Latest / The Elsa Kurt Show / Light by Leonard Zwelling | Where Does Help End And Control Begin?

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Light by Leonard Zwelling | Where Does Help End And Control Begin? · The Elsa Kurt Show

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: If the key to losing weight wasn't willpower, but a beam of light.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is physician, scientist, and author Leonard Swelling, whose new medical thriller Light explores a revolutionary technology that can reshape behavior, influence decisions, and blur the line between healing and control.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fascinating story that asks a chilling question.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: If someone could change the way you think, would you even know it?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's welcome Leonard Swelling.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, see, it's already intriguing right off the bat.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Very good.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: So for people just meeting you right now for the first time, uh, tell everyone and me a little bit about you, and then we'll start talking about what inspired you to write a medical thriller, which by the way, looks so amazing.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, first, a little bit about you.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me your background.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: I um am an academic medical oncologist and was who started my career at Duke Medical School and Duke House staff training, then was a medical oncology fellow and researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda before coming to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 1984, where I spent 29 years, uh worked my way up to being a vice president in charge of the infrastructure that governs uh research of all kinds, clinical and basic.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I also, in the between there, went to business school and to learn a little bit about administration.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: Which came in handy when I became a vice president.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: It was important to know a little bit about money and how that works.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but when I retired, uh, the books that I had in me, that I knew I had in me, finally got out onto the page.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: I had one that I had written about my experience on Capitol Hill as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow during the beginning years of Obamacare.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: And that book is called Congressional Malpractice.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's up on the Amazon website.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I never would have finished that book had I not retired.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: I just, it's a lot more work than people think it is to rewrite a book.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: Once I got that done, then I have the other story that was deep inside me, which was what had happened to me as a vice president.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, that was conflict of interest, uh, money drives medicine and people die.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big novel.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: Light is totally hypothetical.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: None of it comes from real experience, except the science.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: The science comes from a guy who is out in Stanford now named Carl Dysaroff, who has already won the Laska Prize and will undoubtedly win the Nobel Prize for his work on opticogenetics.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: And what the opticogenetics does, it clones life responsive genes into parts of the brain.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Now he's obviously done it in mice, not people.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: Although it's gonna go into people shortly if it hasn't gone there already.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then by putting light on that portion of the brain, you can alter behavior.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: So what Carl was basically able to demonstrate in the videos was he could flash a light on the mice and get him to make right turns.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then a different get him to make left turns.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so, with that, Carl actually, when he was in high school, worked in my laboratory.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: His father was a uh a department chairman at MC Anderson when I was a professor there.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: Came to me one day and said, Do you have room in my for my son in your lab?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: I said, sure.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: He came in the smartest person, kid, unkid, any person I've ever met.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: He is just a genius, and then went on to prove it in his work.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I basically took his work and did what I thought would be fun to do in what if you took us to the nth degree and to use it to control human behavior, which also had a very, in one case, adverse, in another case, useful side effect.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how I drove the book light.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the story.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that's so fascinating.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: So the science is real, the story is fiction.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I I love I love the way your mind works.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: I envy the way that your mind works because you you took something very real and you and you did the the what if.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And and I love the spark for the story.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me a little bit about the the writing process of that.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: You said, and now this is this piece of work is very different from your other ones because it's entirely 100% fiction, except for the science.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me about that process a little bit about writing this book.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: What made it so different for you?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: That's a great question.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: In the case of a book, whether it's a nonfiction book about what you've done, like I've just finished a memoir, or even if it's a novel about what you've experienced, it's almost like the movie is in front of you and you are writing down what happens in the movie.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: There was nothing, I had to make it up as I went along.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I had a vague idea where I wanted to go, but my co-author, Marianne Ehrlich, and I kept bouncing ideas back and forth about where to take it.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then we I wrote it, we wrote it together, and then by the time we got to finishing it and finding the publisher, we thought it was something dated and actually had to update a lot of it.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_03: So it was written and rewritten, and that's kind of the way books go anyway.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: So sure, absolutely.