Mick Ebeling: Founder of Not Impossible
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Recently 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 and listed as one of the world’s most influential creative people by The Creativity 50’s, Mick Ebeling has sparked a movement of pragmatic, inspirational innovation. As a career producer and filmmaker and now founder and CEO of Not Impossible, Ebeling harvests the power of technology and story to change the world.
Ebeling founded Not Impossible, a multiple award-winning social innovation lab and production company, on the premise that nothing is impossible. His mantra of “commit, then figure it out” allows him to convene a disparate team of hackers, doers, makers and thinkers to create devices that better the world by bringing accessibility for all.
Named one of Wired’s ‘Agents of Change’, a two-time SXSW innovation of the year award winner, a two-time Tribeca Disruptor innovation winner, a fellow with The Nantucket Project, and recipient of every major creative and advertising award, Ebeling is on a mission to provide “Technology for the Sake of Humanity.”
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S01E04 Mick Ebeling v2.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe
Welcome to the Enabled Disabled podcast. I'm your host, Gustavo Serafini. I was born with a rare physical disability called PFG. My journey has been about self acceptance, persistence and adaptation. On the show, we'll explore how people experience disability. Other stories we tell ourselves can both enable and disable. Our vulnerability is the foundation for strength and why people with disabilities can contribute more than we imagined. I hope that leaders, companies, clinicians, families and friends will better understand our capacity to contribute to the world and help enable us to improve it.
Mick Ebeling is a force of nature, is the founder of Not Impossible Lives, and has been named one of the top 50 leaders in the US by Forbes magazine. Making his team start with the absurdities of the world kind of problems most people think are impossible. Then they get to work on solving it for one person at a time. Mixed ability to bring teams together to problem solve is remarkable. I've never met anyone like him and I wanted to find out how he became such an amazing problem solver and talk about some of his most current work.
If there's one takeaway I hope you have, it's this. The next time you're stuck. Feeling like you'll never figure it out, please remember this episode. Nothing is impossible forever. If you're enjoying this podcast. Please leave us a good rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever platform it is that you're listening to your podcast on. Thank you so much.
So, Mick, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I would love to start talking a little bit about and move. You have a phenomenal quote on your website, The absurd is born between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. So are you a fan? Do you read KOMU or did this, quote just happen to resonate with you?
So that is the first time anyone has opened any conversation with me with a quote. And I am I already can tell this is going to be a phone conversation. So I began my my infatuation with KOMU and French existentialism in college where I think I just. Accidentally took a class. There was no preconceived thought I had transferred out of the Air Force Academy into UC Santa Barbara, so my priority was to just have as much fun as possible, take as easy classes as possible, because I had just come out of just the grill of the just the grind of the Air Force and a military education.
And so I had this class and it was called like French three three. And I read it, but I took it and it was French for French existentialism. And so I was at a deep dove with this all disheveled. He came in every day with a shirt that looked like he had pulled it out of the hamper. It was wrinkled. He you know, he spoke perfect. He was English as American, but he spoke perfect French. And one of the things where he would win when someone knows French and today they look for opportunities to throw a French word in, but pronounce it perfectly like that kind of personality.
And he was he was this old guy was charming. And I remember just getting sucked into this class and it being like one of my favorite classes I've ever taken. I actually still keep I kept all of my notes and all the books from it. And so that's when I was first exposed to KOMU and Jean-Paul Sartre and other French existentialists and the the opening line for the stranger. My mother died yesterday or my brother died today or was it yesterday?
Was this my first kind of delving into this whole concept of nihilism and existentialism? And so full stop. I've always had kind of a passion around KOMU. Fast forward to about a year or so ago that quote was unearthed by my managing director, Adam Doyle, and he showed that to me. And it was just like thought because I was already a Camu fanboy and that quote is just so representative of not only our sentiment, it's not impossible, but also we use the word absurd a lot that's very much in our vernacular.
And so we just nailed it once again. So it kind of restarted my love affair.
Interesting. I mean, so. I wasn't expecting that, but that's phenomenal. So you're coming off and you dove deep into existentialism and nihilism, and yet you taken this unbelievably optimistic view of it, right? Most people read Camu Sartre. They get depressed or they're just like, yeah, it's all absurd. Anyways, what? We can't do anything right. It's just it's just this absurd existence that we're just happen to be actors in this play. And you said, like, you know.
I know. That's not my interpretation of it at all, when you come up against the absurd. We stand up and we do something about it.
