253. Unlocking the Power of Genomics with Kian Sadeghi, Founder & CEO of Nucleus Genomics

And there will be a trillion-dollar business that finds a way of integrating in the entirety of someone's molecular profile and combines that with their kind of Apple Watch, right? With their Whoop, with their Eight Sleep.

Welcome back to the Fit Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Veneri. Today I'm joined by Kian Sadeghi, founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics. In this episode, we discuss the company's mission to revolutionize healthcare through whole genome sequencing. Kian explains how Nucleus is making comprehensive genetic testing accessible and actionable. Plus, we explore the future of preventative medicine. Challenges in consumer health tech and building a breakthrough brand. Let's get into it. Today's episode is brought to you by eGym. eGym provides fitness and health facilities with smart workout solutions built on its ecosystem of hardware, software, and partners. But it's more than cool tech. Their connected training experience delivers business results while helping members reach their wellness goals. If you run a gym, health club, YMCA, or any kind of fitness facility, You should check them out. Visit egym.com to learn more. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, Joe. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, man. Lots to chat about. As I mentioned offline, I've been following along on Twitter where you're drumming up quite the interest and some controversy. Maybe we'll talk about a little bit, but all that to say, I'm personally interested and I think listeners will be interested to hear about Nucleus Genomics and kind of what led you to start that. So, maybe just give us the background on what you're working on and we'll get into it.

Yeah, again, thank you so much, Joe, for having me. Nucleus unfortunately was started by tragedy. My cousin actually went to bed one night and she didn't wake up the next day. And doctors attributed that to a rare genetic condition that can cause sudden death. And interestingly, a condition that if you know you have it, you can actually take something called a beta blocker and reduce your risk by 10x. So already, I think from a young age, I knew some vague notion that that genetics shapes health, and moreover, that genetics can actually be very actionable too. But at the time, you know, my parents just— they just kept telling me every time I asked them, how does this happen, they just kept saying bad genetics, bad genetics, bad genetics, bad genetics, right? Eventually I learned that millions of Americans have a DNA difference that greatly increases their risk for a preventable disease. And that to me was a kind of amazing statistic in that today we literally have, you know, amongst the population today, people are walking around with a pathogen— what's called a pathogenic variant, something that increases your risk for something like breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or high cholesterol— that they quite simply do not have the genetic insights to know that they can actually prevent the condition. And then what happened over time is I started realizing, wait a second, the cost— this is later on, I did some genetic engineering work and became, you know, kind of more and more deeper into genetics, and then eventually I started working at the intersection of bits and atoms by doing some more computational genomics work, and I saw the decreasing cost of whole genome sequencing. It used to cost, you know, a billion dollars to get the entire read of someone's DNA, right? And then a couple years ago, it cost only $1,000. So I suddenly realized kind of to put 2 pieces together. The first piece is, wait a second, fundamental underlying technology that people use for genetic testing is now different, right? Because Unlike older testing companies like 23andMe or Ancestry that looks at less than 0.1% of someone's DNA, you can now look at all of someone's DNA. And in doing so, you can identify all genetic differences that most greatly impact your health. And then I combined that insight with, wait a second, the fact that there are these millions of people walking around. I said, how is it possible that there's not a genetic test in every single doctor office in this country? Right? So, that was kind of the foundation of Nucleus Genomics and we're live and we kind of provide the most comprehensive and accurate at-home genetic test ever created.

I think a lot of people might be in the same camp as your parents were just saying like, oh, DNA and genetics, this plays a huge role in your health. And maybe you heard about the Genome Sequencing Project or that we're somehow someday going to have access to this information. But you've kind of jumped forward and said, no, it's It's here now. How do we kind of make it accessible? What does that look like in terms of making accessible and hopefully addressing some of these conditions that millions or more people are walking around with every day?

