Daniel Kraft, MD, on Predicting the Future of Technology and Healthcare - and Helping to Create It

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED

Talk or the author of one of

your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in

the lives of others.

This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode.

This episode is brought to you by

the nonprofit I founded, the center for Global Initiatives. The center is an all volunteer organization so there are no salaries and thus all tax deductible donations can go to the work. While our key country partner is in Tanzania, our work is global and generally focused in the areas of education and healthcare. We also help others to get their nonprofits started or augment others project based initiatives. It's our goal to open source humanitarian intervention and to help make it easier for others to do more good in the world. We are proud to have been ranked a great nonprofit every year since 2011 and to have achieved a Platinum level rating by Guidestar Links. In this episode's show, notes will take you to published articles on our outcomes, a number of helpful tools and downloadable resources which are all free always. Please Visit us at CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org and be sure to watch our video at Patreon.com DrChrisStout to learn more. Thanks. Welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host Dr. Chris Stout. Prescription medications are fairly controversial these days, cost, insurance coverage, efficacy, and too often medications are dosed incorrectly, cause toxic side effects or just don't work. But what if we could change how we prescribe drugs? What if there was a 3D printer that could design pills and adapt to an individual's needs and maybe print on demand the medications tailored to the patient? Or what if there was a real world device that worked like the diagnostic tricorder we imagined watching Star Trek? How about AI infused antiviral discoveries and laboratory level diagnostic tools accessible via your smartphone? These technologies and many more are paving the way to a more democratized, connected and data driven future of medicine and personalized care. And this is the world where Dr. Daniel Kraft thrives. Daniel is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician scientist with more than 25 years experience in clinical practice, biomedical research and innovation. He is founder and chair of NextMed Health, a program which explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential to reshape the future of health and Biomedicine and he is the Faculty Chair for Medicine at Singularity University. After graduating from Brown and Medical School at Stanford, Daniel was Board certified in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Following his residency at Mass Ginn Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital and he completed Stanford Fellowships in Hematology, Oncology and bone marrow transplantation. He has multiple scientific publications including in Nature and Science and Medical Device Immunology and stem cell related patents through nih, funded faculty positions with Stanford University School of Medicine and is a clinical faculty for the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplantation Easy

for Me to say Service at the

University of California, San Francisco. He's received NIH K08 Physician Scientist Award, NIH SBIR Phase 1 and 2 awards and is an HHMI Continuing Studies Scholarship Recipient. Daniel's academic research is focused on stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, stem cell derived immunotherapies for cancer, bioengineering, human T cell differentiation and humanized animal models. His clinical work has focused on bone marrow stem cell transplant, plantation and medical devices to enable stem cell based regenerative medicine. Daniel's heavily involved in digital health as

well, creating digital health, serving on the board of Healthy I.O.

and advising several Fortune 50 and digital health related startups. He recently founded Intelli Medicine, focused on personalized data driven precision medicine and he's also inventor of the Marrow Miner, an FDA approved device from minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow and founded Regen Med Systems, a company developing technologies to enable adult stem cell based regenerative therapies. He's an advisor to the XPRIZE foundation where he helped conceive the medical tricorder XPRIZE and chairs their Health and Pandemic alliance, helping lead a new X prize for rapid COVID 19 testing. He is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute Health Innovators as well as being a Kauffman Fellow and is an investor and advisor to several digital health and and life sciences companies. He's a frequent keynote speaker to a diverse array of organizations on the future of health, medicine and technology. His four TED talks and two TED Med talks have garnered over 5 million views. Health Tech magazine named David one of their 50 healthcare IT influencers in 2024, Forbes said he is one of their five futurists to watch in uncertain times and he's also recognized as one of the 40 smartest people in Health Care and and is listed in the Digital Health Top 50. Daniel is also an avid pilot and served for 14 years as an officer and flight surgeon with F15 and F16 fighter squadrons and the Air National Guard. And he's conducted research on aerospace medicine that's been published with NASA, with whom he was a finalist for astronaut selection. Daniel, man, it's great to have you on. What a CV you have.

That's the short version.

Yeah, exactly. I had to abbreviate this for time, so it's good to have you on, I think. If, if my memory serves, we first met way back in San Diego. I was in the class of 2016 with what was then known as Exponential medicine and now NextMed Health.

And I shared a bit about your background.

But maybe you could discuss what led you to become a poly hyphenated physician,

scientist, inventor, flight surgeon, entrepreneur, and in

particular, the convergence of technology and healthcare.

Well, I think especially when I was in medical school, you know, you spend about a month going through different rotations, you know, pediatrics, internal medicine, surgery, you name it. And I kind of liked everything. I was always having trouble deciding what I was going to be when I grew up. So I decided not to grow up too fast. I actually spent a couple extra years at Stanford Medical School, the usual four years. I did six. I spent an extra year doing stem cell biology and immunology research in the lab of Weisman and got involved in space systems design, taking a course designing missions Mars with the Aero Astro department and spent a summer at the International Space University. I took my sort of last year as I was trying to figure out what I was going to do, spending a summer in Costa Rica doing tropical medicine and also working at NASA Johnson Space center back on challenges for space travel and humans. Bottom line, I never quite fit into one round peg into one square hole. So I ended up doing a combined residency in both internal medicine and pediatrics at Harvard, but still always kind of kept my eyes open to all the other things that were happening. And when I came back to Stanford, Hotel California from four wonderful years in Boston, I did hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplant, but also got pulled into things like Stanford's biodesign program, which was very brand new at the time, which is about finding problems and solving them with new mindsets, and got involved in digital health and helped build the first text paging systems at the hospital. And bottom line was sort of, you know, it was early in the, just after the go go 90s, where I built the first online medical bookstore while I was a resident in Boston. So I was kind of getting the bug of seeing that we could kind of create the future through new technologies, new innovations. Again, the Internet was pretty new and kind of enjoy that whole ability to sort of how do we rethink many elements of healthcare medicine which are often kind of broken? And I ended up, I think, pretty luckily getting pulled into this summer of the very first summer of something called Singularity University, co founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, which was focused on understanding exponential technologies and the rate of change of AI and robotics and 3D printing and nanotech and genomics and blockchain. And sort of my role, sort of leading up for that summer, what was happening in healthcare and medicine

kind of

pushed me to think a bit differently about what was the art of the possible and what happens if we bring people together from different clinical fields, from different technological fields to rethink what's possible for prevention, diagnostics therapy, global health, public health, longevity. And that sort of began my unexpected journey as a, I guess as a bit of a healthcare futurist, though I don't really call myself that. I'm more of a nowist. But that's sort of the short story about how all this started, you know, going from sort of the traditional sort of academic scientist and sort of into this world of like, let's reinvent this future together.