Yeah, I think if a lot of my philosophy, I think, is the love child of a lot of different things that I have read or been exposed to over the years and. And ran or and ran, depending on where your school of thought had a book called The Virtue of Selfishness that I read after I had dived into The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and her political views aside, I think the stories of someone who just remains true to who they are really was inspiring to me.
It's inspiring to lots of people. I'm not I'm not novel in that regard. But her virtue of selfishness was about this concept of the fact that selfishness and altruism are actually the the reverse meanings. And we. To be selfish. Is to do things that make yourself feel good and the act of doing good, the act of actually standing up for another human being, the act of putting yourself out there for the benefit of another person is actually the most selfish thing that you can do now.
It's a play on semantics and words, but I think that's how I have taken the my interpretation of existentialism. And that ism is is. If you're going to if you're going to be here, why not do as much good as you can? Because that is essentially the most. And and Adrianne's opinion and her book, the the most selfish thing that you could do would be to serve other people.
And when did that when did that? But like, hit you for the first time where you said, you know what? I want to I'm going to take this leap and I'm going to go do this, like when was that moment where where it just happened, where it clicked?
I mean, I think. It has been a progression of my upbringing by parents who are incredibly philanthropic, Jesuit education, I think was incredibly influential on me. So I don't know if there was this this moment where my mentality shifted. I do know the moment that not impossible was was born, that that concept, the philosophy of not impossible was born. But I think that this kind of who I am as a person has just been a general evolution.
OK, but what was there, and I think that's a great answer, that there was this process, but this this sense of optimism that you have this I'm calling it relentless optimism, because in the face of all these seemingly impossible challenges, you're just stepping up and doing something about it anyways. Was this something that you was this motivated by your parents growing up? Was this something that you also it was part of your personality anyways? Like where did this how did this mix kind of evolve?
I think we are the. The grand sum total of our life's experiences, and I think that in my childhood and the parents that I had combined with the Jesuit education combined with that was this with someone the other day? I was in the Air Force for two years and I truly mastered the art of beating a system when I was in the Air Force because I didn't want to abide by a lot of the rules. And so I figured out how to beat the system.
And I actually got I was really, really good at it until the very end. And then I got caught and then I just got absolutely crushed. At the end of my freshman year after they realized I had had basically subverted their entire system of breaking people down and then building them up and making them learn things that I had just just beat that. I think that that that taught me like, wow, you can actually beat systems that are pretty rigorous and pretty entrenched.
And what if you started to I think that kind of planted the seed of like what if you started to build systems or what if you started to beat systems that oppressed people or or status quo is that that kept people down in some capacity. So.
But you did so OK, but to you, you took that knowledge of how to how to do that, and what was the key moment from you that started? Not impossible, but like, what was that what was that moment of clarity that you said, you know what? My purpose has now shifted the.
Are you familiar with the writer and the story of the writer? And so I was exposed to a paralyzed graffiti artist. He his story stirred something up in me. I was appalled at the absurdity that this gentleman had been lying motionless in a bed for seven years, unable to talk, unable to communicate, and without the access to the basic technology that other people with total paralysis had because he didn't have the right health insurance and the right parents have the right income level.
So I said, that's ridiculous, that's absurd. And ended up bringing a team together in this house and people pushed the tables and chairs against the wall. We slept on the floors and hacked and programed for about two and a half weeks and came up with a device that was made of cheap sunglasses for the Venice Beach boardwalk or coathanger zip ties, duct tape and a Web camera. And we wrote code so that he could put this these glasses on.
And by moving his eyes back and forth, Web camera would track the people of his eye. That would move the cursor around the screen, that would allow him to draw again. And so the act of doing that was kind of the this it was there was no strategy. There was no grand master plan. It was just how can we help this one person? We did it. It worked. He drew again. Everybody laughed, everybody cried.
Everybody went out to party and drink and celebrate afterwards. And then we all went home. And there was no preconceived strategy of what we would do with this afterwards, except for just make it better for the artist. And then we woke up one day and it was Time magazine's top 50 Inventions of the Year permanent collection at the MoMA press and interviews and things from all over the world. And we went, whoa, whoa, what just happened here?
That wasn't what we expected and. That started this debate within myself. Should I continue doing this, should I not continue doing this and this, meaning using technology to help people? And how do you use technology as a means to address problems in the world and then try to hack and make and create a program and convene bringing people together to try to solve them? And I decided not to have to thinking and praying and sleeping on it. I decided not to.