What's so amazing is that people, their model of genetics is still from 20 years ago. This technology that we leverage to basically give this kind of complete assessment of someone's genetic risk This technology used to be only in the hands of scientists, right? So, it was literally in like basically a research lab for 20 years and now it's just finally cheap enough that it can be in your hands. And with that I think comes such an amazing opportunity for genetics to revitalize itself because people sometimes have these weird extreme thoughts about genetics. It's, does my pee smell like asparagus? And, you know, does my mom come from, you know, Europe, whatever? And then it's like, oh, you know, breast cancer screening. And there's like— it's just like almost cognitive dissonance in society, right? And that's partly the reason why we separate out this way because there was material technological limitations, right? Nucleus actually combines over 70,000 genetic tests on the market into just one, right? So, every kind of genetic test that exists in the clinic today, all the consumer genetic tests, right? They all collapse into a single test. And that means I think 3 main things. The first is it means the implications for your individual health. So, your DNA obviously being the language of life, it means it's the language that shapes who you are quite literally. It can basically help predict your future health. So, that's the first application. The next is it can actually help with family planning. You can make sure you can have healthy children. And the last I would say is it satisfies a deep personal curiosity, right? It tells you how you can shape things like IQ, even longevity, traits that people don't actually realize yet that there are measurable ways today of showing someone how their DNA shapes different traits about them that they maybe thought wasn't genetic or they thought that, you know, science didn't have any model of how the DNA shapes these different traits. So, if you think about those 3 things, today those 3 things are kind of separated across a variety of different companies with a huge range of different accuracies, right? And Nucleus believes in bringing this kind of clinical-grade quality, right, the kind that you'd get from a hospital, but doing that at a population-level scale, right? So, that's kind of the magic.

Yeah, I think a lot of people obviously would be interested to have access to that information from the platform to the test to the experience. Like, what does that look like when people sign up and what types of reports do they get and how do they apply that information?

Yeah. So, someone comes on Nucleus, they order our Nucleus Premium Plan which is our whole genome test and they basically get a kit in the mail. Our independent physician network actually reviews the order. Excuse me. Signs off on the order and they get a kit in the mail. Like an example, the kit's actually right behind me. They open it up, take out a swab, swab the inside of their cheek, take another swab, swab the inside of the other cheek. Super simple actually. Um, stick it in a tube and then once it's stuck in a tube, they send that to our partner laboratory, which is outside Boston, which then basically runs your DNA. We do all our sequencing in the United States on US machines. We're very proud about that. Once it's the, the DNA basically runs on the machine, Out comes a raw DNA file. That's when, you know, kind of the magic of Nucleus begins. That raw DNA file then goes into our informatics laboratory, which is in North Carolina, and then we basically analyze it through different models. And the models together basically provide you the most accurate assessment of your genetic risk. So we combine the genetic analysis then with non-genetic information, things like your, you know, height, like your BMI, like your— Yeah. Age, your cholesterol levels, and more. We combine those non-genetic information with the genetic information, then to calculate your overall risk of getting different conditions. And we can actually do that across basically every one of the common conditions, things like, you know, breast cancer, prostate cancer, Alzheimer's, coronary heart disease, AMD, et cetera. And the thing is, people sometimes, I think what they end up realizing after they do Nucleus, customers are like, oh my God, if you look at the top killers in the United States today, by far, By far, it's like heart disease and different cancers. They all have an extremely material genetic component. So, you are sort of flying blind if you don't know your genetic blueprint. You can do all the optimizations in the world. You can take all the supplements in the world. But if you don't know your genetic blueprint, if you don't know literally what the language that has encoded you, you're missing such a huge component of what is more likely not going to kill you. You're likely not going to die from a car coming down and hitting you in the street, but you are likely to die of cancer. And you might have a DNA difference that if you knew, you could take targeted preventative action today to actually prevent the cancer, but because you've never done genetic tests, because you never literally swabbed the inside of your cheek, you don't know. So, we really want to kind of bring finally the realization of what you alluded to earlier, the Human Genome Project technology, frontier technology into the hands of everyone.

I think this is something you obviously spend a ton of time talking about, but, you know, in preparing for this conversation, and then maybe listeners might be thinking like, why isn't this part of, you know, a physical exam? Or why is it— why isn't the doctor— like, what created the kind of opportunity that Nucleus is doing this? This isn't part of traditional healthcare. Like, we're not kind of equipped with this information to make such important decisions about our health.

