trying to, do advanced medicine, over a zoom call.

So it's a, it's like a new era in telemedicine, and I certainly hope that it's the beginning of a greater adventure as well, where maybe we even go beyond the stomach one day.

[00:12:42] Mizter Rad: Okay. That's interesting. So you touched two, two nice interesting topics here. One is telemedicine and two is how you see this ramping up in the next 10 years.

So you start with PillBot to detect or early notice, maybe some malfunction in the GI, in the gastrointestinal tract of human beings. And so you're betting that people take your pill and swallow it with a little bit of water and over a Zoom call any doctor, no matter where they are, can basically give you a diagnosis and, maybe remotely control the pill.

Is that correct?

[00:13:20] Torrey Smith: Ex, exactly. I like to say that, you could even use it in a hospital if you really wanted to.

[00:13:24] Mizter Rad: Okay, cool. And so tell me a bit more about telemedicine, because some people don't understand exactly what it is.

How do you see it developing in the next 10, 20 years?

How is this gonna change the relationship between us humans with, the pharmaceutical, the medical industry?

[00:13:43] Torrey Smith: Tell you what, there's two extremes of telemedicine, right? So one extreme would be a more lightweight version, like for example, getting on a Zoom call with say, your therapist and talking about some of your issues, right?

theoretically that's the kind of thing that we can call telemedicine or maybe telehealth. Then on the other extreme is where Endiatx wants to make a contribution, and so I would say that, we would give the highest credit to probably Dr. Fred Mole, who is the founder of Intuitive Surgical and also Auris, and is the father of robotic surgery at a distance. And so the, Dr. Mole created a series of surgical robots, together with an amazing team in the San Francisco Bay area that, that are capable of doing remote surgery where the doctor puts their fingers in little control loops and in, in a way, very similar to a video game, the movements of their fingers are then scaled down to microscopic scale, with the, at the tip of little robot arms. And it's so cool. You can do surgery inside the human body and you can also do surgery at a great distance. So there's telemedicine. And I think it would be a good time to give a shout out to the Vicarious Surgical team, led by the CEO and founder Adam Sachs.

Who have taken what Intuitive Surgical has done, and created this ultra minimal low profile version of it that can go to clinics, not just major hospital institutions. so if we're putting a patient in a room and a surgical robot's gonna work on that patient, the doctor can be somewhere else on the planet.

The patient can be disconnected but they're probably both still in a hospital somewhere. With Endiatx, the question is, what if we could take that surgical robot? What if we could take the hospital itself? What if we could take the entire ecosystem that delivers that kind of robotic surgery and shrink down to pill size to the point where a patient could swallow it, in their own home or anywhere on the planet or maybe even off the planet. What if you could put tiny surgical robots inside the human body that could go find problems and fix them? and the crazy thing is, what if you could do that really cheap?

Our current iteration of PillBot today costs about $50 for the disposable components.

[00:16:14] Mizter Rad: Okay. there's a lot of info here that is super interesting. I wanna break it up, break it down a bit. and I wanna start by also jumping on board with your imagination, cuz I think it's fantastic to think so big and great, and almost crazy for some people.

Do you think at some point, for example, we'll be able to map out. Sort of set, set coordinates of your inner body and be able to determine the spot where there is a, there's something wrong going on.

A bit like, imagine, I don't know if you went to the stand of the Dubai police in Gitex, they had this drone, they had this video of this drone that would go,from a base and in 3 minutes fly to help someone that was laying down inside of a car having trouble cause they had just an accident.

So I wonder if at some point, you know how you open Google Maps and it shows you if there is a road closure or an accident somewhere.

Will we be able to open an app in our phones and see the exact coordinate XYZ . Where some malfunction is happening within our bodies and then decide to send maybe another bunch of bots, , that help maybe repair some tissue or whatever is being compromised.

[00:17:28] Torrey Smith: That, that is the exact vision here. And the neat thing is, as of today, this morning, one of our like brightest software engineers, texted me really early in the morning cuz he's on French time, but he sent me a secret download and for the very first time I'm seeing PillBot in a augmented reality setting.