That's great. Well, and it really makes you kind of a natural for ted's and TED meds and whatnot, and kind of the penultimate early adopter, but also the early developer. I know we're going to bounce around kind of all over the place, but I mean, even what you just now said kind of perhaps tees up about the little bit that I know about what you help creators founded the digital health community. And it's at my latest count, it catalogs like 3,500 digital health solutions. And I'm presuming it's pretty multidisciplinary and whatnot. But tell us about that. How did that come about and what all is it involved with?

Well, I think in my first ted talk, my second Ted talk, which was in 2011, was the future of Medicine. There's an app for that that was way back in 2011. And at the time there was the Apple iPhone was only a few years old. The App Store just launched, the Fitbit was only 2 years old. So there's a handful of early digital health tools and technologies, from early wearables to a few apps. And what happened in the last decade plus is there's been an explosion of digital health tools, mobile health, connected health tools, and there's huge potential to use them as a consumer, as a patient and as a clinician or as a health system. And so my challenge was how to keep track of those. And so for my own little pain point to solve for, I thought I need to kind of create a database of all the digital health solutions that are there that we can start using. And I was fortunate enough to get the domain name Digital Health. So if you go to digital health today, you can search and find over 4,000 companies and solutions, whether it's for diabetes or running a marathon, or AI platforms for radiology, or solutions that manage almost every disease all the way to public health measures. And so the goal is to sort of catalyze the future. Billy, my voice needs some catalyst.

Yes.

Morning. I'm getting off a cold. I don't normally have this great radio voice, but digital health has become again, this go to spot. It's free for anyone to use. So it's an exploration platform. And the big picture idea is that anybody, whether you're a clinician, hospital administrator, or a consumer or patient can go there and say, here's where I need to go with my healthcare journey or with my disease or with my aspirin goals, and find the tools that will help you get there.

I totally appreciate that. I run a non profit and one of the things that I had found a long story for another podcast. But we had been trying to do a variety of things just with this little handful of volunteers that we had had. And we certainly found that we were not scalable, that we couldn't do all the different kinds of global projects that we wanted to do. They're always collaborative in partnership. But pardon me, they weren't the amount of time that would have required for volunteers who all of us had day jobs, couldn't get away to do. And so my very wise director of our board said, you know, we've done a lot of work to figure out how, what tools are out there in global health, what tools are out there available. You may be familiar with some of the ones from maybe your work you did in Costa Rica, but like where

there is no doctor and where there

is no midwife and a whole series of that actually you know, done out

west as well with the Hesperian Institute.

And we, our pivot was to do kind of a variation on your theme of that, to just be able to have tools be available freely on our website. And it wasn't like, you know, anybody, you know, people could go do that on their own, but it was a

real time saver, timesaver, step saver to

be able to do that. So I, I Tip your hat. Because, man, now that it's 4,000, it just like, where, where does someone start? You'd spend months on Google, you know, just trying to find out these kinds of things. So I think that's quite a generous benefit that you provide to the world with that.

Thank you.

Well, I mean, thank you. The art of the possible. The art of the possible is already pretty incredible. I just got back from CES 2025, and the future's kind of arrived, right? There are wearables and otherables that can measure all sorts of things, not just your steps, but can start to do your blood pressure and even blood sugar without a needle or without a cuff. There's new ways to optimize your sleep. There's new forms of home laboratories. The challenge often, and this is across health and medicine around the world, is these are often point solutions that have a lot of challenge getting into the traditional healthcare environment. And there's a real opportunity now to, you know, connect those dots, to integrate them into clinical workflows so that if you're wearing a wearable device, it could be a Fitbit, an Apple Watch, a Whoop or what have you, that that data from your sleep and your steps and your heart rate variability could flow into your medical records so that your primary care doctor or your nutritionist could see that, and that could become part of your continuous proactive care. And so I think. So what we really need here is sort of this integration of technology and that kind of easy button to really enable it to give us proactive prediction. Like the idea of a check engine light is starting to evolve. I talked about that 10 years ago. Now you're Apple Watch or Whoop will look at your sleep data, your heart rate, your temperature, your heart rate variability, your respiratory rate, and it can start to pick up if, wow, it looks like you're getting a cold or maybe Covid and give you a little bit of a warning a day or two before.

That's great.

I had, gosh, it just brings up so many different things. I forget if it was William Gibson or Kevin Kelly or somebody said, you know, the future's here. It's just not evenly distributed. And I think probably CES is a great way to see that and see what's going on in those kinds of areas. It was a failed startup because I just think the. Maybe the tech wasn't there. We were kind of too early, but we had tried to develop something where you could take diverse. You did a 23andMe study and you had those data and you did. You've got your Fitbits and your whoops and your aura rings and your whatevers. You've got your blood panel from your last physical, you've got your medical history from mom and dad. You've got all these different divert. You can take some screen screening tools. You can take a Hamilton D Depression inventory. You know, they get the mental health side of things and then kind of throw all that into this, you know, this soup where then it could start to kind of look for patterns. And I think, you know, I kind of hope we'll circle, we'll get in deep into AI in a bit. But you know, that maybe those kinds of technologies can kind of start to sort and sift those things out where you can have that, you know, know what to do maybe. And here's the kind of diet I have, here's the kind of exercise, rest routine I have. But take, like you just said, all those diverse kinds of things, make it an easy button and then also be able to scrape it and scrub it through. You know, what kind of insurance coverage do you have or what kind of, you know, out of pocket might I expect?

Is this worth it to me to

be able to, you know, go do these other kinds of things? Because it might improve my health span or it might improve my marathon time or it might, you know, diminish the likelihood of my decrepitude, you know, 10 years early. Those kinds of things. Are you starting to see those kinds of things or knowing you, are you building those, those kinds of things?

Well, yes, on both counts. I mean, the, the opportunity. Now, the challenge has been traditionally you only get a very. We, we've practiced holistically, we don't. We practice health care, we practice sick care. We tend to, you know, wait for someone to show up with a disease, often late stage, and manage it. You know, you think about the current models of your healthcare practice. You hopefully show up for your annual physical and they might do some labs and some vital signs. That's like a small, small fraction of your data from the year. So we have very intermittent data usually collected in the four walls of a clinic or God forbid, the emergency room or intensive care unit. And we have this sort of reactive mindset. We wait for you to show up with a heart attack or stroke or late stage cancer or whatever more advanced healthcare problem usually shows up after the fact. And now we have the ability to collect this data almost seamlessly, almost continuously, whether it's from a standard wearable or the sensors in your home, including WI fi or the voice in your biomarker or the camera on your phone. So we're entering this era of sort of continuous data and it's becoming multimodal. It's not just your labs. It could be, yes, your 23andMe genetics or your full genome. It could be sequencing your proteome, your microbiome, your socio, where you've lived and who you've hung out with, your place home, where you've lit, you know, the places you've been exposed to. And when you put that all together, it's overwhelming. But now with the advent of some of these new tools, you can almost imagine the era of the digital twin. We can start to match those things up. So that can really predict for you, not just the average individual, what's going to be best for you for preventing disease, diagnosing it, managing one when you have it, picking the right therapy, even writ large beyond the individual, how do we best manage public and global health? So a big shift from intermittent, reactive to stick care to a future that's continuous, proactive, anytime, anywhere, excuse my frog, my voice. And where it's going to really give you your own sort of agent that can help connect those dots for you. Because no doctor, nurse, pharmacist can be talking to that data all the time, but the AI can.

Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, the general practitioner, unless they did a fellowship and genomics or something, you know, isn't necessarily going to be able to have the time or the expertise to be able to, you know, parse those kinds of things out versus, you know, a lab test and whatnot. They, you know, have greater familiarity with. This maybe tees us up to. I know that you're very involved with the XPRIZE health alliance. Is that just kind of a natural overlap in your Venn diagram of a life with the other technological, technological kinds of things you're doing or how did that come about?

Well, I've been helping out XPRIZE for several years. I actually came up with a medical tricorder, xprize, doing an X prize visioneering element. When I was starting to talk about that check engine light or the onstar for the body, I think was how I pitched it, was that why can't we use these sort of science fictioning tools like the Star Trek tricorder and imagine having those in everyone's pocket or everyone's homes. What do you have today? Maybe you have a digital thermometer. Maybe after Covid you have a pulse oximeter. But what kind of simple handheld technology could be leveraged to do early diagnostics. And so that became a $10 million prize that was won by several teams to kind of bring us the next generation of diagnostic tools which are, many are now rolled out, some are used in telehealth. But X Prize is kind of a great platform, if you haven't heard of it, that stimulates solutions to grand challenges. So the first X Prize was the Ansari X Prize to get the first non government rocket into space. And it stimulated probably the new space industry from SpaceX to what Blue Origin is doing. And it was a 10 million dollar prize and Rutan and team won that back in 2004 I believe. But there's been many other exercises including in healthcare during the pandemic, which is now five years ago, we put together an alliance of many different organizations try and address the challenges of the pandemic. One of which was the challenge for COVID testing. You might remember in 2020, 2021 would take two days of PCR data and long lines to get tested. So we put together a rapid COVID testing xprize to build better X Prize testing modalities and came up with I think it was 770 teams from 70 countries that competed for a $10 million prize and some amazing solutions came out which are now in the market. So part of what that alliance did was bring new folks together to solve for Covid and also bring new solutions that would address almost any pandemic. And that work has continued on. So it's about connecting the dots and solving for some things sometimes in audacious and quick timelines.

Gotcha. Yeah, I know. I think a friend of mine, Jack Hittery, I don't know if that name would ring a bell with you, but I think he's been doing some things in that neck of the woods with moonshots and quantum computing in that area. So is that the X Prize, is it more so a kind of a global kind of thing in your niche and it is within the health alliance. I mean do they obviously rockets and stuff don't have per se a healthcare orientation other than, you know.

Well, it's it. Yes, there are health prizes, but they're prizes across the board. Jack Hidary is a friend and has helped with other prizes. He has a company now that does things on the quantum computing side of things, some of which really apply to healthcare. But for example, and we're talking now in, you know, in February or so of 2025, we've just had the horrible fires in Los Angeles, there's actually an active prize now for Wildfire Response. I think the competition's already been open for a few months, but you can imagine armies of drones that pick up hotspots and might crowdsource micro drones to drop off water or fire retardant new ways to prevent that sort of tragedy from happening. There are prizes around ocean water cleanup. There are prizes around carbon sequestration. There's now a $101 million Healthspan X prize, and that prize is catalyzing teams to find solutions that will stop and reverse aging. So the idea is to put a prize model out there that will catalyze smart groups of folks, sometimes from outside the traditional industry, to solve for problems in new ways and open up whole new pathways to whether it's to space or to longevity.

Is there a.

Is the mechanics behind that like a certain time period, like applications have to be in at a certain time, or is it sort of like a. More like an sbir where there's like, you hit a certain proof of concept and then you get further funding to continue on.

Or how.

What's the model behind it?

Yeah, each prize is a little bit different, depending. Let's say, for example, the rapid COVID testing, testing especially. We did pretty, pretty tight timeline given the pandemic. We put out a call to action, said, you know, you have until this date to do your initial applications. And the initial form of applications were like, what do you think you want to do? What's your basic proposal? Those were narrowed down, the ones that seemed to have some good science and good ideas around them. Those teams got some small amount of funding to take it to the next stage to reduce it to practice. And the final stage, they went through actual testing with, you know, samples of COVID to show that they could actually pick up Covid with high sensitivity and high specificity. So that had a pacing to it. Others are over years and format differently. But if you just go to xprize.org, you can take a look at some of the amazing prizes that are ongoing and see when ones get announced. And you don't need to always be the expert in that field to join a team. I think when they had the winners of the Ocean Cleanup prize, the winning teams came from, like a tattoo parlor. You know, folks with different forms of expertise can contribute new thinking. So xprize.org has lots of the information.

I will be sure to put that in the show notes in the LinkedIn piece. And it just, again, it just sort of speaks to that diversity of perspective. You know, who would have thunk that someone from doing ink to oceanography would have any kind of benefit to it. So I truly just love that as well, too.

Well, I think the high level is that, you know, we get experts in things, we have people who know their challenges, but it, it sometimes takes that crowdsourcing of knowledge and sort of surprise because the first. The first prize that, that really stimulated X prize was, was Charles Lindbergh crossing the ocean to win the prize for the first plane to cross the Atlantic, which was a very big challenge back in 2028. And now it's, you know, normal. I'm gonna fly the plane today to Europe. And so it kind of catalyzes new mindsets and the art of the possible.

That's right. And the appreciation historically of technology and innovation too.

So.

Well, maybe that tees us up also, then nicely then, for NextMed 2025. So in doing background, I saw that the faculty for NextMed is just outstanding as usual. Eric Topol. I'm a longtime fanboy of his, Jamie Metzl, who's been a guest twice on the show so far. Dean Kame. I was fortunate a million years ago to be invited to be a judge on his first robotics competitions. And it's just really kind of a

who's who of innovators and medical and healthcare arena.

Tell us the genesis of it.

What caused you to create Exponential Medicine,

now rebranded as NextMed Health? And what are you covering in this year's conference?

Thanks. Well, a lot of healthcare, specifically. I mean, I trained in internal medicine, pediatrics, and then hematology, oncology. Most clinicians get very, very narrow in one specialty. If you live in San Francisco, if you're an orthopedic surgeon, you might only do the right knee or the left knee.

That's.

