The Stakes at Deus Ex Medicina

0:28Welcome to the Newcomer podcast. like a long con. I somehow got Eric to, I'm like, I would love if we could collaborate on a conference. We tell people a story of why we're doing this thing. So what is the story? I remember we got coffee and I was like, wow, Naima seems to really like know everybody, excited, cool, something I want to do stuff with. And like, we were kicking around conference ideas. I don't know. What's the story in your mind or how did this all come together? Yeah. So what happened was I remember, Eric, you had tweeted something or you actually wrote a you wrote a substack. It was like October of 2024.

1:03And I get the substack from Eric. And it's basically like, oh, you know, ever since I left the media business, this dying media business, which I was covering at the time because I was doing a show with Ben Smith at Semaphore called Mixed Signals, which she still does with Mac Tani. It's awesome. You should check it out. But, you know, you're like, I'm leaving this dying. I've left this dying media legacy media business and I just made four million dollars and I'm hiring people. I don't think it was$4 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many millions was it, Eric? We said$2 million revenue on a million.

1:30$2 million plus revenue on a million in profit is basically what we said, with ambitions to sort of continue to grow it. Yeah, I really put out the bat signal that we were a media business with money and wanted more respect and, you know, wanted to work with fun, cool people. Yeah, in Jay-Z language, that's known as this for those watching on YouTube. It's just that. Well, it's just like everybody else. dusting of the shoulder. Everybody else brags about how much money they raised. And here we're a business making money. At some point, you just need to say, well, here's what's going on. Which is awesome.

2:00So congratulations, Eric. And I was like, you know, we'd met each other before we'd met at the code conference. We kind of had people in common. And I reached out to you and I was like, hey, Eric, you have this great business. You're looking to do more events. I don't want a job, but I want to go and host things because I love interviewing people. That's my bread butter. I love doing stage events. I'm a big believer in the return to live in the age of AI. And if you want to, if you have the infrastructure to handle all this, like I would love to partner with you editorially. That's what happened.

2:30I think we're both spiritually similar and we love to host. We're different people, obviously. But I was saying to someone literally yesterday, I was like, you know, we hosted the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit the same year I got married. And it's like, oh, I love being a groom. I love everybody so excited to meet you. It's like, it's hard to network any other way once you've had the taste. Yes. Yeah, that's true. I, yeah, I love, see, I love to host, but I think the actual infrastructure around it, there's so much that goes into an event. There's an amazing team, people like Riley. Yeah. So many people have been involved in helping boost and support this event.

3:05And that's the stuff that even though I came up as a producer, I'm like, I love, I love the stage stuff. I love having the conversation, thinking about what we're going to talk about. And I couldn't be more excited because you have killed it in this AI event space. And I just think we're ripe to have a conversation about this next era in American health care in a way that really bridges the technology, the AI, the consumer trends, the policy shift. And I'm so excited to be doing this on September 9th in San Francisco. So deus ex medicina. We agonized over the name. I don't know if you've noticed, but Twitter is like auto-correcting it out of Latin because it's like it's translating it for you.

3:45So AI is ruining our beautiful name. I can only imagine Grok AI does not like anybody else being called. Are you a blue sky person or you're just off? No, I'm not. I just I'm like, no, I like to thirst trap with my pictures on Instagram like a real millennial. I see. Just. You're a YouTuber now, you know. Exactly. No, but I can imagine that Grok and X might not like anyone else being called DX, you know, being called God in Latin. Oh, I see. It's the X. They're sabotaging us. But yeah, I mean, we really saw, you know, we've been hosting Cerebral Valley since March 2023. Obviously, that's really focused on sort of foundation models and people, you know, building software.

4:23You know, we had Anthropics CEO, Alexander Wang at Scale. Just in London, we had, you know, Dara at Uber. Well, we didn't have a lot of the health piece of it, but that was clearly becoming a larger and larger piece of the AI story. So there was that. There was sort of this longevity thing that's been going on. And then there's sort of all the change that's happening, whatever you think about it, because of what's happening with Maha, RFK, and the Trump administration. So I was just like, you know, together we were like, oh, you know, there are these like three wild themes. And it's a little wild, but I do think going into it, we were like, oh, there's a set of Silicon Valley people that are going to get it.

