Joey Wahler (Host): Our guest says, "Everything that we stand for is this concept of technology for the sake of humanity". So we're discussing a groundbreaking company called Not Impossible Labs with the man behind it. Mick Ebeling has been named by Fortune magazine as one of the top 50 world's greatest leaders, a recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award. He's a producer, filmmaker, and author, and for the purposes of this conversation, most importantly, the founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs.

Welcome to the Healthcare Executive Podcast from the American College of Healthcare Executives, providing you with insightful commentary and developments in the world of healthcare leadership. Learn more at ache.org. Thanks for listening. I'm Joey Wahler. Hi there, Mick. Thanks for joining us.

Mick Ebeling: Hey, Joey. How are you?

Host: Great, yourself.

Mick Ebeling: Excellent. Thanks for inviting me to talk today.

Host: Thanks for hopping aboard. So first, tell us just briefly a bit, Mick, about your professional background leading up to launching Not Impossible Labs because you were in production, right?

Mick Ebeling: Film production. I had a company called the Ebling Group that was based in where I live in Venice Beach, California. And we did everything from films, worked on Marvel films to main titles for the James Bond franchise, to commercials, to a whole variety of different things. But it basically was just, uh, really creative narrative work for the screen is probably the most encapsulating way to describe it.

Host: Wow, James Bond movies, huh?

Mick Ebeling: Yeah, that's the, because my focus was animation and design, we did the main title sequence for Quantum of Solace, which is essentially like the Super Bowl, if you're in animation and design. That's like the holy grail. So we got a chance to do that, which was, which was pretty awesome. That was like a, that was a dream come true.

Host: I can imagine it was. So now do you introduce yourself as Ebling, Mick Ebling?

Mick Ebeling: No, but I will say that I got a chance to work and shoot on the famous Pinewood stage and work with Daniel Craig and people like that and as cool as you try to play yourself off, you're just not as cool as he is and as they are like you just always felt like oh my God I can't believe this is happening to me. So it was pretty awesome.

Host: I'm sure that's great. Well, what's also very cool is Not Impossible Labs. Simply put for those unfamiliar, tell us a little bit about the company. What was your initial inspiration for founding it in the first place?

Mick Ebeling: So, you know, as we were just, we're discussing, I had a production company and everything was cruising along. Everything was going great. And, my wife and I had our date night hijacked by a friend of ours, a really good friend named Ubi, who ended up taking us to a gallery event that I begrudgingly went to, got to the event. It was this incredible event. The art was amazing. The vibes and the, just the energy of the room was, far more like a family reunion than it was kind of a boring, stiff gallery event. And when my wife and I kind of did a lap and came back and found Ubi, we were like, I'd love to meet this artist. He said, Oh, you can't meet the artist.

This is a benefit. It's a fundraiser for an artist named Tony Tempt Kwan. And he has ALS. He has Lou Gerrig's disease. And this is his family and friends who've kind of come together to try to pay for his hospital bills and his care, which all of a sudden made total sense because the energy of the room felt more like people coming together as opposed to people just observing art.

So we met his father and brother. We met some of his friends. And that lovely night we went home, that was in the springtime in that winter, that holiday season, my production company, instead of doing the fairly traditional giving someone, you know, giving your clients a bottle of wine or a bottle of booze or tickets to a game, we decided to, on provocation from my wife, who kind of encouraged us, said, you know, why don't we, instead of giving people bottles of boozes that they're never going to remember who gave them, why don't we instead, make a donation to a charity?

Why don't we make a donation to that Tempt One Foundation that we met back in the springtime? Cause we had researched this guy and he was using his art and his kind of status in the art community to get kids out of gangs and there was a whole spiritual side of him. And so that's what we did.

 So I set up a meeting with his father and brother in an old diner in downtown LA. We sat down and we chatted for a little bit and I reached down, slid the check across and said, I'd like to give you this money. And, uh, and they said, thank you so much. That's so generous. I said, what are you going to use it for?

And his brother almost leapt across the table and he said, I just want to talk to my brother again. I just want to be able to communicate with him. I was like, wait a second, doesn't everybody have the, you know, the Stephen Hawking, Lou Gehrig's, you know, ALS machine where you move your eyes and then the robot talks like this.

