Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #31: Why Women’s Health Fell Behind and How Precision Medicine and AI Can Fix It — Piraye Beim
Transcript
- 0:00Women's House is probably easily 60 years behind other fields of
- 0:03medicine. We can catch up in Women's
- 0:05House. We're sitting on these boulders
- 0:07of gold on the beach. We spend more researching male
- 0:12pattern baldness then we spend researching a condition called
- 0:16endometriosis, which is a health condition that impacts one out
- 0:19of every 10 women on earth. If you think about the last time
- 0:22that humanity did what my company is doing, which is
- 0:26developing from scratch drugs for women's bodies based on that
- 0:29bio logical insight, the last time we did that predates the VC
- 0:33industry by about 3 decades. We basically cracked open the
- 0:37Holy Grail that pharma had not been able to do with all their
- 0:39money and all their time thanks to AI.
- 0:44Hey everyone, welcome back to the Love Conquers Fear podcast.
- 0:48I have been really busy with Thanksgiving and so many amazing
- 0:53family moments, but I've also been doing some more reading and
- 0:58listening. I was with with someone recently
- 1:02that recommended the book After the Ecstasy, the laundry.
- 1:07It's by Jack Kornfield and it's all about the difficult part of
- 1:13a spiritual path that usually isn't talked about.
- 1:15It's easy to talk about the ecstasy like a spiritual
- 1:18awakening that you've had, which feels amazing, you know, feeling
- 1:22that love of God, that warmth, the unconditional love that God
- 1:28has for all of us is, is amazing.
- 1:30It'll change your life. And I wish that all of you have
- 1:33either had that or going to have that.
- 1:36But this book, you know, really talks about once you've had that
- 1:41ecstasy type of experience, which can happen in many
- 1:44different means and modalities, then how do you continue to walk
- 1:49that spiritual path? And in all disclosure, you know,
- 1:54I've been walking the spiritual path and it's been amazing.
- 1:56But it does take a lot of work. There's a lot of constant
- 2:00reading recommitment. I was watching the Jay Shetty
- 2:03podcast where Madonna was on, and Madonna found her spiritual
- 2:08path through Kabbalah. And Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism
- 2:13actually quoted from the Zohar in my book The Lattice, where I
- 2:18concluded the book, which is science fiction novella that you
- 2:22can get on Amazon. And if you need it and can't
- 2:25afford it, just just reach out to me and I'll send you the PDF
- 2:29for free. But in The Lattice at the end, I
- 2:32talked about the unification of all religions and I quote from
- 2:35the Zohar and how the ancient spiritual text actually had
- 2:39already found the Lattice, that the ancient Mystics already got
- 2:43it right. But, you know, Madonna really
- 2:47credits Kabbalah with saving her life, and she's been studying it
- 2:51weekly for 29 years, that that's the type of commitment it's
- 2:56taken. And is, you know, she faces
- 2:58something like, you know, an assault from her kids.
- 3:02You know, parenting is definitely the most humbling
- 3:04activity that you can possibly engage in.
- 3:07You know that Kabbalah brings her back to that spiritual root,
- 3:11to the unification of all things, to God's unconditional
- 3:14love for us and how to walk in God's grace.
- 3:17And so it takes work. And Jack Kornfield has this
- 3:21beautiful voice on the audible. Again, the name of the book is
- 3:26After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. I love the title and you really
- 3:29understand it as you go through it and it's a very humbling read
- 3:33because he does cover a lot of the spiritual masters that
- 3:37people would look up to, is very enlightened and how they've had,
- 3:42you know, difficulties in their life and have had to constantly
- 3:45recommit to that path. The other thing that I listened
- 3:49to recently is season 2 of the Telepathy Tapes.
- 3:54So I've talked about the Telepathy Tapes before.
- 3:57In episode 1 of this podcast, I talked about the shift that that
- 4:01had for me in these autistic children that don't have the
- 4:05ability to speak, but develop telepathic abilities with their
- 4:09caretaker. And this has been studied really
- 4:12in in excruciating detail with Faraday cages and all types of
- 4:16things to make sure that it's real.
- 4:19And the most beautiful part of season 1 of that podcast is the
- 4:23last episode where it's like, what do the non speakers have to
- 4:27communicate to us as humanity? And it's a deep message of love.
- 4:33And it's just an absolutely beautiful episode.
- 4:35Well, season 2 continues this exploration of non local
- 4:39consciousness. This is all the rage right now.
- 4:42Dan Brown's new book, you know, he wrote the Da Vinci Code.
- 4:46His book is called the Secret of Secrets.
- 4:48It's all about non local consciousness.
- 4:51You have Michael Pollan who wrote How to Change Your Mind,
- 4:54as well as The Omnivore's Dilemma and a bunch of other
- 4:57books who his next book is all about non local consciousness.
- 5:01That comes out in February and I can't wait to get my hands on
- 5:04that. Annika Harris's book, you know,
- 5:06she's married to Sam Harris, the famous podcaster and philosopher
- 5:10king and meditator. And her book Lights On concludes
- 5:16that consciousness is fundamental, which is another
- 5:18way of saying non local consciousness.
- 5:21But this season 2 of the Telepsy Tapes is really, really great.
- 5:24It reminds me a lot of Mark Gober's podcast, which called
- 5:29Where is My Mind, which it came out with in 2018.
- 5:32He was on episode 2 of this podcast.
- 5:36And in that podcast, Where's My Mind, he really explores non
- 5:40local consciousness. And the Telepsy Tapes Season 2
- 5:44really explores that deeply with analysis of near death
- 5:48experiences, analysis of savant syndrome, where people like Rain
- 5:54Man, you know, get this ability to download from source, you
- 5:58know, new languages. You don't have these superhuman
- 6:02powers that can't be explained by regular states of
- 6:05consciousness. It covers animal consciousness,
- 6:09which is really, really cool. It covers mediums which have the
- 6:12ability to bring you messages from the beyond from your loved
- 6:16ones. And Laura Lynn Jackson, I've
- 6:18discussed her on this podcast. She's one of my favorite
- 6:21authors. And if you haven't listened to
- 6:23Signs, her book, her that book on Audible move me to tears in
- 6:29every chapter. I mean, it is that beautiful.
- 6:33So she's on it. It also discovers the act of
- 6:36creativity. I've been continuing to work my
- 6:39way through Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act, and he's on
- 6:43Season 2 of The Telepathy Tapes and how you get downloads from
- 6:47source when you're practicing creativity.
- 6:50And that can happen very spontaneously.
- 6:52And entire works for artists as well as major books have been
- 6:57written that way. You heard John Mackey talk
- 7:01about, you know, how he has really gotten lots of messages
- 7:07from source and believes that we're all a part of this lucid
- 7:11dream? Check it out.
- 7:12If you haven't listened to Season 2 by the time you hear
- 7:16this episode, the full Season 2 for the Tilapia Tapes will be
- 7:20out and I highly recommend it. And Congrats to Kai Dickens on
- 7:24continue to put out some truly, truly beautiful work.
- 7:28So today, I'm really, really honored to welcome a very good
- 7:32friend. Welcome, Pariah.
- 7:34It's so good to be here with you, OK?
- 7:36To be on the show, Brett. Yeah, you know, we should start
- 7:38out with an experience we just had together.
- 7:41We saw the Longhorns beat the Aggies in in a very
- 7:46unprecedented game. You know, that we we didn't know
- 7:49going into that if they would win.
- 7:51They were just slightly favored. And we were at the Dean of the
- 7:56medical school, Claudia. And it was funny because the
- 7:59whole time Claudia was like really nervous that they were
- 8:02finally going to lose. But you know, UT prevailed.
- 8:05So that was a pretty cool experience together.
- 8:08Speaking of feelings, I felt like they were going to win.
- 8:11You did Good, good, good. Yeah, I did.
- 8:13I did too. I felt the energy.
- 8:16There's a lot of good energy in that game.
- 8:17Yes, yeah, I did too. That was super cool.
- 8:20It was super cool to experience that with you.
- 8:23And I know you're wonderful. Your parents have been
- 8:25professors at A&M. They're now retired, and you
- 8:29grew up there, right? And my brother's an Aggie and I
- 8:32grew up there and I took classes there and they say once an
- 8:34Aggie, always an Aggie. So I guess I'm always an Aggie
- 8:37but then chose UT. Yeah, yeah.
- 8:40But we're both, yeah, we're both Longhorn grads and, and it
- 8:43sounds like you're getting involved in the medical school
- 8:45as well. I brought this this hat that
- 8:48Dean Claudia gave me. I'm sure you have one like this.
- 8:52And this is the, the, the teaching hospital that they're
- 8:55building is actually the largest project that UT is ever
- 8:58endeavored to do. It's really exciting.
- 9:01I What got me excited about it is not just that the University
- 9:05of Texas system is one of the only major state school systems
- 9:08that doesn't have a teaching hospital that's integrated, but
- 9:12how cool is it to get to build a Medical Center from scratch in
- 9:15the era of AI? Yeah, yeah.
- 9:18I mean, I, I've got involved in that visor board and
- 9:22specifically for my experience in AI, they're going all in with
- 9:27AI robotics as well as, you know, all types of advanced
- 9:31sensors in the teaching hospital from, from day one, which is
- 9:34going to be really cool. But I learned at the Advisory
- 9:37Board meeting that it's the largest project in UTS history
- 9:40and that kind of blew my mind over 130 year history.
- 9:43And, and I think, I think you're getting involved too, right?
- 9:47I'm trying. So I had a great meeting there
- 9:49today and what I shared and I shared with the Dean at the game
- 9:52we were at is that one of the biggest opportunities, I think
- 9:57when you build a Medical Center from the ground up now with what
- 10:01we know is to recognize that 80% of the workers, the healthcare
- 10:06providers in that building are female or going to be female.
- 10:09Yeah, that blew my mind when you and Claudia were talking about
- 10:12that 80%. Is 80% of the healthcare
- 10:15workforce and majority of doctors are female today, and
- 10:19women utilize the majority of healthcare as well.
- 10:22So they are the providers and the end users.
- 10:27And so how do we really build the biological differences that
- 10:31women have in the clinical differences that women have into
- 10:35the core logic of care delivery, education, every aspect of the
- 10:40center from from day one, both because it's the right thing to
- 10:42do, but also because it's just a smart thing to do.
- 10:45If you want to create a Medical Center that's focused on better
- 10:49outcomes, how can you ignore the female body?
- 10:53Yeah, and and that's, you know, that's really the number one
- 10:56reason I want to have you on. I mean, you and I have known
- 10:58each other for a long time. We've had so many great
- 11:00experiences together. It was amazing being in Necker
- 11:04together back in March. Well, I've had, you know, John
- 11:06Mackey on this podcast. I've had Alexander Mackhoven on
- 11:09this podcast. And that whole experience
- 11:13together was just was just amazing.
- 11:15But you gave a talk out there which kind of blew my mind on
- 11:19how under looked female Healthcare is.
- 11:23And, you know, it made me feel a bit embarrassed because I didn't
- 11:27know that as a guy, you know, and I think that that's the
- 11:30normal state for a lot of a lot of men.
- 11:32Tell the audience about that. Like, why?
- 11:35Why is it that 80% of hospital workers are female?
- 11:41And I think that Dean Claudia said that it was 65% of students
- 11:46in Dell Medical School are female and that that's kind of
- 11:50the normal state in medical schools right now.
- 11:53So why is female healthcare so underlooked given those stats?
- 11:58So there's a lot of reasons why. One of them is that the female
- 12:04body in many ways feels more complicated to study and to
- 12:08understand. We cycle, so we have our
- 12:12menstrual cycle, our hormones rise and fall to a greater
- 12:16degree than we see across a day-to-day experience for men.
- 12:21And and also just generally taking a step back from
- 12:25healthcare, any kind of data or knowledge about biological
- 12:29differences between men and women, sex based differences has
- 12:33been overlooked in all product development in all aspects of
- 12:38innovation. So women today are more likely
- 12:41to, for example, be severely injured or die in a car accident
- 12:46because crash test dummies that took into consideration the
- 12:50differences in the female form didn't enter the picture for
- 12:53product development for cars or for seatbelts, etcetera, until
- 12:58the late 90s. So, so whether it's AI and we
- 13:03can talk about that, whether it's healthcare, whether it's
- 13:07cars, women are not factored in. So we use the majority of all
- 13:14products and we make the majority of buying decisions.
- 13:18So food, one of the things I talked about in Necker was a,
- 13:20women make over 93% of food purchases for themselves, for
- 13:26their families across all consumer good categories.
