The Future of Health is AI with Noosheen Hashemi

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Hustle Daily. Today, we'll be breaking down the future of health is AI. To drop these value bombs, I brought Nu Sheen Hashemi into EO Fire Studios. Nu Sheen spent three decades as a successful Silicon Valley leader, investor, and entrepreneur. After watching her parents suffer from poor medical diagnosis, she made it her mission to fill the preventative care gap, leading her to co-found the company January AI.

0:37And today, we'll talk about the metabolic health crisis. We'll talk about having passion when creating something and so much more. And the big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Nushin and our sponsors. Sales Evangelist, hosted by my friend, Donald Kelly, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales right now. A recent episode you should definitely check out is the five ways to do daily outbound with LinkedIn.

1:11Listen to Sales Evangelist wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought of giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Nushin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Thanks for having me, John. I think that the role of mental health in leadership is underestimated and undervalued.

1:53I think some people think, well, whatever happened in the past happened, I'm here now, I'm leading, I'm the boss. I'm going to work hard and be successful this moment. But actually going back and doing the work, as they say, doing the work is really important. I think if people have a curiosity about their state of mental health, their subconscious mind, They're kind of what are the drivers for them? What motivates them? And if they are curious about being on a path to healthier places where they don't have unhealthy defenses, they have, you know, they are because if you have unhealthy defenses, you basically are not going to be a great communicator.

2:46You're not going to hear things very well that people are saying to you. And you will also not say things very clearly, or you may actually have a lot of charge or a lot of negativity or other emotions involved in your responses to people that are really unnecessary. They're, you know, that the past is always present, if you will. So I think the role of doing the work, going back to come forward, to be in a great state of mental health is critical to success in whatever you're doing. But especially if you are leading an organization, if you are an entrepreneur and you're trying to give life to an idea that is, well, nothing today.

3:27You're giving life to something that doesn't exist. And these things are usually, you know, dead on arrival. Sometimes the idea is so crazy that people say like, wow, like that's not going to work. So there needs to be a huge amount of conviction, a huge ability to communicate, um, and, uh, an ability to motivate other people. And if you're not in a great state of mind yourself, if you are not on top of life and life is on top of you, um, you are not going to be able to do any of those things. Fire Nation, a lot of great value bombs within that share. And I love the phrase, do the work. It is such a critical mentality.

4:07In fact, Steven Pressfield, an author who I love, wrote a whole book on the title, Do the Work. So a great read if you want to get into it. It's such a critical mindset. And I want to talk about living forever because Nushin, my audience, Fire Nation, they want to live forever. Now, of course, we know that's not very likely. So instead, we'll settle for living as long as possible. Key words, as healthy as possible. So let's talk about the metabolic health crisis that exists in the world today. One out of three people in the United States today has prediabetes. 90 % of those people don't know they have prediabetes.

4:5237 and a half million people or one out of nine people has diabetes and 22 % of those, so one out of five, doesn't know they have it. It's a huge problem in the United States. Half of the adult US population is believed to have diabetes or prediabetes. But unfortunately, our standard of care does not screen for this unless you're over 40 and very obese. And this has left most people in the dark. So they are marching towards disease and they don't know this. Globally, these numbers are also horrible. By 2050, we expect 1.3 billion people to have diabetes. Add three times that number for prediabetes and add even a larger population that is insulin resistant, that is not yet showing disease.

5:37And you've got, you know, half of the world population will have metabolic disease by the middle of the century. So it is a massive problem. The issue is that it's not a problem just by itself. It leads to more disease. So as you advance in metabolic disease, and you get diabetes, actually, there are a whole bunch of things that go wrong when you do that. So just the way you feel and, you know, so the consequences aren't just terrible numbers at the lab, you know, you're not well, when you have diabetes, you have to change your lifestyle to feel, to have the right amount of energy, to be able to have the right mood, to feel better.

6:23But it doesn't stop there. As you advance in diabetes, you might get other comorbidities, such as cardiovascular disease, you might get kidney disease, you might have neuropathy, which is like damage to your nerves and end up with problems in your eyesight, as well as, you know, problems, people get foot ulcers, people get amputations. So it doesn't stop at diabetes. Oh, okay, I'll just live with diabetes for the rest of my life. No, actually, it, as it advances, it brings on other diseases, and then there's complications from diabetes. So it's not something that, you know, you want to have. And in the US, about, you know, 60 % of the people have one chronic disease, something like 10 % of them have five chronic diseases or more.