5:03Like, this is just like the first Cerebral Valley where if you're paying attention, you're like, oh, man, there are a lot of interesting things going on at once that Silicon Valley loves because that means things are investable. I mean, you're a technology journalist as you're built, but I have often thought, I mean, technology is like infrastructure. sure. It's kind of like being like, I am, I work in road because like, I happen to take one on the way to my office, you know, but I think that there is a, it's, it is a, I just had a conversation with one legacy media outlet that's very concerned about like, how, how do its audience understand technology, et cetera.

5:36And we were talking about it and I'm like, it's kind of just everything now, but healthcare is a great way into the topic because everybody cares so much about healthcare. I mean, we're in a moment where obviously, you know, we saw in New York city, the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO last year, last fall, even this recent shooting that happened on Park Avenue with NFL. I mean, there was a concussion background to it. I think healthcare is just such a human and real, I mean, everything I say right now is going to sound so dumb and earnest, but like it is, it is the thing that touches all of our lives and all of our parents' lives from the moment we're born.

6:07And when I started Smart Girl Dumb Questions, the first episode I did was, can billionaires save us with Mark Cuban talking about capitalism and healthcare? And he outlined this vision for how private health care is going to be the only way to get to a kind of national single-payer system over time. So I just think it is the best place to talk about some of these themes, including AI, including policy. We went through some bad names. I, for a second, thought we should call it Maha Valley. Eric was like, no. Yeah, we got very close to that. But I think, you know, we clearly want to reflect, you know, a couple different themes.

6:41There was There was something with blood, too, that we, like, really agonized over. Do you remember what it was? Yeah, you wanted to call it something. I was like, what is that? That sounds so terrible. It was like a video game. So then I was like, I don't know if it was that or there was some random. I can't remember what it was anymore. I don't know. It was like Fingerprick or something. I was like, okay, Elizabeth Holmes, calm down. We're not going to call it that. Anyway, this gets at sort of the technology, the sort of creation. You know, it's a little bit sci-fi. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that ahead of Cerebral Valley, I'll have my co-host, Max and James.

7:15You actually, I think, are friends. You went to business school with Max, right? I did. Max Tyle dropped out of business school. He took his excellent voice. You're always like, he's too cool for school. Yeah. So Max and James and I do an episode or two before the conference, just sort of like talking about what's going to come. And I thought one of my favorite pieces from those conversations is often just like, what themes do you think are going to emerge? So we don't want to like spoil everything. Obviously, the joy of these events is like the unexpected and the answers we don't know. But we're obviously diligent journalists.

7:47So we've done prep calls. So I wanted to play this game with Naima of just coming up, each of us taking turns with three themes that we think will emerge and that we're excited to sort of interrogate during Deus Ex Medicina. Okay. Are you ready? Yeah. I mean, I didn't do my homework because I'm like, oh, podcast. I do this every day. figure it out yeah yeah but i love it why don't you go first and then i'll be like you stole all my great ideas no i i just want to do better than max child well yeah we all love a little this is very competitive i think podcasts i mean max already won because the like the trick is leaving but like the most successful people leave drop out of school i think that's literally i think bology or i don't know somebody gave a speech i think while he was in business school it was like you need to drop out you know it's classic stanford everybody yeah max child disciple People of biology.

8:37Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. The, okay. Longevity is everywhere. So longevity is nowhere. I think that with the rise of GLP-1s, it's like, yeah, duh, longevity. It's like between statins and GLP-1s, everyone clearly sees that helping pretty healthy people have higher quality of life, longer life, is a big moneymaker, is a good idea, something that people want, something that maybe consumers will even spend money on out of pocket. And I think longevity has been this term that said the medical world, you don't embrace like life extension. So we need to give it a different name. But now with, you know, with Govi and everything else, it's just clear that like this is a big opportunity.

9:24And I think the questions will be much more when does like sort of big pharma and everybody else sort of explicitly say we're going after like anti-aging and just embrace it themselves. but I think it's a matter of when. Okay, I love that. Longevity is everywhere. So longevity, the word, is nowhere. Do you agree? Is nowhere. Oh, do I agree with that? The way I think about this in my kind of smart girl, dumb questions framework is like, why are millennials so optimistic that we want to live forever, but so pessimistic that we don't want to procreate? Like what is happening to our generation? But do I agree?