That's a joke. But we get super specialized, and it's often rare that you get a cross convergence of folks from different clinical fields as well as different medical technologies and technology writ large. And I was chair of medicine at Singularity University. And we were looking at all these different fields from AI and robotics and 3D printing and nanotech and genomics and synthetic biology. And I asked the question, you know, what's the future of medicine through the lens of all these different fields and people and ideas. And so I put this program together back in 2011. It was called Future man initially, and then Exponential Medicine. And what was magic about it? We started with 100 folks, was we really cross fertilize. You get folks to really share what they were doing in cardiology or robotics or infectious disease. Or mental health. And the sparks would fly. People go, wow, you can do that here. Why can't I do that in immunology? And that program grew to about 700 folks at the Hotel del Coronado where we've held this since 2013. And amazing people just show up, let alone the faculty has been really incredible. And the whole mission for Next Men Health is to understand what's the Argentine possible today and how do we catalyze the future and do that with cross disciplinary, multimodal mindset. And so we have everyone pretty much in the same room. It's not a massive conference, but we'll have the main stage where you hear from folks like Eric Topol and Dean Gaiman and folks like Rick Doblin on psychedelics or Susan Tersh who leads research innovation for the va. We have entrepreneurs like Amir Dan Rubin who recently built and sold One Medical all the way to Stanford, to patients, to folks running ARPA H whole spectrum. And the goal is to kind of think about how do we together reimagine healthcare? And so the mix is mainstage talks, breakout sessions and an innovation Lab with about 60 startups. And so we spend four days kind of converging and conspiring on how do we really bring the future faster because things are accelerating and of course AI is involved in everything. We have thematics on AI. Digital health is a bit of a through line, the patient journey, but anybody can come. It's not made for just clinicians and patients and biotech folks. We bring together a pretty dynamic global community to look at what's now near next. And so if you go to NextMed Health, you can find out all the information. Come and join us. It's going to be March 30, April 2, in San Diego at the iconic and beautiful Hotel del Coronado. And it's really kind of a special place and community that we're building to be beyond the physical to really help catalyze the future faster.

Yeah, well, here, here I fully endorse it. I was back in the class of 2016 and just very much enjoyed it.

Made a.

Pardon me. One of the little interstitial things around it is just the having meals together or even just. I think I met Jamie Metzl working out. We were in the gym at the same time and then like saw each other, you know, like at dinner or something and then connected. I mean, it's just really kind of a wonderful way not just to hear from the deis of kind of what's going on, but then to have Those opportunities to have that little extra conversation over dinner or to catch up with somebody and go for a walk on the beach. I think probably somewhere packed away in my memorabilia. I have my scrubs still as well too. So it was just a wonderful experience. It's great to see it continue on this way.

So part of that magic, I was gonna say is people kind of let their hair down. Some people call it the burning man in medical meetings on the beach because we're on the playa. But we have our. We have our famous scrubs picture and everyone. You don't need to be a surgeon. We put our scrubs on and we have a picture in front of the Hotel Dell. We have folks like Jamie Metzl, who I've known since college, who's definitely a polymath. He runs a chocolate cacao ceremony, a sacred cacao ceremony. And that's everybody in their little woo woo mode. And we do a meditation and have cacao. We've got our swami who leads meditation. The only medication you need is meditation. You can do runs on the beach with the Navy seals. We have beach bonfires. It's just the kind of magic happens when people kind of cross connect with people that they wouldn't expect to meet. And that's where the sparks are, the new connections and the new ideas and sometimes new companies and new initiatives have started.

Yeah, well, here, here.

Yeah. It is really just a kind of a 24 hour a day kind of extravaganza. I like that Burning man of medicine. That's pretty apropos. So I'm probably going to bounce around a little bit with some of the other kinds of things. Just some itches that I want to scratch. I know that you've really been a part of a lot of the innovations in regenerative medicine. Kind of what's on your radar with that in terms of recently or also overlapping in into stem cell therapies and things like that. What do you do to prognosticate or what do you see or what are you involved with?

Well, the world of stem cell and regenerative medicine is. I mean, it's been a really exciting area, era and era. It also has a lot of snake oil associated with it. You can go to all sorts of clinics in Costa Rica and get stem cell therapy or even in the United States. But let's go back to basics. My clinical training is in hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplantation or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. And that's really the first and still primary form of using stem cells to cure and treat diseases. So the most common example would be someone, God forbid, has a form of leukemia or lymphoma, will hit them up with heavy doses of chemotherapy and radiation that destroys the cancer, but also destroys their blood forming immune system. And you then give them a bone marrow transplant from either a matched donor or sometimes from a sibling or sometimes back from themselves. And that is often curative in many forms of malignancies. There's also ways to use bone marrow transplantation to cure some autoimmune diseases, Some genetic diseases like sickle cell and thalassemia. And now blending that with gene therapy is getting exciting. The ability to take out your blood forming stem cells using crispr, fix the gene and basically reboot the immune system to cure disease like sickle cell, thalassemia, maybe even diseases like hiv. So that's sort of the more core form of stem cell therapy. There are many other organizations and labs looking to do stem cell or regenerative medicine therapies for everything from treating joint diseases to treating organ diseases like cardiac and liver. The data is often sometimes across the spectrum, Depending on what kind of quote, unquote stem cell you use, how you deliver it, what timing, what kind of disease. But writ large, the idea of the field is to sort of the ability to repair diseases that are acute or from aging and to hopefully enhance health span and longevity along the way. You just need to be a little bit careful about what you say when you say stem cell and regenerative medicine.

What are good ways for sort of buyer beware. What are good ways for patients? Because patients in their families and loved ones in these situations can have a level of desperation with it. So how, you know, is it FDA

approval or what are the ways to distinguish between what you mentioned?

You know, could be very snake oilish versus what's got some, you know, early, you know, pardon me, early phase, you know, potential and possibility.

Yeah, I would look for if you are going to be undergoing, quote unquote, a stem cell based therapy, make sure you've seen the data. Is, is even the protocol that you're going into part of a study because not everything has to be 100% proven out yet. Science takes time and takes studies and well designed, sometimes clinical trials. So you know, you can go on clinicaltrials.gov and see is this protocol that you're going into for mesenchymal stem cell therapy, for liver regeneration, Making that up, is that actually a real thing? You can look for who's doing the trials. Sometimes the center is Being run by some folks, you know, folks that don't really have the background and are there as a bit of a money mill. And of course you'll see lots of anecdotes put on websites and Anecdotes.

Yeah, yeah.