I think it was quite literally, technically speaking, impossible to do what I'm describing even a decade ago. We're talking about when the first genetic testing company, think about 23andMe when they got started in 2006, the cost of actually getting this read, the entirety of someone's DNA. So, you think about your DNA, it's like a book, let's say with 1,000 pages. 23andMe looks at maybe 1 page. Nucleus looks at all 1,000. That's the difference in kind of technology we're talking about here. It was quite literally impossible to do it because it was so expensive in 2006. So, now it's actually cheap enough that we can say, hey, Nucleus is $399, which if you think about it, I mean, that's cheaper than some blood tests. We can actually read the entirety of your genetic code for cheaper than a blood test. I mean, it's extraordinary. And I think now that it is cheap enough, it's a question of how do we educate people so they can understand the importance of DNA. Because I think, as I said earlier, people tend to misunderstand. They think it's about, you know, just ancestry or just, you know, some kind of gimmicky kind of test that doesn't have a kind of real clinical insights. But actually, a genetic test can save your life, right? I mean, as my cousin would show. So that's sort of the evolution of the industry, and I think Nucleus is kind of part of this next-generation genetic testing company.

What does that Look like in terms of, you know, you mentioned it's $399 for the test, just like business model. Is it ongoing in terms of what people are getting in terms of reporting insights, recommendations? How do you think about building this as the, the test being part of it, but also like this platform to educate people and make all this information like actionable?

Yeah, so I think right now, if you look at Nucleus, we're building kind of 3 main products. One is the individual health, which is how does your DNA shape you? The next is how does your DNA affect your children? Because DNA is also generational, right? It's not just about you, it's about your parents, about your grandparents, it's about your children, right? And that's a really important thing I think that gets often missed. And then the last is it's also about personal discovery, satisfying the kind of curiosity of, wait a second, how did my DNA shape my IQ, right? It was for a while kind of controversial to say that, but Nucleus has been the first company that says actually we believe that everyone should have insights at the frontier of genomic science, that it belongs in the hands of the people. So, if you think about it at first, it's like, okay, well, there's these 3 different products, but you may be thinking in the audience, but genetic test is one time, right? And I would say a couple of things on that. The first is because it's your whole genome, we can continually add more and more analyses to it, right? We have 20 diseases on the platform right now. Over the coming months, we're going to be adding hundreds more, right? Moreover, I don't think think there's such thing as a genetics company. There's only such thing as a healthcare company. And this is really fundamental that I think a lot of first-generation genetic testing companies got wrong. But if you think about the data today in kind of, um, the consumer health space, there's sort of, I think, a sequestering of health data. On the one hand, there's sort of the personal hardware device-derived data, right? Heart rate, calorie burning, you know, HRV, whatever, from your Eight Sleep, your Whoops, your Levels, your Apple Watch, right? It's owned by very much Silicon Valley. The other end of kind of data is, I would say, lab tests, diagnostic data, which is blood tests, genetic tests, epigenetic tests, urine analyses. That data is owned by a dramatically different kind of company like Quest and LabCorp, right? And then think about the crop of consumer health companies. They're really companies that sit in the middle between these 2 worlds. And there will be a trillion-dollar business that finds a way of integrating in the entirety of someone's molecular profile and combines that with their kind of Apple Watch, right? With their Whoop, with their Eight Sleep, right? So, you can think about genetic insights being the foundation of someone's health journey, the foundation on which they can go to more effectively iterate and fine-tune their health. An example of this would be like, hey, Kian, you know, as a 24-year-old male living in Brooklyn, oh my God, you had super high LDL levels in your last blood test, right? Oh, actually that's no surprise because you're in the 95th percentile for familial hypercholesterolemia. or your genetic risk for high cholesterol. We found people with similar genetic sex and age as you saw a 10% reduction in the LDL levels when they did this specific workout tracked on your Apple Watch. Then imagine you integrate diet in there. Imagine what science has become in a real-time actual consumer health platform. You have to wonder today, why, why do you go take a blood test and have no idea what different metabolites you're predisposed to? Again, you're going in blind. You're going in blind. It's like you're a pilot that doesn't— has less data. You have to wonder why you go to the primary care clinic, right? You don't even know what diseases am I at risk for. You don't know. Maybe you have some vague memory of your family kind of had something, right? But even so, you may not have any family history and still actually have something encoded in your DNA that can increase your risk for disease. So, you have to wonder why are all these things today in the kind of ecosystem, all the data is sequestered, right? They're all in different parts, all in different companies. There needs to be a mass kind of combination of the health data together, and then probably there will be an AI that sits on top and that will flag any kind of molecular abnormality. And already you're kind of winking at this. I mean, one of our investors is, you know, Matteo from Eight Sleep. And I was sleeping on my Eight Sleep one time, and I remember I woke up and it said your heart rate's up 50%. Heart rate up 50%? Right, what the hell is going on here? That must be a bug, right? 24 hours later, I had COVID. And I was saying to myself, why is this not integrated? Hey, if something's really off, 50%, you should go to the One Medical down the block, you should probably get a COVID test, you know, or whatever it may be, right? Whatever, you know, based off all the priors the model predicts. So, this is sort of the grand kind of vision of, I think, Nucleus and really building that kind of elusive trillion-dollar consumer health business.