7:12And imagine the amount of suffering you're going through if you have five chronic diseases. So this is pretty serious stuff. The problem is big. And we have solutions for it. There are some solutions at a personal level, some at societal levels. but we do have solutions, but we are not taking this as seriously as we should. Now, you believe that AI, artificial intelligence, is the answer. Tell us why. Well, I think artificial intelligence sitting on top of a lot of other things is the answer. So we have tremendous amount of knowledge now around behavior change. What helps people change behavior?

7:52What are the motivators for behavior change? How do people adopt a habit, a new habit? it? How do they keep it? So we understand the science of behavior change. We have a lot of sensors these days. We have sensors that people are wearing, like smart watches, you know, the rings, the smart rings, for example, that you and I are wearing. Then there are, you know, sensors for your blood glucose. And there are other sensors for, let's say, your blood pressure. And these sensors are fantastic because they provide frictionless, passive, continuous data about a person's body. And that is exactly the kind of data that we can machine learn on because continuous data shows us patterns over time.

8:37It shows us trends and blips, and we're able to really leverage that data to get a deeper understanding of the person's health. then there's other trends happening for example people are doing a lot of tests at home they're doing a lot of blood tests and other things that used to be ordered by doctors people are just able to reach out to various services and just get a lot of tests that they want whether it's food sensitivity or they want to get a test about their blood sugar or their cholesterol etc there's telehealth there are a lot of services out there ai sits on top of all of these things It is basically helping you connect to your own data, connect to your own data that sits elsewhere, either in Apple HealthKit, in your HR or whatever.

9:25It helps you then gain insights from the intersection of that data. So it combines data from, you know, your sensors. It connects data from your records and everything else. And then it can tell you interesting things about it. And then we can use the power of behavior change in combination with the data with AI to help people slowly, slowly take small steps towards a healthier state of being. And if your audience really wants to live long, you know, the earlier that you can predict disease, you can do something about it. If you can postpone it, fantastic. If you can push out, if you're not going to get chronic disease until you're like 70, you know, 75 or 80, imagine how much healthier you're going to be.

10:16And of course, the whole idea is to prevent it altogether. Like, for example, I personally know I'm not going to get diabetes in my lifetime because I've mastered, I've mastered my eating. And that doesn't mean like last night I had coconut softy. yes um you know from time to time i do eat those things but um i was eating sushi and i told them you know after a couple of sushis i said you know what let's go to sashimi i'm not gonna have that much rice or if you put rice in front of me i won't eat i'll eat a little bit of it i'll taste it i won't eat the rest of it so if your the idea is we know we know behavior change science we have sensors we have access to other data as user reported data like your food logs etc we can put all this together, give you insights so that you can predict, postpone, hopefully prevent chronic disease.

11:06Fire Nation, this is critical stuff. And I just love that mindset of what if you could just push it back till 75, maybe 80, 85. I mean, then think about number one, like how much longer you're going to be able to live healthy. But number two, think about all the advances that will be made between now and then that can maybe continue to help you push things back further and further. I mean, for people that are kind of like, you know, in their 40s, 50s and 60s now, man, it's just all about like, hey, stick around because things are coming. They're coming fast and it's really exciting, but you've got to be in a healthy state to really make the most and benefit from it.

11:41And we have a lot to talk about around these topics when we get back from thanking our sponsor. Happy 2024, Fire Nation. Q1 is here and that means new goals, more growth and upgrading your day-to-day workflow. While most sales folks are stuck in the mud of manual scheduling, digging into data, and tracking down leads, let me share a better way to win so you can get a jumpstart on your year. The new HubSpot Sales Hub is smart sales software for today's multitasking reps. It's built to help you manage every stage of your sales pipeline with ease. It's filled with easy-to-use and powerful tools that make closing deals and collaborating across departments a breeze.

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12:53Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world and Thought Leader can help you get there. Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDx talks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that is going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days.

13:28Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more. visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for his free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Nushin, we are back and I want to dive in to your company, January AI. Tell us more about how this plays into everything that we've talked about thus far today. The way January works is after essentially it helps you train a digital twin. So we allow you to, or the app basically connects to your smartwatch or your smart ring and also a continuous glucose monitor.

14:20And it also collects data from you, like about your food logs. Now, a lot of people don't love logging food, but they will do it for a period of time to train their twin. Also, our food logging is superb. We have 32 million foods in our database, all the U.S. groceries, millions of recipes. We also have all the chain restaurants and local restaurants. This is unique to us. There are no nutrients for local restaurants in the United States. We have used machine learning to come up with nutrients for foods in local restaurants. So you have this information at your fingertips. The AI pulls it together.