So a little bit of caveat emptor. Look to see what the science is, where it's being done. And when they say a stem cell therapy, whether it's for a potion for your skin, all the way to something that might help cure an ailing heart, look very carefully at the basis of that. Not to say that some of these aren't real, it's just that there's a lot of, a lot of mix across the spectrum. At the same time, the field is very exciting now because we're kind of moving from what used to be adult stem cells that you can collect from bone marrow and fat to being able to develop your own stem cells. These induced pluripotent stem cells, you can take a skin cell or cells in your blood. And now with these Yamanaka factors that won the Nobel Prize about 12 years ago, differentiate them into any tissue or cell. And in the last year or so we've had news that the first patient with type 1 diabetes had skin or blood cell turned into basically a beta islet cell grown up in a tissue dish and then basically inserted back underneath their belly and it started to produce insulin and basically cured them of type 1 diabetes. There's been other great work out of Harvard and beyond and doing that in some different forms, but the ability now to create tissues and cells on demand and apply that to very specific diseases, whether that's diabetes or neurologic disease or metabolic, is getting really, really exciting. They've just not really yet rolled out at scale. But the potential is very real and very exciting and blends together with things like tissue engineering, where you might be able to 3D print an organ and blend the right cells in there or eventually replace a damaged heart. Today we've seen early versions of, I think it fits into regenerative medicine where you can reprogram the heart of a pig with some human immunologic factors and transplant a humanized heart, a xenotransplant to save the life, at least temporarily, of someone with heart failure. So these are all coming together in very exciting ways.

So in terms of adoption, I mean once something gets whatever kinds of scientific bonafides behind them, FDA approval, good randomized controlled trials, etc, integrating the new technologies into mainstream healthcare is that then become a healthcare economics, healthcare reimbursement kind of issue or on the, on the dollar side of the equation, what are your thoughts around that?

Well, you can have the best new therapy, drug, app, pharmaceutical, stem cell therapy, et cetera, but unless it gets paid for and it's regulated first, has some regulatory approval, fda, CE mark, et cetera, and an FDA mark usually means that it's that's safe, number one, and also effective. So that's sort of part one, number two. That doesn't mean it's always paid for. The challenge is to show that something is, quote, unquote, cost effective is a moving target. And so even if it's safe, effective and paid for, doesn't mean it's always going to get used by the clinicians. Many folks may not know about the latest digital health tool or regenerative medicine. How do they implement it? How do they get trained to utilize it? Is their hospital system or insurance company covering it? So there's lots and lots of barriers between something being available and utilized and lots of debate because in some cases These drugs like GLP1s are very expensive, they are very effective. But who gets to get them? What are the rules for what level of obesity and what other things have been tried ahead of time might change depending on what system you're in and what country you're in.

Gotcha. One of my other day jobs, I'm chief clinical officer, Digital Health company and I was charged a while back to look into the feasibility of looking for FDA approvals in the area of prescription digital therapeutics. And I tell you, that took me down a Rabbit hole of 510 predicated devices and software as a medical dev. At the end of the day, we wound up not pursuing it because we were concerned about almost kind of like an atrogenic restriction of being able to have a greater access to our digital therapeutics because they don't need a prescription versus those that might need a prescription or do need a prescription. And I have to say, Daniel, it was such an odd experience to draft language when we were in the early phase of this of what would be a package insert for the possible side effects of a piece of software. Do you have any thoughts about that or experiences in that kind of area as well?

I mean, sure, the whole idea, let's say, of software as a medical device is that you don't need to prescribe the actual drug for some things that you can prescribe an app or even a video game for, let's say for mental health. And that could be as good or sometimes better than the standard approach. So one example, a friend of mine, a professor at ucsf, Adam Gazelle, developed technology and spot on, a company called Achille Health, they developed a kind of a video game for kids with ADHD that would show better efficacy than, let's say, taking Ritalin. You know, taking a drug and a kid's brain isn't always the best thing. But if you played this little video game a few minutes a day, it would help you with your focus. And this can be applied to adults as well. So they went through all these expensive clinical trials, they got it through the fda, which is a huge endeavor to show that it's safe and effective. And then getting it prescribed by pediatricians and psychiatrists was really, really hard. Right. Folks weren't used to prescribing an app and the pathway to pay for that, etc. There are other companies that have had big struggles with that as well. Eventually the Kelly app went over the counter so you could just buy it yourself on your smartphone. So it didn't necessarily need the rigor of an FDA barrier. But the idea is good because you can democratize a lot of care at the push of a button. In general, the medical field isn't always ready for that. Medical education isn't always have clinicians of all sorts tuned up to this part of the possible. So for example, on Digital Health, my platform, you can find a whole slew of digital therapeutics and other tools that might integrate or in some place replace traditional medications from diet based interventions for diabetes as opposed to drug based ones. It could be a prescription for exercise or prescription for meditation. But I think we're going to see this blend of digital needs pharmaceutical. Many drugs will benefit from having a companion app because then you can start to see side effects, measure, optimize dosing, give feedback to the clinician and the patient, leverage that into clinical trials. So this sort of digital age needs to move outside of its old traditional buckets and software as a medical device. And digital therapeutics is part of that. But the culture of care, how we design our healthcare systems isn't quite yet dialed in for that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think one of the companies that didn't quite make it, I think it was Para Therapeutics. They had some in the mental health side of things and I think they had partnered with Sandoz for a period of time and that kind of didn't work out. So I think again, a lot of great potentials and great technologies sometimes are just 10 minutes too early to be able to have that kind of acceptance and, and adoption and whatnot. I think again the company that I work with, one of the things that we started off with was just kind of in an unusual area of doing a randomized controlled trial and cognitive behavioral therapy and digital application of it. And I know that's always in science, it's the gold standard, but I've written

a lot on that.

I did a lot of stuff back in the day on clinical outcomes management and behavioral health. And then that begets treatment guidelines and then that begets evidence based practice protocols, which big fan and done a lot and continue to write in that area. But you know, now there's this thing that's come up maybe five, six years, maybe a little bit longer about research findings, irreproducibility and you know, like I can't remember the fellow's name. I think he's in a Canadian scientist and someone tried to reproduce one of his studies and did not come close to what his findings were and it kind of freaked him out and upset him. So he tried to, you know, redo his own and did not get the same kind of findings. And then that kind of led him down into a, a parallel scientific career of looking at the irreproducibility kind of problem. And with all that in mind, like back at another position I had some years ago, I gave a talk on big data and predictive analytics and the work that I was doing then wound up with, I developed two patient registries. We had very large data sets, pardon me, they appear in Clinicaldrials, pardon me.gov and we were, because we had such huge patient volume, we were doing 22,000 patient visits a day across 25 states and 900 clinics. And so I sort of had this cognitive shift, paradigm shift of conceptually thinking more about a practice based evidence model. And just furthermore, and I'll get off my soapbox here, but I know we noted about Eric Topol. I was, I had done some research around this topic and found a quote from him that he had had knee replacement and that he was sort of

calling for a special bespoke PT protocol

due to his atypical situation with his post op rehab. And it really kind of highlighted one

of the snags of evidence based practices.

