S1 | Science

The Future of Healthcare & Education | SALT Talks #249

“I really believe Abu Dhabi is going to give us a window into the future… Geographically, it’s so well situated.”

Welcome to the first episode of the Emerging From a Post-Pandemic World series, presented by ADGM. Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) is an international financial centre (IFC) located in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. Established by UAE Federal Decree as a broad-based financial centre, ADGM augments Abu Dhabi’s position as a global hub for business and finance and serves as a strategic link between the growing economies of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia and the rest of the world.

Michael Moe and Jim Mellon discuss their companies’ efforts to improve education and health care, respectively. They describe the advancements in each industry and how they will transform society while solving some of the world’s biggest challenges. Moe sees education innovation as a huge economic driver, particularly in the Middle East where it will power the region’s knowledge economy. Mellon emphasizes the importance of first improving quality of life before extending lifespans and predicts the mass adoption of meat alternatives that will address persistent health issues and climate change.

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MODERATOR

SPEAKER

Headshot - Mellon, Jim - Cropped.jpeg

Jim Mellon

Chairman & Co-Founder

Juvenescence

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - Intro

7:55 - American education system

8:55 - Healthcare and education in the Middle East and beyond

11:29 - Longevity and anti-aging advancements

12:57 - AgTech and food chain transformation

20:43 - Education as an economic driver

24:45 - Economic incentives driving AgTech, BioTech and education

30:08 - Education as an equalizer

31:31 - Quality assurance in education

35:35 - Non-linear education timeline

37:00 - Juvenescence, metabolic switch and restructuring society around longer life

43:02 - Intermittent fasting and biological breakthroughs

45:42 - Making education and healthy living more engaging

52:00 - Democratizing and reimagining education and healthy living

56:27 - Abu Dhabi as a global center

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Anthony Scaramucci: (00:49)
Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is Anthony Scaramucci, I am the founder of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum encompassing finance, technology, and politics. SALT Talks is a digital interview series with the world's foremost investors, creators and thinkers. Just as we do with our global SALT events, we aim to empower big, important ideas and provide a window into the minds of subject-matter experts. We are excited today to bring you the first episode in a new series of SALT Talks with our friends at Abu Dhabi Global Markets regarding new paradigms in a post-pandemic world. Co-hosting today's talk with me is my dear friend, Mark Cutis, the chief executive officer of ADGM, which obviously stands for Abu Dhabi Global Markets. ADGM is an award-winning international financial center located on the beautiful Al Maryah Island in Abu Dhabi.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:53)
We hosted our inaugural SALT Abu Dhabi Conference at Emirates Palace in 2019 and are excited to bring that event back to the UAE in the coming months. On today's SALT Talk, we will be hosting a conversation about new healthcare and education. This is very applicable and important for the post-pandemic world. These are two of the most successful investors and entrepreneurs, Jim Mellon and Michael Moe. Jim, Jim Mellon is a British entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist with a wide range of interests. Through his private investment company Burnbrae Group he has a substantial holdings in real estate as well as private and public companies. Jim's investment philosophy is underpinned by a careful analysis of new industries, or major shifts in markets. Most recently has focused on investments and businesses in healthcare, biotechnology and Ag tech. His recent book Juvenescence mark the beginning of a rush of capital into the nascent field of aging research, and also led to the formation of the company Juvenescence with his partners.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:06)
Juvenescence is a leading biopharma company in the commercialization of therapies to slow stop and reverse aging. More recently, Jim authored the book Moo's Law, focused on investment opportunities in the new agrarian revolution and fields of cellular agriculture. Jim co founded agronomics to invest in a portfolio of leading companies in the sector and is its largest investor. Jim sits on the board of trustees of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and of the American Federation for Aging Research AFAR. He's a trustee of Biogerontology research... Excuse me, let me say that again, he is a trustee of Biogerontology Research Foundation, and an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford, where he established the Mellon Center for Longevity. And Jim also sits on the advisory board of the Milken Institute's Center for the Future of Aging. And I might add, Jim, you're going to be a really good friend of mine because I expect to keep this hair and my face unwrinkled. So I'm really looking forward to spending more time with you Jim.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:24)
Michael Moe is the founder of GSV, a modern merchant bank that invests advises and partners with the fastest growing most dynamic companies in the world, the stars of tomorrow. He's currently serves as the CEO of GSV asset management. Regarded as a preeminent authority on growth investing Michael's honors include institutional investors, all American research team and the Wall Street Journal's best on the street award. Michael is the author of several best selling books. Michael has increasingly focused recently on his greatest passion education. He is a visionary in the field of Ed Tech. He has a passion that he is pursuing for the last three decades. Today he sits on the board of directors of Coursera, Curious, GSVlabs, Course Hero, Class Dojo, Parchment, Storm Wind, OZY Media. Michael and his business partners, Deborah Quazzo created the GSV ASU summit, the world's greatest Thought Leadership Forum in the field of Ed Tech.