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so the premise of the story, of course, is absolutely fascinating and super, super relevant to right now.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Weight loss is, I mean, this is the thing right now with you know, with GLP1s and and all of that.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Did that was that coincidental?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because you you started writing this a little earlier before this wave, right?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: I did write this before there were GLP ones, and you're talking to someone who's used those drugs extremely successful.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: They're marvelous drugs.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I lost over 30 pounds on GLP ones.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they're incredible, right?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there are, as you may know, a significant chunk of people on GLP ones for whom the drug does not work.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, there are people that are resistant, no one knows why quite yet.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_03: They shouldn't be in theory, but they are.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: And there are others who cannot tolerate the side effects.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I thought the side effects were significant but tolerable, and I was I expected them.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: There was no surprise.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: Others may not feel the same.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: And for those people, if there was something like live therapy, as I invented in the book, it would have been uh really uh interesting.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, I have a different side effect, and that is that people become uh riskier, they become less risky worse.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, all the hands that went up right away to like, yeah, I would try that, might go down when they read the book, right?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the and then of course, who would care about making anybody less risky?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, of course, the military.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: So rangers and green berets and seals, if you could give them light for therapy and then make sure they didn't lose too much weight by feeding them, you would have a better soldier.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so one of the characters in the book comes to that realization before anybody else does, including the inventors of the therapy, and begins to try to sell it to the military.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then when the military rejects him to test it on his own.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: And there are several settings in the book where that goes on, where people taking the drug are tested in violent situations to see whether or not they become better soldiers.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: Essentially, it makes me think of one of my favorite sayings that I always attribute to my husband, not that he's the first one to ever say it, but it's that whole concept of how people ruin everything, like everything that is good, everything that is good or has the potential to good.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: There are humans that find a way to use it for evil or for bad or for, you know, something negative.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: And this is kind of like a another great example of that, right?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: The the human nature, the the duplicitous human nature of, you know, on one side wanting to do good and and to help and to do great things.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's that other side that just has to take it to the next level every time.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, you know, is AI in on balance going to be used for good or not?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: I know that I can use Claude, I'm I'm able to use that.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: And Claude allowed me to format my latest book, including its cover, and publish it myself for exactly zero dollars on KDP Amazon, which I would never have been able to do without the power of AI.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: So true.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: On the other hand, I fear that other people are going to use it for nefarious purposes, uh, one of which would be warfing.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that uh one of the things that uh some of the drugs some of the AI companies, uh Anthropic in particular, was concerned about selling Claude Pentagon was that they would have warfare, war uh uh munitions that would not allow a human to interdict and would work on their own.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: And unfortunately, when AI has been used in war games, inevitably it will drop an atomic bomb.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so, and you know, it is doesn't have empathy and all that other stuff, right?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: Technology is always got is always a double-edged sword.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: It could be used for good and evil.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh automobiles can take people all over the place and they can crash into a telephone pole.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's that whole thing of like, you know, you can't do you then do you justify?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: How do you justify not that you could at this point?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the you know, it's uh Pandora's box, of course, has been opened, but you know, let's just say you can you could wave that magic wand and and make AI disappear, you know, is that a good thing?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: No, not really, because there's so many wonderful things that that AI has allowed for us to do, you know, and and people who didn't have the opportunities or the resources to uh generate wealth, uh, to to start a career, to, you know, just uh education, you know, all of the things, you know.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: So you like you said, there's so much good, but there's also the bad.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, your book actually raises a really profound question, which is if technology can can help us make better, better choices, um, where's the line between helping and controlling?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because that would that would be like the next, the next level.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you have the good and evil question and or the nefarious and and good.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but then, you know, this technology, you know, what if we get into the what if, right?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so let's go back to the beginning of genetic engineering, which about was in the mid-70s, if I'm not mistaken.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: Early on, these fears were raised about when the initial genetic, I mean, this is way back 50 years ago, when I was at still just beginning to train in the laboratory, the concerns began to be raised about genetic engineering, whether it would be a force of good or evil.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: There was a big concert, I think it was in a Silomar, California, where all the leaders in molecular biology got together and wrote a set of rules that would govern the research, govern its clinical applications, and govern the ethics of genetic engineering.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: And for the most part, it has held up.