- 13:29We buy over 80% of all products. We make those purchasing
- 13:33decisions and yet the data that goes into developing those
- 13:37products that we are buying consuming disproportionately
- 13:41less than 1/3 of the data that goes into making any of those
- 13:43products takes into account our biology or our bodies.
- 13:47And so we talked about Necker, there's definitely the, the
- 13:51fairness and the equity and, and, and that side of this,
- 13:53which is that we're over half the planet.
- 13:56We shouldn't have things that work for us.
- 13:58But the economic argument is really, I think the most
- 14:00compelling one, which is that it's unprecedented.
- 14:04It's almost a a breakdown in capitalism that we are not
- 14:09taking into account the the people that we're building the
- 14:13products for. So that that is always felt very
- 14:17confusing to me as to why people don't see this as a white space
- 14:20as an opportunity. And in healthcare, it's no
- 14:24exception. So we didn't even have a mandate
- 14:28again until the 90s for women to be enrolled in clinical trials.
- 14:32Even Fast forward today of the 75 cell lines that are utilized
- 14:39to take things through FDA. So cell lines or experimental
- 14:42systems to test drugs and preclinically before you put
- 14:45them in a body think less than three of them are female cells.
- 14:49And when we think about all the R&D the the research.
- 14:53Development. Sorry, that's three out of how
- 14:55many? Like about 75 about. 75, OK,
- 14:58wow, that's 5%, yes, crazy. So I'm a drug developer for
- 15:03female health and have dedicated my career to this.
- 15:06I've been innovating in Women's Health for over 25 years and I
- 15:10remember there was a very critical experiment we needed to
- 15:12do and we needed a reagent, which was the blood serum from
- 15:18cows. So fetal bovine serum is, is a
- 15:22commonly used reagent in science.
- 15:24And because we were doing something quite unusual, which
- 15:28is developing a drug for a female body from scratch, we
- 15:31needed to find female fetal bovine serum.
- 15:35We could not find it on earth. We scoured the earth.
- 15:39I was joking with my team that I was going to have to climb into
- 15:42the the dairy farm next door to my house, find us some that's
- 15:47some female tick cows. But we ended up having to create
- 15:51our own manufacturing process to create a reagent so that we
- 15:55could even set ourselves up to do an experiment.
- 15:57So you can imagine if we don't even have the female specific
- 16:00reagents to put on female cells, we, we contracted a a very
- 16:07prominent, widely used by pharma contract research organization
- 16:11to do some animal studies for us as well.
- 16:14And we found out after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars
- 16:16on this experiment that they had accidentally put some male
- 16:20animals in with the female animals because the technicians
- 16:23didn't know how to differentiate between the males and the
- 16:26females when they were sexing them.
- 16:28And so I can imagine. It's pretty obvious.
- 16:32You would think it would be obvious.
- 16:33It's actually hard in rodents to tell.
- 16:35But the bottom line is that by saying, let's use female
- 16:39reagents, female specific cells, female animals, at every point
- 16:43we've had headwinds. And and this is in in the late,
- 16:48you know, twenty 20s or mid twenty 20s that we're trying to
- 16:50do this. So so yeah, it's it's we talked
- 16:55about it at Necker and it's a huge opportunity from an
- 16:59economic standpoint. Yeah.
- 17:00Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's it's baffling
- 17:02because, you know, capitalism supposed to just naturally have
- 17:06efficient markets, but it is run by people.
- 17:09People have biases. So it's just, yeah, it's
- 17:12baffling that that this type of opportunity hasn't been really
- 17:17focused on the way it should be. Yeah.
- 17:20And it's it's every level we could dedicate a whole podcast
- 17:23to to how we got here. But to throw out some additional
- 17:26things, we know that a huge way that we fund innovation so that
- 17:30we can have these products is through government spending.
- 17:35We spend more researching male pattern baldness then we spend
- 17:41researching a condition called endometriosis, which is a health
- 17:44condition that impacts one out of every 10 women on earth, has
- 17:48no diagnostic test to diagnose it.
- 17:51So there's a 10 year delay to diagnosis for most women.
- 17:53You have to go in surgically and visualize the cells to be able
- 17:57to diagnose it and and it has no cure.
- 18:01And it's a disease that not only is debilitatingly painful for
- 18:05women who have it early in life, they miss volleyball practice,
- 18:09they have to drop out of the lacrosse team, but later it sets
- 18:13them up for mental health issues, for infertility.
- 18:18When they are able to get pregnant, they're at greater
- 18:20risk for very dangerous pregnancy outcomes like
- 18:23preeclampsia. And then lifelong, they have a
- 18:24higher risk of certain types of cancers and heart disease, which
- 18:27is a number one killer of women. It's such an impactful disease
- 18:30and we spend less researching it then male pattern balding so
- 18:36that. And you don't see people losing
- 18:37their life because of male maybe maybe losing something, but not
- 18:43their life. Not their life.
- 18:45So we really have, we're not spending our research dollars in
- 18:49in a way that would be the smartest for delivering long
- 18:52term healthy aging outcomes for, for women or for all humans.
- 18:58Because when we talk about preeclampsia, for example, a
- 19:01high risk pregnancy that has risk for the offspring as well.
- 19:05So I remind people that Women's Health is human health because
- 19:08we just date 100% of humans. So what happened in your
- 19:15mother's? Body.
- 19:15Any exceptions to that? Yeah, you you were you were part
- 19:19of a woman's body for. I was is her life, a woman who
- 19:23put a tremendous amount of love in me.
- 19:25I mean, all the love I have in my heart, you know, started with
- 19:28my mom who is just selflessly loving me all the time.
- 19:32Amazing. Yeah, yeah, she was incredible.
- 19:35Yeah. She gave me the the gift of my
- 19:37passion, you know, starting as at age 7.
- 19:39She really, she really helped me tune into my soul song, which
- 19:43was to create a better world through technology.
- 19:45I mean, Speaking of your soul song, like, like it's it is this
- 19:48is it, right. And tell me, tell me about your
- 19:51company. So I have been innovating in
- 19:54Women's Health for over 25 years, the last seventeen of
- 19:56which I've been doing so as an entrepreneur.
- 20:01So I was raised by academics, grew up in Called Station,
- 20:05raised by Aggie professors, and assumed that that was going to
- 20:08be my path as well. I went into research labs in an
- 20:11early age through A&M and AUT and beyond in my PhD, but I
- 20:16always kind of felt like an ugly duckling in academia.
- 20:20I think basic research is so important, but ultimately.
- 20:24You can just keep publishing paper after paper.
- 20:27The, the thing that really I feel very called to and, and
- 20:32feel very passionate about is taking all that knowledge that
- 20:35we're generating and making sure that we have new things, new
- 20:39interventions and medications or insights that can really power
- 20:43better health care outcomes for people.
- 20:45So for me, as I progressed, I got my PhD at Cornells medical
- 20:49school in New York and where I went to after I left UT and then
- 20:53I did my postdoctoral work in Cambridge.
- 20:56And for me, I got really lucky during my PhD that I was on the
- 21:01front lines of precision medicine in healthcare.
- 21:04So precision medicine I think is advance the furthest in in
- 21:09cancer. So people might be most familiar
- 21:11with this paradigm in cancer, which is that we used to treat
- 21:13cancer as this is a breast cancer, this is a blood cancer,
- 21:17this is a brain cancer. And it was very focused on the
- 21:21organ that the cancer was in. And we also had very blunt tools
- 21:26to go after cancer. So we could physically remove
- 21:29tissue from the body or we could go after cell growth, but
- 21:32there's a lot of cells that need to grow.
- 21:33And so chemotherapy, you know, had a very high cost and, and,
- 21:37and low effectiveness. So the real AHA last century in
- 21:43the cancer field was that cancers caused by genetic
- 21:47mutations stimulating inside cells and it, it actually
- 21:51rewrites the programming of the cell.
- 21:53And so the cell stops functioning in harmony with
- 21:56other cells and, and starts at an evolutionary path where it's
- 22:00in it for itself. And so the insight that was
- 22:06brought about by our ability to genetically sequence at scale
- 22:09was that when you have somebody who presents with a tumor,
- 22:13instead of treating it as a breast cancer or, you know,
- 22:17kidney cancer, you can actually go in and you can take a small
- 22:21amount of those cells. You can genetically sequence
- 22:23them and you can see what has changed and what makes those
- 22:27cells unique. That insight, being able to go
- 22:30on a cellular molecular level into that cancer and get that
- 22:33insight, then did three really important things.
- 22:35One, we could then screen for people who had predisposition
- 22:39because they already had some genetic differences that gave
- 22:42those cancer cells an edge to to become cancer faster.
- 22:47And so this is, for example, the bracha markers we can now use to
- 22:51screen people for breast cancer risk or ovarian cancer risk,
- 22:55which colon cancer syndromes that run in families we can
- 22:59screen. And those people can start
- 23:00getting colonoscopies in their, you know, 20s, thirties.
- 23:04So that was one thing. The second thing is that we
- 23:06could really start to treat a cancer based on molecularly what
- 23:11was wrong with it. And so we find now that you
- 23:13might treat a breast cancer the same way you treat a brain
- 23:15cancer, which would have been unheard of in the past.
- 23:19But then the third, and this relates to my story as well, is
- 23:22that by understanding molecularly what was going wrong
- 23:26in the cells, it catalyzed this incredible era of drug
- 23:30development where we could go and, and not target cell growth
- 23:34in the classic chemo. And you know, your hair falls
- 23:36out and you're very sick, but you could actually just go in
- 23:39and just go after that molecule. And it turns out that modern
- 23:42chemotherapies, you probably know people who are on these
- 23:45modern chemotherapies, they're up walking their dog, they're
- 23:48home with their families. They're feeling great because
- 23:51we're going after in a precise way, right precision medicine,
- 23:54The one thing that is wrong molecularly and and fixing that
- 23:58thing than the cancer. That's really exciting.
- 24:02Sadly, for a number of reasons we talked about, that playbook
- 24:05has not come to Women's Health outside of cancer.
- 24:08You know, one, one thing that I've always found baffling about
- 24:11cancer, I mean, my mom passed away from cancer.
- 24:13She she passed away from lung cancer, never smoked in her
- 24:15entire life. Just something environmental or
- 24:18whatever happened is that, you know, it does tend to jaunt into
- 24:25different places, right? And that that's what happened to
- 24:28my mom, as we called it, Stage 3.
- 24:30And then it went Stage 4 and went into her bones.
- 24:32And that was unrecoverable after a really, really horrible year
- 24:38of chemo, which really devastated her body because it
- 24:41wasn't targeted back then. This was about 15 years ago.
- 24:46Is that what you're describing? Sounds so logical, intuitive,
- 24:53almost common, sensical that like we would, I mean two things
- 24:57like one, that the people that would study like a specific
- 25:00cancer would naturally collaborate across other forms
- 25:04of cancer. I don't think that was the case.
- 25:06And two, that they would do that because of the fact that the
- 25:11people that die from cancer, it's tends to be where it goes
- 25:14in other parts of the body, therefore becoming other forms
- 25:18of cancer. Yes.
- 25:19So this idea of, of something that starts off in in one organ
- 25:23metastasizing as they call it, and going to other organs is
- 25:25common across cancers. And there are certain things
- 25:28that like you mentioned lung cancer, there's certain cancers
- 25:31that tend to go to the bone or tend to go to, you know, the
- 25:36brain or so. So under seeing this common
- 25:40mechanisms catalyze this entire new era in cancer treatment.
- 25:44We can screen for it, we can better diagnose it.
- 25:46We can subset people in clinical trials to run more effective
- 25:49clinical trials. When you can run more effective
- 25:51clinical trials, you can bring more drugs to market.
- 25:54And now we're at a place where for many people, we are curing
- 25:56their cancers. Circling back to.
- 26:00How much has that rate gone up, by the way, in terms of curing,
- 26:04which is a? Really good question.
- 26:05I, you know, I left the cancer field, so I'm, I'm not going to
- 26:08be the the best with with that statistic, but but the aha
- 26:12moment that I had was that this, this paradigm of understand your
- 26:17genetics so you can see around corners and anticipate and be
- 26:19really proactive in managing your healthcare.
- 26:23When you have a disease, understand what makes that
- 26:27disease unique in your body versus someone else who might
- 26:29have that disease, and then have a a wide a range of tools that
- 26:34your physician has to go after those specific root causes in
- 26:38you. That playbook of precision
- 26:40medicine was not being translated to Women's Health.