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:33)
And my friend Mark Cutis, I'm looking over you and telling you, sir, that you and I are the underachievers here, sir. I don't know what we're doing with our careers after reading those two amazing bios. But I turn it over to you, sir, to start the questioning. And thank you guys so much for joining us on SALT Talks today.

Michael Moe: (05:50)
Thanks Antony.

Jim Mellon: (05:50)
Thanks Antony.

Mark Cutis: (05:52)
Thank you, Anthony. It's quite a pleasure to be involved with this group of the four of us here. And I do want to say both of you are covering two key areas education, and health care, that I think in so many ways will define the new post pandemic age. But if I could just step back for a moment and say, you have amazing credentials, you've achieved a lot. But when I think of the four of us, Anthony Scaramucci, has had many experiences that will be difficult to replicate. And if we do have a moment at the end, I would love to ask him some questions of his career, particularly in the Trump administration. But in any event, I won't delve into that I'll just go straight.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:41)
Well, first of all, Cutis it was a very long career.

Mark Cutis: (06:44)
Exactly.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:44)
I just want to make sure everybody knows that, okay? And if you want to make me feel better, you can say it lasted 954,000 seconds. Keep going Mark.

Mark Cutis: (06:54)
Okay, but let me just put in my two cents here. You're the only person that I know, that has emerged from that administration, which hasn't really been battered. So I think at another time, we'll talk about your longevity, and your ability to essentially come out of this unscathed.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:12)
[crosstalk 00:07:12].

Mark Cutis: (07:12)
So I want to turn for a moment to Michael, on education. And the issue with education, particularly for the Middle East is seminal. Now, before we talk about the Middle East, I want to ask you about the states. America has the best and the worst, kind of like Charles Dickens, with the best of times the worst of times. We have the best schools. And we also have massively underperforming schools particularly in our high school systems that have left behind a large swath of America. And I know that's been something that you have had close to your heart. Can you tell us a little bit about America, what we need to do in the States? And then we'll turn to your big project in the Middle East?

Michael Moe: (07:54)
Yeah, well, fundamentally, one of the biggest problems in America and this also is a problem many places in the world, is that your future is determined by how well you select your parents. And that fundamentally, is just unfair. And so we believe, I believe strongly that talent is pretty equally distributed around the world, but opportunity is not. And so how do you change that equation? How do you give everybody an equal opportunity to participate in the future? And the foundation of that is access to quality education.

Mark Cutis: (08:28)
Great. So when we talk about the region, because I think this is going to be one area yours in healthcare, that will be defining for the modern age for this area and for the world. What sort of initiatives if you can just touch upon those are you thinking about and what are you trying to do? Before we talk about why you're in Abu Dhabi?

Michael Moe: (08:52)
Sure. To back up even GSV stands for Global Silicon Valley, which is basically what we felt was a trend 10 years ago was the mindset of innovation, entrepreneurship that's made Silicon Valley such a remarkable place was spreading throughout the world. And we wanted to connect Silicon Valley with the emerging Global Silicon Valley. As it relates to specifically the Middle East, and I'm going to broaden that scope. The Middle East is a fascinating place in terms of the oil powered the manufacturing economy, where education is going to power the knowledge economy, and this region gets that. And so how do you transform a society? It's getting access to quality education. And so both the acknowledgement, and the mindset that education needs to be at the top of list of priorities is very, very clear. And so we feel that support in every kind of level of conversations that we've had and that's why we are so excited about putting a flag in Abu Dhabi.

Mark Cutis: (09:56)
So one more last question before I turn to Jim. And it's kind of a banal suggestion, but there isn't a one size fits all for education. But are there common characteristics that you think would apply to the US, the Middle East and Europe for that matter?