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: It is mostly a force for good, now getting to the point where it's inpatients, it's curing genetic diseases like sickle cell disease, uh, in a way that, in my wildest dreams, as a trainee, I never would have imagined would be possible.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that it would be nice if there was some leadership somewhere in the uh AI sphere to have a simpler conference that would write the rules.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, it seems there's a race to the pot of right now, and who can make the most money?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: And that, for example, where is AI going to help medicine?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, one could come up with a million ideas of how to help medicine, not the least of which is in diagnostics, just the sheer volume.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, the New England Journal has a uh a um a unique AI website used by doctors only that can you can feed in diagnostic clues and symptoms and signs and see what AI thinks is going on with the patient, which can be very helpful.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: On the other hand, AI used with patients' records could do some real mischief.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so yeah, it would be nice if the rules on AI were written collectively by a group of uh wise people, including not non-professional people, uh, members of Congress, uh, members of the medical profession, members of the information systems people, and got together and said, you know, we're going to we're going to ascribe to these ethics in our applications of AI, and we're not going to stray from this.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: I think that should happen now, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be happening.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that the rollout of this, you know, general capability to use AI, do you think it was rolled out too quickly?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like that they should have hit the pause button on all of that before the whole world basically had access to it, so that they could have maybe put in those safeguards.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I I just I have to wonder if they foresaw what was to come with this.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I don't think I think anybody, once you got to the point where ChatGPT, if you got your hands on Chat GPT in the very beginning, which I did, and uh started to use it, it would be fairly obvious that you could write a turnpaper with ChatGPT, and uh it would be difficult to discern for a greater uh whether that was yours or Rob's.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um I've written in my blog uh recently actually that the what is going to probably lead to is tests in class only and uh the vision of blue books yet again, as I had 50 years ago when I took test with the student, where you had to write your essays in class.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: There'd be no take-home anything that's going to be given because there's no there is a war going on between software that writes these things and software that detects it.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_03: So the students have one set of software, the teachers have another set of software.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: There are videos on YouTube uh that are touting the benefits of each.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_03: That's no way to educate anybody, right?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: This is not gonna work.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I think would I don't know if I would have set the pause button because I'm not naive.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: If there's some way to make money, people are not gonna be paused.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: As with genetic engineering, a conference led by the the government or Congress would have been beneficial to get the ground rules written quickly, not necessarily with regulations.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_03: It would be better if the industry was self-regulated.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, as genetic engineering pretty much was.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, people just decided they were gonna follow the rules and they did.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: There was a recombinant DNA committee set up at the FDA that at the NIH rather that was very instrumental in overseeing this in the beginning.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_03: It worked great.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: It really worked well.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't mean there were incidents, there weren't there were terrible incidents of people going too far too fast, but it was limited.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: I think the same thing could have been done with AIPO.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it does seem that way.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it it always strikes me as so ironic that a tool that, you know, in my opinion, a tool that could and should be making us smarter is kind of making us dumber, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Or lazier, maybe not necessarily dumber, but definitely lazier, you know, instead of um thinking out, you know, answers and problem solving, we just plug it into AI and and have it generate for us.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, that's certainly scary and it's unfortunate because I I love it for a learning tool.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I love the fact that anything that I want to learn is at my fingertips now, you know, and I I let that's like my favorite thing to do.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: I love micro learning and right, you know.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: It says he makes mistakes.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: In the beginning, I kept typing my name into Chat GPT.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: I went to five different medical schools, had many different careers.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: In the beginning, it was unbelievably airport, it would hallucinate all the time.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: Now it's a lot less, but it's not zero.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: They still make mistakes.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I had conversations with Claude.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: I said, Claude, are you sure this is right?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: And Claude would come back and say, Oh, you know, you're right, I made a mistake.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_03: So you can don't, it's not foolproof.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_03: When I was trying to publish my book myself and had Claude formatting it, it made all kinds of mistakes over and over.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: You had to keep asking it to do something.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things my son, who is an AI guru uh who works for Microsoft, uh taught me is you need to ask Claude or the other ones, Gemini, ChatGPT.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: How do you want me to query you?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Can teach you how it wants to interact with you?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's just, it's just amazing.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I love how your your book kind of weaves into this whole um the whole technology question, really, like the whole um battle of you know, the the good and the bad and the right and the wrong and and you know the morality of it.