Expanding Pharmacy for Consumers and Strategic Partners | Areo Nazari, PharmD, CEO Matthew Hawkins, BSC, CTO CaryHealth

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Aero and Matthew, introduce yourself to our listeners.

Areo: My name is Areo Nazari. I am the CEO and co-founder of CaryHealth.

Matthew: My name is Matthew Hawkins and I am chief technology officer here at CaryHealth.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: sometimes I'll be talking to a CEO, but when the CTO comes on, it means we're going to get serious. We're going to get into some action here. So

Areo: That's right.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Cary Health I know you guys are kind of service. Computer technology for, I think, mainly manufacturers in pharmacy. Am I close?

Areo: That's pretty good. That's pretty close. I think to Tell you what we are, maybe it's good to cover where we came from and

how we got to where we are. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: let's go there. Sure. 

Areo: So, we launched in 2017 and when we launched in 2017, we were purely a B2C digital pharmacy experience for patients. Meaning we were delivering prescriptions.

To the doorsteps of our patients in the DC metro area, same day. And that's directly from our pharmacy. So we are an actual physical pharmacy and we created the digital experience. And the idea is to create, I think the easiest way to always say it is an Uber a pharmacy like experience. And the idea is patients don't have to walk into their local Walgreens or CVS, not that we're dissuading them from doing that.

We love our community pharmacists. But the idea is they can have their physician or prescribers send a prescription to our pharmacy. They'll receive a push notification on their mobile app, and they can then schedule the prescription to be delivered to their home at a time that makes sense for them.

So it could be on demand within the hour, or it could be scheduled at a time that works for them at any point in the current day or future days. And so that's how we launched the business in 2017. And, without going into the whole complete story on why we ended up expanding the business we are now, what I would say is more of a digital pharmacy platform servicing, like you said, manufacturers but also health plans or payers.

And so, at this point, Cary Health has several different product lines. including that original digital pharmacy experience. And now we're licensed nationwide and we do work with several specialty pharmacy products, a rare and orphan drug, digital therapeutics as an example, as well, and helping manufacturers reach patients directly and also providing them digital infrastructure.

To do so and help drive their goals. We do have several different products on top of that. Some of those products span more of the clinical side of things, such as our clinical AI reference.

We call Claire as well as one dash, which is an analytics and pop health platform that we sell to pairs.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So, Ariel, going back, you say kind of the idea of the Uber of pharmacy when I think of that, the one thing I'm thinking of is I'm thinking drivers and maybe those drivers were not. Part of the corporation in terms of employees. 

Is that true? Or were you saying more generally, it was to call and get your prescription.

Areo: Yeah, so as far as the mechanism of delivery we work with a handful of different couriers some local companies as well as companies like DoorDash and

Uber. so, we've done an API integration with all of our partners.

And the idea is, we're not necessarily involved with the logistics piece of it, but it is incorporated into our workflow. And so we are handling pharmacy pieces. We're handling the tech piece and then delivery is incorporated into our workflow via that API integration. And. That's what powers our same day delivery as well as courier partners that handle our scheduled deliveries as well.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Now, how much is that a part of your business now? In your mind, was it like, 

 this is pretty challenging, let's pivot a bit? 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Or was it, this is going so well, let's expand it and do something Yeah, so that B2C portion of our business is a smaller piece of our overall business today. I would say less than 10%. We are licensed nationwide in every state now, fulfilling nationwide. But yeah, I'm a pharmacist by trade myself. I've been in the industry for over a decade and I knew going in margin would be tight and, I think all the pharmacy owners out there, they understand margins tight.

Areo: And so imagine adding on the layers of having a tech team and the overhead with that and the cost to deliver. And so, we weren't foolish to think that it was all going to work out perfectly and just go in and just scale it up and plow millions of dollars into it and it'll all be fine.

But you know, going in, we put in a lot of effort into. Making sure we could have a margin that worked or at least as optimal as possible. And so we focused on certain therapeutic areas. We had great ordering routines and we were actually running at about 30 percent margin for our first few years as a B2C pharmacy, which is pretty solid for a general retail pharmacy.

But taking all the data points we have from the industry, looking at how we could scale this business up. And taking it to multiple markets, we just didn't see enough margin at scale without more, some of that more gritty approach. And so we really decided to take a step back and say, all right, there's something working here, 

The retention or adherence, either way you look at it, was very high. Patients our service and It was very rare for a patient to start using what we call CaryRx. So we're not CaryHealth, but the digital pharmacy is CaryRx. It was very rare for a patient to use CaryRx and have that amazing digital pharmacy experience, chatting with our pharmacists, tracking their order in real time, getting reflow reminders, all those nice features that we have baked in.

It was very rare to see someone go from that experience and say, you know what? I liked the way I was doing it before. Let me go

back to

Big box pharmacy. Barely ever happened, so those are the positives. I mean, obviously the negatives were that the margin was tight and it was extremely challenging.

And so we decided to take a step back as a team around 2019 or so, and really looked at some of the opportunities in space, the size of the space, broke it down and really saw that specialty pharmacy was a very big portion, obviously, of. The grander market and learn more about sort of the transition happening to reliance on digital infrastructure and need for digital infrastructure.

And on the payer side, there is an immense focus on quality measures. And so we knew we had an opportunity to assist both on the pharma side, as well as on the payer side to help drive these clinical outcomes. And by bringing in not only our patient experience, but now adding layers of analytics And so now the idea is we have our analytics platforms, we have our auxiliary.

Fast products that help drive sales or clinical outcomes and we have the digital pharmacy experience for patients and using all the above we can Help drive all of these initiatives for our clients.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So what does that conversation look like and when does it happen and who do you have it with when you're saying, let's do this? Was it like, were you fired up about it? Were you like, we gotta spin a little bit here. What did that conversation sound like when you said, your next step away from your base, carry RX back at the time?

Areo: It definitely was. The idea of just being brutally honest with ourselves. And this was early on, like, this is really a startup story, which I think a lot of startups go through where it evolves or dies. And I think we just, we could have certainly tried to make it work and we would have loved to, because we were providing a great service that we were really passionate about and we were really helping patients, patients loved it. We really wish we could continue to scale that same day delivery business because it was nothing but a positive experience for patients that we were serving. But I think the reality was that it's just extremely difficult to project out what your margin can look like at scale, given the way we all know how PBM reimbursements are structured.