He's like, no, that's if you've got money or insurance. We don't have that. And so I took a minute and I was like, all right, how about this? Let's change the script. I'm going to get you one of those Stephen Hawking machines. And why don't we, why don't we take it up a notch? Why don't we not just get a Stephen Hawking machine? Why don't we go one step further? Why don't we figure out how to hack that Stephen Hawking machine? And rather than just having your brother be able to speak through this machine, why don't we hack it and mod it and make it so that he can draw again, but using only his eyes. And they said, you can do that? And I said, and that silence you're hearing in podcast land is a dumb look on my face that they just interpreted as me saying yes, and they were like, Oh, that's amazing. And that kind of set the course. And so I did what a producer does, I convened all these brilliant people and they all came together and they moved into our house and we pushed the tables and chairs against the wall and we hacked and programmed and came up with all these crazy different things.

And in the end, we created this device called the iWriter. Which is a cheap pair of sunglasses from the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Because I believe in locally grown sustainable produce living in Los Angeles. That's the only locally grown sustainable produce that we have in Venice Beach is cheap sunglasses.

Then we pulled it all together. We duct taped a wire around the side, mounted an old web camera to the front of it. Wrote the, the team, just brilliant, brilliant mad scientists and hackers wrote code that would translate the movement of his pupil through that web camera into movements of a cursor on the screen.

And then on, of course, the last night that everybody, everyone had to fly back the next day, we took it to his hospital room. And with his family and friends gathered downstairs, we set up a massive projector in the parking lot of the hospital that he'd been living in for over seven years. And, signal from his room down to this massive projector projected on the side of the wall.

And then we got the signal, and we looked on the wall, and this artist who'd been lying motionless in a bed for seven years was drawing again. And we were all witnessing it. And that was the first time I'd ever really experienced something like that. And it was this incredible night, and everybody was crying and high fiving, and it was just this euphoria. And then we went home, because we did it, and everyone flew out the next day. And then, we like to say we quote, woke up. And it was Time Magazine's top 50 inventions. And all of a sudden it was Ted Talks and articles and podcasts and blogs and people calling it one of the best health inventions of our time.

 I always wanted to do Ted Talks. I didn't know what the hell I would talk about. Now I got invited to do Ted Talks. It's now part of the permanent collection at the MoMA. And we were like, what is going on right now? This is not what we expected. This is, we just wanted to help this one dude. And this has turned into this like global movement that is people are responding to.

So, the punchline is that I finally said, you know, I have to make a decision whether or not this is something that I want to keep doing with my life because it was I just kept waking up thinking about it and thinking about it, meditating about it, praying about it, you know talking to family and friends about it and I finally made the decision and the decision was dude you got so lucky, just don't take it for granted.

Don't also blow it out of proportion. You got lucky. Enjoy your Andy Warhol, 15 minutes of fame, but just go back to your production company and doing what you're doing. So I made that decision on this one particular day, at this one particular time, being a producer and kind of giving myself a deadline. And then I opened up the computer right after I made that decision and I got an email from the artist.

And the email said, from Tempt, he said, that's the first time I've drawn anything for seven years. I feel like I've been held underwater. And someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could take a breath.

And if you're deciding to or not to do something and some dude sends you an email like that, do you really have a choice anymore?

And so that was the launch of Not Impossible Labs. So that was the moment. That was the moment in time where I was like, all right, here we go. We don't know what we're going to do. We don't know how we're going to do it. But we got to keep this going.

Host: That's amazing. And you alluded, Mick, to the fact that you were trying to help this one guy and it led to helping others. And that's really become kind of a common theme in many of your projects going forward. Let me ask you about a few. One exciting one is called Bento, B-E-N-T-O, which addresses food insecurity. In a nutshell, what does that involve?

Mick Ebeling: Bento was a, I mean most of the things that we create out of Not Impossible Labs, which is now, as you said earlier, we are an incubator that creates technology for the sake of humanity. So we look at absurdities that exist in the world and then we figure out how do you hack? How do you program? How do you duct tape? How do you zip tie? How do you convene? How do you figure out how to solve these things? And then try to make it accessible to the world, right? Like our mission isn't to make a billion dollars. Our mission is to affect a billion lives. And then we try to come up with scalable ways to do that. And so Bento, which was initially called Hunger Not Impossible, was a reaction to the fact that there's 50 million people in this country, in the US, that are food insecure. And I didn't know what the word food insecure meant. I, you know, I grew up a middle class kid. I thought you were either homeless and hungry or you weren't. I didn't realize that there was this tweener zone and people who are food insecure, as I learned, are people who hold multiple jobs, multiple households to a family.