So in this case it was, he projected PillBot onto the desk, at Starbucks while I was waiting for some coffee. But our goal is right in line with this. So let's, let's say you, you have a belly ache and you swallow PillBot. PillBot knows where PillBot is. And PillBot is swimming around and scanning and creating a three dimensional map of the inside of your stomach in real time.

And so if you were a doctor, you would, theoretically, you could have control over that through an Oculus like setting so that, theoretically you could be swimming around inside a giant 3D stomach. And if you were in the same room as the patient, you could put on something like Microsoft HoloLens.

And there's no reason why we can't project a hologram of the inside of your body. That, that you can see like a, like this beautiful hologram floating, where your belly is with PillBot blinking away, you know, where you can see it, scanning the tissue in real time, building up this 3D map.

I think that the work that we're doing in the human stomach is basically the first step into the world that you just described. I'm just, I just can't wait until we put the surgical robot arms on the front of it and actually start doing the interventions you were talking about.

[00:19:01] Mizter Rad: So you're thinking that the PillBot should have many arms, many fingers that can go and take a little bit, a little piece of skin, maybe inside of your stomach to, then, check it out in the lab or whatever, or actually diagnose it inside of the stomach itself.

[00:19:17] Torrey Smith: You know, we all hear about lab-on-a-chip, right? Where you have mylo, sorry, microfluidics that, where that can flow through and do some interesting stuff. I think that

[00:19:27] Mizter Rad: I don't know about that. Can you build up on that?

[00:19:29] Torrey Smith: Lab-on-a-chip is basically just, just a fancy use of capillary action where, if you have say a cotton T-shirt and you drip some water on it, you'll see the little drop of water first hover on top of the cotton, and then it'll wick into the cotton and it'll follow through the little channels in weave of the fabric.

So with printed circuit boards, and, other fancy geometry like laser etch, geometry, stuff like that, you can create little channels that will draw fluid in and allow fluid to flow, almost like electricity flows through a circuit board. And so with this kind of small physical structure, you can embed, testing and diagnostic stuff.

And this is a field that has been exploding in the last 10 or 20 years. And I think that PillBot is intended to simply be the first device that can go around inside the human body and do things outside of a hospital setting. I am hoping that researchers and doctors,possibly other technology technologically focused organizations, I'm hoping that we can collaborate and use PillBot as just the first step into this new world because PillBot's not the ultimate version of this technology.

It's actually the humble first beginning of it.

[00:20:48] Mizter Rad: I can see PillBot hanging around not only in your stomach, but maybe in other passages, in other tracts, in other conduits, inside of your body.

So tell me more about that. Where do you see PillBot in the next 10 years?

[00:21:00] Torrey Smith: I want it to go rice grain sized. I think there's a chance we might look at power sources other than lithium batteries. We might look at, we might look at direct chemical power. We might look at nuclear power, believe it or not. There's a company.

[00:21:12] Mizter Rad: Nuclear power. How is that? .

[00:21:13] Torrey Smith: There's a company in Europe called Nano Diamond Battery, or NDB for short, that takes, a little fleck of carbon out of the control rods of a decommissioned nuclear reactor. And th this is a radioactive piece of carbon like pencilled, that's, spitting out radio activity.

They put that right on top of special solar cell and in case it in a crystal at us. So it becomes a safe thing. That can then be surface mounted semiconductor style to a circuit board. And it's basically a nuclear powered solar cell that's fully self-contained.

And all I can say is there is technology that is actively being funded, worked on and in the pipeline for release commercially, um, that would enable amazing work.

I think we could have rice grain sized surgical robots that are capable of crawling through tissue layers, sniping as they go, maybe cauterizing the path behind them leaving a tissue track no bigger than like a needle stick that could actually do brain surgery.

But, imagine if you had a brain tumor but you had a dozen little tiny microrobots constantly working on it. You could be at Disneyland getting brain surgery.