Do you see— I mean, I agree with you and I think there's a lot of things that we think and talk about on this show all the time. And, and right now, everything seems to be happening, happening in silos. Like, you know, even if you are tracking various components of your health, well, you're not factoring in food and nutrition, you're not factoring in mental health, you're not factoring in sleep. And if you are factoring in, you know, one of those, the other ones aren't getting captured. And certainly nothing is alerting you in some type of proactive way about what to do about these things. Do you see Nucleus— you know, you mentioned like an AI, or a lot, a lot of companies right now are talking about like, an AI health coach, right? Or a health assistant that is somehow doing this work of prevention and identification flagging. Do you see Nucleus kind of integrating and being that central hub? Or do you like, how do you see those pieces fitting together if it were to be building a trillion-dollar company?

Not to defend any other companies, but a lot of these companies that use AI because they're hiding behind the fact that they have nothing. So we don't, you don't see Nucleus even using the word AI in our marketing because we don't need to honestly. We look at the most fundamental, literally fundamental molecular blueprint of someone. We don't need to say, oh, we use AI. One of the ways we think about this is we're playing a different game than the rest of the industry, right? We're kind of— what we realized is, wait a second, whole genome data is like a massive celestial body with a huge amount of gravitational pull. What people don't yet fully appreciate is the fact that it is omnirelevant. It is relevant literally because it's your DNA for every disease. Yeah. That exists, right, that you've heard of, every disease that you've heard of and any ones you haven't, by the way, and also for traits and then also for family planning. Think about from a single test, from a single test, it gives you more insights than any other lab test that exists in the world. What I'm trying to stake the case here too is like, then if you are going to build Nucleus in the best way, instead of saying, oh, I want to build a health coach, it's almost like the wrong framework. It's like, I want to build the best genetics product in the world. And then in doing that, inevitably, what does the customer ask us? The customer asks us, what now? You see that? Oh, I have these risks for these things. What now? Well, let's bring in your blood test. Well, let's bring this in. Let's bring this in. And all of a sudden you start answering the question in touch with the customer, right? Instead of just building like a coach, like what does that actually mean? Did you actually start from a data foundation, right? Because any AI model, you need data, right? And we're actually already tinkering with how if, you know, from the output of our genetic analysis, we collect also non-genetic information. Can we harness kind of a more fine-tuned model to give people targeted recommendations? Notice it doesn't need to be— I'm going to start with a coach. Again, you're missing the kind of foundational data layer that you need. The coach is almost kind of a very thin layer on top of that. Who has whole genome data in the world today? Which company? No one. Yeah. Not 23andMe, not Ancestry, not Invitae, not Myriad, not Amazon, not Google. You know, I can go down the list. Not Meta, right? Who has heart rate variability data? Commodity. Who has calorie data? Commodity. Who has blood test data? Commodity. Sorry, maybe I'm getting too aggressive on this podcast, Joe, but I'm wild up, man. You know what I'm saying? Like, you think about it, Joe, like, who— no one has it. No one has it. We're starting from a place no one has it, but it's the single most consequential lab test that exists in the world. I mean, it's just like there's this cognitive dissonance right now and we're mercilessly going at it. And sometimes people say, oh, how can a health company also do IQ analysis? How can this and this? To us, we really believe in releasing the entire power of the genome. That's not a bug of the platform, that's actually a feature. The fact that, yeah, from a single swab, You can learn everything from— you can satisfy your deepest curiosities on how your DNA shapes your IQ all the way to, you know, you can actually see what diseases you're going to pass to your children, right? And of course, if you don't want to engage with one of the products, that's fine. It's up to you. But think about it. That's from a single swab. I mean, it's unheard of. If you went back to Gregor Mendel, you know, in the late 19th century and he was playing with peas, to think we could molecularly go inside and actually elucidate the underlying language of life, it's just truly— Yeah. Yeah,

it's incredible. And I think you mentioned this earlier, but part of it being like almost educating people in terms of what's possible, what it does, what the applications are. What has that experience been like so far with getting Nucleus to market and getting customers on it and starting to really show what it can do? Like how much of it is education and then how are people responding to that?