And I just said, let me go back to my day job. I'll enjoy this Andy Warhol, 15 minutes of fame. But I'm going to just ride this one out and I'm going to go back to my day job. And then I got an email from the artist temped and he said, that's the first time I'd done anything for seven years. I feel like I've been held underwater. And someone finally reached out and pulled my head up so I could take a breath.
And what I mean, what do you do if you get an email like that and someone says something so that I whenever I look back, I look back at that was the moment that not Impossible Labs was born. That was the origin of that possible labs. We had no idea where we were going to do or how it was going to play out. But that was the moment that it was born.
How can you not do it after that email? Right. So. I'm really fascinated by. If we go back to the temp story, right, you just you pull this team together and in two and a half weeks, you innovated something incredible. What did that like in your mind? I know you have a background in production. How did you how did you conceive of like who are we going to bring? How am I going to get these people here in time?
How am I going to convince everybody to do it? And then what is that iteration process going to look like? What was that what was that like for you?
I mean, I think part of what we do well, as we convene brilliant people together who are united around a common cause and the common cause was how do we help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again? And then part of it is just creating the space for brilliance to happen and not futzing with it too much. So, I mean, part of my job was and part of my job as a producer is to bring people together to convince people to to challenge people when they feel like their stock to prod and poke.
But it's a lot of us just get it out of the way and let let the brilliance take place and then jump in when as paths are going down to kind of bring it back over into it. So I kind of see myself in a lot of these things as the originator of the end goal and the idea. And then I just have to make sure that we get to that final outcome. But the in-between becomes more. I just got to make a lot of a lot of pasta and have a lot of cold beer in the in between to get us to that final place.
I think I'm sure there's much there's much more to it than that because. Clearly so I mean, I don't say this to many people, like I'm an entrepreneur. I never went to work for anybody. You're one of the first people that I have read about, seen or heard who I would say like in a heartbeat I would go work for Mick.
That's very kind of you.
You have the ability and I see it with the Project Daniel story to right where you brought in that carpenter who had made fingers for himself. And not only did he come help you, but he taught you everything that he knew about 3D printing. So you are inspiring a type of generosity in people like I don't know what to call it, but you're inspiring a generosity in people. That to me is astounding that very few people have the ability to do so.
I'm just trying to, you know, pick your brain. It's like, how are you? Like, how are you doing this? What's the what's the or maybe it's just you being you, but it's it's working and it's amazing.
I appreciate that. I'm honored that you would say something like that and. Thank you.
OK, you're welcome. You're very welcome. I think it's an incredible I think an incredible thing. I think your clarity of purpose is amazing, that idea of help one person help many. And that seems to be happening with every project that you're taking on. Right. It's just a consistent it's a consistent theme. How do you choose who you're helping?
I mean, the help one help many becomes that unifier and that that focus for the team and what we do and how we do it. The selection of who we decide to help has it started off as it was completely generated internally, like the people who were working with me or a team, we would we would kind of come to those conclusions. Now, what we've really tried to do is to try to expand that out and make it so that we've launched an initiative called or a kind of a strategy a couple of years back called Not Impossible by others.
And so we did a podcast. And then after the podcast, we did the Non Impossible Awards in the manner possible. In both of those were about celebrating other people who were making the impossible, not impossible. And then we launched a project called Absurdity Project and Absurdity Projects, by the way, podcast. But both the podcast and the Non Impossible Awards, you can you can check out on our website at Not Impossible. So we did it this year.
We had to go virtual. So we recorded that. And you can see that on the. But then we launched this absurdity project, which was about how do you crowdsource things that are absurd and B, have one person associated with that absurdity. So we would ask the question, what's absurd and who is the one? And in doing that and it just opened up the floodgates to this. This perspective on things that you know. Gustavo knows what Gustavo knows, Fais knows what faith knows me, knows it, man knows this.
There's no judgment in that. It's just I live in Venice Beach where you, Gustavo and South Florida.
So you together in South for Latin affairs and in Boston, outside of Boston. So we know what we see, what we're exposed to, the colors, the flavors, the smells, the sounds that influences what affects us. Right. Well. We are. That's if you don't if that's only what you're exposed to, then ultimately if we only focus on the absurdities that we're solving, it's only going to be kind of a Southern California Venice Beach mentality.
So when we started to reach out to other people and ask them what's absurd and who is your one, then all of a sudden the gloves came off. And that's how we got some of the the latest things that we've been working on from Project Bishop to our initiative that we're working on around cognitive decline through traumatic brain injury or dementia or Alzheimer's. Like there's different things that that kind of come into play that we wouldn't have we wouldn't have contemplated had we not gone out and inquired and asked other people about that.