And so that opaque Kind of reimbursement model, I think, just made it too difficult for us to grasp the idea of taking this at a higher level. And if we, if we went out and just raised. A mega round of, let's say a hundred million plus dollars, the same issues would just creep up and follow us as we scaled up.

 I think we were fortunate to have a great team and we didn't try to avoid the conversation. We didn't try to say, Hey, let's just ignore some of these warning signs. We were all very cognizant of it and we were just very transparent with each other. And myself, being CEO, like I, I was very transparent with investors and partners.

And I think that was an important part of the story was that we just took a head on and decided to expand the business or pivot to a model that made more sense as kind of a, if you can't beat them, join them scenario, so if you can't make the margin work, let's go work with the people who set margin, you

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: How did you decide the next step? Like, all right, this is good. Where does your mind go from there in terms of saying, we're going to go, B2B right away, or we're going to do this. How did you decide on the next step? 

Areo: We had a lot of proposals on the table. I mean, at one point I think we even looked at this transparent kind of pharmacy model that you're now seeing

Cost plus And we put all the various business models that we saw as opportunities out there and shot them all down as much as we could.

For instance, with the Mark Cuban cost plus model back in 2019, this wasn't necessarily common at scale, like a cost plus setup and out of pocket purchases. But When we looked at that model, we decided, you know what, economies of scale will come into play here and a bigger player in the space will outprice us.

And we just really saw it as a race to the bottom, something that we just didn't think we could compete on. And so we decided to forego that model. And there were plenty of other models we looked at. And so, I think. There's a couple things. One we looked at the long term, benefits of going down each model route, but also we really focus on our strengths and there's always a book I love to quote Good to Great, 

and I think the theme in that book kind of resonates here, we didn't want to just go out and do something we'd be good at. We wanted to go out and do something we'd be great at. and I think this is something Matt can really touch on, but our other partner, NEMA, founded a company called Kinetica and it's in a geospatial database and they do GPU based analytics.

And so, the tech side of our team, Matt included, came from Kinetica and worked directly with NEMA at Kinetica. Tech side of our team really comes from the analytics world. And that was really from a tech perspective, one of our, you know, And so, um, we chose to really combine our passion and knowledge of analytics and setting up analytics infrastructure, combining that with digital pharmacy and looking at some of the tough use cases out there and going out and helping clients with those use cases.

And that's why I really think our one dash platform is just amazing that we're servicing payers with, because it's really combining best in class analytics with best in class. Pharmacy knowledge and you get one dash. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Matt, tell me about, Ario mentioned this other company the analytics. What was that based on? What was that being analytical of?

Matthew: so, back in, I think 2017 was when I first met Nima and worked at Kinetica, Database. Kinetica Database was actually one of the first products out there to leverage GPUs for databases. Analytics. So NVIDIA's flagship products, the graphical processing units that everybody uses to train models and to accelerate analytics.

What Connecticut did is they built the GPU into the database processing engine so that it could perform millions and millions of concurrent operations, allowing a kind of scale of analytics that had not really been seen before. So I worked there at Kinetico quite heavily in the pharmaceutical space, actually working with some large manufacturers, working on things like genome studies, analyzing hundreds of billions of data and correlating results.

And my history has always been in data analytics and large distributed processing systems. I've worked in finance, I've worked in analytics for a long time, worked across like oil and gas, mining, defense, et cetera. So. I met Nima, worked with Nima extensively at Kinetica and eventually came over to Carry as we were doing that B2B push and brought that knowledge of analytics and distributed systems to the table. 

Areo: Andone thing I'll mention is for the, on the GPU thing again, and I know you touched on that so typically how an analytics platform work is using CPU, so using the CPU to actually process and empower the analytics engine, whereas Kinetica really started off with the GPU, like Matt mentioned the graphics processing unit, but the reason I bring it up is Nima, our partner, Nima was actually one of the first people out there in the late 2000s, I think Matt, if I'm not mistaken, where he

was on his own trying to build a high speed trading machine and he wasn't getting quite enough power out of his CPUs.

And so he figured out in his bedroom that he could latch GPUs together. And create a far more powerful way of doing complex queries and analytics. And so that's how I was

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: let me see if I got this. You guys talk about this all day. I'm just an old fart here. And so let me see if I got this. So the CPU, basically you're. Tell the computer what you want it to do. And you're teaching the computer and so on the GPU, you're actually building some of this.

Analysis right into the chip. You're teaching the chips how to do this instead of just telling the master computer how to do it.

Matthew: There's kind of two angles. there's two analogies. I think the first one is to imagine what a CPU does. One operation at a time, and it does that very

quickly. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: A CPU being a central processing unit, a 

Matthew: Correct. Yeah, that's right. And that is like one operation at a time. you take a GPU, a GPU comes with thousands of tiny chips in there that can perform lots of simultaneous calculations at the same time.

So by leveraging the power of GPUs in that way, You can perform huge amounts of number based calculations concurrently to answer a complex analytical question or as now that people are doing is we are training models using GPUs and putting those models out into production to be served. So think about a GPU as a way to perform lots and lots of concurrent calculations very quickly,

and I combining GPUs into the analytics pipeline allows the scale of analytics that's achievable to exponentially expand, which is what we've seen over like the last few years with the rise of generative AI and machine learning and everything 

that, that goes with 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So I'm kind of thinking that a GPU goes into the computer just as some kid might want a faster processing card to use for gaming.

Matthew: You got it.

You got it. It extends your computer. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: specialized. 

Matthew: Specialized

hardware. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Okay. All right, Ariel, back to you. you're not off the stake yet.

Areo: All

right. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So you're sitting there and you're saying, we can process a lot of numbers. We can really do a lot of this stuff. What though, how do you know what needs that kind of powerful analytics?

Areo: Going back to 2019 slash 20, I think it was more on a use case by use case basis, number one, like we always try to approach everything we do from a focus on pharmacy. And so when we started working with one of our regional health plan clients we learned more and more about some of their problems and how they were currently, solving those

problems. One of them that we ran into was that we found, and this is not the case for every regional health plan, of course. but there is disparate data, like there's a lot of data that payers get through their claims, whether that's medical claims, lab claims, pharmacy claims, there's a lot of data.