[00:22:25] Mizter Rad: Okay. That would be interesting. I would like to try that actually. Do you think we'll see this in our lifetime, actually? how long do you think we'll will take for us to see something like that, some sort of bat battalion, some sort of, army working inside of our bodies fixing everything.

[00:22:41] Torrey Smith: Tell you what, I went through a few years feeling oh man, I'm a mechanical guy in a digital world, and I was feeling a little out of place. Endiatx with technology like PillBot, with products in the pipeline that we like to call pill surgeon. With a future generation called micro surgeon, it's given people like me gearheads a chance to feel relevant in the 21st century because I feel we can drive all the way from PillBot, to pill surgeon, to the micro surgeon that could maybe do brain surgery over the next 5, 10, 15 years, if people want this.

If other engineers and people from, the world of finance, from the world of medicine, if,our friends over at FDA who really want all this kind of technology, right? If we can come together, I think there's a whole new chapter in medicine that we're just beginning to open up and to finally realize that there was never anyone holding me down.

I was holding me down. Once I let go of that, once I get, once I let go of that weight and started asking for friends to join me in this thing, it's become more and more real every day. I've swallowed 15 versions of PillBot so far, and when you're sitting in your living room driving PillBot around inside your stomach with a Xbox controller, with a live video, feed on a laptop, you just have to think we're onto something.

[00:24:02] Mizter Rad: Absolutely. That's super inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing that as well and your life experience. That probably took a lot of courage. To say, you know what, I'm gonna do what I want and I'm gonna look for the people that can help me with that and fuck the rest.

[00:24:16] Torrey Smith: For the founders out there, I would just say: you have to be willing to demonstrate that, that you will sacrifice deeply for your vision. if you can make yourself dangerous, where people look at you and they start to realize, uhoh, this person might not quit. Over time you will build followers and supporters in the community and it may take you a few months, a few years before you really feel the momentum behind you, before you feel the weight of your community pushing behind you.

But if you're willing to put that time in, you can definitely make it happen.

[00:24:46] Mizter Rad: How are you in that process right now as an entrepreneur, as an inventor, as a sci-fi enthusiast, and, as a team manager, how are you in your process of maybe raising money, going through all these bureaucratic, challenges that I guess you have with the FDA, maybe some pushback and you tell me if that's right or wrong, from the traditional, maybe endoscopic industry or,the medical companies, et cetera.

[00:25:11] Torrey Smith: Oh, we're getting support and enthusiasm from all sides right now, but it's important to understand we are now entering, I'm in my fourth year with Endiatx. I've been full time on this,, since Burning Man 2018 is when I went on a long walk with my friend Matt Schultz, who's one of the premier artists in the world of very large art.

And Matt and I took this long walk into the desert one night, and we basically agreed that, it was time for me to take this team out of the desert and back to Silicon Valley. And so it had taken us three years to get that giant Tesla coil working at Burning Man. So I had a model, telling me, be ready to push through the darkness for years before you see the light.

Four years into Endiatx, we've raised millions of dollars. We're in this huge facility in the San Francisco Bay area. We have the best doctors in the world. Vivek Kumbhari from Mayo Clinic is an investor of ours, and on our board of directors. We have the support of people throughout the ecosystem. We have friends at all the big medical device OEMs. The makers of endoscopes are all, calling us up and asking us, can they be involved? And so, we feel the full support of the community. But that's because we were willing to push through for quite some time when our technology was not nearly as exciting as it is today.

[00:26:32] Mizter Rad: So it took you a lot of resilience and a lot of push to the front to make sure that your team and yourself didn't, fall into the trap of desperation and saying, this is not gonna work and so on.

[00:26:44] Torrey Smith: You know, the hard thing is I have lost two chief technology officers along the way. People who are smart enough to work on this kind of technology have their options so open.

And I often myself wonder, oh man: those folks at Space X are having fun, right? when I see those rockets landing. But I realize this dream of going into the microcosmos with medical robots, I think it's worthwhile. And I've decided to say that my spiritual energy, my life force is going to be about Endiatx, until we are saving lives.