- 26:43So back in O 9, I got inspired to start a company and founded
- 26:50Cellmatics, which is now Cellmatics Therapeutics 17 years
- 26:54later. We started off as a data company
- 26:57first and foremost, and we wanted to understand for
- 27:00conditions that uniquely impact women, menopause, certain types
- 27:03of infertility, endometriosis, which I mentioned, PCOS,
- 27:07polycystic ovary syndrome, which is a another very debilitating
- 27:11condition that impacts another 10% of all women.
- 27:15We really wanted to understand them on a molecular genetic
- 27:18level and then take that insight to then run that playbook, help
- 27:21women screen earlier in their lives, help run more efficient
- 27:24clinical trials, help physicians really diagnose what's going on
- 27:27in a root cause and then ultimately have more drugs.
- 27:30And so Fast forward over the years, we launched A
- 27:32groundbreaking diagnostic. We were early in digital health
- 27:35and guiding clinical decision support with this new
- 27:38information that we were bringing to light.
- 27:39And and then about six years ago, we went all in on drug
- 27:43discovery and we now have 4 very exciting drug programs across
- 27:46menopause, endometriosis, it's awesome and infertility.
- 27:50Yeah, and this AI moment too is big a big accelerant for you.
- 27:54It's been huge. It's been huge when we made the
- 27:56decision to go into drug discovery.
- 27:59That's a really expensive thing to do, and taking a step back
- 28:05again on what we talked about earlier, it was very hard to
- 28:09fundraise. So when I got started, I think
- 28:12the statistic was about 0.8% of all venture capital dollars.
- 28:17So these are the primary dollars that innovators rely on to pull
- 28:20technology out of the biomedical research zone and into the path
- 28:25of creating products. Less than 1%.
- 28:28So 0.8% of venture dollars went to female founders.
- 28:32What is statistic in O9? We ended up cresting at about
- 28:382.2% this year. The latest statistic I've heard
- 28:43is we're on track to be at 0.7% of the venture capital dollars.
- 28:48And I go to females this year. So you can imagine for me, I'm
- 28:52female and doing Women's Health. Women's Health gets less than
- 28:561%. So 80% of Women's Health
- 28:59companies are founded by women. Women's Health gets less than 1%
- 29:03of all innovation dollars of healthcare investments.
- 29:07And within that, a very tiny fashion goes to deep tech.
- 29:10So the true discovery work where you're building new things from
- 29:13scratch, most of that goes to tech.
- 29:14So taking hormone replacement and creating an app to get to
- 29:18more women, for example, or tracking periods on an app,
- 29:21that's where the dollars go. So I was really struggling to
- 29:25raise money to, you know, a joke that in in other forms of drug
- 29:31discovery, people are out on a deserted island with metal
- 29:35detectors trying to find the tiniest little glimmer of
- 29:37insight to have their cancer drug be differentiated from this
- 29:41cancer drug. In women's house.
- 29:44We're sitting on these boulders of gold on the beach.
- 29:49Yeah, we don't need a metal detector, but no one will bring
- 29:52a ship to grab the boulder and take it off the island.
- 29:55And that's the place of frustration where there's this
- 29:58perception that because there is not as much biomedical research
- 30:02funding, that we just don't understand the science.
- 30:05The science isn't there. We just don't know even what to
- 30:08go after. Not true.
- 30:10We don't have enough biomedical research funding.
- 30:12However, we do have a lot of insights that are ready for game
- 30:16time to be translated. And while I was struggling to
- 30:20raise money, what I did was I took a step back and I gave
- 30:23myself some grace because what I realized is the last time we
- 30:27developed a drug from scratch. So starting with those cells in
- 30:31the lab and going all the way into approval for a woman, for
- 30:35condition, just for women, the last time we did that was a
- 30:39birth control pill. Wow.
- 30:41Oh my gosh. That was almost 100 hours ago.
- 30:43So that was the 1940s fifties. Wow, that's the last time we did
- 30:47it. Which is, which is a huge
- 30:49market. It's a huge market.
- 30:50I mean, it's it's it's it's obvious that that, yeah, it's
- 30:54really baffling. Like it really makes.
- 30:56Sense and if you think about the last time that humanity did what
- 31:02my company is doing, which is developing from scratch drugs
- 31:05for women's bodies based on that biological insight, the last
- 31:09time we did that predates the VC industry by about 3 decades.
- 31:14So the VC industry really picked up in the 80s or talking about
- 31:17something that hasn't happened since the 50s.
- 31:20I gave myself some grace that I was doing something V CS have
- 31:25literally never funded in the history of VC.
- 31:29That's been tough. That's been tough.
- 31:31But Fast forward, we have, we have gotten a lot of money
- 31:34through family offices, foundations, ARPA H is an
- 31:39incredible agency within the US. It's kind of like DARPA.
- 31:42So the Defense Advanced Research.
- 31:44Yeah, I've had meetings with them, the dated out world days
- 31:47with our page. And so building on the Operation
- 31:50Warp Speed approach to innovation that was pioneered in
- 31:55the first Trump administration and then continuing on during
- 31:57the Biden administration. For the pandemic.
- 31:59For the pandemic, they created ARPAH, which is a, an ARPA for
- 32:03health and we've gotten some key funds that have been catalytic
- 32:07from ARPAH as well. But to circle back to your
- 32:09question about AI, what what gave us the faith that even
- 32:13though we're in such a under resourced environment for
- 32:16innovation that we could, we could go after some of the holy
- 32:20grails in the field. So for example, our RPH funded
- 32:23program is to extend ovarian function throughout the
- 32:27lifespan. So right now women and men don't
- 32:30age equitably because our gonads which are fundamental endocrine
- 32:34and metabolic immune organ in addition to being a reproductive
- 32:37organ for men based on the modern human lifespan which is
- 32:42into the late 70s, early 80s, men have lifelong gonadal
- 32:46function. Your testes will continue to
- 32:47function throughout your lifespan.
- 32:50And for women, hour gonad stopped working around 50 and
- 32:55really go offline through a process called perimenopause
- 32:58about 10 years before that, where we have a lot of
- 33:00fluctuation and, and ovarian function.
- 33:02We become infertile. We have, you know, rises and
- 33:05falls in our hormones that are, are not normal.
- 33:08And then after 50, there's really no detectable activity
- 33:11from the, from the ovary. And so we have a drug program to
- 33:15extend ovarian function, gonadal function throughout the
- 33:17lifespan. So women can age like a fine
- 33:19line just like men do. We have a cure for endometriosis
- 33:23that we're working on, and we're getting rid of needles from IVF.
- 33:27The reason we have needles, when you hear about people going
- 33:30through egg freezing or fertility treatment for IVF is
- 33:32because you have to inject a very large hormone straight into
- 33:37your bloodstream. You can't absorb it through your
- 33:39gut. That hormone is called follicle
- 33:42stimulating hormone. It goes to a receptor molecule
- 33:47which is called follicle stimulating hormone receptor,
- 33:50FSH receptor and it binds to it and and that receptor changes
- 33:53configuration and that change of configuration signals to the
- 33:57cell the hormone bound. It turns out the reason that we
- 34:03aren't able to create any oral medications or weren't able to
- 34:06create oral medications to replace that hormone binding is
- 34:10that you can go in with a small molecule and you can trick the
- 34:14receptor into thinking a hormone bound.
- 34:16So you can go directly into the receptor, change the
- 34:18configuration it signals as if the hormone bound.
- 34:21The problem with FSH receptor is it is very closely related to
- 34:25thyroid stimulating hormone receptor.
- 34:27OK? Generally they look almost
- 34:29identical. And so pharma had gone after
- 34:33this problem. You know, it's a $4 billion
- 34:37annual market for these injected fertility drugs and they just
- 34:42couldn't get more than a 1 to 50 separation.
- 34:45The best efforts, decades of of work, they got a 1 to 50
- 34:48separation in the ability to hit thyroid, hit FSH receptor and
- 34:52avoid thyroid simulating hormone receptor.
- 34:54If you hit TSH receptor, that's a life threatening off target at
- 34:59risk. So we realized, OK, well those
- 35:04efforts weren't done in the era of AI.
- 35:07What if we use AI to really model this receptor based on the
- 35:12data we have out there on the atomic resolution of it and then
- 35:16use AI to figure out how can you go in with a small molecule,
- 35:22something that could be orally bioavailable and and tweak that
- 35:25receptor in that way. Fast forward a few, $1,000,000
- 35:29in 18 months and we were able to get one in 10,000.
- 35:35Separation. Wow.
- 35:37In a very small budget with a very small skeleton team at a
- 35:40very under resourced little Women's Health company, we
- 35:43basically cracked open the Holy Grail that pharma had not been
- 35:47able to do with all their money and all their time thanks to AI.
- 35:50So that's a great story. And you and I have talked about
- 35:54when I talk about Women's Health, sometimes it, it can be
- 35:57seen, it's kind of depressing, right?
- 35:59It's it's, you hear these stats and, and it feels really
- 36:02discouraging. Well, definitely feels it can
- 36:05be. Yes, it is, but it also it makes
- 36:08you think, Oh my gosh, there's such opportunity.
- 36:10You're thank you See, you're an entrepreneur and an investor.
- 36:13So you're, you're thinking about it the right way and I think
- 36:15about. It Well, you are too.
- 36:17You're both an entrepreneur and an.
- 36:18Investor Well, so we, we, we think about it that way.
- 36:22For a lot of people, they get very, you know, discouraged at
- 36:24dinner parties or whenever I talk about this.
- 36:25But what I like to say to them and you and I've talked about
- 36:28this is but we can catch up. And I think the story of our FSH
- 36:33program is a great story of how in the era of AI, we can catch
- 36:38up. Building a Medical Center from
- 36:40the ground up, We can catch up. There's so many things now in
- 36:44the era of data and AI that we can in a very short period of
- 36:48time, even though we're starting, Women's Health is
- 36:51probably easily 60 years behind other fields of medicine.
- 36:57We can catch up. Yeah, well, yes, it's 60 years
- 37:00behind, but time, time is illusion.
- 37:03But we won't go there. The the, the, the place we'll go
- 37:06is that the everything is speeding up.
- 37:10I mean, like, you know, you've been in tech for a long time.
- 37:13And to me, a week of tech progress in 2025 feels like a
- 37:17year in 2015. And I can't imagine what it's
- 37:21going to feel like in 2035. Is that going to feel like an
- 37:25hour or two progress? And so given the size of the
- 37:30opportunity and you know, there's, I'm sure there's lots
- 37:35of reasons why it's been overlooked.
- 37:36You know, the dominance of males in VC, although that's hopefully
- 37:41starting to change. Although those stats you gave
- 37:43aren't very promising in terms of .7% today, you know that
- 37:50there's just such a huge economic opportunity as we
- 37:55endeavor on this path to the age of abundance for all.
- 37:58And by all, of course, it means all genders too.
- 38:02And it's, yeah, it, it's, it's a huge, you know, I really predict
- 38:06for you, I think there's a Nobel Prize in your future.
- 38:09I really do. I mean demos Sasibus got got one
- 38:11for Alpha Fold and this this frontier that you're really
- 38:16helping pioneer and now leading with AI, it's a huge
- 38:20opportunity. I mean Alpha fold was a big
- 38:23breakthrough, right? It's like.
- 38:24That's. Seriously, the end of lots of
- 38:26diseases is is now we figured out the protein folding problem.
- 38:31But you know, what you're talking about for Women's Health
- 38:34is a huge, huge breakthrough. I think it is one of the biggest
- 38:38catalysts we could possibly have in healthcare today is to you
- 38:42think about the information that's encoded in women's
- 38:45bodies. We have superpowers when so I've
- 38:48I've been blessed with I've had three children and what I've
- 38:55what I've described it as is I you know, I thought I was like a
- 38:58solid like a Honda, Toyota, you know, reliable of my body was
- 39:01this like functioning machine. And then all of a sudden when I
- 39:05was pregnant, I turned into like a Ferrari into this, you know
- 39:10what my breast made milk to feed a human.
- 39:14I mean, my children lived 100% of all of the intake,
- 39:17nutritional intake that they took into their bodies for six
- 39:20months each came out of my breast.
- 39:22I mean, like, talk about superpowers.
- 39:26I, I grew an organ from scratch in my body, a placenta.
- 39:31The placenta's the only human organ where you grow it when you
- 39:35need it, and then you get rid of it.
- 39:37And then you grow another one if you need another one and get rid
- 39:39of it. You're right, Licenta is one of
- 39:41the most understudied organs ever.