A1C might come in 10 different formats, that data has to be cleansed and parsed and so what we have found by working with a regional health plan in those early days was that quality measures especially, but in general clinical initiatives, a lot of things were being done manually that could be automated.

And there's a whole lot of different use cases within that of what I just said, but you know, you can take one example, quality measures and just getting real time quality measures. It's really important to a payer to have a good grasp on how they're trending and how they're performing from the perspective of HEDIS measures or star ratings, 

 and what we found generally in space was. Some larger payers have a lot of their own internal infrastructure, not the case for every payer. Some players are working with reporting entities that report on the quality measures, but it's typically a report card. So it's retrospective. Um, and so what we found as a niche was to be able to come in and provide. The ability to do real time HEDIS measures and real time star rating, something that we can be recalculated on a daily basis. And now, obviously not every single patient's or enrollees measure has to be recalculated daily.

But when you're talking about millions of lives at scale then there's value there and having infrastructure that can take all these data points and calculate real time. Metrics, real time quality measures, et cetera. And so I think that's a good example of, where something like one dash can come in and play an important role in the day to day for a payer, as an example

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Ario, dumb that down a little bit more for me. Starin give me an example of like, okay this company is using this drug or they're using this prior authorization framework dumb that 

Areo: Yeah. I'll use my favorite one, which is a HEDIS measure that's typically used by Medicaid managed care organizations but there's specifically a HEDIS measure called S. P. D. So, S. P. isn't Paul, D. isn't David, and it basically looks at high level diabetics who are on statin per guidelines, but are not on a statin.

And so, yeah, The more enrollees you have that are not taking that statin, your score gets dinged, and that's not a good thing.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: financially is not a good thing.

Areo: it's financially not a good thing, or, for your renewals, all around not a good thing. And then you're, obviously your enrollees health is going to be taking a hit, 

because they're not taking a statin. And so, we found some plans were actually, going out there and using macros on Excel to really, put triggers in place and look at patients who should be getting some sort of intervention because, they're, they would qualify and meet the criteria for SPD.

And so they were actually really going through the data themselves, combing the data in a very manual way. And looking for opportunities to intervene. And now, what we're doing with one dash, it's all automated on the backend and it is constantly querying, their claims and their database for opportunities to intervene such as SPD.

And we can actually come in and as part of our infrastructure, not only identify those patients. That needs an intervention, but help actually implement change. And we have sequencing and automations and funnels that can go in and incorporate outbound communication, reaching out to patients, reaching out to doctors, telehealth shipping of drugs, so all these things can come together to play an automated role in helping close gaps. And the overarching theme of what we say there is we help identify, monitor and act on intervention opportunities.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Matthew, I imagine that's where you come in because Sally might be entering something into a Google database and then, she's texting the doctor and then the doctor does this and then the patient is on some other system Yeah.

The insurance is you have seven or eight different systems going on, and then you've got the APIs and you're functioning all that together. So in theory, point one can happen and you can go through six or seven points. And the last point is a text or an alert or something to the person.

And all that is faster. It's smarter. It's more complete. All of that with all those functions. Together.

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that we've learned as we've worked on the different use cases right from the start when we were just doing the B2C businesses, we've learned how to build very efficient and automated processes that are event driven on the backend. So we are reacting to, originally we were starting off with people making a payment or people having a query.

They need to speak to a pharmacist. We've increased that to people. Missing a fill to people missing a medication from a profile that they should have. We're building up this knowledge base on our internal systems, which is really driving efficiencies and giving a very personalized experience to a patient when they enter our workflows and the way that we're presenting data to our customers, whether it's through OneDash, whether it's through our other products.

 It's built on years of experience of building very efficient, tightly tuned systems in the pharmacy space that allow us to keep whoever's using the system very well informed of their journey through those processes. And as well as operating at this immense scale that we need to be able to do when we're working with some of our larger customers, you may have millions of lives on records that they won't be able to do this, 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So Ariel, break that down. Just give me like a three or four or seven word mission statement of each of these parts of your business. You talked about like one dash does this, and this system is for this company does this, what are those? I don't know, four or five you have. And now that I kind of understand this, what's the focus of each of those?

Areo: Yeah, sure. So, one dash, we say, is an intervention engine and intelligence solution that helps health plans identify, act and monitor intervention opportunities.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Like we talked about there. That's one dash, mainly the example there. Okay,

Areo: exactly. CaryConnect is everything that has to do with helping pharma or life science companies reach their patients directly with fulfillment in digital infrastructure, and that can cover specialty medications, digital therapeutics, and more.

Any really direct consumer opportunity there we can assist with. So, I would sum it up by saying we can help power fulfillment in digital initiatives for life science companies. And again, that can also cover beyond just fulfillment, for instance, specialized education, passing on very specific, Documents are collateral to prescribers, et cetera.

And we have other associated products that fit into what we're doing with Carry Connect. We recently launched a product called OnLabel and OnLabel is really, again, intended to be an AI, generative AI co-pilot that drives sales for pharma entities by helping bridge gaps in communication between field teams, the sales teams.

and Metinfo teams, specifically MSLs. Internal documents, FDA labels pull through data and help make it easily searchable by field teams, as well as MSLs. And on the MSL side, we also help streamline and automate the response to meta inquiries using generative 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: And just for our listeners, I don't usually dumb this down for the listener because I'm usually a dumbest one in the, in the room, but 

MSL would be the well, this is derogatory. I know they used to call them almost sales reps, but now it's the one up from that. It's the people that really know deeply.

And there are a lot of pharmacists and so on. What is the official term MSL? What does that stand for?

Areo: Medical science liaison.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: All right. So we've got that. All right, go on. I just wanted to let people know where we were 

on that one. 

