Hi everybody. Hi Charlie. Welcome to Gillette, Wyoming. Most of you are residents, and some have come as far as Singapore, France, the UK, and all around the world. It's a special place, and it's a special time. First off, it didn't rain. How about that? Yesterday, I saw the torrential downpours and thought, "Oh no, this is going to be bad." But it's just a beautiful day, and it's a perfect day.
We thought a lot about how we were going to open this facility because it's enormous. It's 60,000 square feet added on to 10,000 square feet. If you know your Gillette, many of you remember the Skyline Grill. It was about 4,000 square feet and was on septic. We dug a sewer line out here, which took 18 months. We had to redo all the power and water, pour thousands of cubic yards of concrete, but we made it with love over the last few years. When we started with the flagship, it looked huge. Within six months, we said, "Gosh, this place is so small. We need to keep growing because we grow. We're up to 40 providers."
If you see our handout here, they're right at the front if you want to do a tour. You can see all the different people who have signed up to take care of you in this community and do amazing things. We also own a construction company, a contracting firm, Hoskinson Contracting. So we said, instead of waiting until the entire clinic was 100% done with all the finishes and artwork, it would be really cool to take people on a tour and show them how the sausage is made.
The reality is that this building was built in nine months. We went from planning all the way to dirt work and concrete being poured in the foundation during the middle of winter, and boy, winters out here are tough. We got those walls up and poured 5 million pounds of concrete over steel deck firewalls up 18 feet high, with rock walls in every single wall, drywall level five finish, and dazzo floors—all in nine months. That was because a lot of people at Hoskinson Contracting worked overtime. They put in so many hours and so much effort to get this done. In fact, some of this concrete was just poured three days ago. We had to call a guy in Oklahoma to figure out the mix because we said, "We can't put stuff on it." Oh no, no. We got this super mix that will strengthen in three days. The cylinder crushed at 3200 PSI in three days. Pretty happy about that.
What we've constructed here is a hundred-year building. This is something that will be here in the next century. When I think about it, I can't help but remember Rochester, Minnesota. A lot of people have heard about Mayo Clinic. It's one of the best clinics in the world. The rich people go there. The Cubans go there when they get sick. But it didn't start that way. It started in 1890 with St. Mary's Hospital. Does anybody know the population in Rochester back then? There were about 5,000 people. Gillette, Wyoming, is seven times larger in the metropolitan area than that little town where Mayo Clinic started. The town grew around it, becoming a destination that brought billions of dollars into the economy, hired tens of thousands of people, and conducted some of the greatest medical research mankind has ever known.
That's the vision and the dream. That's why we took so much effort and love when we put this building together and made it a hundred-year building. We didn't have to build it that way. We didn't have to put rock walls in every wall. We didn't have to put an Infinity Room from Japan in it. We didn't have to put a Godzilla diorama in it, which is coming in a few months. That guy's taking his time. We didn't have to do any of those things. We did it because we wanted it to be here generationally. When you see it, your kids will see it, their kids will see it, and they will all have good memories and do great things here.
Another thing that's so special about this building is we wanted to broadcast the vision to great providers. When we first started, everybody said, "How the heck are you going to get some of the best doctors in the world to come out to Gillette, Wyoming?" I said, "Oh, that's going to be the least of our concerns." And guess what? Just a few years later, we have people like Dr. Devon. I poached him from Cleveland Clinic out in Abu Dhabi. He's an ophthalmologist, and his job was to operate on the royal family. Anytime they had a problem, they'd buy another piece of equipment—million dollars here, million dollars there—and left that thriving metropolis to come here to be with all of you and be part of this story. There are so many more like him who have chosen to make their home in Gillette and bring their families here. Your doctor lives here. He doesn't just fly here; he lives here. She lives here. Your nurse lives here. Your provider lives here. They’re part of this community. They care about you. They want you to be healthy.