They are busting their ass trying to figure out like how do you just keep it all going? But they don't have three meals a day. And so that realization said, well, what if we were to figure out, and this is kind of how we think and our design thinking and how we approach problem solving and innovation at Not Impossible.

What if we were to look at how Joey and Mick, how do we eat? What's our process? What's the supply chain? What's the cycle? What's the how we interact with the world? How we get food? And really, there's two different ways, grocery stores and restaurants. And then we looked at the way that people who are food insecure eat.

They have to go to soup kitchens or food pantries or wait for, you know, different things that are specific times, specific days and waiting in line. Well, that doesn't mesh with the fact that these people are also working multiple jobs and hustling and, and they don't have, you know, childcare to be able to throw their kids off to, and then go wait in the line for four hours.

So we said, what if we mashed up that supply chain and made it so that we both had access to the same supply, but then figured out how that was going to get funded. And so what we ended up doing was creating this having API access to restaurants and grocery stores so that someone who is food insecure, coming through an organization that they belong to, many cases it's nonprofits and charities in, you know, the latter years it's been Medicaid plans, but they were able to access food and have that food transaction take place digitally, either placing an order in a restaurant or placing a grocery box order that we curate, so that's really healthy. But what if they were to do that just simply through text messaging? And so we did that and it worked. We were testing out prototypes, then the pandemic hit.

We were really kind of, it tested our strength and it really worked during the pandemic. And so now what Bento is, is as we've kind of evolved into serving a Medicaid population, because we've kind of, we know that that's a food insecure population and we know that there's needs there, we're able to feed people through simple text messaging that's curated around their particular chronic condition.

And that happens through, right now we're just doing it in California through CalFresh and CalAIM. But it goes through their Medicaid plan and our whole goal, and this is, we just came off of our company offsite. Our whole goal is to put ourselves out of business. That's our stated goal as a company, because if we can put ourselves out of business, it means that we've attained food security through, for this very vulnerable population.

So that's what we're doing. And I will, I'm very proud of what we've done and, and the company and it won, the iWriter was our first Time Magazine top 50 invention and Bento in 2021 was our second Time Magazine top 50 invention.

Host: So you proved there was no fluke, Mick.

Mick Ebeling: That's exactly it. I was like, wait a second. Once is lucky, twice, oh, let's see.

And then just a couple months ago, we won our third for a device that we created to allow the deaf to experience music through their skin acting as the eardrum. It's called Music Not Impossible. So our third time, we're like, okay, legit, we're not lucky, we actually maybe know a little bit about what we're doing.

Host: Amazing as well. And Mick, you mentioned there, Music Not Impossible. You guys have so many amazing things going on. Tell us more about that.

Mick Ebeling: Music Not Impossible is, man, that is a miracle that we feel just so lucky to have discovered. The best way to describe this realization is that we witnessed how the deaf experienced music. We witnessed a deaf concert, which always sounds really crazy to say that I was, I witnessed a deaf concert before.

And, the music lovers, the deaf music lovers would have their hands on speakers. They would have their shoes off so they could feel the vibrations of the floors. They had these, you know, balloons and balls so they could feel those vibrations. And what I realized was that they were not experiencing, as I think I said, you don't experience sound with your ears, you experience it through your ears.

So we made this discovery of like, wait a second, what if we figured out a different pathway to the brain, which is really where music happens. It's the through the ears to the brain. And so we created this solution, by essentially dissecting music into its parts. And just for the sake of this podcast, think of drums, vocals, guitars, bass, all being projected to different wearable sections of your different skin parts of your body through wearable devices.

And so now your skin is acting as the eardrum and that was this huge aha moment. It was a smash success when we launched this at South by Southwest. It was just this incredible experience. And then, and I think given the audience that's listening to this right now, everything was going amazing.

And then we started to see that there might be some medical ramifications to using this. Some, things that have, how it affected people's health. So I'll talk a little bit about that at the event, but it's just been a fantastic project to witness. It was, and it was very much, we kind of call it the, the Viagra moment, you know, when Viagra was created to do one thing, but it did quite another.