9:55I think that longevity is very much in the zeitgeist and very much in our culture, but it is Americanized and commercial. I think the experience of longevity in America is so specific to the United States that even if you like go across the pond to Europe, you do not see this obsession. There's something uniquely American that is happening here. And I feel like the capitalist movement into the longevity space is an example of that. The use cases for GLP-1s are very particular in the United States as well. You're seeing this commercialization and this visualization of longevity in the United States.

10:32Do I think it's everywhere? No, because I think it's like in the contiguous United States. Because I clearly see the world. It's like once capitalism has embraced it, it is everywhere. And you're like, oh, there is more than just whether like every company in healthcare sees like, oh, this is a way to make money. It's like, there's more to that, Eric. But yeah. Yeah. But I do think it's a profound moment because Americans are really reconsidering like longevity and health and buying into that. However, we know from the health data that we pay more than most other countries. We have worse health outcomes than most other countries.

11:03You know, consternation around what's in our food supply, what do we use, plastics in our ecosystem, whatever it is. Like people are very concerned about their health. But it's all happening in a relatively unregulated, highly capitalistic and commercialized world. So I agree with you. In the United States, longevity is now everywhere. And therefore, it's nowhere. But I think in the rest of the world, it's nowhere and somehow it's everywhere. Well, yeah, well, Europe is a couple of beats behind everybody else, I guess. No, but I think actually what I'm saying is different. It's like the rest of the world, longevity is nowhere to be discussed and everywhere to be had.

11:35People are living longer and healthier. I guess America needs to match the lifespans of some other countries. Exactly. Okay, I like that. Lots to unpack there. All right, Naima, you're up. Should I do one? So I think that the future of medicine is N of one. It is all. Go expel on it. I think I know what you're – I learned the health lingo a little bit enough to know what you're saying, but explain it a little bit more. Like even if you think about a concept like longevity that we're talking about, it's no longer going to be about, oh, you know, the average lifespan in the United States is in the mid 70s and I'm going to live to the 90s.

12:07It's like I, based on my own biometric information, genetic data that I have, everything I know about myself, you know, should be expected to live based on my parents history, everything should be expected to live to, I don't know, 87. But I believe that I can extend that to 100 and be, and I believe that I can be, you know, at age 39, feel like I'm age 27. You know, that is what I mean. It's so personalized and everything that you're seeing. And there's obviously this big movement in health around drugs that are like specifically targeted to you and treatments. Yes, exactly. That's where I was going to go.

12:44So, for example, we're doing this one panel at DS that's going to be around novel biosciences and therapeutics. And we're going to have Janice Chen from Mammoth Biosciences, as well as Jacob McCraft from Strand Therapeutics. And if you look at what's happening in healthcare, like the idea that you can find out what particular cancer somebody has, what cells, what bad cells are replicating, how we go into their genetic code to create individualized medicine, individualized therapies. You know, some of this is preclinical, but that is the future of medicine. It is all going to be against yourself.

13:16It is a very different world to operate in. I don't know what it means for clinical care, et cetera, which gets to my second theme, which I will not scoop myself on. My one response to that. Yeah, tell me. I definitely think it's a trend, but I'm of two minds. I think one pushback is just like if AI is really one of the transformational forces, like it's desperate for data. And in some of the things people already want to do, like improve drug discovery, there are questions of like, does it have all the data it needs to improve? how like somebody was literally just telling me today it's like if we're using ai to improve trials we don't actually know what curing alzheimer looks like so how does ai model that right yes we don't even have the data and so then if you're saying or are we going to make leaps with the individual it's like even harder for ai just to know you know even on a system-wide let alone an individual and i get there are lots of different pieces of technology happening at once but i I probably lean a little bit more on the like, there's a lot of work on like the big side.

14:16On the general meta. Though even there are a lot of people doing exactly what you're saying. No, and I think there's probably like some income distribution to this thing, which is like there's going to be a group of people who, and you already hear about people who are coming up with unique PCR tests and funding development of their own personalized mRNA vaccines for their own type of cancer in their family, whatever it is. So you're hearing stories about that happening. Meanwhile, you're right. The big push is going to be on broad data. But I mean, you in healthcare are an anecdote. I just wore a CGM for a couple of weeks because I'm seeing this longevity doctor right now.

