Tech Giant Gives Glimpse Into The Future of Ai | KMP Ep.56

0:00I wear my MAGA hat proudly in Palo Alto, and I have given my voice, my resources, and my time to this movement. So I'm not passing through. I'm home. From where I come from, a lot of people are still in, you know, although I don't hear as much about climate doom, but, you know, I grew up in that environment thinking that climate change was the biggest threat facing humanity. It turns out that is not the biggest threat facing humanity. and ceding leadership to an authoritarian state is the greatest threat to humanity. I left that storied career a really, really fast track to become a full-time mother and become a trad wife and build homes and make my children's homeschooling essentially the center of my life.

0:46You know, I had a very ambitious curriculum for them, which included basically three threads, history, arts, and nature.

0:52Katie Miller:I make a joke. I was like, you know, AI may kill us all, but yesterday helped me pick out the perfect shade of makeup at Sephora. Exactly.

1:08Katie Miller:Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller Podcast. We're in Washington, D.C. today with Nusheen Hashemi. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. So give my audience a brief blurb of who you are, what you've done, and why you and I are talking today. Thank you. Well, I am a builder, a convener, a mother. Those have been the common threads of my life. I've been, I love building companies and bringing ideas to life. I love connecting people around pivotal topics, whether it's in entrepreneurship or philanthropy or public life. And most importantly, I have taken responsibility for educating my kids directly.

1:54That's been very central to my life. So the common thread is really agency. I'm interested, you know, if something needs to be built or a person needs to be supported or a problem needs to be solved, I just jump in. It's very funny you frame it like

2:08Katie Miller:that. The only person who says builder like that is from San Francisco. They all talk the same way. So how'd you get your start in San Francisco? Who'd you work for? How's that work? So I came to the United States as a teenager. Eight years later I was at Oracle. From where? From Iran. And eight years later I was at Oracle and I worked there for 10 years. Do you want me to jump into that? Yeah, it's your brief version. Sure. So you worked for Larry Allison? Yes. So these were the absolutely most incredible times. So we were doubling the company every year. So we were going from 20 million something to billions of dollars in revenues.

2:48We were, you know, first seven years, I worked 18-hour days every day, every holiday, you know, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's.

2:55Katie Miller:At what point did you have your kids? Oh, way, way, way, way later. I was very devoted. Oracle was my life. Everyone who knows me knows that. But it was really thrilling because we were building, actually building the software industry. And Oracle was a meritocracy. So I was one of two women vice presidents in Silicon Valley. I was, I think, half the age of the other one. At 27, I was essentially running a job that people in their 40s would get to run. I was 10 years younger than my peers, reporting one level down from Larry Ellison. I ran all of finance administration for Oracle U.S. And so it was exciting.

3:39We were building the infrastructure for one of the most productive and ferocious sales forces that's ever been in technology. And, you know, everything from recruiting and sales training and compensation and KPIs and forecasting and essentially building that operating system that helped us move at that speed. And, yeah, Larry, he's one of the most extraordinary leaders that has ever walked this earth. his standards are uncompromising, his speed was relentless and he could make you see the future in a way that no one else could way before anybody else could. And so he used to say, Oracle people, when they achieve their own standards of achievement when they achieve their own standards, they astonish others.

4:25So the culture was really a culture of excellence. Hiring the best people, paying them well, not like communists there was a big difference between good and great people. and measuring what mattered. So you always knew if you were winning.

4:39Katie Miller:So you were 27 when you were doing that role. You said you had kids way later. How old were you when you had your kids? 34 and 36. And were you working then? How did you, you know, one of the things that I want to use this show to do is say to women that you can have these incredible roles. You can report one level down from Larry Ellison and yet still have children still achieve your dreams. So walk me through that. So you have kids at 34 and 36. Where in your career were you? I had a storied career. I left Oracle 10 years later. So I entered when I was 22, left when I was 32, took a year off because I had not lived at all.