Can you talk a little bit more about those latest projects? And I'd like to learn more.
Sure. Project I mean, Project Bishop was one that we did in partnership with Zappos. Incredible guy there by name of Tyler Tyler Williams, who you guys should think about having on your show. He's an amazing human being. And he believed in he believes he's a massive believer in what we do and how we do it. And he said, let's let's launch an absurdity project here, interviewed a bunch of people at the company after I gave a big speech to at their all hands.
People submitted ideas. We added we put them all on the table and picked them out, then whittled down and eventually chose. There's a guy by the name of Javon who had a friend named Justin and Justin, and he grew up skating. And then Justin stopped coming around and Justin was like he was on a hard trajectory of possibly competing at the highest level. And Justin came down with or struck down with retinitis pigmentosa. So he lost his vision and that vision.
Then the loss of vision stopped him from skateboarding. And so the absurdity was, from Japan's perspective, was I have a friend who loves to skateboard, who's incredibly good at it, but he can't do it because he lost his vision. And is there a way for us to to empower him to get back out and to be able to compete again? And so we we I mean, being in Venice Beach, I skateboard, my kids skateboard. One of our pandemic projects this year was to build a half pipe in our backyard to.
To kind of be able to buy our time during quarantine and we decided to try to figure this one out and so rinse and repeat, bring a bunch of people together, start to pack a program and figure out a way. And ultimately we crafted a way that was. That was something that would be creating audio delineations and audio spaces that someone who can't see would be able to interpret and understand what their environment looked like, look like our environment was by no having audio cues around that space.
And so that's what we created. We created these sound arrays that would send that would have these kind of beeping noises and those beeping noises where we're very focused. So they would just go down in a very confined amount of space so that it's not typically sound is like this. And you can hear it anywhere. Well, when you put multiple speakers next to each other, this crazy thing happens where it focuses. The sound, so it goes very straight, so if you hear is the sound and you're hear you can't hear it, but as you cross over it, you hear it.
And so that would create those delineations around the space. So we did it. We took it to him and he went bonkers. Bonkers. He was he already was incredibly talented. But this kind of opened up his horizons of what he could do and what he could say. And and for us, that's a that's a wonderful, simple idea that we hope that these ideas, when people see them and experience them, that it empowers them, other people to see them and go, wait a second, I would have never thought of that.
But that's not that crazy of an idea. And where can I borrow that? Can I use that or what other things do I see in my life that are absurd and how can I attack them? We ultimately that's kind of our goal. And then a possible is to be these these these people and this company that reminds people that they have the ability to do it, not that that empowers them or it's a semantics thing, but not to not to empower them or inspire them, but just to remind them that they have the ability to go do things and to do incredible things.
And that's so important. I mean, I remember visiting Brazil as a teenager and some people over the first time and seeing the. The the wealth, some of the wealthiest people that are living right next to some of the, you know, the slums, the ghettos, and I was I remember being outraged as a teenager and saying, like, how can you how can you do this? This is crazy. And the people's response was, well, you know, this is this is what we live with.
This is this is Brazil. And I think your reminders tremendously important that we don't have to settle for this. We don't have to accept it. We can actually do something about it. So there's this new project with the it sounds like it was almost sound like I'm a I'm a techie person. So like it it's almost like it was sonar, though, right? You use kind of like it's mapping, mapping his his environment with audio.
Yeah. It's the reverse of sonar. Typically sonar is something that the that there's a primary or the origin person or entity will send something out and receive that information back in this situation, we took the sonar or the sound cues and would put that in different places and so people would pass through that.
How long did it take him to get used to it?
The wonderful thing about people who have lost their eyesight or lost their hearing or lost different abilities is they're able to adapt it like just super human speeds, adapts to different inputs or or signals. And so it took literally no time to be fluent in and understanding kind of how to position things and really tried to push what we were doing to try to make it and refine it even more for his purpose.
That's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. How does your. Like, I'm interested, I saw your your Google talks and you dived in a little bit into your your business model there, but I find it interesting that you're you guys are essentially inventing all this amazing tech. You're giving the tech away, essentially. Right, because I understand that that's what you believe. That's your mission. Have you guys thought about maybe shifting that a little bit and like maybe licensing it out for a very small fee that still incentivizes other people to go in and make it better, but it helps make you guys more sustainable?
By what do you mean what what would relicense out these things?