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um talk to me a little bit about so you know, like villains in the best thrillers, they rarely see themselves as the villain, right?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: And without like giving any spoilers, I won't ask you for any spoilers.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: What motivates the people who push this technology in your book um beyond the ethical boundaries?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: Is it it was revenge against against one of the primary physicians a family member needed to see and couldn't gain access to because they were in different states and the insurance couldn't cover it.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then came, I think, his feeling of what he would probably consider patriotism, but in fact it was self-glory in trying to get the technology to the CIA and the military.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: So he was confused, he was confused and also had people at his side who were a little bit vengeful and vicious as well.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: His girlfriend, for example, was a terrorist.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay, without him knowing it.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I mean, yes, there are repercussions and their interactions among the characters where, in one sphere, there are characters who are trying to use this for good, for people who want to lose weight, and then there's this other sphere where the side effect is the real benefit that they're looking for to make better soldiers, and in that way, it's a little bit a bit robotic, uh, a little bit Star Warsy.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so, but the people are all motivated by what they think is the right reason, and you might think, as a reader, not so good.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: I can see how that plays out in so many different real life scenarios, right?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Or things that we watch and and Read like the the in the moment you don't know that you might be the villain, right?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: It happens in our politics fairly readily, and sometimes it has political implications for the people who do the wrong thing, sure.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes it has political implications, economic implications for us as citizens.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: And very often the person who started that ball rolling had the best of intentions, but didn't look deep into see what the implications are.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things I think the country in general is uh suffering from is uh a lack of deep thought before doing something.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh to really consider what are the long-term effects of what I'm about to do, and is this really benefiting my constituency the best?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: And for example, what happened in New York over the over the last two days with this tremendous leftward swing in the politics?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what is the implications for Manhattan and the rest of the boroughs of this?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, are they going to be taxed into oblivion?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: And is the money in Manhattan going to retreat to New Jersey or Connecticut?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I don't know.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how you're going to pay for this stuff that is being promised to people and for which they now voted.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: I just I don't know how that works.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think you you nailed it right on the head, too.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's that short-sightedness, it's uh instant gratification or what they believe is instant gratification, promises of instant gratification, you know, the free stuff mantra.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm curious, you mentioned that your book, like you had started it, you know, a little while back, um, and then kind of revisited and revised and revamped in in more current times to kind of bring it up to speed.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: How much of uh current events uh affected the the changes in the book?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, huge.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think in the beginning the bad guys were ISIS, and now they became you know Palestinian.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, wow.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: In the beginning, I don't I think I I landed early on in the notion that the major effect of the therapy was going to be to lose weight.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_03: This side effect I think eluded me for a while.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I didn't think I had a story without it.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_03: I thought there was no story unless you had more.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: And once I got that, I then it wrote pretty much very quickly wrote itself, other than the setting.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: The set pieces, I mean, there is a tremendous battle in the Duke Chapel.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I'm a Duke graduate, I don't know.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: The Duke Chapel is the uh symbol of the university, it's the centerpiece of the university.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, it was it's been around since like 1935, and everybody who ever went to Duke knows it in and out.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: And it was then, I said, gee, when I walked through it and looked and started to do a little research on the ground, I said, what would it be like to have a gun battery here?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: What if a service was interrupted by a terrorist attack?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: And how would that play out?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that was a lot of fun to formulate, although, again, orchestrating it and directing it in my mind was tricky.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: It sure took a while, and there's also a lot of stuff that happens here in Houston.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I must say that I've been here for 42 years now, and no, I've never lived anywhere as long as I lived in Houston, and I absolutely adore this city.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: It is absolutely fabulous.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_03: It is the most diverse city in the country.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: There is nothing for which you can want in Houston except snow.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have that.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: No loss three times in 42 years, something like that.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's 95 degrees most of the time, often from uh mid-May to uh end of September.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: But uh, as new, we are both my wife is from Cleveland, I am from New York.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: We miss snow not at all.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: This is just fine for us to take off all the 12 months a year.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_03: So going to some of the sites in Houston and introducing them to people, which I also did in my last book, and and and um also invented a hospital in you, as you may or may not know, the largest medical center in the world is in Houston.