15:00It watches you over several days and it essentially is able to predict your glucose that creates the digital twin. And it is able then to predict your glycemic response or your blood sugar response to anything you're going to eat in that 32 million strong database. And what it can do is also give you alternatives. So it can you can say, hey, I want to have fried chicken. it will it will tell you your glycemic response to that fried chicken it may give you alternatives to that fried chicken it may give you healthier alternatives for that like fried chicken that will have lower glycemic index so that you can try other things if you were searching for a recipe it might give you other recipes if you were searching for a food in a restaurant it will give you alternatives to that it also just has generic information just generic burger generic you know, all of that food information.

15:55So the beauty of this is that you don't have to wear the sensor continuously. I think a lot of people sort of self-censor, they don't, oh, that's a pun, different sensor. They just think, well, I can't afford to wear a continuous glucose monitor all the time, so I don't even need to try one. But you don't need to wear it all the time. Actually, you could just try it once and build a twin. And then you can see, you can walk around the grocery store and see, you know, what different snacks or different energy bars or different ice creams will do to your blood sugar. And this is the beauty of this is that essentially you're able to take the power of the sensor, but not necessarily the cost of the sensor.

16:43You can have a much, much smaller cost, use the sensor once, get your twin, then continue to use essentially the sensor without wearing the sensor, you know, everywhere at the grocery store, at the restaurant, in the kitchen, you know, ordering food delivery. You can basically see, should I have this or should I have that? So you basically the what AI gives you, which is beautiful, AI gives you counterfactuals, it says, okay, you've eaten this stuff. But what if you ate this other thing, you ate this stuff, what if you ate it, and you worked out like 10 minutes after what would that your blood sugar response would be and none of those things you can do without AI.

17:23So it's really awesome. So essentially, January helps you, you know, democratizes metabolic health, because it gives access. It increases access to technologies that are revolutionary, but they're too expensive. So it helps you get the power of that technology, but at a much lower cost. So why are you passionate about this? Because with every entrepreneur, there's usually a driving why. I shared a little bit about it in the introduction, but get a little bit deeper with our audience now. So I am obsessed with prevention. I have been for the last 15 years. My mother was misdiagnosed and she almost died.

18:10My father was diagnosed late with his disease and he did die. And I was in the room when he was told he was stage four after he'd been under the care of the same oncology department for eight years. So I was wondering if he's been coming here for eight years. Why didn't you figure out he has another cancer? And they just don't screen for that. if you can believe that. They were like, well, we don't scream for that. It's just really hard to believe. So I know a lot of people, tens of millions of people don't even have access to a primary care physician, but my father did, and he was under the care of oncology.

18:46So I became obsessed with prevention many years ago, and I tried over the years to really make sense of it all. Like, why do we know so little about human health? How does the medical research world even work, who does research, who funds it, at what pace does it work, how does research even happen, how are clinical trials carried on, what's the role of academia, role of government, role of people. So I was studying this quite rigorously. And it led me to this idea of multiomics, this idea that we really need to have a full and complete picture of someone's health as complete as we can from various angles.

19:27Most people are managing their health by a single marker, like cholesterol or A1C or their blood pressure. But really, we are way more complex than that. And today we understand that whole health means, you know, mental, social, and physical health. But physical health itself is very, very complex. And this idea of multi-omics, this idea that you should know, you know, ideally, you would want to know your genetics, you would want to know your microbiome, you would want to know, a variety of other omics led me to Mike Snyder at Stanford. And Mike has type 2 diabetes. And he was really very focused on how can we warn people about how can we warn the people with prediabetes that don't know they have prediabetes today that they are going to get diabetes if they don't do something about it.

20:17So essentially, prevention led me to multiomics. Multiomics led led me to Mike Snyder. Mike Snyder led me to type two. That's why I focused on diabetes. But my passion for entrepreneurship, that's been my whole life. You know, I spent 10 years at Oracle. We built the software industry in the late 80s and early 90s. That was extremely exciting. It was, you know, Oracle, those 10 years between 85 and 95 were just an unbelievable place to be. And I I love that and that adrenaline and that sense of building is extremely exciting. And I was looking for the next thing to build. And so when I kind of landed on diabetes and AI, well, I started with the AI company first in 2017.

21:06When I landed at AI and health and then met Mike Snyder and I was like, okay, then it's AI health and diabetes. That's kind of how it came together. And so my why is prevention and my why is service to others. I can really do anything I want in my life. I've worked very, very, very hard and I'm in a position where I can do whatever. But I choose this. I choose to wake up every day and advance and pioneer in the area of AI and health because I truly believe it's the best thing we can do for people. Health is wealth. Today, look at the state of the world. The state of the world is you think it's really bad, it's going to get way, way, way worse.