Well, the idea. The idea that you created something that hasn't existed before, you could you could patent it and you could license it.
Yeah, I mean, some of the things that we do, we will spin out and we have spun out into their own separate businesses and panels. But in certain things, we just feel like that the obligation is to get it out there to as many people as possible. So in the case of Project Daniel or the case of. Writer, we published that open source that was my first experience with open source, the team really educated me about that, but we published that open source project, Daniel, the same thing we had that was a culmination of a lot of different a lot of different factors that a lot of different ideas that came into play.
But we did not we didn't think that the way to help the most amount of people was going to be about trying to launch a 3D printing press that a company. And I think that's the way that we think is we measure ourselves on how can we help the most amount of people first and then we figure out what can this be, something that we can make money doing. And so it's not a conventional business approach by any means, but it's that's what drives us and that's our purpose.
So we have some that we give away and we have some that we have put out their own separate companies.
And when you give those away, how do you help make sure that it is helping as many people as possible? Do you keep your eyes on it? Yeah, we keep our eyes on it. I mean, I wish there was a way to kind of tag it and drop a pixel on it so that we could figure out all the good that it's doing. But we're not able to there's not a way to measure necessarily. And if there is, by all means, get in touch with me.
If you're listening to measure how you put something out into the open source community and then be able to track back whether your idea is really inspired people to go help others.
And did you did you always have this idea? I noticed, like, there's this hacker culture, hacker mentality. Was that something that was always. Paramount to bringing the team in like that just clicked with you like these are the people at least need to be involved.
Yeah, I think there's this whatever it takes mentality that exists within the hacker maker culture that we just resonated with. And I, again, would not consider myself to be a brilliant hacker maker. I consider myself to be one, but I am in awe of the abilities that people have of just like looking and pulling from different plots and pools and pans and putting it together and something works. And that's kind of our mentality of how we how we tackle the things that we do.
Interesting.
So how can we like how can how can I how can our listeners, how can we help? What you're doing, what is what are the biggest things that you're looking, how are you looking to grow? How are you looking to make more of an impact? What can we do to help you?
I mean, as of right now, we have a couple of things that we have launched. One of the things that we've launched is an initiative right now that addresses hunger and food insecurity in the wake of the pandemic we saw. That is one of the biggest problems and absurdities that our society is going to face. So you can find out more about that if you go to another possible Dotcom's hunger and see some of the things that we're doing there. If your community wants to help to promote that, if they want to donate a meal, a meal per week or meal per month or whatever they can do, we see that as just a super simple way for people to get involved.
And we're pretty we're pretty proud of the idea that we've created and we think it really has the ability to scale and then on a more of a large scale kind of big picture. Perspective, I think it's just about going out there and just going and helping people and believing that you can help people. It doesn't have to be for us or with us. But seeing absurdities that you see in the world and saying that's not right, it shouldn't be that way.
And going out and doing something to try to solve it and fix it, I think that to me is the way that we can subvert right now this culture of this this culture of polarism that is just it's us versus them. It's red versus blue. It's, you know. Whites versus Asians, or it's just like everything right now, every news that you see is just about this, just it's about this is lack of continuity within our species. And I just really believe that if there becomes more of this mentality of service where we just try to figure out how we can help our fellow man or woman, regardless of the color of their skin or who they sleep with or what they call themselves, it's just just that alone, I think, in propel our society forward.
So you want to if you want to support something pragmatic with not impossible. Awesome rocket with us on some of the things that we're working supports there. But on a bigger scale, I just think we have a bigger responsibility right now to to be better citizens of this planet.
I agree with you completely. And one of the things that I think you're doing so right and not impossible is. Not only not only are you showing that commitment to service, but you're not doing it in a way that is critical of anybody else, you're just saying, look, this is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it. We're taking a stand. Come join us. You're actually inviting people. You're reminding people you're not you're not putting them down.
You're not creating those conflicts. And I and I think that's it's beautiful. It's inspiring and it's motivating. And I think you're just you're hitting you're hitting all the records. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Are we doing on time?
I think we could probably we could start to wrap it up. Be awesome. Awesome.
So one question the last question that I would like to ask you make is there's something that you want to talk about that I missed that you feel is important.
No, I mean, I think we got a chance to talk about many of the things that we're working on now and kind of our ideals and our position on the planet and specifically right now, our position on hunger. That's the thing that I always like to try and talk to people about is this is what we're working on right now, is this concept of what would happen if we created a level of stability where everybody who is food insecure was no longer food insecure, that they knew where their next meal was coming from.