Michael Moe: (10:14)
Well, I think there's a key philosophy. So if you think about, one idea is that the word elite means scarcity in most parts of the world, where elite really means to mean excellence, as well as cost and quality are directly associated. So what we need to be able to do is make high quality education as at lower cost as humanly possible, if not free. So we're invested in Coursera, they have over 80 million students on their platform, 97% of them don't pay a dime. And so there's many, many, many lessons to learn from different parts of the world in different areas of where there's both opportunity and excellence. But I would say it starts with a mindset.

Mark Cutis: (10:58)
That's great. That's excellent, thank you for that. I'm going to turn to Jim for a moment. Anthony talked about longevity. And you were a member, you're still a part of The Buck Institute, which I belonged to, at one point in time. Tell us a little bit about longevity, what it means because many people have confused longevity with people becoming gnarled and living to be 110 but without a quality of life. Because I know, that's not what you mean.

Jim Mellon: (11:28)
Yeah, our first mission, and what we do, is to try and improve the quality of life in the latter years. And about 15% of people's lives at the moment are characterized towards the end of their lives by one or more severe illness. And our mission to begin with, is to try and reduce that period, which can be as long as 13 years. So rather than trying to extend life, which is our secondary mission, which I think will happen by the way. And so we are looking at aging as a central disease from which the diseases of aging cascades, all the familiar ones that we know about, like cancer or heart disease or dementia. They proliferate as you get older, so they are diseases of aging. And what we're trying to do is to address aging as a central disease, which is now possible, which in turn will lessen the burden of these diseases of aging, which are really quite dreadful and their impact on older people.

Mark Cutis: (12:32)
Great. And part of your mission also, is to help mankind change their dietary input various proteins or various ways of eating. There's been a lot of work in this area, which has applicability here, from a food security standpoint, but more importantly, you're saying to make the planet sustainable, we need to do different things in the way we grow food.

Jim Mellon: (12:55)
Yeah, I agree with that Mark. So basically, after the Second World War and led by the United States, intensive farming became the norm, that is animals reared in very close proximity and the use of antibiotics and hormones and so forth to encourage growth and to stop disease became rife. That intensive farming is not a big threat to humanity, partly because it's the biggest source of global emissions. And if you're a believer in global warming, which I am, it's something that needs to be addressed. It's about 20% of all global emissions. Partly because 80% of antibiotics go into farmed animals. And if you think about it, this pandemic is pretty bad. But just imagine if we had a bacterial rather than a viral pandemic and the antibiotics didn't work anymore, we could have... and I'm not making this up, because none of us would have thought a year and a half ago, that this would be as bad as it is. But we could have a black death on our hands where a third of the world's population died, for instance.

Jim Mellon: (13:58)
So we need to do something about reducing antibiotic usage in animals otherwise, we become more and more resistant to antibiotics. On top of that, one of the great causes of disease in the world is, frankly speaking the food that people eat. And you may have seen that Nestle admitted, their board admitted that 80% of the food, they're one of the largest food companies in the world, was bad for human health. And this is across the world basically. Diabetes has gone up from 1% in China, in 1980, to 13% today. And it's as a result of the Western diet. The food that we eat needs to change. And one way that we can do it and the technology is here is to eat plant based foods which are better substitutes than the food from intensive farming. And perhaps more excitingly use cellular agriculture, which is growing food and labs and factories to create healthy alternatives without antibiotics, without emissions without great land, use without water use, on the scale that it's currently being used. So it's a very exciting time. And there are many companies out there now with viable products.

Mark Cutis: (15:07)
Maybe you can touch upon briefly on a few of these companies that you've backed and what they're doing, particularly when they're growing meat in a petri dish exactly, from cells. So tell us a little bit about that.

Jim Mellon: (15:18)
So if I just showed you my little fingernail, and we took a sample from a cow that was equivalent to the size of my little fingernail now, was about 2.5 milliliters. The idea is that in 40 days, that little fingernails worth of sample and the cow goes back, it doesn't get slaughtered, it goes back to its field will grow into the equivalent of seven or eight cows worth of beef, about 3,000 kilos. Whereas the conventional way of growing cows would take about 28 months. And the way it works is that from my little fingernails worth of sample, stem cells, which are the precursor cells for all of us, are extracted differentiated into the cell types that you want, which are typically muscle and fat, grown in large steel containers that are called bio reactors. And this is why it's so interesting to me, because my background is in biotech.