You know, once we're saving tens of thousands of lives, maybe I can take a breath and ask myself, do I have a new dream? But for now, this dream of micro robotics inside the human body, is something that I am absolutely 100% committed to realizing.

[00:27:39] Mizter Rad: You talk about microcosmos and, micro medical robots.

You, you bring up this spiritual in you, every now and then, and I wonder, if at some point in time you see something like this happening: so imagine, PillBot, it goes into your body. I'm into meditation. I try to meditate every day...

[00:28:02] Torrey Smith: I am a huge fan of this part of the human experience because I mentioned feeling like I was trapped in a box. I mentioned feeling like it was someone else's fault that I was in that box. And it took me years to finally realize that the person who had the keys to that cage was myself.

The person who had built that cage was. Was myself. And once I realized that there's no human being in existence, besides myself, that has that kind of ultimate power, I realized I can do anything. As long as my heart is beanie, I can do anything. And I feel like that transcendental, opening of the eyes and opening of the mind is something that every person deserves to experience during their life.

Because that's when you get to that's when you get to realize what you truly are here to do.

[00:29:06] Mizter Rad: Absolutely. I completely agree. And I'm on the same boat as well. It's a journey of discovery, but talking about discovering, discovering the microcosmos inside of you with the robots and, maybe thinking a bit ahead of what kind of opportunities, this invention of yours can open for humanity in general. Imagine you have PillBot with a little mic or sound system, micro sound system that brings inside of your body closer to your chakras. Certain chants that can open up energy levels that are otherwise maybe for some people hard to open. is this a bit too crazy or ... can you see this maybe happening? in the future?

[00:29:47] Torrey Smith: I feel that at some point the mechanical world will find its way all the way down to the molecular level, and that is where it shakes hands with the biological world. And also that's where they are all affected by the quantum world. And so when people are asking questions of spirituality or the nature of this beautiful universe that we live in, or maybe what's behind the curtain, right? These are sacred questions and all I can say is that I am honored to be alive and participating in this conversation. It feels good.

[00:30:30] Mizter Rad: I think the beauty of it is that you can combine both things, in my opinion, our advancements in, in, let's put it like rational science with our, also advancements with more, in a way, irrational, meditative, beliefs and practices. And I think I myself see both things advancing at crazy pace at the moment.

[00:30:53] Torrey Smith: Things are moving along very quickly now. it's humbling because I still feel this imposter syndrome when I'm asking some of the most brilliant people in the world to give this Endiatx dream a shot. that, that includes people from the world of finance, but it also includes, embedded firmware wizards who, are designing switched reluctance motors at Tesla, or, they're designing avionics at SpaceX, and I'm saying: hey, we don't have nearly as many resources, but would you be willing to take a chance and come build this journey into the microcosmos with us?

I think we're starting to build a case for the world's most brilliant creative people that maybe these robotic pills could actually be a reasonable place for them to park their brilliance for a few years.

[00:31:35] Mizter Rad: Absolutely. I think it's just a matter of time. like you said, telemedicine is just, I wouldn't say in the, in its beginnings, but it's definitely something that I see, I personally see as a big trend happening.

not just because,the technical capabilities that we have, but also because I feel that this relationship between people and health is getting at least for a big part of it, stronger and stronger, and people wanna be healthier and have more control of what they eat, what they have, what, how they behave, how their body reacts to certain things.

And I think having the ability to always track certain things within your body, helps a great deal in that quest of being healthier. But in that same line of thought, let me ask you about, the life feed that you, cuz you were mentioning before that, you, you go from PillBot to pill, pill surgeon,and to micro surgeon.

So basically having little doctors inside of you. and those little doctors or those PillBots that you swallow, I guess can take,photos, of your inner body that then will be sent to some sort of server.

[00:32:46] Torrey Smith: oh, it's a live video. It's like playing Mario. It's like playing Mario cart to be honest.