Areo: yeah. I mean, MSL is typically a pharmacist. I think you'll see some MSLs that are PhDs or physicians. I think typically you'll see a pharmacist as an MSL. But yeah, I mean, the other thing we've noticed in the industry is that today responding to med inquiries, 

so a typical med inquiry, I think one example is someone in the field team is at a physician's office and a question is asked that is not on the FDA label. So off label questions. That would go to the MSL and the MSL is then able to have a more thorough answer using internally approved documents might be studies, whatever it is and they're able to respond and attach those studies and send it out to the doctor that typically has an approval process as well, there may be, depending on the organization, multiple people that have to approve the outgoing message. So, instead of relying on stock templates that may or may not address the question or a manual response. From an MSL, 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: like my boss has one in the trunk. I'm going to deliver that Tuesday and you bring it to Bob in the office and he's going to lay it on the desk of the doctor or something like that.

Areo: Yeah, exactly. Instead of manually doing or even manually typing it out and, faxing it or emailing it we can actually generate a clinical response and the actual email using the company's internal documents, so all their approved studies and protocols, everything else they have, we can use that knowledge base and actually give a perfect response to that medical inquiry.

And then enable them to send it out via any source they want, whether it's email, fax or even an AI agent call if they'd like. And we also have our own clinical database. So I touched on that other product, Clare. We have an on label that is really born out of Clare. But we also have a clinical database of 200 million plus studies as well as 2 million plus drug interactions, 147, 000 FDA inserts.

And so using all of that, as well as guidelines, by the way, so all the clinical guidelines available, using all of that knowledge, we're able to present a clinical response with references. And that's really the role it comes into play for on label as well as to help streamline meeting queries.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: And then Claire was the last one you alluded to and then nothing after that right now.

Areo: That's it for now. Stopping there. But yeah, I mean, Clare itself is actually something that anyone on this call can go and try out. It's a clinical reference. The URL is ask clare. ai. 

AskClear. ai is something that anyone can sign up and use, and the idea is, instead of relying on, a Micromedics, Lexicomp, or even an up to date, where you have to dig for your answer, and really kind of dig to find the appropriate document that's hidden in there, you can just ask a question, whether it's a medical, pharmacy, any type of clinical question you can ask, and you get a response.

With references. And so we've obviously seen everything going on with chat GPT and how amazing chat GPT is. And the idea here is this is an LLM based model that we've trained and the important part is that we've put clinical guardrails in place, so it's only curating an answer from that knowledge base I just mentioned

before,

And it's not scraping the entirety of Google and just putting an answer together, it makes sense which happens. And the biggest issue there is right, inconsistency, you don't, you're not getting a consistent answer. The other issue with chat to BT is that the database is not up to date, 

I don't know the latest cutoff, but you'll see it says, Oh, this answer's up to date as of one year ago. So that's not ideal. So, I think I have to be consistent. Quick answer that you can rely on and have a reference, which ChatGPT also doesn't, supply, having a reference that you can validate the answer with is also very crucial

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: That matters. not many people know about this, but there's one out called Google LM. I'm not talking about Gemini, it's Google LM. And they had sort of advertised it as basically like their notebook. And so in theory, I haven't done it in theory. I could take all of our pharmacies.

Procedures, policies, and all that, put them in there. And then our team, I suppose customers this or that could look into them, but for my safety, you have to have the LM so they don't put a question in there and then they say, get rid of the old gray hair guy, he's your problem, and that would be hallucinating.

Of course, that's not true.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: But you have to have Some container on that, 

Matthew, everything that you're hearing from Ario here now, what is your biggest challenge in, I know APIs can do wonders and all that. What is your biggest challenge in communication ?

Systems. Are there problems? Are there some systems that have too many safeguards and it's too difficult to get through those? What speed bumps do you hit in all the things that Aureo was just talking about?

Matthew: Sure, absolutely. I think if we talk about System integration. All of the products that Aureo is talking through, we have API connections for, and that has been purposely designed in that way. but This gives us a big advantage when it comes to integrating with third party systems, because we built the technology to foundationally support integrations. And that means we have a very structured API, we have a very flexible API, we have a very, very structured and extendable data model that we can use to plug into third party systems.

Undoubtedly. It's a challenge, absolutely. Working with um, different EHRs, different health systems, like everything that goes with that is always a challenge when you're working with new customers. But because of the work that we did up front and everything that we learned through kind of the pharmacy experience as we've got to this point, I think we have a very streamlined process in place, but undoubtedly.

There is no centralized place to go to sometimes to write one API connection that solves every problem. So you have to make your

system as flexible as possible. Make sure you comply with things like FHIR and have easy ways to integrate with those systems that need to produce data in a certain format or consume it in a format that people want to have.

And I think. Our API goes a long way to solving that challenge for us in that scenario. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: If you do have a challenge with somebody, I'm not saying you do, but I'm just in general, if let's say there's some system and it's hard to get into or something, do these companies let you go in there and poke around? Or I imagine you've got to kind of talk to their CTO first and figure things out.

 They don't give you the key to it. I'm sure,

Matthew: No, I think what we have learned is to be very prescriptive in terms of what we need, like, I think We guide people that we work with very concisely on what we need in order for this integration to work, and I think that's part of our, again, part of the learnings where we've done this many times, and we know what we need to be successful because we've seen Those challenges and how hard it can be to get it right and the downstream problems It causes when it's not right having a having an out of sync Data 

connection, 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: What are any, Speed bumps in growing the business and so on.

Areo: Yeah, I mean, I think generally speaking, there is of course competition, like we're not in a vacuum with zero competition. And I think given we're a company that has a handful of products and a lot of these products are new products, ensuring that everyone is up to date and understanding how to properly communicate.

The value prop that we provide and the differentiators. I would say that's key and can oftentimes be challenging when you have a handful of products. And so, we're spending a lot of our time, Matt and I, roadmapping how we grow the business and how we scale it.

creating these business units in a way that they can be a little more independent from the other products to create that ability to make sure that we can properly. Address all those issues. 

 as an example, I think having a pharmacy, like a physical pharmacy is always important, because it allows us to come in with a pretty clear differentiating advantage When we're dealing with quality measures, there's a lot of companies out there that, help close gaps or, do analytics, whatever it may be, but they're not a pharmacy, 

so oftentimes they're just creating intervention opportunities for health plans to address, but not really giving them the tools to help actually close those gaps and so coming in with both the, specific experience of pharmacy and data, I think that's a real big differentiator for us to be able to come in 

and have an actual plan.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Ario, I'm always asking people about, MBAs and not so much attorney because that you need some of those to sign certain papers and so on, but the MBA, I'm like, how much of it is valuable for you and how much of it is valuable because your name has an MBA afterwards.

