…I’m actually super excited about Cohack.
Thank you. Thank you. It really helped with UC Berkeley. The School of Public Health there is tasked with how to reopen the campus.
We did work with them three years ago. They have a new Dean now, and so these past two weeks it’s been nonstop meetings, trying to figure out how we can help. There’s a bunch of really good stuff there.
Berkeley really wants to work with Taiwan. They think that there’s this amazing cohort in Taiwan that they would love to be able to study.
You got it.
People. People’s data. Both.
Yeah. Out of Cohack came two amazing things. First is we met Dr. Ho at Sinica. She has been a huge help.
The new stuff we’re doing with our app now relates to nutrition, so she was showing us from age 7 to age 12 the youth in Taiwan already have the biomarkers for prediabetes. It was blowing my mind.
We’re doing all kinds of cool stuff to combine nutrition.
I can’t afford her.
She’s so awesome. This is recorded. It will come out the wrong way, but she reminds so much of my mom.
From the youngest of age my mom always told me about the benefits of nutrition. “Take care of your health. Your health is the most important thing.”
We originally wanted her help with Cohack, but then as we talked the stuff that Casey and I are interested in, both physical health, mental health, before we spoke about the social media…
You got it. That’s what she wants to do. She doesn’t know software. I’m like, “OK, we know software. We don’t know health and nutrition.”
We’ve been meeting with her at least once a week since then.
She’s a full-on mentor. She’s awesome. She’s like, “Look at these figures.” She’s like, “I’m not a medical person. I’m public health, but look at these numbers.”
She’s like, “If I saw these numbers I couldn’t sleep at night. What are we doing?”
The backdrop of all of this is that because of Cohack we got Dr. Ho. UC Berkeley is really excited, “How do we do US-Taiwan study of public health?” so today, mainly, I want to ask for your help navigating.
There’s three things. When we first showed you the app that we were working on you said, “Hey, maybe do it Web-based.”
That’s right. We’re adding more and more of those cell phone sensors – health, nutrition, location, all this kind of stuff. We have a practical problem in that Apple and Google block anybody that’s not an institution or university.
Correct, but there’s enough still in our app that we need to be mobile. What we’re trying to do now is essentially, “I’m in this location. Can I show you places that have nutritious food, places you can exercise?”
This is interesting. I will push the team to look into that direction again.
No, this is interesting. We’ll definitely look at that again.
The one thing that we are trying to do is to nudge people through notifications, but then I don’t know. It feels like people have almost managed to crack progressive Web apps to do notifications. We’ll bring this back.
What I would love your help on is, first, to know are there any institutions that you feel in Taiwan – and we can think about this very creatively. It doesn’t need to be CDC, for example – that we can partner to work on this neighborhood public health.
In my mind I’ve been crazy inspired by SpaceX and NASA, how you have private and public together. It’s so inspiring.
What Dr. Ho was showing us was all of this data that CDC is releasing, but they’re mainly releasing it as PDFs. She’s like, “If you just put this into an app and it became location based…”
I would be curious, is there any institutions that you felt we could talk to?
That’s the purpose of it, right?
That’s why they reached out, then? I’m meeting with them next week.
[laughs] Good.
Who else is in this club? You have…
Really?
That’s amazing.
That’s what we’re trying to do.
I love this.
I brought my notes. The other thing is the NDF has an angel fund. They have three different funds.
We’re in the final stages of the process. Our application was accepted.
Yes. That would be an investment. What I would also like, how can I find if are there government projects that need infrastructure?
We want to build open infrastructure. That’s how we see what we’re doing. With UC Berkeley they’re connecting us now to…Public health offices in the US is county-based.
They’re connecting us, and we’re trying to figure out how do we build, let’s call it, next-generation public health infrastructure. What I’m curious of is does Taiwan have any of that kind of thing?
Would they also cover public health? Is that under the same umbrella?
HPA, Health Prevention.
Intervention and prevention?
Who does the prevention?
HPA?
Who are they under?
Do they ever give government contracts to private companies?
Which means we can collaborate with them, right?