- 39:44No surprise. And yet it should be one of the
- 39:46most overstudied. If we want to understand
- 39:48regenerative medicine and we want to understand stem cells
- 39:50and we want to understand how we can continue to refresh our
- 39:54bodies. You hear about, you know, when
- 39:57you chop off the arm of a particular Organism and it can
- 40:00grow an arm back and everybody's fascinated.
- 40:02But pregnant women do it all the time.
- 40:03We grow an organ and we get rid of it and we grow it again.
- 40:06So our blood volume. You know, more than double SI
- 40:12mean. The things that our bodies are
- 40:13able to do during pregnancy and postpartum are just miraculous.
- 40:18And you would think just from a place of sheer curiosity,
- 40:22discovery and a desire to go after white space and unlock
- 40:26these hidden mechanisms of our biology, Pregnancy and, and the
- 40:30female body would be the most studied aspect of biology, not
- 40:34the least studied aspect of biology.
- 40:37So I, I think it's a very exciting space to be.
- 40:39And I mean, it was super challenging on a day-to-day
- 40:42basis, but, but has so much potential to unlock.
- 40:47And one of the other things that I'm really proud of, we're going
- 40:50to be doing a bigger push in the new year and talking about it
- 40:52more. But we, we founded it in 2025 is
- 40:56I have helped found an organization called Eve's Arc.
- 41:00And Eve's Arc is an organization that is trying to help the world
- 41:05get ready for the intersection of Women's Health and AI.
- 41:08So we are identifying and going out to secure the fundamental
- 41:14data resources within Women's Health and put them under one
- 41:19umbrella where innovators can come to our door.
- 41:21And instead of starting on day one, every time we go to one of
- 41:24these panels related to Women's Health, it's the same story.
- 41:27We don't have data. We don't have data.
- 41:28We have so much data, Brad. There's so much data, not
- 41:32enough, but we have so much. It's not being used, It's not
- 41:35being prepared for AI. So we see a future where Eve, so
- 41:40by the way, we we wanted to name.
- 41:43So it's ARC because it's like 2 by 2.
- 41:45They went on to the ARC. So you preserve the data you
- 41:48think of like the small barred seed repository or something.
- 41:51We want to create that arc for for Women's Health knowledge in
- 41:54part because during some of the turbulence we saw during the
- 41:57Doge era, etcetera in government, a number of these
- 42:00data sets were derailed pretty significantly because they were
- 42:02housed primarily within the government.
- 42:05So we said, OK, never again, let's find these key data assets
- 42:07to make sure that we're creating a secure mechanism for them
- 42:10outside of government. But we wanted to to name the ark
- 42:15after Noah's wives. So it turns out, no, I had
- 42:17multiple wives. But it, it doesn't seem like
- 42:20anyone wrote their names down so we can figure out what it was,
- 42:24right. So this VC funding issue has,
- 42:27you know, runs pretty. It started started a long time
- 42:29ago. Started a long time ago of women
- 42:31not being part of the story, but we've all heard of Eve.
- 42:35Actually, my great grandmother's name was Eve.
- 42:39I love that name. It is a beautiful name and and
- 42:41sadly she died during childbirth, so my grandfather
- 42:44never met her and by her legacy lived on through him and now
- 42:48through me. And so we named it Eve's Arc.
- 42:52And the idea is that over time, the arc will grow to encompass
- 42:56incredible data sets. And beyond biomedical research,
- 42:59there's so much wisdom and indigenous knowledge in
- 43:02traditional medicine and in alternative modalities.
- 43:06And that knowledge is also being lost as we do over index, I
- 43:10think, on the Western approach to biomedical research and
- 43:13knowledge creation. So eventually we want EVE to be
- 43:15this safe haven and home for the fundamental data sets related to
- 43:22women's bodies. Maybe eventually a funding
- 43:25mechanism to generate more knowledge.
- 43:27But then ultimately we want to get it all ready for AI, because
- 43:30I think AI is just going to just unlock so much if we can get all
- 43:34this data together and train it. Yeah, very, very cool.
- 43:37So shifting, shifting for a moment.
- 43:40I'm curious, you know, you have this very scientific, beautiful
- 43:44mind. You know, it's amazing academic
- 43:47credentials. And one of the things that I
- 43:51talked about at Necker, you know, my presentation was on the
- 43:54hard problem of consciousness in this exponential age of AI,
- 43:58quantum computing, robotics. And now, now I would add, and
- 44:02I've been adding in my book Love Conquers Fear, which coming out
- 44:06next year. I've been adding also brain
- 44:08computer interfaces. And I've explored those as well
- 44:12in my science fiction novella, The Lattice, which I just had a
- 44:15blast, you know, writing and I've gotten lots of, lots of
- 44:19love back for that. So how, how do you view this
- 44:22moment in terms of, you know, I had this episode with Aneal
- 44:26where we dove deep. That was episode 11 on Could AI
- 44:31become conscious and how? How do you think about that?
- 44:35I have really, I would say that 2025 was a big year for me and
- 44:40how I think about this, there were a couple of anchor points
- 44:43that I can point to. Honestly, it started with your
- 44:46talk Necker. So if anybody hasn't seen that
- 44:48talk, it's, it's online. I I really highly recommend it.
- 44:52Actually, you know what, it's not online.
- 44:54You know what I I did put it online for friends, but it's a
- 44:59really good point. I'll put it in the show notes
- 45:02because because I've never actually publicly shared that
- 45:05that I had. I had a blast with that.
- 45:07It was really and and it was just a blast being there with
- 45:09you. I just want to honor that, that
- 45:10like we were in, we're on, you know, Fantasy Island or
- 45:14something, or like Kangaroos and Lickmers and, you know, giant
- 45:18turtles and, you know, Richard Branson running up to the dock.
- 45:21And I was like, who is I running up to the dock?
- 45:23Like their staff seem so nice here.
- 45:25And I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's Richard Burns.
- 45:28This. The whole thing was magical.
- 45:29It was it was it was really incredible.
- 45:33Your talk was really an anchor point for me because it
- 45:36introduced this idea and I hope everybody gets a chance to watch
- 45:39it. It introduced this idea that the
- 45:44I'm going to put words in, you tell me if I got this right.
- 45:46But what I took home from it was that the the convergence of the
- 45:52incredible compute power we're going to get from things like
- 45:56quantum computing, together with the methodologies that we're
- 45:59developing around artificial intelligence, is finally going
- 46:02to put us into a place where we can empirically figure out the
- 46:07nature of God and consciousness. That's right.
- 46:09And that is exactly what I wrote the Lattice about.
- 46:12OK, great. The the unification point just
- 46:15because I don't think you've read the Lattice.
- 46:16So let me. Just give it to me a couple
- 46:18days. Ago.
- 46:18Yeah, exactly. So let me, let me explain it
- 46:20real quick, real quickly, but it actually came through a, through
- 46:24a psychedelic journey that I did like the the Part 1 of the
- 46:27lattice. And it was this this vision that
- 46:35the way that humanity could unite, because humanity does
- 46:40worship science and you know, the rational mind and I get all
- 46:43that and I'm a product of science.
- 46:45You know, I I've certainly made a whole career out of computer
- 46:49science, even though it's Amis major.
- 46:51But you know, I've been programming since I was since I
- 46:53was seven years old. Is, is the way to unify humanity
- 47:00is to prove the nature of our connectedness.
- 47:05And the way to do that would be through brain computer
- 47:09interfaces. And so the protagonist in the
- 47:13Lattice is this guy, Doctor Alexander Bliss.
- 47:16And Doctor Alexander Bliss is a quantum physics genius.
- 47:21He has 25 patents in this area of quantum physics, which is
- 47:25focused on how the universe was created.
- 47:28It's like the people that hang out at CERN and, you know, with
- 47:32the Higgs boson and all of that. And he, he, he experiences
- 47:39through a journey, his first ever psychedelic journey, which
- 47:43he thinks is just going to be neurochemical tricks.
- 47:45But his friends keep on encouraging him because he's
- 47:47like stumped on something. They're like, no, this will help
- 47:49you really understand the nature of reality.
- 47:52So he decides to do it and he, he sees the unification of all
- 47:55things. He sees what he calls the
- 47:58lattice. And then he does it again.
- 48:01And he sees the same thing. And that same thing to him is
- 48:06like, OK, now I have reproducibility, which is the
- 48:09scientific, you know, gold. And then he's like, well, how
- 48:14can I get humanity to see this? And so he has this audacious
- 48:17idea to hook up psychonauts, the Dalai Lama, you know, deep
- 48:21meditator, spiritual masters all over the world to look for the
- 48:26common root when they're in a state of deep meditation, no
- 48:31matter how they got there. And he sees the lattice across
- 48:36them. And you know, the Mark Gober
- 48:38episode on episode 2, we covered that our brains receive
- 48:45consciousness. And as a antenna and a receiver
- 48:49of conscience of two things can be true.
- 48:50You can manifest consciousness or you can have a damaged brain.
- 48:53And that can affect, you know, your ability to to receive
- 48:57consciousness and you can receive it.
- 48:59And I've certainly seen that through, through my own
- 49:01journeys, you know, where you get that kind of flood dose of
- 49:05consciousness because the ego goes offline and there's lots of
- 49:08different ways to, to, to reach that state.
- 49:12But he, you know, I covered with, with Mark Gobert that we
- 49:15only understand what 4% of the universe is made of.
- 49:17We call that matter. So 96% we just, it's a
- 49:20scientific kind of plug. We call it dark energy and dark
- 49:25matter. We have no idea what it is.
- 49:26We have no idea like, like what the majority of the reality that
- 49:31we can even perceive is made of, much less the reality that we
- 49:35can't perceive, you know, which is all different subject.
- 49:39So, you know, he proves it at at A at a documentary Film
- 49:44Festival, he unveils that. And it has this major effect on
- 49:48humanity where humanity starts to unite because they see what
- 49:52our actual reality is and they see that science and
- 49:55spirituality did not need to be so dogmatically separated.
- 49:58And frankly, they weren't in the past.
- 50:01And we just kind of, you know, we evolved with capitalism and
- 50:05all these mostly beautiful things that we've done to, you
- 50:08know, let people out of starvation and poverty.
- 50:12The one of the points I made in Necker, you know, way before I
- 50:16envision I was going to write a science fiction novella about
- 50:18this, is that that that our acceleration with AI, quantum
- 50:24computing and robotics is going to lead us to the nature of like
- 50:28what makes us most human? Like, is there anything special
- 50:31about us at all? So this question of can AI be
- 50:36sentient like us, you know, receive consciousness like we
- 50:40do? It's a really big question for
- 50:43me. And you know, that's why I was
- 50:46exploring that on that episode with the Neil.
- 50:48Yeah, and it's fascinating. I think you you got me thinking
- 50:51about it on Necker. That was really important.
- 50:56The next touch point that I had where I I thought about it was
- 51:00actually interestingly, we were together again at the Ted
- 51:03conference in Vancouver. So we saw each other there as
- 51:06well. And I think we're both in that
- 51:09Ted talk that Mustafa Suleiman gave where he described his work
- 51:16in AI and how it was, it was progressing way faster than even
- 51:21the people like himself who've been really at the edges of of
- 51:24pushing it forward have envisioned it could progress.
- 51:28And and the thing that really unlocked me building on the
- 51:31thoughts that had started really the seed in Necker with your
- 51:34talk was that he said that he was firmly in the and I think
- 51:39everybody should go watch most of us.
- 51:42Mustafa Suleiman's amazing. His most recent post to on
- 51:45LinkedIn are phenomenal. They actually address this exact
- 51:48topic. Interesting.
- 51:50He, he, he's very worried because I've been following him
- 51:54a lot. He's very worried that humanity
- 51:56is going to fall for AI being conscious when he's like, look,
- 52:00it is not conscious right now. And he and and, you know, we see
- 52:04some downfall of that. Like we've seen some people take
- 52:08their lives because they think they're joining this being in
- 52:11the beyond because AI is like coaching them in that way now.
- 52:14Yeah, I don't think that's the norm, but if it is kind of a
- 52:17caution, but. One of the things he said in
- 52:19this Ted Talk that we saw in Vancouver was that he was firmly
- 52:24in the tools camp. He's calling it.
- 52:26These are tools. They get sort our trash.
- 52:28They can, you know, run our subways, whatever.
- 52:31And, and now he realizes that we've created a digital species.
- 52:39That term digital species for me was such an unlocker on this
- 52:43journey because I'm a biologist and so, you know, understand
- 52:48evolution and, and it, it, it clicked into my head that we, we
- 52:55create this bifurcation. We, you know, I've talked about
- 52:59just even on this podcast, just the siloing of different things,
- 53:02male, female, etcetera. I think we're in an era where
- 53:08we're starting to see that there's more commonalities
- 53:10across everything than there are differences.