What could that do to our society? Because if you think about do you think about that need that you have when you're hungry and you get grouchy and angry and just horrible person to hang out with and you're just you're just a couple hours after your meal time. Imagine imagine having to go to bed to deal with your hunger because you have to sleep it off because you do you hope that your fatigue overcomes the pit in your stomach without eating. Think about what people when people are constantly worried about that, what their perspective is in the world, it's hard for them to have a perspective that's much beyond three, four hours.
And so there was an incredible playwright named Bertolt Brecht, and he had a scene that was kind of a battle cry for us at another possible and specifically in regards to our hunger initiative, which is food first, then morality. Right. So you can't you can't think about anything else unless you've been blessed. You've been fed. So don't talk to me about going to school. Don't talk to me about going to get a job or don't talk to me about stopping doing drugs or anything like that.
Don't talk to me about anything until there is food in my belly. So that's why we're really proud of what we've done. We just crossed over one hundred thousand meals since we launched in April. Three days before that, we got our first million meal order that we'll be serving in Chicago through this. And it's all we have, another five hundred thousand meals we're doing in Santa Monica. And it all came through text messaging, like we're all where everything happens with the it's called Beento is the company that was spun off.
It all happens through June. So we're not asking anybody to change any of their behaviors or download a new app or go wait in line for four hours waiting for a box of food that you don't know what's going to be in it at all. Deployers people go conveniently to restaurants that are that are close to them. So Gustavo or Mick, who are food insecure, we don't have to take a bus across town or drive across our car, drive across town to wait in line.
We actually have the ability to go to restaurants that are very close in proximity to us to go pick up a meal and all the ordering process happens on the back end and you do it real time. So there's no way. So Gustavo enters hungry. It starts a text from it, asks you what your address is so we can manually go locate you because many of these people don't have a big fat dataplan. Then we offer you restaurants that are close to you.
You pick the restaurant, then you pick the food, and then you go in and pick it up.
And so these are restaurants that just if they have extra food that they're going to get rid of, not it's not extra food that the food's actually paid for from the nonprofit or the charity that supports that person. So we give the software away to the non profit, to the community based organization, to the church, to the school, and then they just pour the cell phone numbers in of their constituents. And that's the thing. Everybody has a cell phone like ninety six percent of the country has a cell phone.
The four percent are probably people who are on life support someplace because that's how prevalent it is. So they're either at the end of their life or they're so young that they don't even know what a cell phone is. Right. That's probably the four percent. So once people are enrolled in this program, they are able to kind of dial up and eat at a at a convenience level and a frequency that they that they have with their organization, the Boys and Girls Club or the city of Santa Monica or whatever it may be.
I can't tell you that how simple that is for an organization to deploy and everybody along the continuum from the organization that's deploying it now doesn't have to do anything except for her cell phone numbers into the application. Restaurants, local restaurants now get business where they wouldn't have got it otherwise. Now that that those meals are eventually going to be discounted, but there's still getting business coming in the door. And then the person, the store where the MC comes in, we come in with just like anybody else, we just walk in and grab our meal.
And Hi, my name is Macrocosmic. Give me my meal and I walk out so I get to walk out with dignity. So that program for us is so important because of not just the simplicity of what it does and the frictionless nature of how it does it, but we just see this as a way that we might be able to really stabilize this this bottom line baseline, Maslow's hierarchy of need that could give our society the ability to to think about what's next as opposed to what's next and two, three hours from now.
That's incredible. I mean, you're taking a problem. By the horns with innovation, and you're saying like this problem has been with us for a long time and it's getting worse and you guys just like, look, it's solvable. Here it is. And let's just do it. So who do we if I if I want to go and start. Pitching that down here or listening in another in another city that doesn't have that program yet, how do we what are the first steps that we should be taking?
It's super simple. If there is an organization that has a constituency of people that need to be fed Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, local churches, local church, whatever it might be, all they have to do is connect. They just say, great, we've got the money to pay the pay for the meals. They get in touch with us. We we deploy the program with them. They all that has to happen as they enter the cell phone numbers of the people into the program and then boom, they start.
I mean, it's if someone was to call me right now and say, hey, we want to launch this in Fort Lauderdale, we want a lot of this in Boston, we want whatever. And our primary markets, we're already we're in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle. Those if you have group, if you live in one of those cities, then we're already live and working there. So it's a question of just having the money to fund the meals.
And that's the perfectly that's the easy part.
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