Now, Know the value in the PharmD. How valuable do you think that has been andhaving that behind your name for investors, for trust, marketing of yourself?

How valuable do you think that has been? you alluded to it now that you're a pharmacy, but as far as you being a pharmacist, has that been a nice feather in your cap? It's,

Areo: Yeah, I mean, I think optically it's always good to have that and it makes you obviously show yourself as being someone with domain expertise. But I think it's helped me because I, obviously I'm building a pharmacy company. And so, having that background has just been crucial 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: it's helped you of course, but having it behind your name, maybe.

Areo: Yeah. I mean, I think it definitely doesn't hurt. But I think at the end of the day, if you get on a call with someone, you still have to know what you're talking about and be able to speak to whatever you're speaking to. So, yeah, I don't know maybe it's been more impactful than I realized, but I think it certainly is a positive at the end of the

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: I think so. I always think of some things that can hurt people. I always say that if I didn't have my pharmacy degree, let's say someone took it from me 20 years ago for some reason, God forbid I'm glad that didn't happen, but let's just say it did.

What things would I have done not thinking I had to be down that road? Would I have expanded things I mean, even the podcast here I don't hide the fact that I'm an independent pharmacy owner, but sometimes I think in people's heads, as I'm talking to different people across the pharmacy world, I think sometimes that has, a good old boy, corner feeling, and I don't know, but sometimes I think it almost can take away from The larger scale.

 You see in Congress the different pharmacists that are there once in a while, Buddy Carter. I'm not sure what his background is, but I don't think it does. But I'm always wondering if certain degrees can hurt you. I just kind of wonder

that 

Areo: sometimes I think that because it can put you in a box as well. Like you take the politician, and someone who has no degree or maybe a legal degree, it's a little more broad. And if you're going into a conversation as a politician, does having a pharmD or RPH, whatever it is, do that sometimes put you in a box for there?

Like, okay that's a pharmacist. Like he knows about pharmacy we'll talk to him when we have pharmacy questions. Who knows? I think that to your point could be a risk.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: That's a point there, Ario. Just for example, you mentioned Mark Cuban and so on. It's like, I don't think this is a case, but if you get Mark Cuban there, who doesn't, or I should say, didn't know a lick about pharmacy. 

And then you put you there or me there as pharmacists, would people look at us and say, ah, Ario and Mike, they're stuck, that they're in their box, they're stuck.

They don't have a big vision. And this guy who doesn't know a lick about it has a bigger vision. And that's true in some cases, but it can't be true across the board because it just doesn't make sense. But the quick thought I think could be there

Areo: Yeah, I think two things. One, I think in general, graduate level degrees are good in that they can teach you how to learn. And I think that's pretty important. I mean, you go to school, obviously, there's things we had to memorize for exams, but more importantly, we learn how to learn because they, These institutions know that you're going to constantly be learning.

Obviously, we have CEs and everything else, but the material will be changing and you will have to always be a lifelong learner. And so I think that's an important part of having a graduate degree, at least the benefit of it, I should say, is that you learn how to learn, how to reason and learn.

 The other thing I'll mention is actually that you, it's funny you bring this up, but I have run into a few instances where I've run into people who. Our generalists, I guess you could say. And they actually said, wow, you're a pharmacist. That's shocking or surprising that you've started a company.

 And this has happened to me more than once. And it's happened to me recently where they say, wow we rarely see pharmacists start companies or be entrepreneurs. That's so rare. And so amazing that you've done that. To your point, in some cases, it's almost like looked at in a negative way, even though it shouldn't be a negative thing.

 And of course I fire it back and say, well, you'd be surprised. There's a lot of pharmacists that are entrepreneurs. And I think pharmacy itself lends itself to being a great degree for anyone who has entrepreneurial aspirations.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: And I guess there, if you look at numbers, you do have somebody as a pharmacist where let's say the average age of a startup I don't know, let's say 24. I have no idea. I'm just throwing that out there. Get someone who's a 24 year old, who's a farm D that person's finishing up school. They're 200,000 in debt.

 They don't or can't take many chances. They don't have the time. They've got to start paying things off. And so sometimes it may not be that the skills are lacking, it's just like. The mechanics of it, of how does this person become an entrepreneur?

So, and that's a big complaint of mine. I've talked to different people on the show and, my thought is sure a six, seven year degree is okay for clinical stuff, but let's not do that for, for, pharmacists who aren't going that route, put them in a three year program, get rid of the first two years of stuff you repeated from high school and let them come out with lower debt.

And maybe they can't do all the stuff that everybody else can do in the hospital, but they're not going to do that anyway. So interesting.

Areo: Yeah, no, I agree with you. It's very challenging when you're saddled with six figure debt to go out and take a risk. And,

just having that weight on your shoulders, it's just, cause you just feel like I want to get rid of this debt as soon as possible. So let me go earn money and make as much money as possible.

And obviously when you're starting a company, there's a lot of unknown.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Yeah, Matt. I've always thought about collection ways, and I've talked before about who's Amazon, what's her name? The Amazon computer. What's her name? Alexa. And these people are coming up with goofy names now, has something called a, what the hell is it?

It's like, I got to look it up now. Just a second. You guys. Oh, Amazon's got one now called Rufus.

Areo: 

haven't heard about that

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: I just saw it a

Matthew: I haven't heard about 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: and you guys might be too young for this, but there was one called ask Jeeves

and 

Areo: as 

Matthew: I 

I remember

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Jeeves was like the butler, and it was kind of a cool concept and you got Google and stuff, but Rufus. Kind of sounds different. And then the first thing that comes to my mind when I say it is Roofies.

 And so 

Areo: Yeah. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: of an 

Areo: Yeah. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: for me. It's just an odd name. 

Areo: It is not a name.

Matthew: Mm-Hmm.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So anyway with Alexa, I thought about, you get some. Elderly person in her assisted living home. And it says Hey, Mary Lou how was breakfast?