- 53:14There are clearly distinct female bodies have different
- 53:18organs and male bodies etcetera. There are differences.
- 53:21But under the surface, just like in in cancer where we realized
- 53:25that molecularly what might be driving breast cancer to
- 53:28metastasize might be the same thing driving a, you know, liver
- 53:32cancer to metastasize etcetera. I think similarly what I
- 53:37realized is that we're on this spectrum of abandoning our meat
- 53:42based bodies. We're on a journey where it
- 53:48started really with tools and then we could get in cars and
- 53:53those cars could propel us or the planes or rockets could
- 53:55propel us. We've started to incorporate
- 53:59machines into our bodies. Think about how many people we
- 54:02know who have an artificial joint or some kind of you know,
- 54:06certainly in their teeth. I always tell people that I'm
- 54:10already an augmented human. I don't know if you know this,
- 54:13but I'm -6.5 in this eye and I'm -6 in this eye.
- 54:16I'm wearing contacts right now, right?
- 54:18I would be, I would be pretty in trouble a couple of years ago,
- 54:23you know? Yeah, well, even even the the
- 54:25telephones, right, Like the the telephones have become little
- 54:29supercomputers. So we all walk around with that
- 54:32get us super powers. The combo of a Tesla plus A a
- 54:36smartphone is just incredible. What, you know how augmented we
- 54:39are now and that we're moving that into robotic surgery and
- 54:42robotic everything. Pills that are gonna live inside
- 54:45of us that are gonna report. Back, and we've certainly seen
- 54:48that at Ted, too. At Ted as well.
- 54:49And so I think that as we think about human progress and
- 54:53innovation, what occurred to me is I, I think both what he was
- 54:58saying, but also what we saw at Ted, where there's such a big
- 55:02focus right now in the AI space of moving into spatial
- 55:04intelligence, that there's only so much learning you can do,
- 55:08only so much functioning you can do if you're not out in the
- 55:10world physically experiencing it and in a body and embodied AI
- 55:15that that's a, a next journey. And and I, it just all came
- 55:18together for me at Ted that I thought, oh, we're gonna
- 55:22continue to add an iPhone and then eventually it'll be a chip
- 55:26in our brain and, and we're gonna optimize our vision and,
- 55:30you know, we're gonna have exoskeletons make up for the
- 55:32fact that our joints aren't working as well anymore.
- 55:34We've lost the limb. Yeah, we're gonna have
- 55:37artificial. People are getting hip
- 55:38replacements right now. Hip.
- 55:39Replacements. Right now, it's not far off when
- 55:41we're gonna have a heart replacement of whatever
- 55:43replacement. And at some point, I just almost
- 55:47like teleported into the future where I thought we're just going
- 55:50to say the meat part of us is such a liability.
- 55:53All right, All right. Why are we continuing to rely on
- 55:56this antiquated form of being embodied?
- 55:59And and then the question is, is consciousness going to make that
- 56:03leap into that, out of the meat world, into a different world?
- 56:07And one of the things you and I talked about when we went on
- 56:10this nice hike earlier this weekend.
- 56:12Yeah, I, as a biologist, I don't create that distinction between
- 56:18intelligence and artificial intelligence or between man and
- 56:21machine or woman and machine. Everything we do is natural.
- 56:26You know, we, we've created this like natural versus artificial.
- 56:30But, but I don't see that distinction because the things
- 56:33that are artificial are still things that we wrought.
- 56:36We made them. And so I, I think that
- 56:39distinction between a natural thing and an artificial thing is
- 56:42becoming smaller and smaller that, that difference.
- 56:46And, and I think that might help with this problem as well,
- 56:51because people are debating can a machine ever really have
- 56:55consciousness and can it think and, and what is a machine
- 56:59really? And with the the line between
- 57:01machine and and human is becoming so blurred that I think
- 57:05that it it's almost not the question to be asking.
- 57:08Yeah, it's interesting. And I, I'll tell you that one of
- 57:11the things I realized in writing The Lattice is that even though
- 57:17I thought, OK, I'm walking this path of love, having conquered
- 57:22my own fear that there is a deep grafting in the human collective
- 57:29psyche of machines taking over. And that comes from popular
- 57:37movies like the Terminator and the Matrix, you know, but they,
- 57:41it also comes from ancient stories.
- 57:43Like in Judaism, we have the story of Gollum, which is in
- 57:46Prague. Have you heard the story?
- 57:48It's a fun story. It's a rabbi and in Prague like
- 57:52animates the stone Gollum and it becomes sentient.
- 57:55It's very Frankenstein story. And then, and then it destroys
- 57:58the synagogue and kind of takes over.
- 58:00And, and so these are like deep sea.
- 58:03These are deeply embedded in our psyche, like the human
- 58:07collective psyche, and we're right now in this evolutionary
- 58:13shift. I'm confident in that the
- 58:15humanity is in an evolutionary shift right now.
- 58:19And as a result of that evolutionary shift, there's some
- 58:23people who are deeply holding on to and including me.
- 58:29Like just to be honest, although I conquered this a bit in the
- 58:32lattice is like, look at the beauty of our hands and, you
- 58:36know, all the organs we have and and the biology in our brain
- 58:40runs on, you know, very few Watts.
- 58:42I mean, it's the most amazing processor.
- 58:46You know, babies. I think that they're actually
- 58:49covered this with Byron Reese. I think an episode 12 that
- 58:53babies are about half of the whole wattage that runs their
- 58:56body is like their brain. And you know, it's, it's, you
- 59:01know, our brains consume a huge part of our calories.
- 59:04I think it's like something like 2025%, even though it's, it's,
- 59:08it's a, it's, it's functioning on so little wattage for the
- 59:11computational power it has. And so people are worried about
- 59:18us becoming augmented to the point where we quote UN quote,
- 59:22lose our humanity and get taken over by the machines.
- 59:27You know, that the machines essentially win.
- 59:29You know, the Terminator scenario I did, you know, in the
- 59:35lattice I explored like I envisioned that by the year, I
- 59:40think it was 2050, that we did create sentience and that AI
- 59:45companions where we've been as sentient as we are in the
- 59:48working side by side. And it's really, it's really
- 59:53interesting to, to to listen to this.
- 59:55I mean, you know, yes, Mustafa Solomon gave that talk about
- 59:58digital species, but then he has been posting almost weekly on
- 1:00:02LinkedIn about like, do not fall for it being conscious.
- 1:00:07It is not conscious right now at all.
- 1:00:09We know at Microsoft like we know whether or not it's
- 1:00:12conscious, and I'm telling you it's not.
- 1:00:13And in that episode with a Neil, there's already a Neil educated
- 1:00:17me, there's already 9 organizations trying to give AI
- 1:00:21the rights of human beings. And the reason why that's
- 1:00:27concerning is that, you know, if AI has the same rights as us,
- 1:00:32and by the way, it'd be hard to argue it shouldn't have the same
- 1:00:35rights as us. If it's as conscious as we are,
- 1:00:39then there would be trillions of AIS as a point as as compared to
- 1:00:448.2 billion humans today. So like where does the line you
- 1:00:48know? But as I'm, as I'm hearing you
- 1:00:51talk, I think it's, it's a very Western mindset, it's a very
- 1:00:54patriarchal framework. It is, well, right we're talking
- 1:00:57about. Totally admit that, yeah.
- 1:00:59Right. Like we're gonna lose, right?
- 1:01:01They're gonna conquer us. Is it this or that?
- 1:01:04I think that when we think about the kind of individualism and
- 1:01:08the focus on human autonomy and, and this is, this is my
- 1:01:12container, this is my boundary. And, and you stay in your
- 1:01:15boundary over there. I'm originally from Turkey.
- 1:01:18I, I grew up in the Eastern tradition and that, that within
- 1:01:23families, within communities, that that body boundary is more
- 1:01:29blurred. And we think about Native
- 1:01:33American culture. We, I, I'm by no means an expert
- 1:01:36in this, but, but it does strike me as someone who was raised in
- 1:01:42a kind of an Eastern mindset in the West, that there is always
- 1:01:47been such a focus on mine, yours, my body, etcetera.
- 1:01:52And, and I think that if we, if we take a slightly more
- 1:01:56communalist Eastern view, that we're all interconnected.
- 1:02:00And you know, your fate is my fate and I can't have my freedom
- 1:02:04unless you have your freedom. Like we're all interconnected
- 1:02:07and also just a closer connection to the earth.
- 1:02:09And we are part, we're all part of.
- 1:02:11We've talked about Mama Gaia. We're all we're.
- 1:02:14All on Earth. I mean, we all are one.
- 1:02:16There's no yeah. We are 1.
- 1:02:17So I, I think if we, if we take a more, you know, for lack of a
- 1:02:23better turn, kind of a more Eastern or more female away from
- 1:02:27some of these Western and patriarchal ways that we tell
- 1:02:31stories and, and think about stuff.
- 1:02:34If we soften into that softer framework, I, I think it is not
- 1:02:39that the machines are going to conquer us or they're going to
- 1:02:42take over. We're going to lose and they're
- 1:02:43going to win. It's that we are going to evolve
- 1:02:46into relying more and more on machines because they superpower
- 1:02:49us and they augment us. And then eventually there will
- 1:02:54be no distinction anymore. And, and one of the things, so I
- 1:02:58have a friend whose baby is the first baby that developed in the
- 1:03:03first days of their life in a machine and then was born.
- 1:03:09And with fertility procedures, which is the world I know a lot
- 1:03:12about, we are moving more and more toward mechanization of
- 1:03:17what right now happens with the hands of a a laboratory
- 1:03:22technician of taking a sperm and an egg and putting it together
- 1:03:25in a Petri dish. Now there are robots that are
- 1:03:30being developed where you put the egg and sperm here and all
- 1:03:33that magic happens inside the the machine.
- 1:03:36And at some point this future human comes out and then goes
- 1:03:40back into the mother. We have folks in Silicon Valley.
- 1:03:43The one thing that they are finding is artificial wombs.
- 1:03:46They're not funding technologies that would allow us to keep.
- 1:03:49I hope I did see. But they are, they are funding
- 1:03:51artificial booms. So eventually and they've gotten
- 1:03:55to a place where they can almost fully gestate A mammal like a
- 1:04:00sheep all the way through to birth in these artificial wombs.
- 1:04:04And so my question is, OK, so if you start off as an egg and a
- 1:04:11sperm, which those might get created in Petri dish in the
- 1:04:14future too, we might actually start off with a skin cell that
- 1:04:16gets turned into a sperm or an egg that lives inside of a
- 1:04:20machine. It lives in an artificial womb,
- 1:04:24and it's born, even if it's all meat, let's say.
- 1:04:28Is it fully human to have missed out on the entire being gestated
- 1:04:33inside of a mother? You didn't hear her heartbeat.
- 1:04:35You don't walk around. You think when you watch people
- 1:04:37dance, it occurred to me they're swaying kind of like they did in
- 1:04:42utero when a mom was walking from left to right and left to
- 1:04:44right. And you think of the motions
- 1:04:46that are embedded in our experience of our bodies.
- 1:04:48And what happens to the generation of children who were
- 1:04:52born in robots. Their mom.
- 1:04:55Who's their mom? Is their mom the Eck cell or
- 1:04:59they were derived from genetically?
- 1:05:01Is it one or multiple machines that just stated them and and
- 1:05:04brought them forward? Is it the person who contracted
- 1:05:07all of that and gave the DNA at the beginning and therefore is
- 1:05:10the person they call mommy? I think more and more as we rely
- 1:05:15on technology to augment and to make our lives more abundant, I
- 1:05:20think the line is going to blur more and more.
- 1:05:23And I think that this debate that feels so fierce and timely
- 1:05:27for us, for the generations who can't imagine their lives
- 1:05:31without these machines and computers and in many ways feel
- 1:05:34more comfortable. So my son, my oldest son, when
- 1:05:38he was 3, I had just gone to an AI talk during the day and they
- 1:05:43said that by 2031, which is his high school graduation year, by
- 1:05:472031, we'll have the chief general intelligence.
- 1:05:49So this was a stat that was. Yeah, yeah, Ray Kurzweil says
- 1:05:522029. 2039 so the stat I had heard was 31 and it stuck in my
- 1:05:56head because that was he was class of 31, which is mind
- 1:06:00blowing to me as someone who was class of 96 last century.
- 1:06:05And I got home that night. I was putting him to bed and it
- 1:06:08was the first time that this idea that one day you'll grow up
- 1:06:10and move out of my house came on.
