Jason Eichenholz: Driving Progress with Photonic Innovation

The 20th century was really all about electronics and microcomputers, and that was the era of the electron. The 21st century is about photonics and photons and it's really about that light particle and how the light is generated, transmitted. So for example. You and I are having a conversation right now. We've got a camera with the lights to capture the information. It's over a fiber optic network. We then see each other on a display. All of that is photonics.

Um, Welcome to Super Entrepreneur's Podcast. Today we have with us Jason Eichenholz. Jason is a true pioneer in the world of photonics and laser enabled technologies with over 85 U. S. patents to his name. As a serial entrepreneur, he has led companies to success, raising over a billion dollars in investor funding and taking them public on NASDAQ. His innovations have revolutionized industries like autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and even space exploration.

With his technologies being used from the ocean depths to the surface of the moon and Mars. Jason is also a passionate advocate for autism awareness and community service. Welcome to our show, Jason. It's an honor. Go ahead. The honor's all mine. Thank you very much. I really enjoy your podcast. Thank you so much. Welcome to the family. I'm grateful that you're part of it.

So photonics, it's not something that most people think about or maybe even aware of, but it's behind a lot of the technologies that we use today.

Could you please explain how photonics is already changing industries such as autonomous vehicles and health care and why it's going to be even more important in the future, even maybe potentially even more than a I yeah, or it could be an enabler for a I even better able. Yeah, so for products is an enabling technology should. So it's about light and. So light is the fundamental particle of light is a photon. This is about as geeky as I'm gonna get on the podcast with you today.

But if you think of the 20th century was really all about electronics and microcomputers, and that was the era of the electron. The 21st century is about photonics and photons, and it's really about that light particle and how the light is generated, transmitted. So for example. You and I are having a conversation right now. We've got a camera with the lights to capture the information. It's over a fiber optic network. We then see each other on a display. All of that is photonics.

Those computer chips that are inside the laptops and the cell phones are all made with lasers and optics. So it's really about making and harnessing light and the generation of that light to do good. And so everything from your solar panel to the display in your car to people that are using optical measurement systems, whether you're testing and looking under a microscope for biology, all of that is powered by essentially light and photonics, and that's the field that I really specialize in.

Yeah, that's amazing. It was so incredible to read about you and what you have done. And, definitely seems like you have a super genius mind to work on this niche and what you're doing. My question is, could potentially this technology even power. Mobile devices and your watch, for example, stuff that you carry and

move with, could just the light and the energy around you power it so you never need to charge anything? Is that a potential? It is. It is a potential. And for example, I just got a frame TV in the room behind me here, and in that frame TV, on the back of the remote, they put a little solar cell. So now you no longer have to go find a plug in to charge a remote for the TV. It's just built in. I had a watch a few years ago that had a solar panel in it. Same thing.

It would just get charged by light. So absolutely charging of things via solar. But I also have a rule of thumb when it comes to doing things with photonics and lasers, and the rule of thumb is if you have to do something with a laser or photonics, it's probably your least resort. Like it's the last thing to get it done. Whereas if you charge it via a wire or electronics or do anything like if you think of it this way, you can use lasers to cut metal.

But if you cut that metal with a saw, that's mechanical. It'll be way more cost effective. But if you want to make a complex shape, or have some sort of chamfer, or cut through a material that you just can't do it with a normal saw, that's where the lasers and photonics is. Sort of that scalpel to get something done rather than hitting something with a sledgehammer. It's the detail work. It's the detail work or it's more efficient or more cost effective, lower scrap.

There's got to be a reason to use photonics to do something. In the TV remote case, it's obvious. Just take your remote and turn it upside down and face the room lights and they're at remote quick charge. I think all TV remotes. Should have that. So you're not having to get that little warning, to say, plug in the detector. Just it does it. Does that make sense for a car and the amount of charge you need with a, solar front maybe not, but you can make that distributed and still harness solar.