[00:32:51] Mizter Rad: But, so where is this, where does this go? all this videos or photos that you can take of your inner body. where do they go and how do you think this will develop in terms of, how things can get diagnosed? imagine you have all this like 1500, 1 million photos of your body, and where is this gonna be stored?

How do you feel about it? Because it, it is a liability,Okay. let me put it like this. Right now I think we're concerned about our data. how you know, the big companies and big tech firms know how we behave before we actually, behave or before we actually take an action.

They know more about us than ourselves know about us. So I'm thinking now, beyond having external data, we are gonna have data from what's happening inside of our body. So how do we prevent that, that sacred, super personal private data, is not manipulated by, let's say, Nestle or a big company that says, I know that Mizter Rad has a problem in his stomach and let's give him a bit of this product because we wanna push it. You know what I mean?

[00:34:05] Torrey Smith: All I can say is that, as a citizen of the United States, I answer to FDA, and FDA throughout my career has asked me three questions.

Torrey, can you prove that this technology is safe?

Can you prove that it's effective?

And can you prove that safety and efficacy is tied to an actual clinical use? And so that holds us to a high bar in terms of what technology we have to offer to the community. But then with hipaa,we then are held to incredibly high ethical standards. And so there, there is few kind, there are few kinds of data, that are as sacred in our health ecosystem as medical data.

And so this is the highest bar for privacy, but it also represents one of the biggest opportunities,for dignity and agency in the patient population. So my stated goal for a patient is, if you have a tummy ache or GI issues, I wanna make it 10 times cheaper, for you, to get these advanced procedures done.

I wanna make it 10 times more accessible for you. And so for people with Crohn's or celiacs or gastritis, anything like that, ulcers, lesions, even stomach cancers, they know what it's like to get all the gate keeping. They know what it's like to be pushed around. They know what it's like to have to fight with their insurance provider to qualify to receive an upper endoscopy.

With this technology, I simply wanna make it so cheap and easy and safe that it's just accessible. So that's part of the question. But to really answer your question, if we take a typical Zoom enabled upper endoscopy using the PillBot platform, I would want the patient to very rapidly get qualified, drink some water, swallow the robot, and now, they get to talk with their doctor in real time and see what the doctor is seeing and see what PillBot is seeing as it drives around in their stomach in real time. This is like bedside manner that you can't deliver to a patient who is knocked out with sedation, but with PillBot you can, right?

So first of all, there's a little bit of agency and dignity there, but when the procedure is finished, I want the patient to have access to all of that imagery, all of their own data on their own phone, instantly.

I don't want them to have to fight anyone to get access to their medical records. I want that to be made available to them instantly because it, they were holding their phone on the Zoom, there's no reason why they can't have that information right away right now. That would have to be very private and secure, and we're gonna be working with cybersecurity experts to help us do this, right?

Because honestly, that's not my area of expertise. I'm gonna have to ask for help with that. But now let's go. Let's go to the doctor's side. The doctor is not only generating all this imagery by directing PillBot around, but they're also annotating it in real time because ultimately they're going to give a diagnosis of some kind, which represents the ultimate annotation of data by the ultimate experts, in this case, a gastroenterologist.

And so that obviously must be kept extremely safe. Some other corporation like Nestle would never legally have access to that. It would be a huge, terrible scandal if that kind of data was leaked somehow. And obviously the cybersecurity challenges is non-trivial, but we can at least hold our hands up, ask for help and do it right.

But there's something else that happens in parallel with the patient journey and the doctor journey and it's all that annotated data collecting over time because over time we will be training and artificial intelligence to be the world's greatest doctor.

[00:38:01] Mizter Rad: I wanted to get there. Exactly. Cuz you're gonna have a lot of data that,it's hard to get in a way.

So if you train AI to give you a diagnosis without the doc or at least an idea of what could be happening based of what that same technology has seen in thousands and hundreds of patients before, that's a big help for doctors as well.

[00:38:22] Torrey Smith: I see this as a completely new chapter in the world of medicine.