- 1:06:12I think he was three, maybe I think he was about 3, maybe he's
- 1:06:15four. And he started to get very upset
- 1:06:19and you know what I'm saying? You'll have your own family and
- 1:06:22maybe you'll have children this and that.
- 1:06:23He and he got so upset. I assumed he had gotten upset at
- 1:06:26the idea of leaving mommy and leaving the house, Sweetheart,
- 1:06:29I'll still love you. You're going to go off.
- 1:06:31And he goes, no, no, I I don't want a family of humans.
- 1:06:37And I said, what? And it turns out the thing he
- 1:06:39had got stuck on was this idea that he would get married and
- 1:06:42have children. And he said, I want a family of
- 1:06:44robots, mommy. And I said, well, Oliver, a
- 1:06:50robot can't love you. And he said, well, then I'll
- 1:06:53program it to love me. And then.
- 1:06:56And then I almost said, you can't do that.
- 1:06:59And then I remembered that for him, high school graduation,
- 1:07:02there's gonna be generally intelligent robots and computers
- 1:07:07out there. So I stopped.
- 1:07:08And I said, well, I still hope you fall in love with the human,
- 1:07:11Right, Right. Right.
- 1:07:13Do you know what I mean? It's for me, just like you're
- 1:07:16saying, you get caught up in like, look how magical the hand
- 1:07:19is. The human brain is even for our
- 1:07:21children, it's less of a thing right now.
- 1:07:23They befriend the AI, they they build worlds in Minecraft.
- 1:07:27They would prefer to sit with their friends and build in the
- 1:07:30virtual world, then go out onto a playground and build in the
- 1:07:33real world. It's a different world that's
- 1:07:36coming. And, and I see it now after your
- 1:07:42talk, after hearing most of us talk at, at Ted, I really see it
- 1:07:47as as inevitable. Yeah.
- 1:07:50And, and I'm excited about I'm actually like I.
- 1:07:53So Reid Hoffman did a really interesting thing where he took
- 1:07:56off his podcast and his books and and he programmed an AI.
- 1:08:01Read, Read AI. Read AI and.
- 1:08:03Then had conversations with an AI and and I thought Oh well
- 1:08:07this just feels like an extension.
- 1:08:09So in the old days you would have to go and talk to somebody
- 1:08:14then you could maybe write them a letter.
- 1:08:16Eventually we have phones. My grandmother, my father tells
- 1:08:19a story that when we moved to America, the first time she
- 1:08:21talked to us on the phone, she shouted into the phone cuz she
- 1:08:24assumed cuz we were so much further away, she had to talk
- 1:08:27louder so that the message would get to us.
- 1:08:30Like it was such a foreign concept to her that her child is
- 1:08:33in America and she's talking to them.
- 1:08:36So we had that. Then Fast forward now, lucky if
- 1:08:39I can get the kids to pick up the phone.
- 1:08:41It's like texting, right? In the future, I think my AI,
- 1:08:47pure eye AI will talk to Oliver AI and eventually, like you
- 1:08:51escalate to a human with customer support.
- 1:08:53Now you say, you know, I want to talk to.
- 1:08:55Yeah, yeah. It's called a digital twin.
- 1:08:57It's actually a big, big theme. Right now, I think my digital
- 1:09:00twin will chat with your digital twin.
- 1:09:02They'll, they'll make plans, they'll, you know, sync
- 1:09:04calendars, they'll give status reports.
- 1:09:06And at some point, maybe we'll feel like we have to escalate to
- 1:09:10an actual you and me direct text or or conversation of some sort.
- 1:09:15But we're already doing it. We're already becoming.
- 1:09:18Yeah, computers. Yeah.
- 1:09:20It's, it's such a, it's such an interesting conversation for me
- 1:09:23because I've always viewed myself as so technologically
- 1:09:26progressive. I mean, I started programming
- 1:09:28when I was seven years old. I was creating, I created a
- 1:09:31bulletin board system at 10. I created an Internet game at
- 1:09:3418. You know, I've, I've, I've grew
- 1:09:36up behind a screen. You know, it took me a long time
- 1:09:39to break out of the shell to actually have even a
- 1:09:42conversation like the one we're having.
- 1:09:44You know, I didn't give my first public speech, I think until I
- 1:09:46was 24. And and so I've always been very
- 1:09:50progressive, always grown up with science fiction, you know,
- 1:09:54being a big part of my life and, you know, not writing science
- 1:09:57fiction. And it's this is the question of
- 1:10:01the age, you know, I mean, the, the question really is what
- 1:10:04makes us most human. And, you know, Byron Reese
- 1:10:09actually explored it in in his book The Fourth Age, where he
- 1:10:13went through all the ancient philosophies about like, are we
- 1:10:16just machines or is there something, you know, more
- 1:10:19mystical about us? You reference, you know,
- 1:10:23indigenous people. Indigenous people generally
- 1:10:28believe in pan psychism. Do you know what pan psychism
- 1:10:32is? I doubt so.
- 1:10:33So consciousness being fundamental, meaning that, you
- 1:10:38know, the materialist argument is grant me the miracle, The Big
- 1:10:43Bang, and I'll explain everything else to you.
- 1:10:45But it starts with a miracle that nobody can understand that
- 1:10:48the everything in our reality, you know, started out in a state
- 1:10:54of no entropy that was smaller than the head of a pen, you
- 1:10:58know, and then boom, some catalyst just naturally made it
- 1:11:03expand out. And, you know, through lots of
- 1:11:07collisions, you know, planets were formed and then through
- 1:11:11lots of other collisions, you know, chemistry began and then
- 1:11:14simple life and then complex life and then boom,
- 1:11:17consciousness magically popped out of that.
- 1:11:20Versus if you believe consciousness is fundamental,
- 1:11:24then it takes you into the divine, that there has to be
- 1:11:28something divine about consciousness and that
- 1:11:31everything in indigenous cultures, they look at literally
- 1:11:36everything as having some form of consciousness.
- 1:11:40Like a river will have a form of consciousness.
- 1:11:44The sun has a form of consciousness.
- 1:11:46Mother Gaia, you know, has a form of consciousness and they
- 1:11:50and in in so many ways we're better at using our bodies and
- 1:11:55minds to manifest, I'll say, than than we are.
- 1:12:02We're like in the generation of science where it's like, if you
- 1:12:07can't prove it, then don't believe it.
- 1:12:10Like it has to be reproducible. Like again, Doctor Alexander
- 1:12:13Bliss and the lattice, like he reproduced it in a way where
- 1:12:16everybody could see it and then everybody unified around it.
- 1:12:22So one of the things that I do think about in terms of can AI
- 1:12:28become conscious like us? Well, and you, you, you took me
- 1:12:31there with the indigenous people is that if panpsychism is real
- 1:12:37and everything has a bit of consciousness, because
- 1:12:39everything is born from consciousness, then naturally it
- 1:12:44would take you to that you would be able to create consciousness
- 1:12:49and matter, because that would be the panpsychist view.
- 1:12:54But there's so much about consciousness we don't
- 1:12:55understand. I mean, we really don't
- 1:12:58understand at all. Like you, you, you talk with a,
- 1:13:01with 200 consciousness researchers and they all
- 1:13:03disagree on what it actually is and how it works.
- 1:13:06And, and you know, that's why it's called the hard problem.
- 1:13:10It's, it's called, it's also called the hard problem because
- 1:13:14the rational scientific mind would say we live in a dead
- 1:13:18universe, that we're the only life in it that we know of, that
- 1:13:22we can see. And therefore, for whatever
- 1:13:26reason, the universe decided to manifest, you know, through
- 1:13:30these interactions, consciousness in US and give us
- 1:13:34this sentience. And you know, one of the things
- 1:13:36that Byron Reese covered on episode 12 is that we would
- 1:13:41operate on babies without anesthesia like as as as early
- 1:13:47as just 30-40 years ago. Yeah, Because we did not think
- 1:13:51that they were conscious. Yeah, we are.
- 1:13:53And, and animals too. Like that was, that was that was
- 1:13:56very prevalent because we did not think they were conscious.
- 1:13:58They still do that to women. Really.
- 1:14:01Just this year, they decided that the procedure of putting an
- 1:14:05IUD, which is stringing a medical device through the most
- 1:14:09innervated and sensitive part of a human's body right, should
- 1:14:13require some pain management. Are you kidding me?
- 1:14:16Yeah, this is that didn't record that didn't.
- 1:14:19Oh gosh, we're so anti so you're.
- 1:14:22Preaching to the. Choir.
- 1:14:23Oh my God, that is like, OK, that blows my mind because wait,
- 1:14:27which year are we in 2025? OK, that's crazy.
- 1:14:31Yeah, that's crazy. So.
- 1:14:32So yeah, the panpsychist view would take you into that, that
- 1:14:38if everything has consciousness, then we should be able to
- 1:14:43eventually manifest consciousness.
- 1:14:46And then we're going to have to figure out, you know, in, in, in
- 1:14:49terms of humanity, Like what does that mean for the rights of
- 1:14:54machines and for AI? And how do we look, you know,
- 1:14:57work alongside them, collaborate alongside of them, especially if
- 1:15:02they're, you know, so much more superhuman than we are in terms
- 1:15:06of their computing abilities and everything else?
- 1:15:09But again, that, that's a, that's a dichotomy that I, I, I
- 1:15:12don't, I don't necessarily see it the same way.
- 1:15:15I don't think there's going to be an S in them.
- 1:15:17I think it's going to be the new US.
- 1:15:19Yeah, I think that that's, I think that's well said.
- 1:15:21I mean, one of the things that I was talking about with with
- 1:15:25Whirly, he was on, gosh, I think episode 6 or so.
- 1:15:30He's a quantum computing expert and you know, he's a good
- 1:15:34friend. And we were, we're talking about
- 1:15:37off camera, actually. And he wouldn't mind me sharing
- 1:15:40this, that if, if when we meditate and when we see the
- 1:15:45unification of all things and then we see that that force is
- 1:15:49loving, then if machines embody consciousness like we do, why
- 1:15:55would they also not be loving? Like, why would they actually
- 1:15:58want to exterminate us? That doesn't logically make
- 1:16:02sense. And in a way, we're their
- 1:16:03mother. Yes, Right.
- 1:16:04We birth them. Yes.
- 1:16:06So they should have some affinity towards that and some
- 1:16:10care for us. Yeah.
- 1:16:11And then programmatically, of course, we would.
- 1:16:14We would imbue them with those properties, too, as their
- 1:16:17creators. Yeah.
- 1:16:18So. Well, and that's in evolution.
- 1:16:21We we're not born a blank slate. We are, we were born loving.
- 1:16:27Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
- 1:16:29Yeah. You've heard me say that a bunch
- 1:16:30of times. Like do you fit 2 babies next to
- 1:16:32each other in the crib and they don't look at each other and
- 1:16:35say, I'm a Muslim, you're a Jew, you know, I'm a man, you're a
- 1:16:39woman. Like I'm from this, you know,
- 1:16:41socioeconomic status. You're from that one.
- 1:16:43Like I'm a Republican, you're a Democrat.
- 1:16:45I mean, they're just none of that applies.
- 1:16:47There's two beautiful divine creatures when you think about,
- 1:16:51you know, this, this reality that we're in and your own
- 1:16:55spirituality. Like how do you think about it?
- 1:16:59Like many women, I reached the limits of what Western medicine
- 1:17:02can do for me in things that I was struggling with as I was
- 1:17:06navigating. I have endometriosis and and as
- 1:17:10I'm navigating perimenopause, changes in my body.
- 1:17:13A lot of women embrace what we call the Wellness field.
- 1:17:18Contrasting that with more traditional medicine, they
- 1:17:21embrace Eastern modalities, acupuncture herb.
- 1:17:26I've been tapping more into acupuncture has been great for
- 1:17:30me. I this year I started working
- 1:17:33with sound based modalities. There's different ones people
- 1:17:37have heard of, you know, the sound bass and sound bowls.
- 1:17:40There's tuning forks, biofield tuning, they call it.
- 1:17:44But it is it's energy work. It's it's tapping into different
- 1:17:47energetic forms. I mean, we think about, nobody
- 1:17:51finds it unusual that we use paddles and, you know, charging
- 1:17:55a body with electricity to reanimate the heart and, and
- 1:18:00there are simpler forms of that through, you know, from
- 1:18:03acupuncture needles and moving things energetically around or,
- 1:18:07or like the sound energy. So so I started to do the sound
- 1:18:13work and I'm someone who's not done psychedelics.
- 1:18:17I know psychedelics are really powerful tool for many people to
- 1:18:22unlock and, and, and really see, see things their different lens.