21:58The best thing we can do as citizens of this sort of mad, uncertain world is to be healthy and to take responsibility for ourselves and responsibility for the health of others around us, the ones that we relate to. Like, for example, if we are head of a household or we are principals in a household, we can have a lot of influence about the nutrition of the whole household. It's not just ourselves, but also people around us. We have parents. We have friends. We can have impact on people around us. So I'm obsessed with prevention. I'm obsessed with the role of health in wealth and happiness. And I'm obsessed with essentially service, service to ourselves, keeping ourselves healthy and service to others, keeping people around us healthy.

22:44Nushin, give us a way that our listeners can connect with you with January AI so that they can start taking the correct steps to go down the path that we're talking about here. You can find us at January.ai. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Nushin Hashemi on LinkedIn. in, I would say the most important thing for people to do is to reach out in their gut and ask themselves, how do they want to spend the last many years of their lives? Do they want to be in, you know, depending, dependent on other people? Do they want to not be able to eat this or eat that? Do they want to not be able to travel to the places they want to?

23:29Do they want, do they not want to have energy to play with their grandchildren or with their, you know, have a healthy social life? And if the answers to those are, you really are optimizing for health span, well, with very few changes today, and really, they're not that many. I'll tell you what they are right now. Number one, gain awareness around blood sugar, throw on a CGM, see what kinds of foods are spiking your blood sugar, hack those foods, either eliminate them, cut their quantity, or sop out ingredients. Two, increase fiber in your diet. It's the single most important thing you can do nutritionally to be healthy.

24:05Fiber is critical. Americans are getting 10 to 15 grams a day. They need to be getting 20 to 38 grams, 21 to 25 grams for women, 30 to 38 for men. Let me jump in here. What would be an easy or not incredibly difficult way to get more fiber in our diet? Go to edensguthhealth.com, edens, E-D-E-N-S, guthealth.com and order Edens and subscribe to it. I've been taking it for two and a half years. It was built experientially and scientifically. It's the first time that prebiotics have been studied to this level specifically for cardiometabolic and immune benefit. Take Edens, take a scoop every day. Well, you have to onboard to it slowly because if you've never had a fiber diet before in the first month, you might experience gassiness or GI things.

25:01But it does go away. So you have to start with like a quarter scoop for a week, then half a scoop for maybe a couple of weeks and then go to a full scoop maybe in a month or two. But you have to let your body get used to it. But the single most important thing you could do for your health is increase fiber in your diet. It is not possible to really, I mean, one scoop of, you know, eat-ins is like three cups of broccoli a day, which you can't really eat. And also broccoli doesn't have all the fiber you need. This is a fiber blend of five different prebiotics, fibers, plus polyphenols and probiotics.

25:36So you're putting the right population there and then you're feeding it to make sure that you're going to thrive. So going back to the five strategies, one, remove spiking foods in your daily life. find out what is really spiking your blood sugar and hack those uh again cut them in quantity or swap out ingredients or just stop eating them all together it's not that hard there are alternatives to those foods two add fiber in your diet three move before and after you eat very very critical and not like after you eat like you sit for two hours to eat and then you you eventually decide to do a walk as soon as you eat start moving it's critically important And the other thing is try to bring your calories in line with your level of activity.

26:23Find out, you know, take a DEXA scan. Find out your fat level in your body. Find out how many calories you can eat for your level of mobility. You can do that through DEXA scan. You can do it through January. Find that out. And then keep within those because if you don't, you can't maintain a healthy weight. And finally, fast. This does not cost any money. You don't have to go to grocery stores and buy expensive organic food. You don't have to spend your time cooking. Learning how to fast is unbelievably useful. It's a discipline that improves insulin sensitivity, especially in combination with calorie restriction.

27:04It doesn't cost money. It takes discipline. And you can find out where you are with fasting. Let's say you're fasting, you know, eight hours and you're eating 16 hours a day right now. Well, slowly try to increase the fasting period from eight hours to eight hours and 15 minutes, you know, for a week and other 15 minutes. Keep going until you get to 16 hours. I don't eat before 11 a.m. I usually eat around 11 to 12 and I stop eating between essentially 6 and 7 30. so I eat I try to eat around eight hours a day but I fast for about 16 hours incredibly successful doing that and you will feel fantastic fire nation you are getting pure gold from somebody who has now dedicated her life to helping people just like us and you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with you've been hanging out with nh and jld today so keep up the heat.

28:00And for links to everything we talked about today, visit eofire.com. Type Nushin into the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And that's N-O-O-S-H-E-E-N. And then links to everything we talked about will pop right up. Of course, January.ai. Connect with Nushin on LinkedIn. She's there. She's connectable. And I want to say thank you, Nushin, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Nushin for sponsoring today's episode.

28:38And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Sales Evangelist, hosted by my friend Donald Kelly, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.