So LIDR is the key to making the self driving cars that you were seeing so much potential That in the future, become a normal state in

all the cities and, just not have to even worry about getting a license. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but that day will come, I feel. And photonics is a big part of that. What are some of the toughest challenges that you would face in that type of technology when you want to go mainstream, and how close do you think we are to self driving becoming a normal thing?

Self driving is really hard, and people have been trying to do this for quite some time, and there's There's sort of two ways you can do that. You can do that over here where you can say, all right, I'm going to go take a and build a car with lots of sensors, lots of compute, Waymo, cruise, all those guys are running these robo taxis. And if you haven't done that, it's really cool.

These things do really well, but apparently, one had a problem yesterday where there was a motorcade and the car kind of froze. It's really easy to make a self driving car work 99. 9 percent of that time. That 1 percent is the gotcha. Those edge cases and where it makes it very difficult. And the edge cases could be, a ball falling. Out of a truck or, a child coming out between two parked cars. Those things are really hard.

And what we focused on was really focusing at Luminar on that last 0. 1%. That last little bit. that were the edge cases. In order to make that work, you really needed to be able to have good high definition three B sensing of the world. And that's where light art comes in. And that's where light are. It stands for light detection and ranging where we take a pulse of light, we send it out, we go out a couple 100 football field. Sorry, a couple football fields away.

A couple 100 m like comes back and then we can go see what the makeup of The world is in 3D and then give the car 3D vision to then make informed decisions and how. And so that's the high end. And then there's what about for consumers and for consumers, that's where autonomy will be coming eventually. But I think if people think that their self driving car is going to pick them up from. Home drive them to work then go home and park in the garage.

That's not going to happen The utilization rate of a typical car is about two percent. So these cars are sitting idle most of the time But I think you're going to begin to see autonomy and like traffic jam pilots, you know When you're stuck in traffic if anyone's ever been stuck on the 405 or the 101 you understand what that's or You're you'll see limited full autonomy coming with some of our partners on highways in the very near future.

But that first option you were saying, that park the car in a garage and do all those wonderful things, you feel that will never happen? It's gonna be decades. Before, car possible. There's possibility there. It's absolutely possible. It comes down to economics and infrastructure, right? It really comes down to, taking your car and, summoning it to come get picked up. That's so cool. It is cool. And it's fun.

Or, when I, my car self park so I can pull up, the sensors look through that card does not have a my Mercedes does not have a lighter system in it yet, but it uses cameras and the radar and the ultrasonic sensors and it senses the gap and it'll self park and it does a pretty good job.

But there's a big difference between self parking and operating on a city street where you've got all the construction and fire trucks and, school zones and all these things coming out that really make it a bit more difficult. Okay, so let's talk about, the early cancer detection that you're also involved in. It's so incredible, man, like Jason, I love what you're doing.

For new drug delivery methods it's been a revolutionary, how is the photonics making these medical breakthroughs possible and is there any new development in the health care that, everyone should be excited about? So there, there's a lot of developments since, so as I said before, something, yeah it's an enabling technology. So whether it's drug discovery, whether it's doing something called spectroscopy, which is an area I spend a bunch of time on, which is like measuring the color of light.

. You can see things differently than the human eye. Human eye is really good at seeing the rods and cones you can see in color and you're really good at seeing changes in color between two things, but really not good at measuring the actual color. And so spectroscopy is a great tool to be able to measure the actual. It's called the spectrum of light and see the shape of the spectrum. And so you can do that for sorting LEDs. You can do that to look at you hit something. It glows.

What color does it glow? You can use cameras and very high sensitivity cameras. And that's one of the projects we did for cancer detection where you attach a chemical. It picks up and attaches to the cancer molecules. It glows and we designed a system to measure that glow. And then depending on which bead glue. Clothes, is that a word? Glued. Which one was brighter? You can tell what was going on.