A lot of it is education. One of our missions at Nucleus is to inform— I mean, if you think about the product fundamentally, where the product is, we inform you of your risks. We're all about communications. So for us, we really need to make genetics something that's actually friendly and life-saving, right? I think people, again, they have these older 20-year-old models, and we as a company feel as if there's such extraordinary alpha right now. Both technically but also ideologically in pushing out this idea that, hey, when a baby's born, they should get their DNA sequenced. Every adult in the United States should get their DNA sequenced. It is a table stakes preventative health measure and it could easily save millions of lives today and also future lives as well for people who aren't born yet. So, it's a huge part of what we're doing and that's why I think we're really trying to communicate and engage in a kind of new way for a genetics company too. Right? That's why, you know, you— we talk about Twitter, right? We try to really engage an audience and to say, hey, actually, you don't— you might think you know genetics from 23andMe, you don't. You might think you did a genetic test, you didn't. This is some, you know, frontier science that has only just become possible.

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I think that if you look at the most valuable healthcare company in the world today, it's UnitedHealthcare. That is a tragedy. That is a devastation. I mean, UnitedHealthcare, are we kidding me, right? I like to say that Apple Watch sells more Apple Watches a year than 23andMe sold DNA kits in the last And all this I'm getting at here, Joe, is there is a fundamental marketing problem. There's a fundamental marketing problem. And why is that? We can have a lot of theories as to why that may be. We see ourselves as though, to your point, pioneering a new approach to bringing genetics and more broadly, I think, kind of consumer health to the world. I think Bryan Johnson's a great example of this. We're super excited to be partnering with Bryan at the upcoming Don't Die Summit in San Francisco. Yeah. I think if you look at across, you know, like Peter Attia, look at some of these, you know, Huberman, and then, you know, kind of Bryan Johnson. I like to say the influencers reflect the culture. And it's not just the technology's changed, Joe, it's that consumer taste has changed. There is— I mean, even like Fit Insider, you know, what your entire podcast is— there is a movement where people are health conscious. They want to build a more preventative healthcare system. They want to have more data. They want to actually take the qualitative into the quantitative, right? All these trends converge with, uh, kind of the technical decrease in cost of whole genome sequencing, right? Which then makes it such that partnering with someone like Bryan Johnson is such a natural fit because it's the combination of thinking about frontier science and ultimately preventing disease and living forever, right, with the sort of manifestation of the cultural persona of that today. So of course we're going to work together, and of course I think the next crop of consumer health companies, it's so important for them to meet the audience where they are. One of the problems with sometimes frontier technology is it's, you know, it's technology in search of a, of a problem, right? And people don't exactly know what to do with it. But of course what's so interesting about genetics is there was a kind of first generation set of genetic companies, so people have some intuition for it, which you could argue whether it's good or bad or not, but they have some intuition for it, right? And usually, it's almost like MySpace kind of Facebook kind of thing. The second bounce of the ball is always much higher, right? So, I think Nucleus is going to ascend much higher. And by leveraging the kind of new media age of going direct, engaging with these influencers, and tapping into the inherent movement right now of a massive preventative— a call for basically entirely shift of healthcare from the sick care system to preventative.

With that, I mean, of course I kind of agree and it's certainly trending this direction and I'm more so on the side of more agency and access and democratization for consumers. But then you kind of see the pushback somewhat, call it medical paternalism or critiques of companies that are trying to build a more proactive, personalized future of healthcare. More recently, this has happened with a lot of, call it like preventative scanning, whole body MRI companies, like the debate over is this, is this necessary? Is this just creating false positives? Should people be paying out of pocket for this? And I kind of come down on the camp of like, well, people want more information. They're clearly not getting that from the traditional paths to the extent that they're satisfied with it. If they want to pay for it, like, you know, good for them to be able to go and do this. Are you having to push back against any of that in terms of like traditional healthcare? Do you even think about, you know, where you sit relative to the healthcare system, UnitedHealthcare is out there?