Jim Mellon: (16:11)
So this is a biotech process. There's no genetic modification. There's no Frankenstein element to this. But the cells are bathed in the media, which is the nutrients which are roughly equivalent to what cows would get from plants. And that growth hormones, which are roughly equivalent to what cows get in nature, are introduced as well. And then you get this glute gloop that is amalgamated and creates this beef. And that can be done across all species without the use of antibiotics, no bacterial contamination. And it can also be done in materials. So some of our companies are growing leather in laboratories, cotton, cocoa. And all of these things will substitute very effectively for the Frankly speaking, poor quality food that is being offered to most consumers at the moment. And this will happen within 10 years. So I just want to make up... I'll quickly finish three predictions.

Jim Mellon: (17:03)
In 10 years time, there will be no dairy industry as we know it on the planet. None. Already plant alternatives are a huge business. And you saw that only went public quite recently. But precision fermentation is coming down the pipe very quickly. And there will be no cows producing milk in the way that we see them at the moment, within 10 years. In 10 years, 50% of the meat market will be plant based, or cell Ag based, and over 50% of the fish market will be cell based fish. So this is happening extremely quickly and will be one of the world's most transformative industries.

Mark Cutis: (17:38)
Wow. That's amazing. And I think if we step back, and I'm going to turn it over in a moment to Anthony. From the prospect of educating the masses, you mentioned 97% take Coursera courses for free to being able to change the food chain, and to provide people with nutritious food that doesn't damage the planet is amazing, and it's brave new world. On that note, Anthony I'll turn it over to you.

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:08)
I appreciate [inaudible 00:18:09]. Fascinated by the discussion. I want to ask both gentlemen, the same question in their respective fields. And this is about political will, not just in our countries, the UAE or the United States, but global political will, on things like changing the food paradigm, changing the food supply chain, but then also discussing education. And as Michael knows, in the United States, education being a big issue, I'm the product of a public school. But we have a tremendous amount of special interests in education that prevent us from making innovation. Jim, is that the case in what you're discussing as well. And so let's start with Jim, where is the political will, where the potential political unity to get these things done that you're talking about in the future?

Jim Mellon: (19:02)
Well, it's a great question, Anthony. And we're in the UAE, which imports between 85 and 90% of its food. It's one of the most food insecure countries in the world. Other countries like this would be my own country, the UK which imports 50% of its food. And so countries such as the UAE or the UK, have a natural inclination to accelerate the process of substituting the current form of agriculture. And so you're seeing a lot of innovation here forward thinking, and frankly, capital going into this into this area. So where the government's have a vested interest in making it happen, you get a bigger propellant. But I wouldn't discount the United States or European countries which have net food export as either. The US has a quite a good regime for regulating novel foods and as does Europe. And we're very surprised at the speed at which some of this stuff is happening.

Jim Mellon: (19:55)
So for instance, I can confidently predict that by the end of this year, the fish coming out of laboratories will be on the market for US consumers. Chicken is already on the market in Singapore, it's already on the market in Israel. This is the dial up phase of the Internet of this industry. But if we can pick some of the winners out of that dial up phase, we're going to do very well. But overall, I think the public is beginning to embrace this very much. And you can see that and Beyond Meat, Impossible Burger, Oatly. The enthusiasm for those companies is reflective of general enthusiasm, particularly among younger people to save the planet by changing the food system.

Anthony Scaramucci: (20:36)
Michael.

Michael Moe: (20:37)
Yeah, so just following up on that point. What's happened is it's completely well known that in the knowledge economy in a global marketplace, what you know, your education makes the difference, not only for an individual, but for a company, and for that matter, a country. You only need to look at Singapore, which has really been the model for investing in human capital for over the last 50 years, where they started their independence, the same year that Jamaica did both hit about $2,500 GDP per capita. And because of the prioritization of education in Singapore it was a big part of what fueled that success of that country, which GDP, per capita [inaudible 00:21:24] is in excess in the United States. One of the things about, back to the point about Abu Dhabi, I think that Abu Dhabi is creating what is going to be the next Singapore.