And I've gotten to do some really fun stuff, but from day one, when I really got into science and engineering, and this was in high school, when I was in

a National Science Foundation program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, on the wall it said, Why not change the world? And you ever see one of those things where you just stop? And you go, yeah, huh? That's my mantra. And so I've been fortunate that in addition to doing the work that you have to do when you have a job, I also, when you become an entrepreneur, with that comes a little bit of freedom.

You've got the responsibility to pay the bills and pay your employees and make sure you can pay the rent. But you also have the ability to say, you know what, I'm going to work on that project. I'm going to work on that project.

I want to do this, and so I've had the opportunity to do some pretty cool things, whether it's, being part of a team at Oceanoptics where we sent, spectrometers to Mars and measuring the rocks and the elements at Mars, to taking stuff to the top of Mount Everest, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, to, the moon. You name it. So we've done some pretty cool things.

A couple years ago, I got to participate with a team and do something called, I talked about spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging to measure a rocket re entry coming back from space and an inflatable heat shield so we can go to Mars. Wow. It's fun. Elon Musk is definitely in talks with you then. That case, there may be another company that we are talking to on that one. But, yeah. That's a quite a lot of problem. How do we get to Mars?

It, so having put technology onto a Mars rover and having stuff on Mars right now. Yeah. It's pretty cool. But. Yeah. We're, we're sending essentially the version of a. A VW bug. Now we need to set a school bus with water and air and all those things for people to go there. We have a lot of payload that we need to deliver and the martian atmosphere is a little thinner. So to slow that rocket down as it's Coming through and in the payload down, we need creative solutions.

And NASA had invented some technology a number of years ago, and we finally got to test it about two years ago. So you're flying in a NASA jet and a NASA flight suit doing spectroscopy, just under the speed of sound and I'm in a NASA jet, and I'm there collecting spectra. Why not change the world indeed? Yeah, love it. Do you practice that word? Do you ever mess it up? Why not change the world? Spectroscopy? No, you spent enough time doing spectroscopy.

That's one of the things You got that down right. Yeah, that's one of the things, they don't give you a Ph. D. until you can check off at America. I was going to say, spectroscopy and laser. Yeah, that's one of the exams, yeah, that's one of the exams. Yeah. So how about going back to the spectrum, the light spectrum, human beings, like you mentioned, we were just able to see a very small area.

Do you feel technology in this realm could open up new dimensions of knowledge when it comes to working with photonics? If we start studying the infinite light spectrum, if I'm making sense, because there's so much of it. Yeah. Yeah. So look, cameras and technology can see things that we can't see. I'll give you a very practical area. Example. There's a company up in Boston. I met this her she does some great stuff on sunscreens and next generation sunscreens that are much healthier.

She also has a little camera that you can connect to your iPhone and that camera can see in the UV spectrum. So you can see, if you missed. A spot of sunscreen here, and you can look at that in the camera, do your selfie in the camera and go, all right, I need to reapply, or I miss a spot. Yeah, that's a great example of where the technology can do something that the human eye cannot see. You can do that. Look, the human brain, the human eye is great.

You can take a pair of stereo cameras and a 15 watt computer and you can drive a car. It's possible for just cameras and a computer to do that. The problem is, the compute doesn't quite match up what humans can put into a computer in the trunk of a car for what a human brain is able to do with a pair of stereo cameras. Until that time, self driving cars are going to need LIDAR. And you think LIDAR is advancing as we speak as well? I'm making sure it does. That's my job, right?

My job is So where, can you share some advancements that are coming about?

So a lot of the early parts of LIDAR were about just figuring out how to make it work. And, spent a good part of eight, nine years doing that, getting over 170 patents in the company to go build that technology. And now we're really focusing on the commercialization, getting the cost down so that people can do it, getting the reliability, moving into scale production, and that's really the effort of the team, my team, built the tech and we call it the chip level up strategy. I don't settle.