• 27:03
  unknown: Okay.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: Texas Medical Center has hospital after hospital after children's hospital, MD Inners, Methodists, St.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: Luke's.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: There are many hospitals up and it's all in one place.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was at the edge of Houston back in the late 1940s when it started.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Now it's of course absorbed into the city, but it is the biggest medical center in the world.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_03: I said, well, it can handle one more hospital.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I invented a hospital and called it Masada after the place in Israel.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: And the the book, Conflict of Interest, is basically an allegory based upon the Masada legend.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I said, what the heck?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'll take it into life.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: So all the people in light work at Masada Hospital, too.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: So that's and I'll probably use it again.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: I have one more I'm working on right now.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's so terrific.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: Is this uh is this a standalone book, or is this gonna be part of a series or all on its own?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the characters come in and out, and Masada isn't part of all of them, but mostly they're standalones.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I find it easier to um reconstruct the protagonists a little bit and not lock them in.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, this is not Jack Ryan, this is not that sort of thing.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: I I I don't I don't feel it's necessary, and of course, other than the protagonist, everybody else changes.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody else comes back.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Right, yeah, yeah.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: I as a reader, I so love when my favorite authors, you know, when I find an author, I like I have to read everything that they do, and I love finding those little Easter eggs from other books, you know, things like your hospital, you know, carries over from another place.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: I love stuff like that.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's so exciting.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I remember that.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: I knew that was that I'm so glad he brought that back.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: They're definitely Easter eggs in life that come from conflict of interest, no question.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: But conflict of interest is dealing with issues that are facing academic medicine in a way that they've never faced before.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: And they played out during my vice presidency in real time with a true president of the institution that got into big trouble with some of the things he did in ways that probably nowadays a younger president wouldn't have done.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: He was more old school and never would have thought that things like conflicts of interest and self-dealing were things that could happen in academic medicine, and then he stepped right in it.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: You're, I just I I said it earlier, and I have to say it again.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: I love, I so envy and love the way that your mind works, your your the the capability to write a book like this, uh, you know, combining these kind of elements, the the medical, the science, the and then the pure entertainment aspect of it, to take those elements which can be, you know, can potentially be very dry and very straightforward, and you make them exciting, you make it a thriller, which is I I think is so, so cool and and such a wonderful read.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: In my mind, I already see this as a movie.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: Is that something you you would ever envision?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: Boy, from your mouth to God's ears, we have tried everything I can think of.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: And it is really, really tough more now than ever, to get either Hollywood or traditional published, these are all self-published books.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, to get either Hollywood or traditional publishers interested in your stuff to even get them to read it.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: You really need a literary agent, and literary agents don't often pick up unpublished authors, right?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's just really, really hard.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'm hoping someone will listen to your show.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I love it.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: I love it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: The people who have read particularly conflict of interest and have left reviews have liked it.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and those people who've directly communicated with me.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: Our goal right now, the the barrier we're facing is getting people to read the books.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: And hopefully, yeah, I always get so anxious for first-time authors, and this doesn't apply to you, you're not a first-time author, uh, but I always get anxious when I hear from them and they say that, you know, that they it ends up being like I'm sure you've heard the term by now, the vanity press, you know, where they just basically just take people's money.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and you know, and anytime I hear it like, yeah, I had to pay up front for them to do this and that.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, oh, you could have done this yourself on on KDP, like you know, you did.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: Once I learned about yeah, once I learned about KDP, I tried to get through it with a YouTube video, and that was arduous.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: And my son said, What are you doing?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: Upload it to Claude and tell Claude to do.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: So I tell I upload the documents, said call it, format this for KDP Amazon.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: Two minutes later, done.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it I mean, I had to keep going back and you know, getting this right, but right, he was absolutely right, as he usually is.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean he's taught himself about AI.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: He now works in it for Microsoft.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, uh, has become very adept at understanding it and its application, which I think some of the wonks don't quite get.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: He really knows how to use it.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he knows the differences between the ones.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_03: He says, use chat for this, use Gemini for this, use Claude for this.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: And he's absolutely right because Claude was the only one that would take the upload and automatically formatted it to KDP Amazon.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: The others wouldn't do it.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: I actually asked, um, well, I asked multiple ones, like, what are you, what are you best at compared to, you know, this other play?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: Ask it.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's you know, people think they can't, you know, we have this bad habit of attributing human characteristics to everything, right?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: We think that our dog has a person's pal personality.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: We think that our AI has feelings, and it's like, no, you need to ask it the questions, direct it, you know, it's not gonna think that you're asking a dumb question, it's just not gonna think.