So, why did we start it? I was getting tired of medicine. My family's been in it for 70 years. When you come to the second grand opening, when all the finishes are in, we're going to have beautiful pictures, some of which will be of my grandfather who graduated from medical school in the 1950s. He did his residency to become an OBGYN down in the Panama Canal Zone. That's how long ago it was. He opened up practice from Montana over to Hawaii. That's where I got this lay from. The Hawaiian roots of the family started in the 1970s. For 70 years, the family's been in medicine.
What we've seen is that medicine has transformed a lot. It changed as a field. It used to be about curing people. If you had something wrong with you, you went to your doctor, and what did your doctor do? He fixed you. He cured you. But now, when you go to your doctor, they give you a pill. They give you something to treat it, but it doesn't fix it. It doesn't cure it. It just lingers and lingers. There are so many people over the age of 50 who are laden with many comorbidities on dozens of drugs, and every day is just a little worse than the day before. I don't think anybody goes through the hell of medical school and residency to say, "Boy, I cannot wait to tell a patient there's nothing I can do for you." I don't think a single person signed up for that. But that's the system we have today in the United States of America.
On America's birthday, I'll remind you all that it's the best country in the world. Why are we spending so much and getting so little? There's something broken about it. A lot of people will try to tell you that a politician in DC is going to solve that problem for you. But here's the thing: America was never built by somebody else solving the problem. America was built by people getting so tired of the problem that they fixed it themselves. And that's what we're doing here.
The purpose of this clinic, above and beyond being a bastion of public health, is to focus on cures instead of treatments. We want to actually cure your diabetes and your cancer, cure your arthritis. We want to fix the problems that are there. So there's a huge research focus to what we do. We have Dr. Sanjay Dar. We poached him from the University of California, Irvine, and he's building up a great team of scientists. He's your chief scientist, and we've already started a stem cell program. Not bad ones, the good ones—the adult ones that come from your fat. I got a lot of them, and that's okay because we can take them out, replicate them, and once we clean them up and put them back in, we can make you younger and fix your problems. That's just one of many things that we're researching.
We built this place as a research hub in addition to being a bastion of clinical excellence with amazing practitioners. You're going to see a lot of amazing people—MDs and PhDs. The MD side means they can fix you as a physician. The PhD side means they can read the research papers and know where the world is going over the next 10, 20, or 30 years. In addition to that, we have a supercomputer inside this clinic. This is one of the few places in the entire United States that will be a clinical research hub for artificial intelligence. We're really excited about that.
The first thing we’re going to get for some of the people on the tours is to see the MRI. We have the most advanced MRI in the state. It's a Magnetom from Siemens. We worked with them for about two years to get it here. It's a three Tesla MRI. It's like high-def of high-def of high-def. It makes all other MRIs look inferior. Honestly, you just can't go back. But beyond the fact that it takes great raw pictures, the first thing you do to a picture is AI enhance it. That supercomputer, with a petabyte of storage and terabytes of RAM, uses those new AI upgrades to upscale it. We get better pictures than Johns Hopkins or Mayo Clinic. So when that clinic opens, that system will be running, and we can use it for everybody here. It's the same for pathology and all of our radiology.
But that's just the beginning. Every single doctor is going to have a co-pilot. Every single nurse is going to have a co-pilot that never gets tired, that cares only about you, that knows your entire medical history, and can read all the charts and scan through them every single day. It will ask, "Is there a new treatment? Is there a new cure? Is there something better? Are you on the right drugs? And even if you are on the right drugs, is the dosage right? Is the frequency right? Is there something better we can do for you?"
Here's the thing: Medicine's too complicated now. There are too many things going on, too many papers coming out, too many changes, and doctors aren't paid to keep up with all these things. In the modern medical system, some physicians see 30 patients a day. How can you give high-quality care to 30 people a day when you only get to talk to them for 10, 15, or 20 minutes? You're supposed to read the chart, call their care team—the cardiologist, the nephrologist, the pulmonologist. You're supposed to know their history, read through 10, 20, 30, or 40 years of history in 15 or 20 minutes, and make a decision. You can't do it. That's why healthcare has fallen apart in America. We incentivize the wrong things, pay for the wrong things, and don't give the providers the right tools.