Michael Moe: (21:35)
All the pieces of fundamentals in place, including that understanding of investing in the knowledge economy, but you only need to look at places like China and India, how education is really what they view is their key strategic advantage to fit to fast forward into the future. You look at the United States, and I too went to public schools, both public elementary and high school as well as college. And the fact of the matter is, the system that's been created in the United States today doesn't work. It's rigged. You only need to look at our nation's capital, right across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High School is the number one high school United States, right across Washington Memorial is the worst High School in United States yet Washington Memorial spends twice as much as Thomas Jefferson. Effectively Washington Memorial gets 30,000 per kid and is a dropout factory where less than half the kids that enter that school finish at school. That's unacceptable in a country like the United States.

Michael Moe: (22:40)
And the fact that because of this whole idea of the American dream, and how education really was that opportunity to advance your cause, that doesn't exist today. 70% of the kids are born poor, or remain poor. That system isn't acceptable. I think there's great awareness, but to your point, there is a very significant entrenched status quo namely unions and other people that benefit from the old system, which frankly it doesn't work. You look at every single data point, and you look at how America is competing against the rest of the world. You got parents, you got businesses that say, we can't employ students coming out of our schools, they can't read they can't write. You got parents that see studies that show this generation of the children will be less educated themselves. You got politicians are actually seeing that it's pulling for the first time to change the dynamics. And against that you got the [inaudible 00:23:27] status quo.

Michael Moe: (23:27)
And the good news is, I think America is finally starting to see 200... The union says, give us more time, give us more money. And American people are saying 200 years is long enough, we need to change things today.

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:38)
I just want to have a follow up, then I'll turn it back to Mark. And this is a follow up again, for both of you. And I appreciate what you're saying because all of us are friends with Michael Milken. He once pointed out to me that the women's liberation movement caused people like Meg Whitman not to be school teachers, they went on to become billionaires of eBay and CEOs of Hewlett Packard. I guess what I'm wondering and this applies to both of you as it relates to incentives, human capital and human ingenuity. It seems like in Jim's business, we have that and all that Jim opined, and that whether or not that's true. But it seems like in the educational businesses, we don't have that for some reason. In terms of you look at salaries, and you look at where people are. What's your reaction to that Jim? Do we have enough incentives economically to get the world going to where you see it going? And then for Michael, how do we make those incentives better in education?

Jim Mellon: (24:44)
So I think the incentives are fairly well entrenched by the IP, the Intellectual Property system patents around the world. And that works very well in biotech and that biotech IP system has been transferred into the novel foods business. So there'll be a period of 10, 15 years of commercial exploitation, which will be the base of the price of innovation, which is a well established and US led system. The same applies on the science of longevity. The longevity science is not just for the elites, as Michael was... The elites, the wrong way of describing it, not the way you described it. But you know what I'm saying. It's for everyone, ultimately, because we live quite a long life. And so if there's 10 years of patent exploitation on some of the drugs and therapies, that biotech companies such as ours are developing. That's a relatively short space of time in human longevity. And so I think this will become available for everyone.

Jim Mellon: (25:45)
And there are already drugs and therapies out there that we can all take to make ourselves live longer. And we know that people are getting better educated about food. And they are as a result, changing their diets. And so sugar consumption is beginning to go down for the first time ever in the United States than in Europe, which is a great thing, because sugar is directly related to a lot of disease, not just diabetes, but also Alzheimers, and the proliferation of Alzheimers, as a result is going down, which is wonderful news. That is based partly on this IP system. And I'm not going to put any words into Michael's mouth. But education doesn't really have IP around it, it has passion and commitment and money and governmental will, which is a very different thing.

Michael Moe: (26:33)
So looking at, back to what incentives need to be aligned to create change, I think, frankly, a lot of change is taking place in front of our eyes, which was catalyzed in many respects by the pandemic. In fact, you basically had 1.6 billion students that were instantly put online last March, essentially, that's 20% of the world's population that was thrown in the deep end of the online learning pool and told to sink or swim, some sank, some got to the edge of the pool crawled out and will never go back in. Many flail around a little bit and all of a sudden this digital education, which should be growing at a nice rate, but only 2% of the overall $7 trillion education spend has massive acceleration. Which by the way and we all know, it wasn't perfect in terms of the quality and access and so forth.

Michael Moe: (27:22)
But I think people can start to see the future and how you can start to not have to fight this entrenched status quo. But I think also you look at the great education systems around the world where you seeing kids more effectively educated, Finland, China, Singapore, Korea. One of the big changes or big differences is just the prioritization of education, and the people going in that field are the top of their class, not near the bottom. So you look at the conversation that goes along with that. In Finland, for example it's double that, the United States, right? There's all sorts of different movements that represents the complex system like healthcare. But the good part of this is change is happening in terms of investment categories. We frankly, stay away from where the control is taken out of our hands. And so investing in, for example, charter school, physical charter schools in the United States there's better places where you can see more explosive opportunity, and frankly, where there's going to be more of a systemic impact.