Dirty little secrets that one size oftentimes as a guideline, you know, fits few.

So

my thinking is if we can get these, these big datas that we can throw some AI at it to be able to look at like, like you and I know like when you do a scientific study and you want to get it published, you have exclusionary data or exclusionary variables out the wazoo. You know, if I'm doing something on something orthopedic, I don't want someone obese, I don't want someone with diabetes, I don't want someone, you know, with xyz. So I have this like really clean sample to test whatever it is I'm testing. But the generalizability of it to anyone other than what my sample population is like is hugely limited. Limited.

When I have a patient registry where

I have a huge background of all

different shapes, sizes, presentations, medical histories, comorbidities,

et cetera, of people, then is it possible or is it just sort of like a fantasy, you know, fever dream of mine, that there's a potential to be able to tap into those kinds of big data sets, to be able to come up with more, you know, probabilistic, tailor made, precision medicine kinds of protocols?

100%, you're well ahead of the curve. This is exactly where things are starting to and need to head. Is this idea of, you know, truly personalized, proactive, data driven and applicable. Not just data, but insights and knowledge that you can apply to you or to your patient. No one has the average, you know, very few people have an average temper of 98.6. That's what we use. You know, you go into an average total knee replacement placement like maybe Eric had and doesn't take into account his pharmacogenomics, what sports he played, his actual height, how he might metabolize any other drugs. So what we're entering into, I like to call this new era, where it should be, is multimodal health. The ability to integrate your basic labs, that we have basic vitals, but now we can have your proteome and your microbiome and your base genome and your exposome, you know, where you, if you lived in a high pollution area or a farm in Kansas, integrate that together to create a bit of a digital twin and to understand for that digital twin what's best for your prevention, diagnostics or therapy. Kind of the analogy I used, it's probably too much is that of our modern travel. We all drive with Google Maps or Waze and we use the crowdsource knowledge of the cars on the street around us, not just in real time, but of the, the hours, weeks and years before to predict how long it's going to take for me to get from Palo Alto to San Francisco in rush hour or in bad weather. And it's always updated, right? And it gives me new routings. I don't take the same route every day. And that certainly needs to come to health and medicine. In fact, advised a company out of Israel called Stuff that Works, built by one of the founders of Waze. If you go to Stuff that Works Health, you can put in almost any condition from migraines to Crohn's disease to inflammatory bowel disease. You pick it something from severe to common and you can learn from thousands of other patients like you what's worked and what hasn't worked. And so I'm hoping that's going to start to come to real time for all of us as patients and as clinicians. And I was just in San Francisco during J.P. morgan. I had not my first, but one of my second or third Waymo rides. Waymo is the self driving taxi cars that are all over San Francisco. And unlike a normal Uber or taxi, you know, you press the button, the car comes to you, it knows who you are, it has price transparency, it adapts to the traffic into the weather. You see the on the screen, the traffic around you, where you go in real time, it gets you where you're going in a safe way, arguably safer than a human driver. And I would argue the analogy for the future of medicine should be a little bit like a self driving Waymo enabled car. It uses AI big data knowledge from thousands of journeys and trips before you and hyper individualizes your journey to get you there in the most efficacious and healthy manner. And we have a long way to go to do that in healthcare, but starting to plug in as we can make sense of not just data, but real time insights and we won't wait the usual 17 years to go from data to knowledge to insights to action.

I think that's, you know, that kind of just tees up, you know, for one of the next questions. It's very exciting to me. I mean just these kinds of conversations and the potentials and then the actual seeing that these do come into being in existence, they don't maintain themselves as science fictions or you know, hopes and stuff. That doesn't mean every startup is going to be, you know, a unicorn or even exist. But in the midst of all these kinds of things, you know, the, we have the fundamentals, Hippocratic oath. Are, are some of the, what are some of the ethical considerations that you see or that you see get dealt with with these rapidly advancing technologies and whatnot in biomedicine and digital technology? Digital health?

Yeah, one of the, I mean everybody, every time I give a keynote or something is well, what about the Privacy. I'm like, oh, privacy is dead. I'm sorry. I mean, I mean, would you want to go back to driving without Google Maps or wait ways. Because Google Maps, whether you know it or not, takes your personal driving data where you are. It knows where you were at 2 in the morning and if you were speeding and integrates that into these maps which we use to hopefully get us where we want to in a faster, safer, less frustrating way. So we need to let people to easily opt in to become data donors in a de anonymized way so that we can create these data lakes that are going to give you the right information for patients like mine or patients like you. So that we're not doing, you know, one size fits all average medicine. So that's, you know, one regulatory area we also need to make it easier to do. It's always this issue of data interoperability. A lot of health systems and pharma companies want to hold on to their data, so it's hard to connect those dots. So I think that's not necessarily an ethical thing, but it's more of a regulatory. How do we help force this sharing of information? NIH is running a trial called the all of Us trial, kind of like a Framingham trial on steroids with a million Americans. So that when you're looking at a study, it's not the Framingham study based on Caucasian nurses in western Massachusetts, it's based on representative populations from like you or from your neighborhood. So I think there's some ethics and regulatory elements that need to come together there to help force the data to turn into useful insights. At the same time, we need to have some smart guide rails, particularly around AI, which is moving so fast that the regulators and culture and reimbursement can't quite catch up. What's going to happen already happening with generative AI and AI is really exciting and has tremendous potential, but we need to be a bit careful on the dark side as well.

Right? Yeah. I've seen some headline things about perhaps some third party payers using AI for claims denials and things like that and it just terrifies me. I mean, it's sort of like without AI, you know, as I. It's been a long time since I've been a practicing clinician, but I just know that kind of dealing with third party payers was always sort of a saber rattling and difficult, you know, kind of problem to have to deal with.

Now you have your chatbot talk to their chatbots.

Yeah, exactly.

But there literally are now AI platforms on doximity and others where you can literally say, here, write the letter to make sure the insurance company covers my patient's preexisting condition and the evidence for why you should approve this drug or therapy, because it's a bit of a arms race in that regard and the potentials. We waste a lot of money in sick care treating expensive diseases, whereas if we approved and aligned our incentives to pay for some of these proactive preventative things or picking up disease and screening for the early, that would really, truly upscale our healthcare experience. Because here in the United States, we spend the most per capita, but are way down the list in terms of outcomes per dollar spent.

Right.

And isn't our longevity our, you know, has been going down as well too, kind of lockstep with that as well. So in that kind of conceptualization of taking these most recent things we've been talking about, what do you see from your perspective as maybe the biggest misconceptions around the future of medicine, medical technologies?