5:12I literally not. By the way, I managed to get a master's at Stanford while I was doing that. And then went to a dot-com world. And basically, that company got sold. Then I had my two kids. I left that storied career of really, really fast track to become a full-time mother and become a trad wife and build homes and make my children's homeschooling essentially the center of my life. So I had a very ambitious curriculum for them, which included basically three threads, history, arts, and nature. kids don't really have contacts so you can't really teach them history in books so I prioritized travel I took an experiential approach so for example took him to Sarajevo street corner where Ferdinand was shot and World War I was started took them to Auschwitz, Birkenau, took them to Cuba North Korea Larry thought I was insane for taking him to North Korea but thankfully we survived and you know took them to pray at some of the holiest places around the world and I think it mattered to me that that I that I raised them myself and so because it's really raising your your kids is the most consequential thing you can do and then in terms of art and nature so arts really important to to experience creativity and to see beauty I think seeing beauty is a very important part of life.

6:54I keep going back to Larry. I don't know why I do that, but he says we're after truth and beauty. If we can't have truth, we must have beauty. But beauty is very important. And so a lot of art programs, so they did, they were doing watercolor in Hawaii, or they were doing Wrangoli in India, or ink calligraphy in Shanghai. They were making vegetable dyes in Thailand. And also nature. So I think nature gives you that sense of awe and wonder. And you really get humility and understand kind of where you play. So we go back to agency is what drives me. So I was trying to give them that sense of agency, the fact that, you know, to help them learn who they are, how the world works, and to believe that they could shape their own future.

7:36Katie Miller:You mentioned prayer, and I can't help but not to bring both a cross and a Star of David. Why both? I believe in Jesus. I wear a Star of David. I've worn a Star of David for decades. I wear it for solidarity with Jewish people. I've traveled enough around the world and I've read enough history to know that we should have, we must have a Jewish state and it has a right to defend itself. So it's very important for me to take that statement and to take that position. You were a Democrat for a very long time. What red-pilled you? So I want to tell you that I have always had conservative beliefs my whole life.

8:12So faith has always played a big role in my life. I've always believed families should make their own decisions. I've believed in limited government. But was there one moment that struck you and was like, I've had enough? There are many, many moments, many moments, and I'll share some with you. But first, first, really, the sort of the underpinning, I think, and then I want to share some of the specific things. But I've also always believed in limited government. And I'm a, I'm a legal immigrant, so I've always believed in measured immigration and also believe that American experiment is something that is worth fighting for.

8:52But I was living in a place where everybody was a Democrat, predominantly, and it was important professionally and socially to sort of belong to that group. So I was too. But thankfully, I was never an ideological zealot or very politically active. When people ask me to go to events and contribute as a community leader or as a well-to-do person, I guess, in their minds, I did. But I began to understand that essentially Democratic Party was moving away from equality of opportunity, believing in equality of opportunity. Meritocracy is so core to who I am and what I believe in. And we were really moving away from meritocracy, moving away from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, regardless of talent, experience or effort.

9:47Just may not make any sense to me. Boys in sports, climate doom or just open borders were things I could not sign up for. So those were some of the things. And like many other technology CEOs at the end of 2024, we basically left the party and joined MAGA. and I'm very proud to have done that.

10:08Katie Miller:Republicans are rightfully skeptical of those who come from San Francisco who are in big tech because of all the censorship that took place in 2020. You're seeing that now even with TikTok that it's still censoring conservatives. What do you say to people who don't trust the San Francisco crowd as they're now saying, no, no, but I'm agreeing with you? So, I mean, my conversion, I mean, I think it's a fair question And I think my conversion is absolutely real. Believe me, there's nothing socially convenient about being MAGA in Palo Alto. And I have declared my conversion on Facebook to thousands of people, on Substack, on X.

10:48I have lost many friendships in a community that I was a part of. But I defend my views. I wear my MAGA hat proudly in Palo Alto. And I have given my voice, my resources, and my time to this movement. So I'm not passing through. I'm home.

11:14Katie Miller:When the president started bombing Iran, what was your first reaction as somebody who emigrated from there? Well, I have an America first viewpoint. So I believe that there were a lot of Iranians that were asking the U.S. and Israeli governments to come in and to essentially deal with this regime. There were those invitations. And I was hoping that something could be done quickly and swiftly. I think that was everyone's hope. Do you think the president is right to still be in Iran? I do. I think that the president is the new strategy about cutting dollars, really, really going after and really, really, really, you know, we've had lots of extreme sanctions and lots of things.

12:04But I think this recent measure about cutting dollars to these specific people is really working.