So, another thing that we did here, above and beyond being a bastion of research excellence, is to add AI into it and make all of our physicians better. AI has unlimited patience and unlimited time. In just a split second, it can look at 40 years of history and know everything about you, reminding your doctor if they're about to make a mistake. It can remind your provider that maybe they should prescribe a different drug or what journal article to read or what's relevant to your cure.
Now, it will start slow, but as the years go by, it will become superhuman in capability. This means we can provide better care, faster care, and, most importantly, it will be easier for us to coordinate with care teams. As you get older, you need more people involved in keeping you healthy. It's important that everybody's on the same team, rowing in the same direction, and taking care of you with the same incentive model.
That's another thing that Gillette, Wyoming, is doing. We've already started wiring in research labs at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Athens, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Some of those AI researchers are now collaborating with people here in this thriving metropolis, Gillette, Wyoming, to figure out how to get all this done. It will become a regional hub. Not just Gillette, but we’ll start serving the broader community. The radius, just like Mayo, will grow more and more. As it grows, the clinic will keep getting bigger. We'll keep building more buildings.
You might not know this, but I bought that UPS building over there. It's not going to survive long; we're building something else out there. As we continue to build up, we'll create more jobs and more opportunities for the economy, and we're going to bring a lot of great people in here. What makes me most proud is that we're already starting to cure things. Our mental health program has a depression cure that gets rid of your depression 45-50% of the time just using magnets. It's FDA approved and called a transcranial magnetic stimulation device. Who would have thought? The stem cells are the same. It's just amazing.
Every year I come up here, it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's incredible to meet the amazing people and be part of this community while keeping it growing. The fact that we got to build it with our own construction company means that everything in this building was placed by us—every panel, every window, every bag of concrete, every piece of wood. We made it with love and a lot of pride. It’s who we are, and that created hundreds of jobs. As we keep building, we’ll keep growing and changing.
What makes America great is all of you. I was poor 10 years ago. I didn't have anything. I lived in a small apartment, living paycheck to paycheck. I said, "I'm going to be an entrepreneur." Everybody thought I was crazy. It turned out I did some good stuff. I am crazy, but you know what? After these 10 long years, I look at all of you and say, "You're the same as me. You just have to have a dream, and you just have to care about people."
People ask me, "Why Gillette?" I always respond, "Why not Gillette?" This is how America is made—places just like this, people just like you. You just have to start with a vision. You just have to start with a dream. You get a lot of good people in, bring them together, and eventually, if you get enough of them, you can get these things done.
Ten years from now, this is going to be a thriving medical metropolis. We're going to cure a lot of things—many cancers, many conditions. Ten more years from now, this is probably going to be the best healthcare center in the entire United States. Ten more years, probably the best one in the entire world. When people hear about Gillette, they'll say, "You mean that place with that amazing health center?" And you know what? You're all part of this now. You were here for the opening, for the first flagship, for the second one. This is part of your community for all time.
It's a hundred-year building. I'll be long gone, and this thing will still be around, just like Mayo Clinic in Rochester. So, I built it for all of you. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you love it as much as we did. We have a second grand opening this year when it's all finished. In the interim, do hug your construction workers because they put in a lot of work to get this done, and we wanted to celebrate them as much as possible. If we could all just give Hoskinson Contracting a hand—they went through hell. They were out there when it was -40, and the birds were falling out and shattering on the ground. They were out there in the rain, trying to get this done. Some of them worked at night in double shifts. It was pretty magical to see how much progress they made every time I came up. They did it because they wanted this moment here, and they wanted to show you their skill, talent, and passion. Almost all of them are from this community, so now every time they drive by, they can say, "You know what? I built that. I was part of the history of this town."
So, I love you all. Thank you for coming. We have a lot of free food. If you haven't had a chance to take a tour, please do. It's pretty amazing, and this is just the beginning. Cheers. [Applause]
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