I refuse to settle for what, what's done. I, we had a saying, it was go big or go home. Go big or go home. And if you're going to fail we had a saying, run fast and break stuff, maybe a different last word. And so we would try a bunch of things. We found a thousand ways not to build the LIDAR system. Now that we figured out the right architecture, now that we've got the physics working, Okay. At the end of the day physics beats PowerPoint every single time.

Eventually people figure out the physics is what the physics is. We were told time and time again. No, the competition said they're going to go do this. No, the competition said they're going to do this. Your solution is inelegant. You can't do it. It's not going to be cost effective. It, the physics doesn't work. We're like, physics that you're proposing doesn't work. Physics rules. So now we're moving into production. Now at the end of the year, I get to pick up my Volvo EX90.

And my LIDAR system is going to be in the roof of that car. Oh, love it. That is going to be the sort of pinnacle for me. I've always wanted, I've always been a car guy. I grew up in a garage. My first job in high school was a petroleum distribution engineer. I pumped gas.

I, to go from pumping gas, yeah, now I, now we're going to see stuff going into production and picking up technology in a car dealership that took radical thinking, bold thinking, how to, how we could do that and that technology is now going into production and it's only getting smaller and more exciting. You build something is going to be around for, forever or even advance from there because definitely you created a company around it. Correct.

I created a company, but more importantly, we created a team and the team is what got us there. Not the company. The company was a mechanism to unlock the potential of the team. Yeah. And I can tell you're good at unlocking potential in the human being. And that's I can relate and appreciate the mindset that you have. And we need more and more people to think this way.

Not look at what could go wrong and what's, obviously you want to be aware of those things, but your energy is going into what's possible. And that's how you. Create, you fix more problems in the universe and we advance so much further. Hopefully we can duplicate and multiply you in the world because we need more of you. Yeah, there's a lot. And starting being an entrepreneur was a mechanism to do more. And that's where I'm really excited about what I call my chapter three.

My chapter one was that schooling and that arduous PhD journey. Chapter two is what I call my professional career.

I, so he said I'm out of professional goals. What do you do when you build a company? You take a company public goes up to NASDAQ that, we're going into production. Like I don't have any professional goals left. Now, do I still have entrepreneurship in me? Absolutely, but what I'm doing is focusing on moving in my chapter three from reputation building to legacy building.

I want to unlock that hidden potential, and I'm applying that with my foundation, Jonathan's Landing, and the community I'm building for adults with autism to enable people to live to their highest potential and solve for a tidal wave. of kids who are aging out of the system with autism. It's personal for me because I have a son with autism. No, because when I saw your information, your bio and it mentioned that and I felt a connection to you even when I didn't meet you yet.

And I'm grateful to have you on the show. As a kid, my parents used to give me, my brothers hand me down toys. The reason being is that I would Take apart anything they would give me. I would just want to see how it operated. What was happening inside. And as I got older, my focus shifted on, how to make sure others like me.

And that was my my Predominant attention is doing things that others would be approved, others would approve and I would be liked, for example, in school, growing up, different areas. And that progressed into, as an adult. And in 2018, I was diagnosed with autism as well on the spectrum. And you mentioned that you saw my post about disclosing it because since then I didn't mention it. I was, I didn't know.

I was confused, I didn't want to bring it out, but I just, I have a, I have this guidance that I need to somehow, whatever I've been through, wherever I'm going, it is a main component, a main, a part. Of what I'm trying to do in the world, and that's why I came out with it when I met you, and it just happened that way around the same time I was thinking about this disclosure and the fact that passion I have is to bring that empowerment to the communities of.

People on spectrum, instead of trying to point at all that is going wrong, bring the attention to what's going right and amplify that power within people that are on the spectrum because they have a very special gifts, I would say, or things that they can bring to the world that I want them to bring out through This awareness and through this confidence that they can create first is putting themselves in that kind of environment and then I met you and I said what and I saw that I said I got

to book him in right away and that's how we're on the show now and talking about this stuff and your organization and what you're doing specifically for adults. That's my attention as well. What I want to do is for late real life late realizers because they had a lot of stuff They went through growing up. They didn't realize what it was, but it becomes clear when they find out. But what do they do with that?