12:09Katie Miller:What's one thing Democrats still don't understand about why people are leaving their party? There are a lot of things they don't understand. I think from where I come from, for example, a lot of people are still in, although I don't hear as much about climate doom, but I grew up in that environment thinking that climate change was the biggest threat facing humanity. It turns out that is not the biggest threat facing humanity. And ceding leadership to an authoritarian state is the greatest threat to humanity. And I think that's something a lot of people miss. Another thing is all the great things that Maha has done is truly unbelievable.

12:51I think this truth that Maha has taken on, which is, look, you can't out-medicate your way out of a chronic disease epidemic. And we're spending$5.3 trillion on healthcare. And as you know, most of that, 80 % of that, goes to preventable chronic diseases. And so Maha has taken on essentially the root causes, has taken cardiometabolic disease, has taken ultra-processed foods versus real foods and is to the center of public policy and public debate. That has not happened before. I don't want to name names, but people tried to get rid of ultra-processed foods before, and they were put very much into their place.

13:37No one has been so bold. So I think what Secretary Kennedy and Callie Means and the administration have done has been great. I know this very well because I've been working. I was on the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Board for six years. I'm on the Food is Medicine Institute for the last two years. So since 2018, I've lived inside of Food is Medicine as a movement. And much of the policies and studies we've come up with have now ended up in actual Maha policies for the U.S. government. So I couldn't be more thrilled. And I think the third thing, immigration. I think this idea that, you know, your borders could just be open.

14:11I think I came here as a legal immigrant. I think nations have the responsibility and the right to decide who comes in, and they should do that in a safe and secure way.

14:20Katie Miller:There's been a mass exodus of wealth from California because the proposed wealth tax that Gavin Newsom said was not going to happen under his watch, and it looks like it's going to happen. Are you planning to leave California, and are some of your friends also going to leave? Well, most of my friends have already left California. I can name many, many names. Literally, my friends have left California because I'm, you know, in that we're in that we have cohorts and vintages in in Silicon Valley. So Anthropocopanai hasn't come yet. But, you know, the previous vintages, they have moved. They have already moved outside of California.

14:55So people have gone to Nevada to, you know, they've gone to Florida, obviously to Texas. I may, you know, for me very personally, yes, I'm considering moving out of California as well for the first time. Because I was an immigrant, I felt like, okay, I've already had a big move in my life. But yes, absolutely. I think it's important to vote with your feet. I mean, California has 1.7 times the population of Florida. It spends three times the budget of Florida. It's just Florida balances its budget every year. it's receiving people. California constantly is losing people. I mean, California is so, so mismanaged.

15:36Katie Miller:So as someone who worked at Oracle and knows a lot about AI and technology, does all the doomerism in the headlines, do you agree with it? Or do you see that there's more positive, say, to some of the health aspects than there is to Terminator is near? Oh my God, but I am very much on the positive side of AI, and especially you mentioned health. So today health is episodic. You see your doctor once a year. People are making, doctors are making decisions on very limited data. You're basically getting reactive care. You are getting care after something goes wrong. AI will completely change that on its head.

16:12You're gonna be able to get data from your Oura Ring, your, today we don't know, basically the doctor doesn't know anything about your lifestyle in between visits, right? They don't know what you've been eating. They don't know how you're sleeping. They don't really know. They're even prescribing GLP-1s to you without knowing whether you're going to be a responder or non-responder. They're just doing that. So we're basically flying blind. AI is going to change all of that. It's going to connect all of your data. In fact, January AI, my company, does that today. It connects your EHR data, all your lab data, your wearable data, your genomics, your microbiome data.

16:40Whatever health data you have, you can connect that. And then it watches patterns over time. and when a pattern forms then it can inform your doctor and say hey you need to watch out for this before you get sick or it can say this person just turned 40 they should have a mammogram or they're 45 they should get a colonoscopy before waiting until you have an actual symptom so healthcare is going to become completely predictable and predictive and preventative and it's going to become

17:10Katie Miller:become continuous one of the things that all that AI needs the data center where are you on believing that the Chinese Communist Party is personally responsible for spreading some of the misinformation in the United States about the construction of data centers and the noise of data centers, the pollution of data centers here in the United States? So, I mean, we have evidence for that, right? Everyone has seen the evidence from X, from OpenAI, et cetera. So we have evidence that they are definitely involved. I think people want us to stop. They want us to slow down because this president actually is the first person who understands the war with China over AI.