I'm not sure about misconceptions. I think in many ways you use that quote, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. It's more about being able to connect a lot of these dots in new forms. We'll just do a thought experiment. What should the future state look like? We're talking in 2025. Things are accelerating. What should it look like in 2030? So I'm just making this up on the fly with my post cold voice, so I apologize, but imagine it's 2030, all your medical data from you. You own it. You've got your genome done maybe several times. You've recently had your labs done with a proteome. You've had a cgm, a continuous glucose monitor that's now embedded in your watch without a needle. It also tracks your real time blood pressure and your heart rate and your sleep, kind of like the wearables do today. But it gives you real time blood sugar, real time blood pressure. It knows your place history. It knows a bit about your mental state based on your emotion and your sleep and your voice. So your data is continuously being sifted and looked at and could be like a little bit of a digital coach and say, hey Daniel, you know, wow, you've had a rough week. You've just been at CES and JP Morgan and you're about to jump on a plane. Maybe you really need to get to bed early tonight or it's time to get another lab done, or, you know, I'm managing a certain condition and it really nudges me in the right way. Not just beeps at me to take my medications, but really smartly knows my personality and reminds me to take my baby aspirin every morning or my statin. It might know how to really optimize my key health things, which my sleep, my exercise, my social interaction, all those sort of basic things that really lead to better health span. And then you might imagine it starts to see some small tweaks in my vitals from my smartwatch that might mean I'm running into trouble. And it points me to go get evaluated at my clinician. And we do a full body scan in 10 minutes and they pick something early that. That would have been lethal if it hadn't been picked up 10 months later when symptoms evolve. So those sorts of things are already sort of here. We just need to design the elements and the components around them.

Gotcha.

It's a real goosebumpy talking with you and all the kinds of things that you're involved with. And I'm going to have just a whole sheet of links and show notes and whatnot. But maybe we could shift a little bit as we wind up a little bit on the personal side, if that's okay with you.

Sure.

So who's influenced you in your work the most? Or who's been a mentor to you through all these different and varied kinds of, you know, fellowships and research grants and things like that? Or is there a team of those that have been kind of the shapers

or influencers in your varied career?

That's a great question. I mean, I think I've always been someone who maybe got overexcited by multiple fields. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. I was lucky when I was, I don't know, three or four to go to the last Apollo launch, Apollo 17. So I always had this space and aviation and flying passion. And so when I was in college, I learned how to fly. I went to this NASA space life sciences training program. I got lucky to know a few physician astronauts who were mentors. Folks like Scott Parazinski, who was ahead of me at Stanford Medical School and flew, I think, on five missions, including with John Glenn. So I sort of had some space mentors. I went to International Space University and met folks who were flight surgeons. And I then later joined the Air National Guard and got to fly in fighter jets as a. And take care of fighter pilots. So that was sort of on my space mentoring journey, which also opens your eyes to, like, this whole multidisciplinary world. Getting to do space requires all sorts of folks. Outside of healthcare, it requires the space medicine part as well. Even in college, in high school actually, I had a mentor in science at National Institute of Health, where I was lucky to do a science fair project that won all the international science fairs and eventually turned into a drug used by Genentech called Zolair. Oh my gosh, I didn't know. I didn't know anything about patents and IT and startups. But if I did later, back at Stanford, there's mentorship through a platform called Stanford Biodesign, which gives you the kind of mindset to see a clinical problem and to solve for it. So I launched a company off of an idea to harvest bone marrow stem cells with a medical device that's called the marrow minor today, still exists. And then of course, I had my, my core research mentor, Irv Weitzman, who's a huge figure in the stem cell biology world at Stanford and was in his lab as a postdoc. So those are certain forms of mentors across the journey. And then Megan Silicon Valley, meet a lot of entrepreneurs. And so I kind of got the cross fertilization bug of how do you have an idea and see it to impact. And so there's been a variety of those as well. And so I think maybe a lesson for anybody is like, find mentors outside of different buckets that kind of might give you different visions of the art of the possible and have your own sort of board of advisors, as it were, and find different ones as you go through life because there's tremendous potential to have non normative career paths when you kind of can blend those all together and the future is going to go look really, really interesting in this new age. And what we've been trained on traditionally may not work in the future.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's. That makes perfect sense to me. And just I appreciate those other little factoids about your, your history and whatnot. So taking that, I know that, you know, having worked, I was at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern and then wound up at University of Illinois College of Medicine and working with a lot of med students. You know, they're, it seemed like admissions processes back in the day was that you need to be like super focal. Like people practically needed to know what their fellowships were going to be on day one of med school. But you are kind of a great role model of diversity and angularity and whatnot. So what advice would you give to young medical professionals, maybe in med school or heading to internship or residency fellowships or Whatnot interested in innovation and entrepreneurship. What, what should they seek out?

Well, I think you raised a bigger question of even before you're a medical student, when is the future of medical education? Like who should get into medical school and do they need to be good at, you know, physics and chemistry and have high MCAT scores? You know what, you know, what makes a good doctor, let alone nurse or pharmacist, or pick your clinical field as in this year of AI and data and GPT. You know, do you need to be memorizing drug lists? Do you need to be good at organic chemistry or do you need to be better at, you know, have a better EQ emotional intelligence than just eq and where does that blend together? You know, because the role of the clinician is going to change, you know, in 10 years we're going to have fully autonomous robotic surgery. A lot of your primary care can be done with a chat bot. We're going to have home based diagnostics. We still definitely need humans in the loop. But what you're going to be doing might be quite a bit different again if the regulatory reimbursement and other changes can come along with the technology stack. So I think if you're a medical student today, you need to sort of cross fertilize a little bit, learn some AI, play with some of these digital health tools. They're not in your curriculum in most cases. Think about how do you find a clinical problem and solve for it with the tools of today or how do you build them for tomorrow and be a bit of a need knower and often can be designing and creating and collaborating on building the next generation solutions for prevention, diagnostics, therapy, healthspan, public health. Because we need new mindsets. The current model is not, it's pretty broken, it's not sustainable. So it's an exciting time to sort of I think reinvent and reimagine healthcare and, and we'll see what happens with the next administration in that mindset as well.

That's good advice. That's good perspective. What you just said reminded me Beck, I forget what year it was. Probably 10 years ago I was at south by and they were talking about, I think Steve Case was getting ready to start kind of a medical school in I think Austin about kind of this, what you were talking about, but kind of really the technology forward kind of thinking around, around medical training. I did not, I have not kept track of that. I, it's not on my radar. Do you, do you know, has that gotten traction? Does it exist or what are they, if it does or what are they doing?

Do you know?

Yeah.