No, I didn't go to breakfast. My foot hurts. Oh, why does your foot hurt? This or that, it kind of talks to them, or maybe even 20 questions, like, did you go to breakfast? Did you go to the bathroom yet? This kind of stuff. Now I thought that'd be cool. Now that's almost kind of.

Passé now. What do you see coming down the pike as far as input things? And I know there's retina scans and people, you can tell them if they maybe have diabetes and things like that. When you think of all these APIs that people are doing, I know some of the doctors in their offices, like AI will capture just their conversation and are talking about it?

On label for the MSLs, where if a doctor says, Hey Sally, there's a pretty good study on this. I should get that to you. Well, it's already on its way to the company. And before he even knows it, it's emailed on Sally's little handheld or something like that.

What dreams are out there, Matthew, as far as collecting things that you could see would be pretty cool in healthcare? Well, I know drones would be cool of course, but what are the things you see out there?

Areo: We right now lie around how you, and you kind of alluded to it in the way that you were talking there, is how you join all of these systems together. Join all these individual collection systems into a coherent use case that is. 

Milenkovic. 

Matthew: that then turns into something that's actionable? And automated in the same way as well. So that one collection system is feeding into another collection system that eventually might feed down to a medication being dispatched or a healthcare worker being dispatched, so healthcare is a complicated space where there's lots and lots of data. I think we're really good at collecting data. And I think we're really bad at turning it into information. I think the healthcare space has been, has certainly been my experience. So I think what I'm excited to see grow and some of the things that we are working on as well, is taking those collectors and turning them into coherent processes that are all talking to each other and combining to create.

A true digital experience for somebody that's automated, tailored to their needs in a very precise way, and quick, fast, and efficient. And I think that is going to be super interesting. And that's similar to some of the stuff that we're doing with interventions through OneDash. Joining multiple collection points together and creating this automated digital experience for people as part of their healthcare journey.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: You think of the assassination attempt. And then what was it last week? There was a school shooting, and four people died. In each of these, there seemed to have been at least, I don't know, half hour timeframe, where somebody knew this or that, but

Even in something like that, it's just hard to, I'm thinking, if you can close those timeframes and stuff like you're talking aboutEven where we are today, that whole connection process will continue to need work.

Matthew: And I think the technology space is moving so fast right now in generative AI. It kind of goes back to some of the things that you were saying around challenges internally with the company and working with sales and things like that is the education is constant on the new technology that's coming around.

This is a chat.

GPT is innovating weekly and pushing the boundaries on what people expect. And. Having those systems in place that require more and more storage to have all this information in one place, to reduce the latency, that data becomes available for it to be queried. These are going to address the challenges that you're talking through there, 

in terms of bringing that data into one place and having these high powered systems. Potentially powered by GPUs, like we talked about at the start, that can make those snap decisions and perform those, whether it's healthcare, whether it's in the news because of a security event, to make those decisions quickly and have an impact on preventing or enhancing somebody's life experience.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: And it's still very personal. My sister texts it out to the siblings. She's like the fire alarm went off at our house. In the afternoon. So I gathered up the dogs and my other sister, and we went and three fire trucks came and, well, at least we're safe, and I'm like, Oh, I suppose you're supposed to do that.

 I would have gone down and smelled smoke. And if it is. Wasn't there. I would have just swatted at the fire thing and pulled it off the wall and dealt with it the next day. So some people want the three fire trucks at their house and some don't. So it does come down to a lot of personal choices still.

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's what generative AI as well is very good at. It's about delivering precise and personalized experiences, you can have a process or a workflow in place that can be tailored around an individual, so if your particular threshold differs from somebody else's, you can have that personalized experience.

You talk to even an Alexa and you can customize how it responds to you. It's verbosity. It's the way that it communicates. I think personalization in healthcare especially makes so much sense because it's everybody is unique, everybody has unique healthcare experiences and unique profiles to 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Yeah, Matthew, I'm at technology stuff. I get a little jealous sometimes because 

I spend a lot of time at my desk. If I'm at my desk, I don't have to do real work. I can just sit there and fiddle with stuff, but a lot of time, fiddling with technology and I'm like, as a kid, I learned all about the different drives and the different serial ports and those kinds of things.

And now our kids, if their screen doesn't turn on their phone, they pitch it and want a new one. And sometimes I feel jealous, like, Hey, we put all this work in and now things are going to come along and be so easy. But I don't think that's the case. I think the people that are using it like large language models and things like that.

I think it's the people 

 Already kind of dedicated themselves, using technology and real comfortable with it because the average person, my mother in law, is not going to start using chat GPT, even though it's simple for her, I think things become simple for all of us that spend a lot of time with the more difficult things.

It makes the simple

Seems simpler. I guess

Matthew: I think we're still, we're still on this AI journey, I don't think that we're anywhere near to AI being embedded in everyone's lives and having figured out exactly how that works. And I think there's some interesting things that are happening right now, for example, Apple Intelligence, everybody uses iPhones on a daily basis. They are probably going to define the way that people expect to use AI through an interface, for example. Because, Everybody's suddenly going to have it in their hands, so it's going to be interesting to see you talk about that, somebody not comfortable using ChatGPT, it's new, even though it's easy, it's something people aren't comfortable interacting with.

I think the secret is going to be people not even knowing that they're interacting with AI services, because it just becomes It's Such an expected part of your experience when you're analyzing a piece of data, when you're writing a message, when everything that you do it will just be ingrained and it will be invisible and you will expect that level of assistance.

Let's say along that particular process 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Yeah, I think the people on chat GPT now, they're kind of early adopters, but you're right. You look back at blockchain was kind of cool for people and NFCs and that kind of stuff. 

Kind of cool, but then they go into hiding and then they gradually come up where nobody knows they're coming up. They're coming up in programs and scanning things and that kind of stuff.

So that's when it is really going to hit home

Matthew: Remember like 10, 12 years ago, traditional machine learning was exploding with things like image recognition with the facial recognition technology that we all take for granted now. Now it's in every Snapchat filter. It's on Instagram. It's used in places. You just don't quite realize that it's 

Prevalence,

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: And you never know this weekend. My wife and I were at a, we were away for a wedding and we're in this kind of cool, older Airbnb we're sitting there in the room and I wanted to work on my podcast website, I wanted to work on my about page or something like that.