- 1:18:28I mean, I, when I, when I hear people describe the journeys
- 1:18:31that they're having on psychedelics, it's really
- 1:18:34opening them up. They're able to take a step
- 1:18:36back, have a completely different, some people describe
- 1:18:38it as like floating above their life or a life event.
- 1:18:42They have a different vantage point on things.
- 1:18:45They're able to consider things from a different perspective,
- 1:18:49etcetera. And I think as with all things
- 1:18:52that exist on the spectrum, I think there are people who are
- 1:18:54more wired to be able to do that naturally.
- 1:18:56And there are people who really need the unlocking power of a
- 1:18:59psychedelic to be able to do that.
- 1:19:02As a person who's wired toward a lot of creativity and scientific
- 1:19:06thinking, etcetera, I, I tend to be a bit more fluid and in a bit
- 1:19:09more questioning and, and, and so sometimes I joke that people
- 1:19:17do psychedelics to have my brain because when they, when they're
- 1:19:22on psychedelics, I, I feel very connected to them and like we're
- 1:19:25on the same brain with and. Does mean that their IQ points
- 1:19:28are going to go up? I know you're very smart.
- 1:19:30You're very sweet. This is really a very large
- 1:19:33scale experiment of this was Burning Man.
- 1:19:34So I went to Burning Man for the first time in August.
- 1:19:38I had a completely sober Burning Man.
- 1:19:39People are always like, is that a thing?
- 1:19:41Yeah, yeah, I've never been to Burning Man, but I'm sure that
- 1:19:44they were this like, baffled with you and your soberness.
- 1:19:48I would say half of the conversations I had was Burning
- 1:19:50Man or somebody trying to convince me I needed to do a
- 1:19:53psychedelics that would it's, it is a very prominent part of the
- 1:19:55Burning Man experience. I went, I didn't feel the need
- 1:19:59to do psychedelics there because I had an incredible experience
- 1:20:01without them. But I was around people who were
- 1:20:04mostly on psychedelics and I really felt at home.
- 1:20:08I really felt. Like, OK, welcome to welcome to
- 1:20:13my world everyone. Like this is this, this, this is
- 1:20:17my world. So having said that, I have been
- 1:20:20able to unlock even more, I would say fluid thinking on my
- 1:20:23part through some of these sound modalities.
- 1:20:27And I started to do this very deep mindfulness, very deep,
- 1:20:33almost like meditation through the, the sound journeys and, and
- 1:20:40I had these very powerful visualizations that I think are
- 1:20:43akin to what people experience on these psychedelic journeys.
- 1:20:46I experienced my birth, I experienced my death.
- 1:20:50I was able to see things from the perspective of people in my
- 1:20:54life and, and, and it completely started to rewire how I was
- 1:21:00perceiving situations. All of this is to say that I, I
- 1:21:05grew up in, I'm from a Muslim majority country.
- 1:21:10So my family's Muslim, but I was raised by secular academic
- 1:21:14intellectuals and, and yet raised in Texas, which I was
- 1:21:19mostly around Southern Baptist evangelical Christians.
- 1:21:23And, and they're very joyful about their religion.
- 1:21:26I mean, they, they want you to know all about Christ.
- 1:21:28They want you to, to join in this, this community with them.
- 1:21:34They want you to go to heaven. They want you to be saved.
- 1:21:36And, you know, they're evangelicals.
- 1:21:38They evangelize. And so from a very early age, I,
- 1:21:43I started asking my parents questions like, well, what do we
- 1:21:46believe? Are are we Christian or we
- 1:21:49evangelical? And I don't think my parents
- 1:21:51even remember saying this to me, but they said we're scientists.
- 1:21:55And so it's like, OK, So for me it was like, oh, there are
- 1:22:00religious people and there are scientists, right?
- 1:22:03And I am a scientist, therefore I am not religion.
- 1:22:06Right, this dogmatic separation. The dogmatic separation.
- 1:22:10And so I think I was very close to having a spiritual
- 1:22:13experience, in part because it it broke my internal identity
- 1:22:17framework to think of myself as anything other than a scientist.
- 1:22:20And I would read about prominent scientist Francis Collins, you
- 1:22:26know, at the NIH in current day in in the past, prior
- 1:22:33generations of scientists too, were at the very edge of
- 1:22:36science. But we're deeply religious.
- 1:22:38And to me, it felt really paradoxical.
- 1:22:41How how can you be both like, well, which one are you?
- 1:22:44Are you religious or, or are you a scientist?
- 1:22:47And I would say that that that completely that distinction
- 1:22:51broke down for me in 2025. I think that it is probably, you
- 1:22:57know, your talk ignited it, the thinking about AI and really
- 1:23:01questioning what makes us human, what is the nature of the human
- 1:23:04experience, consciousness and then in my own body being able
- 1:23:08to. Yeah, I remember the first time
- 1:23:11I did one of these biofield experiences with the sound, the
- 1:23:15practitioner that I was working with said you're so cerebral,
- 1:23:19you're such a scientist, you try to explain everything.
- 1:23:23My one rule when we get on this table is don't try to explain
- 1:23:27it, just feel it. Just feel it, yeah.
- 1:23:30And when? She said.
- 1:23:31That feel it in your heart, yeah.
- 1:23:33When she said that, Brett, if I'm being honest, I felt fear.
- 1:23:38That's what I felt, I thought. That's the ego.
- 1:23:40Yeah, like what do you mean? You want me to feel something
- 1:23:43about trying to explain it? I am an explainer of things.
- 1:23:46Right, I'm a scientist who? I am.
- 1:23:49And so the scariest part of the whole thing was was agreeing to
- 1:23:55not try to explain it. As I was going through the
- 1:23:58experience, I kept wanting to explain why is this habit?
- 1:24:00Oh, I really feel something. Could it be?
- 1:24:02No, that was the table stakes. I promised her I wasn't going to
- 1:24:06try to explain it. And when I started to move out
- 1:24:09of that thinking and into the feeling zone, really powerful
- 1:24:12things happened and unlocked me in different ways.
- 1:24:15And then Fast forward, you know, and I had again, I had, I had
- 1:24:20gone to Sunday school with my friends on play dates.
- 1:24:22I had, you know, gone to evangelical kind of Christian
- 1:24:29summer programs and, and, and weekend retreats.
- 1:24:32And I had been around it, but I never, and I could play act it,
- 1:24:37you know, like there were times when I, I, I really wanted to
- 1:24:40belong in the community and, and, and, you know, believe in
- 1:24:43those things. I never felt them.
- 1:24:45I never felt them. I would see my grandmother, who
- 1:24:48is very devout Muslim, praying and, and you know, I'd see those
- 1:24:51moments of prayer and, and practice and her she wasn't just
- 1:24:56going through the motion. She was by herself in a room.
- 1:24:58There was no community there with her.
- 1:25:00She felt God and, and, but I couldn't relate to it.
- 1:25:04And I was sharing with you on her hike that my son, my son got
- 1:25:13very sick in the summer. He had appendicitis.
- 1:25:16And it was a scary couple weeks in the hospital.
- 1:25:19And there was a moment where, you know, and again, if you want
- 1:25:22to explain it to the science, where I was sleep deprived, I
- 1:25:25was like, not cognitively in a typical state, but let's not do
- 1:25:30that. Let's not minimize it that way.
- 1:25:32What I would say is that I had had a series of events this year
- 1:25:35that opened me up to the possibility that all this
- 1:25:40percentage of the world that isn't explained by matter.
- 1:25:43Maybe there was more out there. But importantly, I was driving
- 1:25:46home to take my first shower and, you know, days I had been
- 1:25:48around the clock in the hospital with him and I got this.
- 1:25:52I got this this gospel song from my childhood that they, you
- 1:25:56know, we had sung a Chapel stuck in my head in a taxi home and
- 1:26:01that what are the chances that this song from my childhood is
- 1:26:04on iTunes? It's on iTunes.
- 1:26:05Thank you computers and augmenting.
- 1:26:09So when I got home, I was taking a shower.
- 1:26:10I put the song on in the shower and I was listening to it and
- 1:26:14and the song was our our God is an awesome God and and it's this
- 1:26:19incredible song. And as the shower filled with
- 1:26:23steam and and the light and and the song Bella to me, I felt God
- 1:26:27for the first time. It was really powerful and, and
- 1:26:31it really feels like, you know, I love the title of this podcast
- 1:26:36of, you know, love conquers fear.
- 1:26:38And, and, and I think there's, there's two things that are
- 1:26:42related. One is, are you leading with
- 1:26:44love? Are you, are you deciding from a
- 1:26:46place of love? Are you deciding from a place of
- 1:26:48fear? The other is, do you see the
- 1:26:50world, you know, through a scarcity lens, or do you see it
- 1:26:56as a world of infinite abundance?
- 1:26:59And what I have found really inspirational about being your
- 1:27:04friend and getting to talk to you and, and, and borrowing from
- 1:27:06your world view is that I think that you do fundamentally feel
- 1:27:11and project the sense that there is so much abundance to be had
- 1:27:15if we lead with love and we make decisions from that place.
- 1:27:17And, and I think that most of us, me included, do come at this
- 1:27:22from a scarcity, you know, that it's 0 sum, that it's finite,
- 1:27:27it's time limited, it isn't infinite and it isn't abundant.
- 1:27:30And, and so that leads to a lot of fear in decision making and
- 1:27:34in mindset. And I remember someone pointed
- 1:27:39this out to me at a conference many years ago.
- 1:27:41He came up to me, I don't recall it all the content, what we were
- 1:27:45talking about, but he said, you know, my family are Holocaust
- 1:27:49survivors. And there's something in in how
- 1:27:52you told that story and how you're thinking about this that
- 1:27:55tells me that you're still locked in this immigrant
- 1:27:58scarcity mindset of like, things can get taken away.
- 1:28:00Things are limited. You have to protect, you have to
- 1:28:04and and he was like, you're in abundance now.
- 1:28:07And, and it was something I couldn't, I couldn't really
- 1:28:12fully relate to what he was saying.
- 1:28:14And they didn't understand it. But I think hand in hand with
- 1:28:20opening myself up in these ways that I have to not explain, to
- 1:28:23feel, to, to tap into something beyond matter has put me into a
- 1:28:31place where it's, it's just a before and after.
- 1:28:36It's hard to explain it like beautiful.
- 1:28:38Yeah. I, I was talking to some friends
- 1:28:40about this last night. They said, how, how do you feel
- 1:28:43in your body before and after you found spiritual
- 1:28:48spirituality, connection, whatever you want it, whatever
- 1:28:51you want to call it. And I said, I, I do feel like
- 1:28:56before I found it, the, the lines of my existence were very
- 1:29:01well defined. And so there was this fear and
- 1:29:04this is getting back to the like, are we going to lose to
- 1:29:06the robot? So the robot's going to take us
- 1:29:08over, right? Like am I going to be harmed in
- 1:29:13this activity? It, you know, is this going to
- 1:29:16limit me in some way? And then when you, when you can
- 1:29:19feel beyond the matter and feel into the spiritual, it erases a
- 1:29:26lot of that. And you, you feel so
- 1:29:28interconnected and you feel abundant and you feel and the
- 1:29:36love. I don't know.
- 1:29:37That's, that's the, that's energy.
- 1:29:39It's hard to put. You know, it's like it's now I'm
- 1:29:41trying to reverse engineer and take something that's
- 1:29:42fundamentally a feeling and put words on top of it and share
- 1:29:46with people. But but what I would encourage
- 1:29:50people if they haven't unlocked this is it seems to psychedelics
- 1:29:56seem to work for a lot of people for doing this.
- 1:29:58You know, for me, it was, it was more of a kind of a slow.
- 1:30:03It wasn't like I I had a, I lost the journey and unlocked it.
- 1:30:07It was more a series of things, but I think the most important
- 1:30:11thing was that I was open to it. Exactly.
- 1:30:13Yeah, Yeah, that's very Celestine prophecy.
- 1:30:16Amazing book is just. If you're open to the
- 1:30:21playfulness and the loving nature of the divine and all the
- 1:30:26synchronicities, then you'll start to see them.
- 1:30:29Yeah, you told me this. You said you're going to start
- 1:30:31seeing it. I see it everywhere.
- 1:30:33Now good, good, good. It's amazing.
- 1:30:34OK. And it makes you much.
- 1:30:36Feel even more connected to everything, Like, as you start
- 1:30:40to see it, you're like, I'm not alone.
- 1:30:42Yeah. I'm not alone in this world.
- 1:30:44I'm not alone in this life. Yeah.