Well, I think it was Dell from Dell Computer, started at the new Dell Medical School in Austin. And now there's new medical schools from Kaiser 1 in the LA area. There's a new University of Arkansas, I think, medical school just about to open. And so there are new schools with new mindsets and paradigms. You know, some might be doing anatomy, all in virtual reality. Some are redesigning their core systems not to do it by organ system, but by, you know, by disease state and rethink the curriculum. You can use these new tools like AI now to do virtual patient visits and learn faster as a surgeon. You can use augmented reality and haptics to practice procedures and learn how to do a complex case, kind of like a flight simulator in the aviation world. Wow. So, but, but the curriculums are often driven by the state level, so you need to have the right mindsets to approve these new curriculums. So how we train medical students, nurses, pharmacists, everybody is going to shift dramatically. And, you know, for example, in many parts of the world, there's not enough or there are no surgeons. And now with robotics and other training platforms, how could you bring surgery to, you know, role rural Rwanda and have that AI and robotically enabled? Lots of ways to sort of think about that. The key thing in healthcare is often the workflow, Right? All these tools are sometimes here, but unless there's sort of an easy button to find that app and prescribe it, or have the data come to you and use it and of course, have it paid for, it's a bit of a challenge. One of the things we're trying to do with digital health, as we mentioned earlier, is to enable you as a clinician to find and let's say prescribe a digital health tool might be an app, it might be a wearable, it might be a solution for your practice. A lot of it is the design thinking that's going to go into the future of health and medicine, not just the tools and technologies.

That's great.

Well, and Daniel, thank you for this time. I know scheduling our time for this conversation was a bit tricky in that you're kind of traveling, as you've mentioned, hitherto and yon with JPM and whatnot. Do I have my facts straight?

You're heading off to Davos to the World Economic Forum. Is that your next stop? Heading off the second plane?

I'm on a plane and about four hours to my voice allows me.

Okay.

I normally have a much Better radio voice. I'm going to. Yeah. And Davos, which I've never been to, is sounds like it's a quite the convergence of people from all sorts of spectrums.

Oh, it's.

So I'll be speaking at a session at something called Brain House, put together by George Vranenberg and others who are originally very focused on Alzheimer's disease, but thinking more broadly about. About the future of brain health and health span. Right. And everything from optimizing your mental health and resiliency to early diagnostics and treatment of things like Alzheimer's and to bring new community, new funding to address brain health not just for the developed world, but for emerging markets and beyond. And we'll also be sessions run by MIT on AI while we'll be talking about future of AI enabled care. And so I think what things like Davos do is bring together amazing folks from all sorts of different worlds and hopefully catalyze the future. In the mountains in Switzerland.

That's right, yeah. You enjoy it. I had the opportunity to be what they called back in the day, a global leader for tomorrow and then be able to be faculty. And it's just a heady experience. And again, just sort of like what you've been able to create with the conferences and involvements that you have of these wonderful opportunities in between time to get to know people and to go to dinners and, you know, get to, you know, network. It is, it is, it is designed for you. So you will, you will have a great time. I hope you're feeling better for it.

So I'll say one thing, both of us have similar experiences. I mean, I was really lucky in 2006 to go to my very first TED conference. It was before everyone knew what TED was. It was, it was in Monterey, it was a thousand people and, and I was still doing my postdoc in hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplant. And all of a sudden I'm like, like randomly having dinner with Larry and Sergey and Vin Kost and that groening and meeting and meeting Hollywood types and moguls and like, wow, there's this whole other world and the whole art of the possible kind of exploded for me. Right. Because you sort of meet like minded and unlike minded people and you have these conversations in the halls and these things start to blend. And that really became a bit of a catalyst for me. And I ended up with four TED talks after that. But that wasn't the plan. But, but, but I think for anybody, you need to get out of your usual, not rut but your normal little bucket.

Yeah.

And that's where things open up and things like Ted and Davos, I think are where some of those cross connections happen. And for health and medicine, that's what we need more of. Right. And that's what we try and do it at Exponential Medicine is have that kind of theme of, you know, burning man meets a medical conference at the beach with people you wouldn't normally meet.

Right.

And yeah.

So hopefully some of you, hopefully some of you miss listening, can come join us this March 30, April 2, in San Diego. And you just go to NextMed Health to have all the information.

I, yeah, I highly recommend it. Yeah. Do, do go, you will, you'll get the bug. You'll have an excellent time, you'll learn an amazing amount of time and, and do, don't be a wallflower, you know, go to, go to the dinners, go for the walks, go for, you know, go work out with Jamie Metzl. So those are all, all, you know, great, great opportunities to be able to do those kinds of things. So Daniel, we've, we've covered a lot of territory. Is there anything that we've missed or anything else that you'd like to add before we wrap?

I think writ large, we're moving from an era of sick care to health care to really self care. Like each of us now can be much more responsible. And on top of our quote unquote health information, meaning you can now access all your labs from platforms like Function Health. You can wear an aura ring or a Fitbit or an Apple watch and look at your integrated data and take action on that. It's not like you need to wait for something to happen and then go to your doctor, if you even get a doctor visit. So it can take much more responsibility and integration into your, your loved ones, health journeys and leverage tools that exist. So go out there and find them, even if they're not always purely FDA cleared, as long as they're not dangerous. You can certainly buy a wearable or an app to help with any number of conditions from mental health to managing your sleep. But also everyone's a need knower. Everyone has some health issue that they are loved one or friend or family member's gone through. And many of you are innovators. You can see a problem and say how can I solve for this using some of these new tools and technologies and collaborations. And sometimes it means starting a company or sometimes it means finding the, the kid down the street with a good garage 3D printer and app machine. That can mold it for you. So it's an exciting time to reimagine healthcare going forward and it's a team sport.

That's right.

Hear, hear.

I 100% agree. So I'll put in links for your TED talks and digital health, et cetera, the things we've talked about. Is there anything else in terms of NextMed Health? Any other ways or good ways for

listeners to learn more about all your activities or involvements?

Yeah, if you go to my core website, danielcraftmd.net, danielcraftmd.net it has links, talks and content and articles and ways to find me. So always happy to mix it up with folks who would like to collaborate on a better future.

Great. Will do. That'll be in the show notes. Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time. I hope you feel better. You will just just be a rock star at DAV at Davos. I know you'll enjoy it. So thanks so much for making the time and going through it. Even not feeling the the best in

the world, I I feel better. I just need the AI to now replace my throat. Maybe you can tune it into a real voice.

There you go.

And you, by the way, you can do that now. If, if you haven't tried some of these platforms like Synesthesia, you can make your own avatar, you can type something. It'll speak for you. And we're entering this really interesting age where what's real, what's not real is going to be harder and harder to tell, and that's going to shift things up. So buckle up. The next 10 years are going to be pretty nutty.

That's right.

Hang on. Thanks again, Daniel. I appreciate your time.

Thanks for having me.

As a reminder, listeners can read a summary of this episode and access links

to the show notes via my LinkedIn Top Voice Companion article, along with past gifts as well. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I have, and I hope

it will help you in your journey

to living your life in full.

Until next time,

Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media,

a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. A sister assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host, Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice no doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks.

And until next time,