And it was kind of disrupting because I had to take my Chromebook. Into the bedroom because I was going to be talking to GPT about the page. And I told my wife I'd be embarrassed if she heard me talking back to it. God forbid, I actually type stuff out. the speech into texts and so on, but someone said, will you be doing that?

And I'm not even talking about the technology that is even available. If somebody said this technology will be available, A, B, and C, which one will you be using? I'd say, I don't know. I don't know which one 

I'll be using it. Then you start using, you say, I can't live without B, but you didn't know what at the time.

Matthew: And it's the ones that become ingrained into your everyday life. It's the ones that do the little things, not so much the big things. It's that expectation of the subtle interactions that you just start using a service and start interacting with the service. And you're like, how did I ever interact with this service in this way before?

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: So, Ariel, how different would a company have to be for you to break it off because these are all under Cary Health now, 

Areo: yeah, that's right.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Different would a business have to be of yours to break it out of Cary Health? And I can't even think, I mean, let's say you end up, I don't know, you think of a. A brain surgery product or something like that, helping that, that might not be under there because one brain surgeon might want something more specialized and two, it might dilute that brand because now you go to your website and they're talking about brain surgery.

Areo: Yeah.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: When would you pull out? And when would you not pull out the solutions you keep bringing to customers. growing.

Areo: Well, I think we have a freeze on any new products for now.

So 

 I don't think Matt will let us, and,

I guess, I always just have ideas, so it's hard to put a freeze on things, but no, I mean, I think, look, I think one of the reasons let's talk about These products that we have, I mean, I think they're all really, at the day, here to help drive, positive outcomes for our partners.

And we have a great team. We have a great design team. We have a great engineering team, amazing operations team. So, I think we feel comfortable operating and launching these products as they are, and they currently stand it, if we were to bring in new products, I think they would have to fit within the mold of driving outcomes for, life science organizations or payers or in some cases health systems, but I don't think we would stray too far away from this pharmacy focus. So to your point. If we were to go and attack a use case for brain surgery, I mean, I just don't think we would do that. And we've actually had people approach us for specific use cases that were a little bit outside of our wheelhouse.

And I'll give you an example, in the earlier days of this gen AI kind of rush here, we had an organization that wanted us to create a scribe. A medical scribe, like someone to document notes. I can't remember what the specialty was. I think maybe orthopedic surgery. I really can't remember.

But we just really kind of got together as a team. So, you know what, we could bring on this logo and take Claire and modify it so it can accommodate this use case. But it really didn't fall into the grander mission and picture. And so we decided not to pursue it. That opportunity.

And I think that kind of speaks to what you're asking, like, as long as it fits into our overarching mission, I think we're, we're willing to give it a try and look, not every client is going to have the same problems. And so. Really, every time you work with a client, there are some niche use cases that appear or some modifications that have to occur.

But generally speaking, I think they all follow the same theme.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: You mentioned over time, like you're Claire, you said that kind of, Almost slid under on label a little bit, that might not be your words, but , as Matthew keeps spewing stuff out, some things might merge a little bit and twist.

Areo: Yeah. One thing I didn't mention actually, is that Claire is kind of like our foundational model and all labels were born out of Claire. And so Claire actually, beyond just being that clinical reference and clinical database, it's also a co-pilot that lives Within all of our infrastructure and we're really putting a deep focus on those generative AI opportunities within all of our infrastructure.

And so, today, if you were to use one dash, there are various points within one, which is something we recently introduced where the clear logo will appear in various components of the platform. Indicating there's an opportunity to use a generative AI function, and so Claire is living as a co-pilot and helping automate and create efficiencies within all of our infrastructure.

And so generally speaking, we have a handful of differentiators and I would say within the pharmacy space, that focus on generative AI is a very big one. I'll say that many times because I think it's super important, not just in pharmacy and all verticals and we're putting a lot of weight into it.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Claire can be your Rufus with just a lot better name, 

Areo: That's right. It's a nice acronym, 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: yeah, must have ran out of those,

Areo: I wonder if Rufus is actually an acronym. We're just not aware. Maybe it is.

Yeah. So Claire is an acronym for clinical AI reference. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Did you make it as an Alexa name in that? So you could call on

Claire.

Areo: that's

right. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: cool. Very cool. 

So Ario, at some point in the career of this I imagine starting with carrying RX, When was the choice to bring in investors? Was it in your game plan before you even got the name carry Rx? Was it later? What were the investment choices along the way?

Areo: Yeah, so, I mean, getting CarryRx off the ground did require capital, and so we primarily raised for the company as a whole only seed capital. And so CarryRx itself initially. We raise enough money, mostly from friends and family so that we can get off the ground and, just launch a business, prove it out.

And this was, we started working on CarrierX itself in 2015. it took longer than expected, of course, to get all of our permits and pharmacy licenses and everything else. So while we launched the concepts of, or really I should say, we started working on the concepts, And coding it, et cetera.

In 2000, late 2015, we weren't able to launch until July of 2017. So digital pharmacy was still. New, like delivering prescriptions to someone's door through a mobile app when we first started kicking around this idea was not a common thing. I mean, I should say that delivering prescriptions was a common thing, but through a mobile app experience, it was not common, right?

On demand, someone's home through a mobile app experience DoorDash and Grubhub and all these different services were on the rise. Prescriptions necessarily weren't on the tech side of things. The tech spotlight yet from that perspective. So we were really trying to prove out the model, make it almost a proof of concept and launch that MVP in DC and figure it out.

And I think through that initial launch. We kind of proved to ourselves that it wasn't something scalable. And so it required us to 

then pivot to what we now have.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: When you talk about the capital, the seed capital, have you already given Percentages of your business away? Or is there an agreement that you can buy that back once you get going, are there differences of that?

Areo: Yeah. I mean, when you're starting a company, there's a whole lot of ways to raise capital, you can do convertible notes, you can do a safe one criminal note, being dead and safe, technically not being a debt instrument. And it's not always common to do a price round. So in other words, selling shares at that early stage of everything that we raised because it was seed capital was either a safe or a convertible note.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: It's like a loan from these people versus you giving part of the company.