Did they take that as a victim mindset, for example, or they're taking that somewhere in the direction of shifting their self image to make something big happen. So you have an opportunity, right? So I had the, you have this platform, you have these followers over a million downloads, you can become a role model or a catalyst for change and good for adults with autism that are in the same situation you are. But maybe you don't have the courage to announce what you did.

And so what I love doing is leveraging the community, thinking in that open innovation mindset and let leverage right. I was an entrepreneur. Now, one of my motivations to create the self driving car was to have that safe, ubiquitous transportation for my son. So it was a little bit personal that I was doing that, but now I've got an opportunity as a successful entrepreneur to that doesn't need to work anymore.

But choosing to make the world a better place, why not change the world, and apply that as being an advocate for people who can't advocate for themselves, or need help to go do and that's where our model comes together, and I need people like you. To also be advocates, to be out there as role models to go, okay, if he can do this and he can have a podcast have all these followers and he, you can coach and inspire others.

Imagine if you apply that a little bit to the things that are passionate and you're passionate about. And I think that's the, by the way, I think that's the number one success in an entrepreneur. You've got to have that passion. You've got to have that belief. And I want to unlock potential.

In all human beings, but I want to unlock potential, especially in adults with autism, you mentioned, that's my focus is on the adults, the kids get the focus, and then mobilize people like you that are the change makers to come together and say, let's go work on something big. Yeah, this is amazing. And I would love to have another call with you, just me and you, if you're interested to discuss this because we met for a reason. It was sorry. AB first.

Absolutely. And yeah, so I, I call it divine intervention. I the, yeah, not call it the same thing. The way I describe and the way I describe my life now post, post you know, success with entrepreneurship as I'm in that transition in my chapter three. is my favorite word is surreal. Tell me that you and I meeting this thing going out isn't surreal. 110%. It's like you can't explain it. When I saw your message come in and I looked at your bio, it was for me.

It's at a very it's becoming at a normalcy, a Norman normal. State now the more I spend time within all human beings have a belief system in their subconscious mind. Have a self image of how they see themselves. And that self image keeps them in that ceiling their whole life. So I help with that. I feel everyone is born super. I feel like we were very special in, in all of the creations. And, but this brought another angle is I, if I struggled my whole life.

As much as I struggled, how many people have struggled and now they're realizing the condition, even if they didn't realize they can, if they have this struggle of the hearing the story and you're saying, wait a minute, I can relate to this, let me get this checked, not take that as something that is an issue, but take that as a stepping stone to do better. Big major things. I'd really like that. Cause I, yeah. It's surreal. It's just surreal, right?

And I just wake up every day and I go, okay, yeah, that, did that just happen? Yeah, it did. All right, let's go let's go change the world. And so that's what I'm really passionate about doing is, and we're doing that in a social enterprise at Jonathan's Landing. We're going to create a place for 500 residents to live and we're going to create 5, 000 jobs. It's surreal. It's surreal. It's just it gives me goosebumps and stuff when it happens. And it's it's we're meant to meet. And here we are.

And I'm grateful for all the information you shared definitely is going to make an impact on people's lives because this is a topic that You know, might not be both topics. And what we've been talking about. Yeah, they're both important topics and we brought it in one episode. I'm sure it's going to make a lot of impact. I appreciate your time. I'm looking forward to building a long term relationship I appreciate the opportunity. And together, once I got to change the world once with.

Self driving cars and yeah, we'll save a hundred million lives and give back people a hundred trillion hours of their time over the next hundred years. But now together, we're going to work together and we're going to create a life of dignity and purpose for adults with autism. Let's go do this. Love it. Thank you so much. I'm looking so forward to this.