You know, one of the foundations of kind of Western medicine is this idea of the Hippocratic Oath, which is do no harm. And the problem with do no harm is it can also end up kind of manifesting in do nothing, right? Which is a problem, I think. And if you look at the kind of whole body scans or even consumer genetic tests or epigenetic tests, urinalyses, The fundamental, if you actually think about the metaphilosophical point, it's a point of we don't want to harm patients, which is respectable. I mean, my dad's an ophthalmologist, he's an eye doctor. I totally understand that perspective. The job of the physician is to not do harm. They don't want to give someone insights that then causes some downstream sort of care that, God forbid, is the inappropriate course of action, or there's no evidence-based care where the doctor doesn't know what to do. I'm empathetic to that. The thing is though, that fundamentally I believe in liberty. And I also believe that people should, if a company appropriately communicates the risk, which by the way, these companies more often than not do, if they do that, a company like Nucleus, of course someone should have access to the insights, right? Of course someone should be able to say, what does my DNA say about my body? What does my, you know, whatever urine says about me? What does my blood say about me? You should have the right to that. That doesn't— it shouldn't be owned by a doctor, shouldn't be owned by the healthcare establishment, shouldn't be owned by your insurance company. It should be owned by you. So I think part of that though isn't as a company to be kind of like, uh, you know, screw the paternalism, which there is paternalism. It's to be a little bit more, I think, careful and deliberate, which is 2 things. One, how can we appropriately communicate risks to customers and how can we do a good job actually in doing that, right? Because I actually understand if a doctor, if someone does a test, And you know, they're not CLIA accredited, they're not CAP accredited. There's literally no science behind it, and it's kind of just like you know completely useless. And then you know they go to the doctor, and the doctor's like, "What the hell is this?" But you look at a company like Nucleus, CLIA certified, you know, CAP accredited, physician ordered, right? I mean, there's a physician version of all our reports. Everything we do is well cited. Everything we do is so clearly communicated, right? We have genetic counselors on hand immediately if anyone. Wants kind of further consultation. In other words, what I'm saying is there's a way of doing this such that it's not so much a, oh, with a doctor, without a doctor. There is the kind of happy medium where you educate, empower, inform in a fully regulatory compliant and scientifically rigorous way while also still giving empowerment to the customer. I think companies like Ezra are doing that. I think companies like Nucleus are doing that. So, I also think over time, the kind of healthcare establishment. Our job is not to fight the healthcare establishment. We want mass distribution of genetic testing. We want to help patients. We want to save patients' lives, people like my cousin. So I, I wonder whether, you know, at some point— I said this earlier— like, a baby should be born, their DNA should be sequenced. Probably to do that, you need to work with a large number of hospitals, and that's very much the healthcare establishment. So, you know, this is sort of my answer to this question, which is I think it's, it's more, um, kind of nuanced. And there needs to be more kind of respect, I think, from both the kind of private commercial side and also from the medical establishment, because we all have the same goal— want to help patients, want to save lives. That's it.

I think that's really well put. And I think that's a, you know, it can get overlooked, that piece that you're talking about, which is there is a large responsibility that a company like Nucleus takes on to say we have to do things and maintain our own checks and balances to even earn that right to then go and say Like, how do we fill these voids and improve the system that, you know, if you set out to either build it from scratch or circumvent it, like probably not going to work, at least not in this lifetime, unfortunately.

Yeah, agreed.

It's still fairly early, right, in the Nucleus lifetime here and building the platform. What are the kind of key priorities now? What do you talk to the team about? Like, what are you most focused on relative to Whether it's some of the things we talked about today like the distribution and marketing and education, or are there other things in terms of improving the technology and continuing to build out that platform? Like, what's top of mind for you?

