The dawn of surgery bots + buy a home for $250 (w/ Andromeda & Mogul) | E2313

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Syndicates, something that's worked incredibly well, allowing a group of people to act as one unit to buy an asset. People want to buy into single-family rental properties.

**Alex Blackwood** (0:10)
Real estate, as we know, is the world's largest wealth generator. 90% of millionaires became such through real estate investment. The idea is buying shares in a single-family rental home, because it's completely headache-free.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:22)
What is the goal of your investors? They want to get 10, 15% back every year in a dividend, or they want to get the appreciation.

**Alex Blackwood** (0:31)
The assets typically yield between 8 to 12% per year for dividend payout. That's dollars that you can withdraw tomorrow.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:38)
How do you make money?

**Alex Blackwood** (0:39)
How do we at Mogul make money, we're saying?

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:42)
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Hello and welcome back to Twist. This is Alex. Now, have you read the books in the Expanse series or seen the show? One of my favorite parts of it is whenever they get hurt, they get shot, they get irradiated, whatever it is, they go back to their ship and they put their hand and arm into a little device and it fixes them. I've always thought that was a beautiful vision of the future. No matter what's wrong with you, there's this machine that can put you back together again. Now, we're a long way from that today. If you go into the doctor today, it's a person. If you get some surgery done, probably also a person and on down the healthcare chain. But there are companies right now working on building us towards a more robotic and more autonomous healthcare future, including in the realm of surgery. Now, that will either delight you or terrify you, but I wanted to learn more about where the technology is today and how quickly it's advancing. So please join me in welcoming to the show. It's Nick Damiano, the CEO and co-founder of Andromeda Surgical. Nick, how are you?

**Nick Damiano** (2:12)
Doing well. Great to be here.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:13)
I forgot to ask before we started, are you a science fiction fan?

**Nick Damiano** (2:16)
I am.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:16)
That intro is perfect for you. Let's start by defining where the company is going. You said on LinkedIn that, surgery is currently almost untouched by AI, but in 10 years, AI and autonomy will be ubiquitous. So paint that picture for me. Where are we going to be in a decade? And then I want to go back to where we are now.

**Nick Damiano** (2:34)
Yeah. I mean, like a lot of labor in the world, surgeons are going to be totally transformed by AI in the next decade.
Right now, surgery is way behind where it really should be in terms of where we are, in terms of tech. So we're somewhere between, to use a driving analogy, the horse and buggy era and the car era now. There's not really much autonomy happening at all. Whereas for driving, of course, we have Tesla, Waymo, and others deploying autonomous cars on roads now. So we're taking surgery to that point, where it's going to be mostly autonomous. Surgeons will still have a job and a role to play, but a lot of it's going to be done by AI.

**Alex Wilhelm** (3:13)
So now, you guys currently have a system that involves an iPad app in Doscobie. So we have a camera, we can look and see where we are. You work with surgeons, so it's kind of surgeon-mediated. And there's also a robotic arm doing some of the work.
It might be better if you do explain kind of what the current Andromeda system is, and then what procedures it can kind of currently tackle.

**Nick Damiano** (3:33)
Yeah, so it is a robot that's controlled by an iPad. The robot is fairly simple. It's an off-the-shelf arm. We don't want to be a company that builds lots of complex hardware. The exciting part is really in the software. And so what's happening on the iPad is the important part.
We are starting with urology with this procedure called wholepits for BPH or enlarged prostate, something that almost every man gets at some point in life. And then we're expanding from there into other urology and then a lot of other surgical procedures where this can be a general platform doing most types of surgery eventually.