17:50He understands it very well. He thinks we should move at the speed of the threat. We are on AI time. And what AI needs, obviously AI needs compute. We need data centers. We need energy. All of this has been unleashed by this administration in terms of infrastructure needed to build that capacity. So is there any truth to those problems? Noise, water, yes, there are some truths, and people have come up with solutions. Secretary Wright has come up with things. Secretary Burgum has come up with solutions. There are solutions on the table. People that are building these things should come with the capacity.

18:27We should be building more capacity. We should build a greater grid as a result of AI than we first had. and there are many proposals on the table to do that and we can do that responsibly. We should watch out for speculative builds because it sucks up resources. But the math and economics can work on this, absolutely. And I think if we slow down, we are in a multi-front war with China. One front is capacity, which is chips and compute and data centers and energy. That's one category. Another category is industrial AI.

19:06Katie Miller:Does it concern you that all of our chips are currently made in Taiwan? Yes, but we have some chips being made now in, I think, Arizona. Our reindustrialization program is working. It's just going to take a little bit of time, which is why, again, Germany is very important. You said Germany is lost, but Germany is critically important because if you care about the Western industrial strength, Basically, Germany is a big part of that, and we really can't let it drift to China as much as it has. I would love to tell you more about that. Well, look at what happens with Germany, for example. They have mass migration, specifically from Muslim nations.

19:44Katie Miller:You're seeing violent stabbings, violent murders, violent rapes. There are fewer leaders, fewer people worse than Angela Merkel. Immigration, dependence on Chinese gas, selling out German industry to China. It's just unbelievable. what happened in Germany in the last 20 years. You see a new party rising up and getting 44 % of a vote in a specific region of Germany, and they're being called far right. When they're just trying to rein in what is mass migration, which is causing, which is what I agree, is the downfall of Germany. Yeah, I mean, Merz is currently in coalition with the Greens, and hopefully he gets the courage to build a different coalition.

20:28Katie Miller:You mentioned January AI. You found it in 2017, years before the current AI boom. Yeah. What did you see that other people didn't? Well, I was dealing with my parents' health. So my mother was, my father was diagnosed late for his cancer and he passed away. My mother was misdiagnosed as having asthma. She had heart failure. She ended up having a stroke and was hospitalized multiple times. She almost died. So I was looking for answers like, why do we know so little? Why do we know so late? and that I'm a ferocious researcher that brought me to multi-omics a field in science called multi-omics which basically is about bringing different views of your health so so your genomics your microbiome your transcriptome your proteomics your metabolomics your wearable data what you're eating your lifestyle bringing all of that together because when you do it's very predictive so multi-omics is is what gives you precision medicine what we about precision health, precision medicine, which is essentially very predictive.

21:31You can see where you're headed and where your health trajectory is. And my co-founder, Mike Snyder at Stanford has, you know, the study that he's been doing, a multi-omics study, has diagnosed 48 conditions before anybody had any symptom. So I came into multi-omics, I met Mike Snyder, and I told him I wanted to work in multi-omics and in prevention, because I'm obsessed with prevention, given what's happened to my parents, and I was dealing with something myself. And we became partners. Mike Snyder has type 2 diabetes. He wears a lot of wearables. He was obsessed with continuous glucose monitors.

22:01This is back in 2017. And then the technical person that I found to partner with me to build the company happened to be a theoretical physicist that was obsessed with AI. A paper that Google had just put out in 2016, he was just obsessed. It was just a new age of AI that was happening. So we hired a bunch of machine learning engineers and started working on cardiometabolic health. So it was kind of a divine intervention that sort of AI and metabolic because of Snyder's type 2 diabetes and my interest in morphology all came together.

22:30Katie Miller:Have you distilled any models in order to build January AI? We have. So we built, we started with machine learning models. We have not trained an LLM, but our data is going to be used very shortly to train a very, very large LLM that you know of on metabolic. And so we have, so our innovations, our greatest innovation that we've gotten a lot of awards for is our virtual continuous glucose monitor. So using actual continuous glucose monitors in thousands of people in several studies over many years, we have essentially come up with prediction models that help now people who don't wear a sensor use a probabilistic model to tell you what your blood sugar is.

23:16So you can take a picture of a food and then be able to see what your blood sugar is going to do and decide whether you're going to eat the whole thing, swap an ingredient, eat half of it, whatever.