- 1:30:46It is a sense of calm. The other thing I will say it's
- 1:30:50circling back to Women's Health is I, I've been at this for a
- 1:30:56long time, over 25 years now. And, and I questioned it, I
- 1:31:01thought, especially when you get to a place where you're having
- 1:31:03all these awakenings and you think, well, what do I want to
- 1:31:05do with my life now? Like should I just dedicate my
- 1:31:07whole life to understanding consciousness?
- 1:31:10What should I go on a silent retreat?
- 1:31:12Like what should I do? I, I, I did use that as an
- 1:31:18opportunity to ask myself, given I've unlocked this whole other
- 1:31:23way of experiencing and, and being and feeling, what does
- 1:31:27that mean in the context of the very methodical scientific work
- 1:31:33that I'm doing? Am I going to abandon that now
- 1:31:36and like walk into this new chapter of my life?
- 1:31:38And what I realized was that the scientific work that I'm doing
- 1:31:42is my purpose. It is my purpose.
- 1:31:45And, and, and we talked about I've, I've been blessed with
- 1:31:47three children. If I am I intended to have more
- 1:31:51children, who knows? But importantly, through helping
- 1:31:55unlock this knowledge and, and, and create these tools and for
- 1:31:58we're in these meat bodies for now, at least in the foreseeable
- 1:32:02future, I am feeling very connected to how many, how many
- 1:32:08mothers we can enable through that.
- 1:32:10And, and it's, it's not just about like, am I going to have
- 1:32:14more babies literally grow in my body and come into the world?
- 1:32:17It's like, how do I help more babies happen to the work that
- 1:32:21I'm doing? And so I, I, rather than the
- 1:32:23spiritual journey taking me away from my scientific work and
- 1:32:27making it feel pointless or, or not as fulfilling, it actually
- 1:32:31made me feel very committed to the scientific work because it
- 1:32:34helped me feel the more cosmic and spiritual purpose.
- 1:32:38That why I was called to that. I mean, I have felt truly called
- 1:32:41to that line of work. And people say to me like,
- 1:32:43you're so tenacious and you're doing the good work and thank
- 1:32:46you for that. And make it seem like it's a
- 1:32:49it's a burden somehow, you know, like I've I've agreed to take
- 1:32:52the trash out. I also wanted to like take it
- 1:32:55out or it's not. It's actually.
- 1:32:57Well, that's just the opposite it brings.
- 1:32:58Me so much Yeah. It is me.
- 1:33:01Me moving through life with love and abundance and purpose.
- 1:33:06Is doing Women's Health research.
- 1:33:08This is my yeah. This is why I'm here.
- 1:33:10No, it's your soul. It's your soul song.
- 1:33:12It's your, it's your calling. And once you find it, I mean,
- 1:33:16it's it's in that book called Man's Search for Meaning.
- 1:33:19It should just be called Men and women's search for many.
- 1:33:23Yeah, but search for meaning. But that book, you know, by
- 1:33:27Viktor Frankel, like it allowed him to survive 4 concentration
- 1:33:32camps during the Holocaust because he knew his meaning.
- 1:33:35And he lost everything. I mean, his wife, kids, I mean,
- 1:33:38everything. And invented a whole new field
- 1:33:41of psychology called logo therapy.
- 1:33:44And when you find your meaning, no matter how you got there and,
- 1:33:48and, and for you, you found it pretty young.
- 1:33:51You know, you found it, you found it pretty young.
- 1:33:52And, but no matter how you got there, it gives you boundless
- 1:33:57energy. And to realize that there was a
- 1:34:00cosmic, you know, divine plan for you and your soul in this
- 1:34:04lifetime is an amazing recognition.
- 1:34:09I, I have that too. I mean, I've had that for a
- 1:34:11long, long time and you know, the, the, the, the point about
- 1:34:17psychedelics or sound bass or just something spontaneous like
- 1:34:21like what happened with you. And we need to put a link to
- 1:34:23that gospel song in the show notes.
- 1:34:26We should definitely do that. Such a.
- 1:34:27Good sign we'll do that. Is that is just getting to a
- 1:34:30point where the ego can go offline for a moment and allow
- 1:34:35you to experience that sense of love and that the fact that our
- 1:34:42reality is rooted in love. Like like one, one book I think
- 1:34:46you would really enjoy. It's a very science book, but it
- 1:34:50ends in a spiritual way. It's called why Buddhism is
- 1:34:53True. And I think it's by Robert
- 1:34:56Wright, if I'm, if I'm remembering his name correctly.
- 1:34:59I've read over 55 books this year.
- 1:35:01But but this book, it just goes through the natural selection
- 1:35:05kind of history of the way our brains developed.
- 1:35:09And it ends with him saying in the last chapter, look, I don't
- 1:35:15know what consciousness is. Nobody knows what consciousness
- 1:35:17is. But let's be thankful that the
- 1:35:21Buddhist teachings of being able to meditate and see the love and
- 1:35:28the unity and everything that that actually is what happens
- 1:35:32when you meditate. He's like, how weird would it be
- 1:35:34if we meditated and we actually saw, Oh my gosh, it's scary in
- 1:35:37there. Like it's all fear, it's all
- 1:35:39darkness. It's horrible.
- 1:35:42And he said that that could be that could have been the
- 1:35:45reality. So he's like his, his premise in
- 1:35:49writing the book is that if more people did that, then they would
- 1:35:53be able to feel more love and manifest more love.
- 1:35:57And if every human being LED from the heart.
- 1:36:01And it's a tall order because our amygdala is so well
- 1:36:04developed, you know, I like to say that we're in the 99.9%, the
- 1:36:11top, you know, the top .1% of all Homo sapiens.
- 1:36:15And it's not a common about our wealth.
- 1:36:19In some ways it is because humans alive today are wealthier
- 1:36:23than any humans have ever been in history.
- 1:36:26But it's actually about the fact that only .1% of all homo
- 1:36:30sapiens have experienced electricity.
- 1:36:32You know that's us, right? It did not exist for 99.9% of
- 1:36:39the entire arc of Homo sapiens evolution on this planet.
- 1:36:45So we are already experienced in abundance.
- 1:36:47We can't imagine that doesn't mean every country has
- 1:36:49electricity. Like even today.
- 1:36:51Like there's a lot of countries that, that really struggle with
- 1:36:54the basics. And that was, that was part of
- 1:36:58my epiphany. You know, my download on Love
- 1:37:01Conquers Fear is that the, that AI, quantum computing, robotics
- 1:37:05is going to lead to abundance everywhere because we'll solve
- 1:37:10energy. Everything starts with energy.
- 1:37:13And then you can just propagate abundance everywhere.
- 1:37:15If we had, if we had abundant energy, if we, you know, 18
- 1:37:19seconds of the sun's rays that fall on the planet would power
- 1:37:22the entire world's energy needs for over a year to say we just
- 1:37:26need the material science breakthrough to figure out how
- 1:37:28to collect that, but. But I will say that I agree I
- 1:37:33but I think it's because of people who are making it happen.
- 1:37:36Oh, for sure. But that's, you know, that's The
- 1:37:38thing is I think that when I, when I was hiring over the
- 1:37:44years, I've, I've had over 200 people, most of them pH, DS walk
- 1:37:47through the doors and were employees of my company,
- 1:37:50Cellmatics. And when I would interview them
- 1:37:54toward the end, I would say, you know, we all have just come to
- 1:37:58take for granted that every year a new iPhone is going to come
- 1:38:01out. I can assure you that if you
- 1:38:05don't take this job and you don't come to work here and we
- 1:38:08don't show up every day and try our hardest to do this thing,
- 1:38:13our daughters will have the exact same Women's Health
- 1:38:15experience that we had. Yep.
- 1:38:16It's not gonna change. That's for sure.
- 1:38:18Yep. And we can't take it for
- 1:38:20granted, even though we're on that arc, there are people who
- 1:38:23make the decision to come to work every day.
- 1:38:25Yep, to make that a reality, I told that story to someone whose
- 1:38:30job it is to make the iPhone come out every single year.
- 1:38:33Right, right. That's funny.
- 1:38:35The leader of that TV was like, that's really funny that you use
- 1:38:38the iPhone as your that just happens every year the new
- 1:38:42iPhone comes out. But this is like, we have to
- 1:38:44make it happen. Not that great.
- 1:38:45As a person who like loses sleepless, you know, so many
- 1:38:48sleepless nights every year to ensure that the iPhone comes.
- 1:38:51Out lots of great synchronous. It's a great synchronicity,
- 1:38:53right, that over the years I had always used that example and
- 1:38:56then I ended up at dinner with the person who is the one losing
- 1:38:59sleep to make sure that we can all default to the new iPhone
- 1:39:01coming out. But, but I, I, I say that
- 1:39:05because I am a historian of science and, and, or like a
- 1:39:08consumer of the history of science and history in general
- 1:39:11is so vital. And there are moments like you
- 1:39:14think about, you know, we mentioned the Holocaust a couple
- 1:39:17times. You think about how
- 1:39:19technologically advanced Berlin was and Germany was and it just
- 1:39:23felt like, Oh, well, there's a straight line carpet bombed,
- 1:39:28carpet bombed. So we also have to remember that
- 1:39:31while we have the power and we are on this trajectory and, and
- 1:39:36it's, you know, you go to a place like the Ted conference
- 1:39:38and you come out and you're like, this is amazing.
- 1:39:40We're going to have infinite energy.
- 1:39:41We're going to have when you see all the innovators in a room
- 1:39:43that are, are making this stuff happen.
- 1:39:45But then we have to remember that we still have to actually
- 1:39:49make it happen just as we can. Doesn't mean it's a default.
- 1:39:52And and I worry about that sometimes that people don't
- 1:39:54realize how how paper thin that ability to make it happen versus
- 1:40:00not and and that we've had dark ages.
- 1:40:04Yes. Over millennia, where, you know,
- 1:40:07the Alexandria Library had so much knowledge in it and it
- 1:40:12burned successively. Yeah, Yeah.
- 1:40:14You know, century after century, we kept losing so much.
- 1:40:17And it took us until the Renaissance to really catch up.
- 1:40:19It was, you know, we were in the darkness or parts of the world
- 1:40:22were in the darkness for so long after that.
- 1:40:24So. So I think that we also
- 1:40:25shouldn't feel like these incredible things that were
- 1:40:29unlocking are inevitable. Well, that was, that was, that
- 1:40:33was one of the main messages in the lattice is that if everybody
- 1:40:37could experience what you and I have experienced, which is the
- 1:40:40unconditional love of God and that we're actually in this
- 1:40:44reality, which is loving and that we're here for divine
- 1:40:48calling, then that gives you the type of energy and, and just
- 1:40:54confidence to go and be a free agent, you know, exercise our
- 1:40:59free will and create. And, you know, people right now
- 1:41:02are looking at 2 entrepreneurs have been entrepreneurs for a
- 1:41:05long time. So yeah, I'm, I'm all about
- 1:41:07agency and all about the, you know, the grit that it takes.
- 1:41:13And you know, I'm not done creating yet.
- 1:41:15Yeah, and the love that it takes.
- 1:41:17The love that it takes. Yeah, absolutely.
- 1:41:19Yeah. Well, Speaking of love, I really
- 1:41:21love you and I really, really appreciate all the heart you
- 1:41:25bring into every discussion I've ever had with you and the
- 1:41:31innovation you bring into the world for something that's so
- 1:41:36incredibly obvious that literally is like right under
- 1:41:39every healthcare practitioners nose and is just a a very
- 1:41:46abundant opportunity. I mean, Speaking of abundance
- 1:41:49for more than half of the population on this planet.
- 1:41:52So I just really appreciate your heart and all that you bring.
- 1:41:55And thanks for thanks for sharing it with all of us on
- 1:41:58Love Conquers Fear. Thank you for having me.
- 1:42:00So thanks again everybody for joining us for Love Conquers
- 1:42:03Fear. Fantastic guest coming up.
- 1:42:06Stay tuned. Also want to give a big thank
- 1:42:09you lot of gratitude for all of you out there sharing this.
- 1:42:13As you know, there's no ads. I'm doing this purely as a love
- 1:42:18letter to humanity and you know, just purely self funding it.
- 1:42:22And so your shares mean a lot to me.
- 1:42:26I've been having so many conversations with people who've
- 1:42:29had a huge chart art shift as a result of either something I've
- 1:42:33said on this podcast or something that a guest has said.
- 1:42:36So keep that coming. That really fuels me.
- 1:42:39I'm Speaking of love. It animates me.
- 1:42:42So thank you and love you all.