14:52CGM? CGM, continuous glucose monitoring. Like levels. Oh, okay, okay. Remember? Get with it. Yeah, get with it. Live forever. What are you doing? I don't know if I've said this on the podcast. I'm going to be open about this. I've started taking Wagovi. wagovi so i'm deep in one of the one thing so at least on that front i'm i'm not the full medical dose i'm like the one before that so it's an ongoing experiment so i'm i'm certainly in that and i use like one medical or whatever but yeah i'm not deep in i i wouldn't say a super health hacker i'm always asking these health people and i i'm sure i'll ask them at the event on tuesday some of them like do you do anything different and honestly some of the more medical people they're like no I don't I don't do anything weird like so it'll be interesting to even get anyone to say like oh yeah I'm doing something no I'm I'm super curious when I'm speaking to uh Celine from Loyal and Seju no no I just talked to her I just talked to her spoiler she doesn't do anything weird she is like hopefully Seju from New is doing some stuff she's like no you need to see studies and everything like even sort of a big believer in longevity she's doing life extension for dogs, which I'm super excited to talk about.

16:03Yes, going to be so excited. And Noom has just gotten into microdosing GLP-1. So one, very cool. Thank you for sharing with us about the Vigovia. I'm so curious what you'll learn from it. I've thought about it as well. Like I've definitely talked to doctors about microdosing. I'm very worried about it because I'm worried about losing any muscle mass. It was so important for women to retain muscle mass and it becomes harder in your mid to late 30s and beyond. And so it's something that I think a lot about. Oh, I was going to say the CGM thing. I just want to say one thing on CGM. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

16:31I was wearing the CGM. And, for example, like, everyone will tell you, oh, carbs, rice, whatever. Like, I don't spike. I don't spike with ice cream. I didn't spike with cookies. I'm not saying it's not good for me somehow. Oh, I should try this. I hate blood. You know I'm, like, a big fainter about blood. But you won't see any. It just, like, goes into your arm. I know. And I take the shots with a govy. And I gave, you know, my wife all these, I think I can say this, all these IVF shots. So, you know, I'm used to it. Yes. Well, I mean, now I'm doubly confused about why you wanted to call it like Blood Point or whatever bad name you wanted to give to our conference.

17:01That I'm afraid of blood? Well, you got to lean into your weaknesses. All right. All right. Yes. Okay. Confront your fears. Okay. Second trend. What do you got to pursue? This is a big, big idea, but I'm just calling it friends to enemies. Like I think there are a lot of these companies that are just going to collide. You know, like certainly at all our AI events, you know, OpenAI Anthropic loom large in some of these companies built on top of them. But they're trying to make sure it's like we need you, but we can do our own thing. And then even all the companies in the space, they're raising it's such high valuations that they need to be everything.

17:36And so I think it's a small world. Everybody knows each other. They try to be friendly, but they also have these enormous valuations that they need to justify. And so I think there's going to be this, are we partners or are we competitors? Ooh, I like it. Yeah, I kind of feel the frenemy ship that's evolving, even as we're, you know, kind of prepping for this. Because partnerships are always an interesting reality in the healthcare space. I have a related one to this, which is Race to the Bundle. Race to the Bundles. Interesting. I think this is like, you know, I came up in kind of documentary film.

18:10I worked briefly at Jason Kyler's Vessel, had raised$125 million for like a short format video service that was going to window YouTube content for three days. I mean, I won't. And 100 lives. Wow, I didn't know that. I know. You know, I turned down an offer to be like employee number 120 at Stripe to do that. Huh. Not a good financial decision. It's on my list of interesting decisions. Yeah. But what I will say is, you know, what you've seen in the streaming wars, I think, is really interesting because of this push, because of the trends that are happening, which is consumers as payers and increasingly subscription fees versus fee for service, which has been the historical model of health care delivery.

18:51You have data at your fingertips and subscription pay versus, you know, data in the hand of the clinician and fee for service. So that's been a huge shift. And as a result of that, I think it's like, okay, consumers are gonna be like, well, how many you know, I don't want to pay for Peacock and Netflix and Hulu and whatever. I love all you guys Peacock, Netflix, Hulu, we love you guys of my pod some of you but I do think that there's going to be kind of a reckoning where not everyone can I what who are the big IPO? That's a big question I have. Who do you think are the big IPOs? I think we have some big IPOs coming to our conference.