We are customer obsessed at Nucleus, and part of that is we want to provide as many rigorous, high-quality, and informative genetic insights that exist. So one of our key goals over the next several months is to dramatically ramp up the number of analyses we provide for, right? As I mentioned earlier, we're going to be providing hundreds of more disease analyses. We're going to be building out kind of those just 3 different products that I went into, the individual health, the family planning, as well as the kind of more curiosity kind of traits, right? We also then at the same time, like parallel to, so, so If you think about it, right, like in doing— like let's say like, you know, you're CEO of Nucleus. I know something about that. And you want to, you know, bring a product to market, right? What does that entail? It entails science, it entails clinical genetics, it entails communications, right? Scientific communications. Um, it entails marketing, it entails UI/UX, it entails operations, both kind of, uh, kind of the sense of like clinical operations, like diagnostic operations. There's regulatory and also like Kind of customer service, whatever. And then there's also regulations, right? I don't think I repeated anything twice though. I may have, but I don't think I did. And think about how complicated that is, right? This isn't a traditional, just purely software business where it's just like, oh, okay, like we just, you know, program this and push it out. There's so multifaceted and complicated. So one of our missions though is to bring the speed without sacrificing quality, but bring the speed of a kind of a software business to healthcare. Right? One has to wonder what has happened to these other genetic testing platforms last twenty years. They haven't changed. In fact, they probably regress in some ways. Right? How can we make it such that two years from now someone comes onto Nucleus and they're like, "Oh my God! This is by far the greatest health investment I've ever made in my entire life." That is the ambition. Right? So that's kind of the things we're thinking about. And I always think you know it starts with what the customer wants, and then kind of. Everything builds back from there. And also sometimes, you know, the customer might say, I want this thing, and then we kind of alchemize it with our own imagination, with our own kind of vision, and then we make something even better that delights, right? But that's sort of the way we sort of think of this balance of customer demand and the alchemy that is productizing science.

Yeah, even this might be just like purely cosmetic, but just to the point of speed, I think I've seen maybe 2 or 3 versions of the website since I've started, you know, going back to it, clicking around and what that onboarding and journey might look like. So it's definitely evident from the outside.

Yeah, yeah, we've changed the site around a lot. By the way, Joe, have you ordered a kit yet? Or what's going on?

I have not, but it is on the to-do list. So I'm excited about it. And really piecing it into that overall, just like, you know, view of my health. And certainly I have that curiosity of like, all these things that I'm already tinkering with and experimenting with, and frankly, investing a ton of time and money into. That, you know, am I just going completely in the wrong direction here? So I'm interested to, to see how that plays out.

And that's why I think Bryan Johnson is such a great partner for Nucleus, because if you think about all the different Bryan Johnson fans, we really are about kind of optimization and we really think about data, data, data, data. How can we start measuring? Genetics fits in perfectly to that, but it's actually often overlooked. People focus on, you know, diet, lifestyle, exercise, as they should, of course. But then, we know across the largest killers in the country today, they all have this material genetic component, right? So, there's a huge part of the puzzle that's going unnoticed. There's a huge thing that we could measure that we're not measuring. So, I think that's why part of this kind of broader optimization, health optimization, it's such an amazing partner. And I actually can't wait for that summit. I think it's a couple weeks from now. It's gonna be so exciting. Are you gonna go there by any chance? You're going to the Don't Die Summit?

I'm not. I wasn't able to make it. I've been obviously keeping up with what he's doing and like the dinners and the buildup to that. And thinking about when I saw that you tweeted about that in that partnership, it's like it opens this door, like you said, to really find not only the partners that then unlock access awareness among those audiences, but it's also like, look, timing and I don't want to call it luck, but just like really great timing that like this trend is where it is, the interest, the availability, like the technology has to line up. The interest has to line up, the consumer demand has to line up in such a way that like, you know, when you think about like the Twitter audience and the Spaces and then Brian Johnson, the Summit, like the, that demo persona is like right there. And for them to be the kind of first movers, prove it out, help add to the data and the analysis that you're already doing, like a lot of things are lining up super favorably. So it's really cool just to see how those things are coming together.

I agree, Joe. And if you actually look at it, Brian and Balaji are also part of the Network State. I'm not sure if you saw that. And I tweeted to Balaji, I said, hey, we kind of need a genetic baseline of people's health so they can more kind of appropriately optimize things. If we're going to build a new society, one that's kind of, I would say, technologically built from the ground up, we should probably in this society sequence every person that's involved. So, I think that's something that's actually really exciting. I can't say whether for sure it's going to happen yet, but I can say that Balaji and I, we're texting, we're seeing what we can do. But I do think that's part of this new era of people quantifying and living far longer than they've ever lived before. And the thing about genetics is it's not just the history of genomic science that has dramatically changed the last 20 years, right? It's not just that the cost has gone from $1 billion to now $399. It's that I think about like the broader longevity picture of humanity. So, you know, think about vaccines, antibiotics, right? Did these things cause, you know, post-industrial revolution dramatic changes in lifespan? Dramatic changes in lifespan. And we have to wonder though, as a society, what's next, right? What is next for us to push the bounds? Because, you know, I think something like sometimes gets lost in all the kind of longevity conversations is that we have had innovations that dramatically increase people's lifespan. And I think they've almost in many cases been singular kind of things, singular sort of catalysts that almost single-handedly changed lifespan. And I almost wonder as that today, what is it? Is it gonna be an agglomeration of different technology, right? Surely I know for, for a fact whole genome sequencing could save millions of lives. Right, definitely from the ground up if you actually start sequencing and then kind of iterating. But I almost guess this time around, what's going to get the next kind of order of magnitude jump is going to be an amazing combination of technology that's probably going to be AI optimized to some extent to then cause this kind of, I think, revolution in how long we're going to live. I think genetics obviously is going to play such a kind of foundational pillar in this new longevity revolution.