Areo: That's right. But the idea is for their generosity of investing is for them to convert into equity in the future. So SAFE itself stands for simple agreement for future equity. And so the idea is that they're going to take part of the upside. they're essentially investing in it.

And of course, there are different triggers and ways for them to get their money back if they want, or for you to pay them, but at the end of the day, they invested and you want them to see the upside and own a piece of the

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: What was your path to gaining the knowledge to start that as far as learning about how to go outside yourself and not grassroot it yourself? 

Areo: That's a good question. And let me think back to those days. It's been some years now, but I was fortunate enough to have friends around me that were entrepreneurs and people that advised me to help me get on my way. And I'm also fortunate to be in DC that has a great tech scene and a lot of supportive entrepreneurs here who helped me, Learned the ins and outs of raising capital.

And so, as an example, my partner Nima was there to really help, guide the path forward and ensure that we were on the right journey as far as capital raising. Nima himself raised,

I think it was a hundred million roughly plus.

Matthew: Yeah, just under, over series A and B, and I think they've probably busted that now from subsequent raises, but the large ones were at the start.

Areo: Yeah. So, Nima had extensive fundraising history himself with Connecticut and they've raised capital from various investors. So that was obviously super helpful. But I'd like to say I got an MBA by fire, so I really had to just dig in there and learn the ins and outs of bookkeeping, finance fundraising, et cetera, et cetera.

So, there was a lot of self learning involved.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: What was your biggest stumble in that? If you could redo something?

Areo: Oh, that's a really good question. 

 I'm sure there were plenty of stumbles along the way, but you know, I have this knack for being extremely transparent. And so I think I don't want to say this is something I would change, but I think when you're fundraising, sometimes you have to sell a big picture.

And oftentimes the people that raise the biggest rounds are sort of, they're selling the vision and not necessarily touching on all the negatives, but I always remember Warren Buffett touching on how he approaches his. Earnings calls and with his investors, he's like, I'm just always blunt and transparent.

And I'm like, you know what? The only way I know how to operate is to be truthful and transparent. And so I think that can be to your detriment sometimes when you're raising funds, but so be it. We still operate the same way. And when we're working with our investors, we let them know risks.

We let them know the negatives, start off investor updates with wins, losses. And I think. When you're raising a seed round company that has no revenue, being extremely transparent can sometimes hurt your ability to raise funds. I don't know if I'd necessarily change it, but I think that maybe was

a stumbling 

block early on. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: And it depends what 

your long game is, is it a year or two? Is it a long time? Because I agree. I don't see doing it any other way. It seems to me.

Areo: I agree. I think transparency will win in the long run. But outside of that, I guess you could say, something we stumbled on was the original idea and just the lack of margin there. But, 

Areo: I think we were able to rebound on that pretty quickly 

and obviously get to a better place.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: In DC Is there any place you'd rather be than DC? I know you hear about Silicon Valley, and then you hear about other places. There's others popping up besides that, maybe Minnesota or something like that.

 Are you in the best spot you think you can be?

Areo: I mean, I think personally for myself, I have a big network. I've been here for so long. I grew up here. I went to school here. The entire founding team went to University of Maryland. And so we were fortunate to get support from a lot of different people to help us along the way. I've even been involved with, you know, University of Maryland, College Park with some entrepreneurial programs they have.

So I mean, I like DC and I think it's a great place to start a company. It's also a great place to find talent. There's a lot of great universities in the area that can feed into local businesses and companies. And obviously Amazon's here for a there's a lot of talent and a great but there's a lot of great places to start a company.

So I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. There's a lot of great tech hubs, but DC is actually I think a larger tech hub and people realize, and it's routinely in the top 10 for funds raised. For exits and VC dollars, et cetera. So, it's a great place to start a company.

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: I lost track of that. Amazon. I never associated them with DC. forgot where they were based,

Areo: yeah, it's right over the bridge on the other side of the river in Pentagon City so right in Virginia, Northern

Virginia.

And that's where HQ two is. So their second headquarters

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Oh, that's it. Where was their first one?

Areo: They are in Seattle, I'm not 

mistaken. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: there you go. That's why it wasn't connecting for me because I know Grand Rapids was in the, well, I don't know, at least according to our people, they were in the running. There were like five or six places. That was like. Two or three years ago, they were thinking of their next headquarters. I think,

Areo: That's right. Yeah. I think New York, and I believe New York actually initially was selected and then they reversed the decision. There's protests, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, there, there was a handful of cities 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: That's right. That's right. Now that I remember that. 

 so guys, our listeners a lot of pharmacists, entrepreneurs, people interested in business, what's the best way they can help you

Areo: I'll go first and I'll let Matt pitch in, but I think the easiest thing to do is check out Clare askclare. ai, give us feedback. We are moving towards giving it to students, whether they're pharmacy, medical, dental, giving it to students for free. We'd love feedback on that. If anyone has any channels to help us distribute the students, we'd love to hear from them.

But you know, generally speaking, I'm happy to chat with anyone in the industry who's working for companies like science companies, payers. Health systems, et cetera. If you're not happy with your current clinical reference product, talk to us we're here to work with you and roll out interesting use cases using Claire.

Matthew: I think just to build on Aria's answer, the easiest way to interact with us is through Ask Claire. It's a service that anyone can try and interact with. I'd love to hear your feedback have a contact form on there. You can submit feedback on the quality of the answer, the usefulness of references.

I'd love to get feedback and hear what people think of it 

out there. 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Well, golly guys, thank you. First of all, you have to dumb things down for me. I appreciate your patience, but it was cool to learn all that stuff. 

Open and honest. And that shows forth in what you shared with us. So best wishes to you guys. And I look forward to seeing how things progress.

Areo: Thank you, Mike. Much appreciated. And don't sell yourself short. I think it's obvious, you know, what you're talking about. So

Matthew: You definitely do. 

Areo: good questions 

Mike Koelzer, Host 9/11: Well, Norm Macdonald, you remember Norm. He was a

comedian. Norm was always like, people don't like, the, I think Dennis Miller was a friend of his , but he says people don't like to be. If you are the dumbest guy in the room you're going to go places.

So that I'll take that spot. So, all right, guys, thank you very much.

Areo: Thanks, Mike.

Matthew: Thank

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