I think it's very important that we be clear initially with the minimum viable product. With PillBot, we're just trying to create a virtual endoscope. We're just trying to make the hospital visit itself unnecessary with these cheap little robot pills. but let's also be clear that we have the full intention of developing artificial intelligence over time that initially can reduce the doctor's workload, right?

Then eventually you get to a point where when you get to a certain level with the ai, you can probably let it do auto screenings.

and every time you do this, you have the opportunity to drop costs by as much as an order of magnitude, because now you're not paying a gastroenterologist at the absolute apex of their career, to take direct control of the device. you're letting this artificial intelligent, entity that represents millions of doctors or in, tens of thousands initially, you're letting this AI do the screening.

it's fascinating and it's also not trivial. There's, it's so deliciously non-trivial, isn't it? and this is why I felt like it was very important for Endiatx to share the journey as publicly as we can. This is why I have a YouTube channel where I upload videos of my own R&D.

you can see my voyage into my own stomach. As we drive these imperfect robots around. You can see our terrible video quality . you can see the progression from football size, devices down to, to pill size devices, because the bottom line is we're simply trying to tell the world, the general public, that the people at Endiatx are putting their heart and soul into this.

We are trying to do it right, and we're gonna need to ask for help.

[00:40:07] Mizter Rad: And what's the main challenge for the people at Endiatx right now? What's your main challenge? how can maybe people contribute or help?

[00:40:15] Torrey Smith: I'll tell you what, we are looking for someone who knows a programming language called Verilog, because we need to start doing image compression on chips known as f PGAs.

So we're talking about embedded firmware engineers, wizards, right? I don't know if there's more than 50 people in the world with the skill set that, that we're looking for. because right now we are on the verge of going from grainy slow frame rate video to crisp, beautiful high frame rate video.

but it's gonna take PhD level code and this is not the kind of code that you write right out of a bootcamp. And so we truly are trying to recruit the world's most brilliant software engineers at this time. And, and all I can say is, you would be at the very bottom of the stack, so to speak.

this is very sticky code. It's very difficult. Everything about it is hard. But, that's where we like to be mechanically, electronically, financially, right?. And so we're looking for people with the world's stickiest skill sets who would be willing to take the plunge, like we've taken the plunge.

[00:41:28] Mizter Rad: That's beautiful. Torrey, I applaud you because you know, you there to follow your imagination and intuition, and went, for something that, for some rational minds out there would be or would be thought as impossible or as sci-fi, and now you know you're making that product, the product of your imagination, a reality together with your team.

So I applaud you for that. I really hope you are as successful as one can be. I recommend everyone listening to this episode to go check Torrey Smith out on. what's the best channel, Torrey, where are you more, active? LinkedIn maybe?

[00:42:09] Torrey Smith: LinkedIn has become,my, my LinkedIn page has become the way that I get to engage the general public.

we do have a, a simple YouTube channel in my name Torrey Smith, where you can see the r and d videos. There's nothing produced about it. you'll see my old Burning Man videos. You'll see , Yeah. You'll, it's just one person's YouTube channel. But I think there, there may be some beauty in that, because I feel like if we're going to be taking human lives in trust, like we are putting tiny robot pills in people, putting lithium polymer batteries inside people, there is nothing trivial about what we're doing.

But if we're going to be doing that and we are doing that, then I want to share this journey. I want to share this journey so that I can show people that we can tell the truth even when the truth hurts, right? And also so that we can demonstrate to the brilliant minds out there, please consider joining us.

We need your help. We truly need your help. And we feel like with your help, we can do some really beautiful stuff in the world of health.

[00:43:08] Mizter Rad: Beautifully put Torrey. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you being here. I'm super excited to publish this soon in my podcast channels. and I wanna thank everyone for being here and joining us, supporting us.

Hasta La Vista Torrey, I hope, you had fun and, hope to see you soon, maybe next year in Dubai. Who knows?

[00:43:32] Torrey Smith: This was an honor and we definitely wanna swallow a robot next time we're in Dubai.

[00:43:36] Mizter Rad: Cheers to that, man. Have fun. Enjoy. Thank you so much. Bye.