Maybe one more question before we get you out of here. Just thinking about, you know, the work that's been done to date, what it might take to get to this next level as you think about integrating the DNA sequencing, the platform, the impact on longevity, the opportunity that's in front of you, kind of launched in the announcement. Well, whatever the timing of this was, had raised $18 million. Obviously, you know, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Alexis Ohanian and Matteo, it sounds like from Eight Sleep and some, I'm sure other great folks in there. How do you think about scaling, profitability, raising, like just financing, all the things that might go into that? Do you have kind of like a framework you're thinking to this from, or are you still kind of playing it out as you continue to grow the company at the early stage?

Yeah, I think I do have a framework. I mean, and it's, it's a very classic kind of model for startups, right? If you look at like Tesla's master plan, it's very similar. Sequencing is the most expensive it will ever be today, right? It is by far the most expensive. And then if you look at the next 20 years, Nucleus will look extremely expensive, right? Which is what's so amazing. Give it 10 years, the cost of sequencing the human genome, it's going to be nothing basically. It's going to be negligible, right? And so we're very keenly aware at Nucleus that the economics for us are just going to get better and better and better. And that is the— I like to say also the business model shapes the strategy, right? We're subscription for good reason, not only because we think we can provide customers with insane value— I mean, just look at IQ already— we think we, you know, go well beyond that. But also it's because we're hinting at something much more fundamental, which is, hey, this is actually not a genetics company, as we'll see. So all these things together, that the kind of improvement in the genomic economics coupled with the fact that we're really a healthcare company, a consumer healthcare company, they're all going to alchemize into shaping kind of the entire direction of the company. And then I would say one more meta point, which is you can make this argument today that AI is going to kind of commoditize, make everything a commodity, right? The only alpha that's going to be left for companies is proprietary data sources, right? Large proprietary data sources. I think obviously the amount of good we can do for our patients with a large whole genome database is extraordinary, right? People actually often come to us and say, can you cure cancer? Can you cure Parkinson's? We actually can if we have enough data. We can do that. And to be clear, we do that in a way that's extremely thoughtful and deliberate and high agency. We don't ever share anyone's data, period, without your explicit consent. We're under HIPAA. We have very, very, very serious delineation of the genetic data from other protected health information. There is customers though who do choose to opt in to use their data for research. And if you think about it, wow, a whole large whole genome database. I actually think we can make preventable diseases a thing of the past. And this is something that if we can make preventable diseases a thing of the past, I mean, that's probably one of the most foundational kind of— I mean, you're basically saying we're going to stop people from dying. I mean, it's literally don't die. So, all these things end up touching financing and kind of scaling up Nucleus. I always believe with startups is like, you have to get the big things right. If you get the big things right, you can actually— everything else will actually eventually fall into place. And I think one of the most upstream things is sort of a foundational generational platform shift in technology. And Nucleus has that. The fundraising, the scaling up, the marketing, everything is downstream of us productizing this amazing technology. Right. So inevitably it's already baked into what we're doing. We're going to crush it, Joe. We're gonna absolutely crush it.

It's awesome. It's super excited to see all that come to life. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have this conversation today. And now as you're talking about it, almost in the future, come back to this and maybe have follow-ups to this in the future as it continues to evolve, because we'll certainly be keeping tabs on that and sharing the updates and everything with the audience as they, they kind of play out. But for anybody who's listening to the conversation today, wants to learn more, order a kit, just check out and keep up with what you have going on, where would you point them?

mynucleus.com.

We'll get that and all the other various socials and updates and everything linked in the show notes here. But super excited about this conversation. Really glad you were able to make some time today.

Thank you so much, Joe. Had a lot of fun.

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