This was created to help allow the deaf to experience music in a new, more robust way. It ended up creating a way for us all to experience music, whether you can hear or can't hear. And now there might be a way that it could affect our quality of life from, from different people who have different, different diseases. And so we're really excited just about what happened with that.

Host: You have a mantra, Mick. Commit, then figure it out. Which sounds gutsy, but risky. So, when you hear from other leaders struggling to be innovative, especially when they've got all their regular work to do, what's your advice for them?

Mick Ebeling: It sounds risky. Yet, here's the statement of fact, that this is how we exist as human beings. Everything that we have ever attempted to do as a species and everything that we've attempted to do as individuals, we are constantly transitioning things from impossible to possible. Right? So let's go back in time.

There was a time when Joey came in to the cave to do his podcast and he had to sit on a rock. And his ass started hurting and he was like, I don't want to sit on the rock anymore. I need to invent something. I got an idea. Let's get some wood. Let's get some legs. Let's put some padding on it with that woolly mammoth I just hunted last week. Ah, and the chair was born, right? So you transition things from impossible to possible. And now when you came into the studio today, Joey, did you think, I'm so glad that the world invented chairs? No, you don't even think about it anymore, right?

That's just part of this natural progression of us as humans. We're constantly inventing things, that are transitioning from impossible to possible. And as a species, what we also do is we also see something that we want to do, or we see something that needs to be done, and we throw the life preserver out a little further than we can swim.

And then we figure out how to get there. Again, examples abound in terms of different ways for us to have done this throughout, through our own existence, throughout our own life. When you're talking about people, you know, that being risky, it's actually not, it's living exactly who you were born to be, which is a human being.

And this is how we've acted our entire time on this planet. So it's more about just for what we talk about at Not Impossible; this is more about really quantifying and calling out that if this is how the world has always worked, it's always worked from transitioning things from impossible to possible.

And this is how we are as a species where we're constantly figuring out how to push ourselves a little further, run a little further, swim a little further, exercise a little bit more, whatever it might be, you know, get a bit, get another degree. We're always doing that. Then when we see these other tasks that are within our business, why?

Why do we think that that's hard? Or why do we think that that's impossible? It might be hard. It might be difficult. But it's not impossible. And when we really embrace that, like truly, we truly embrace that, all of a sudden us as individuals and leaders are able to now start to do more than what we thought we were capable of doing.

And then when our teams witness that, and when we empower our teams to be able to see things that, wow, look, look what's possible for us to do. We don't know how we're going to do it. We don't know how it's going to get done. But we know that it's possible. Then all of a sudden now that opens up, it opens up the horizon for us to be able to do these things.

And that's, I think, kind of how we think as humans, and as leaders at Not Impossible.

Host: And you are so right, by the way. I take the comfort of the chair I'm sitting in, like the one I'm using right now, take it for granted all the time.

Mick Ebeling: 100%, 100%.

Host: So, the 2024 Congress on Healthcare Leadership is from March 25th through the 28th in Chicago. And you're presenting at the McGeckern Memorial Lecture and Luncheon, and you'll be doing a talk discussing Creativity for Breakfast, Innovation in a Tumultuous World. I love the title. It sounds like a course at Harvard or something. What can attendees expect to hear from you on that?

Mick Ebeling: Well, you'll hear a little bit about what we talked about today, the origin of Not Impossible with the iWriter and some of the other projects that we've learned. I'll tell you what it isn't. It is not a seven steps towards X, right? It is really, me sharing kind of the journey that Not Impossible has been on, as you heard on this podcast, I'm sure I'll drop a couple swear words here and there. I'll do my best. The Irish Catholic in me, you know, that's, that's just kind of our normal vernacular. But we'll talk about some of the things that we've done, some of the things that we're doing, some of the lessons that we've learned along the way, and hopefully leave everybody with a thought that they too can go out and change the world.

Host: And to register for that upcoming event, you can visit ache.org/congress. Well, folks, we trust you're now more familiar with leader, innovator, and entrepreneur, Mick Ebeling and his company, Not Impossible Labs. Mick, congrats on all the amazing work by you and your team, continued success, and thanks so much again.

Mick Ebeling: Thanks so much.

Host: And if you found this podcast helpful, please do share it on your social media. I'm Joey Wahler. And thanks again for listening to the Healthcare Executive Podcast from the American College of Healthcare Executives, providing you with insightful commentary and developments in the world of healthcare leadership.