19:21future ideas. Interesting. I mean, it's going to take a while. Well, a funny thing is that this space has extreme hype and extreme pessimism in that biotech has been in a terrible downturn, but obviously computational AI based companies are raising at massive valuations and biotech companies are traditionally the ones that like go public early on, whereas the highly valued AI startups are like, oh, I'll just raise from the private market. So I honestly, I don't have a great read on who's like about to go out. Yeah. It's sort of a mixed it's like who can frame themselves which way. Yeah. I'll be curious to see.

19:56But I do think that some of these you know you have these companies that are all of a sudden I think you know Aura did a partnership with I'm going to forget the name but Aura did a partnership with a CGM company. Now you know what CGMs are. So yeah and it's not wear it all the time and it's something that the ring can't do but it is you know how do you integrate that data around they've always had this idea of experimentation at Aura. So like, can you not drink coffee for a couple of weeks? Can you not? And so this is a kind of in the model of experimentation, they can have these partnerships that are going to teach their consumers so much.

20:27The question is over time, do you develop a bundle? Do you acquire these companies? Do you vertically integrate? Are you doing everything? Or does some strategic just come in and buy the thing? All right. So that was about bundling. Bundling. Services and companies. My third and final theme is drama blinders. It's like there have been major changes at the, you know, CDC, obviously. Maha is, you know, proposing a lot of things. Some people in the medical community will have, you know, are certainly more dem aligned, I think. But I think that honestly, more than I think people sort of, I don't want to be interested to see.

21:03But I think a lot of people are going to be like, doing my thing. Happy to work with the government where it's possible. Like excited that they're taking swings. I don't know. I think there will be a lot of there's so much going on. There's so much opportunity. I think that there's going to be some desire to avoid. Confrontation. Conflict, not just with the administration, but just sort of like, you know, like this fitting with my first theme, like the longevity. It's like these are not the Brian Johnson's types. Like I didn't extend we didn't extend an invitation to Brian Johnson here, partially because I wanted sort of like the real like a builder class of people here.

21:39And I do think a lot of the people who are going to be speaking are like not necessarily trying to, you know, they're not selling like some, you know, I don't know, like what do they call supplement or whatever? You know, I just think we're not going to have sort of the grifter class here, which you can often see in longevity. And we're not going to see people looking to like fight with the administration. And so drama blinders maybe doesn't even fully capture it. It's sort of like. Yeah. Hard at work. Focus on their thing. I don't know. You know, since the pandemic, there has been this real politicization of health care we have seen for sure.

22:12And it is even through this last week when we have seen the CDC appointee from the Trump administration is no longer holding the job. All of a sudden there's been a, you know, acting CDC director appointment for Deputy Health Secretary Jim O 'Neill. I mean, it makes sense. I mean, this is these are his people. He was in Silicon Valley. Like I think for the Trump administration to have a super positive health agenda besides, you know, maybe some of like the food quality stuff, having us sort of work around what's happening in AI makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, I think it's it's a natural place for him to be.

22:46Yeah. So Jim O 'Neill has roots in Silicon Valley, had worked in HHS under, you know, Bush 43 administration, had been the CEO of the Thiel Foundation, worked at various investment firms in the Valley for a long time. But there is a really interesting shakeup happening in American health care. There is a lot of media coverage about that. I think that there is a real question around the future of science, the role of private sector companies, the role of the public sector. You're seeing in the big, beautiful bill cuts to health provision programs, particularly Medicaid. You're also seeing these big off branches extended to private companies.

23:21Noom or companies are actually working with CMS and HHS on this great data collection. I'm really interested to hear about what is the future of health care? What is the conversation that's happening in Washington? What is the role of Silicon Valley? What is the role of science, et cetera? We have a lot to discuss. But my last theme, the end of privacy. Oh, interesting. That's a good different direction. Like what even is HIPAA anymore, right? Like HIPAA. And who wants it, you know? Like all of a sudden. I didn't do Silicon Valley alignment. But it's just like for all of us, you're taking, you're putting devices to yourself.

23:54It's just like, yeah, I feel like HIPAA. By the way, I am like somebody who doesn't have my memory on Chachi PT. And I'm like, let me give you my minute to minute blood glucose data. Privacy to me is, I never have been a big privacy person. I want these companies to have the information. Yeah. And that's where I think the integration is really interesting. And that's actually where I think, you know, there's been some surprising moves out of D.C., including, you know, the stake in Intel, right? We did not expect a Republican party to be doing, you know, joint stock ventures in the mode of, you know, percentage stakes in private companies.