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: It happened to me making the cover, which is very difficult.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: You have to make a continuous back, spine, and front cover in one piece.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I kept asking Claude to do it.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_03: It must have taken seven times.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: And the seventh time that gee, I hope he's not getting bored with me.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: I said, What's wrong with you?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: You're talking to a machine.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's just our human nature.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, it's just we can't even help ourselves.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're anthropomorphous.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's a machine.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's not, but I did it.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: I you did it, and your end result, your cover is is magnificent.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: I I think it's I think I love how bold and direct it is.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's a, you know, it I would call it a scroll stopper.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's a scroll stopper, you know, if you're online.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're in a bookstore and you're walking past it and that book's facing out, that book is gonna make you stop and say, hang on, what's this about?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: So well, I gotta credit my publisher for that.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: I Callahan uh published this book and I'm there and they're a self-published press, but I went to them, I said, I want a yellow cover because one of the things they teach you in marketing in business school is yellow is what you want on the shelves.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's like sandflakes are yellow.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: So, anyway, I put up, I said, I want a yellow cover, I want a traffic light, but no yellow light, blue, and I want a bullet hole in the bull.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: Nice.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_03: They did it.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love it when a vision comes together.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: Credit Callahan, they get uh full credit for that one.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's fantastic.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, tell everyone where they can find your book, and if you're doing any appearances where they can find you.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_03: Find me uh, Perdon, you can find all my stuff at Lanswelling, L-E-N-Z-W-E-L-L-I-N-G dot com.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_03: My email is leonard.zwelling at gmail.com.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_03: Happy to answer me mails.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_03: My blog, my podcast, and all the books are available on the website just by pushing it.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: Go straight to Amazon.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, everything's on Amazon.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I will be putting those, uh, all of that information in our show notes too, so you guys will be able to click on all of that from from there as well.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I can't thank you enough for coming on.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: Your book sounds amazing.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: You are amazing.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: You're such an intriguing human.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: You you just are just a wealth of I I really I could I could sit and listen to you just tell stories.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's so much more I want I want to know.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to sit for another three, four hours and just tell me everything?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: But wait a minute, you're working on it.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: You finished a memoir?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: The memoir is out.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's called an unfinished product.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: And that I wrote because my dad wrote a little memoir to me, my sister, and his grandchildren.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: And one of my sons said, You ought to do that too.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I did it.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, it didn't cover what conflict of interest covers, and it didn't cover what congressional mock-up practice covers.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_03: It basically covers the early aspects of my life.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: And it goes all the way through uh now, but it skips all the medicine part.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's mostly about uh what it was like uh to grow up where I grew up and to get educated where I did during the 60s, which was a really tumultuous time everywhere, including this university, and then what it was like to get educated as a cancer doctor in the 70s, and how much has changed.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I am flabbergasted by what I read every week in the New England Journal of Medicine, what the oncologists of today can do, I couldn't have dreamed of doing.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's magic.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_03: Great, it's just great.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, sir.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: I enjoyed this so much.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for sharing some of your time with me and your story.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate it so much.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I know the uh listeners and viewers will love it as well.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: And send me an email when this gets up so I can distribute it and make people look at it.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get their eyes on it and uh we'll get this made into a movie, right?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna happen.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_03: That's the whole fun day.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: Streaming light.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: That's the idea.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, everybody loves streaming, so that's that's the goal right here.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody start thinking about who's gonna play these main characters, right?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I've already done that.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: I actually have a I had a presentation where I actually put real actors' faces on things.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: You bet.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_03: Are you willing to tell me the are you willing to tell me two of the well the person I think my my the person that was based on my wife?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: My wife was head of pediatrics at MD Anderson for many years, and one of the characters in the last book is based on her to a large extent.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_03: And if she's in light too, but do it not a smaller, and she insisted Juliana Martelly's had to play her.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I love her, yeah.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there you go.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I love it.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: There's our tease right there.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: You've got a story worth sharing.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's time to tell it well.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're an author, entrepreneur, influencer, or podcast guest, stepping in front of the camera or microphone can feel overwhelming.
• 38:41
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• 38:48
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• 38:51
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• 38:56
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