Michael Moe: (28:28)
So I think, again ultimately, capitalism does work. We can talk about contemporary capitalism, which is going to be a modification of that. But the fact of the matter is, you're seeing a wave of entrepreneurs that are coming into space, you're seeing amazing ideas. And you're seeing venture capital that is coming into the education space that is about 20x, of what it was 10 years ago. And that's because the growth is happening. You now have 40 unicorns in Ed Tech. People couldn't have imagined that five years ago. And so there's a bunch of different pieces that all add up to a big piece. And I think this wave is happening in a major way. And when I say it's such a big change, we had before Corona BC, and now you have AD, after the disease, and effectively the future is accelerated to the present.

Anthony Scaramucci: (29:18)
I think it's a good point. I just want to cap it off, because I worry about this, given the neighborhood I grew up in. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. My dad was a crane operator, so we had a hourly wage. But we felt very aspirational. There is stuff going on in the UK here in the United States, where blue collar families that were once aspirational, feel desperation. And the goal politically has to be from a policy perspective, to reach those people. Now they'll become less populistic, if you will, if that's even a word. I'm channeling my George W. Bush, Mark Cutis, less populistic. They'll become less nationalistic. And so hopefully we can figure out good policies to do that for these communities.

Michael Moe: (30:08)
Well, I think what you're seeing, again, there's all these different... there's all this anger out there, there's all these people that are creating different movements. And if you boil it down, they're angry. What they're angry about is they don't feel like they're participating in the future. And the system is rigged.

Anthony Scaramucci: (30:26)
Exactly.

Michael Moe: (30:26)
And you know what? They're right. The system is rigged, and they aren't participant in the future. And this goes back to the foundation, how you fix that is through providing access to quality education, like you had through your public schools, like I had through my public schools. But far too few kids, I mean, fewer and fewer are getting that type of opportunity. And that doesn't work. That's not sustainable.

Anthony Scaramucci: (30:48)
We certainly agree. I'll turn it back to Mark. But I appreciate the insight that you provide.

Michael Moe: (30:55)
Thank you.

Mark Cutis: (30:56)
Michael, I want to turn to you one more time on education. And you mentioned, bringing the full bearing of the capitalist system to seek new solutions, to make a difference, and to democratize education. And I think everyone will agree and everyone will nod their head, but tell me, how should we address the potential for shysters, and people who come in to this space, and I won't refer to the last administration and the universities that they fomented. And that caused a lot of problems. But how do we address those issues? And I'm not suggesting more regulation. But I'm asking you, how do you think we should be thinking about that to protect people from being sold a bill of goods?

Michael Moe: (31:40)
So one of the biggest reasons that you're seeing change happen faster in education, which historically was very slow to change, is because the internet not only provides access, but it provides transparency. And so I think there are a number of education operators that I can think of that basically, were really good at selling things, but weren't that good at actually delivering the goods and delivering quality. Less mean exposed. The information travels so fast. And you can see what goes on with artificial intelligence, you're getting real time results in what's going on in school. So it's no longer kind of after the fact to say, "Oh, my God, nobody learned anything in this classroom." Where they had this tutor, and this tutor didn't help me at all. That's just the transparency I think is extraordinarily important. I think is a waste of the financial lens of what we're seeing because this industry is getting so much attention, right. And there are very sophisticated people involved. They're just much more scrutiny-

Mark Cutis: (32:41)
So greater transparency and scrutiny?

Michael Moe: (32:42)
And scrutiny. And because now everybody gets the fact, what's the purpose of education is to give people the knowledge and the education, the learning they need to be successful. Or whatever that's defined as. And now you can actually measure it, we call that return on education. And that we think the companies that actually are going to create the biggest investment returns are the ones that create the greatest education returns. And that type of alignment, I think creates huge acceleration for what is already happening very fast.

Mark Cutis: (33:13)
But we've seen what's happening now with technology, and the new administration is looking at ways of curtailing the power of these large technological giants. Do you think we're ever going to get to that point where it'll be a similar situation? Because if you're referring to an unfettered space where it's open, then you're expecting civil society to harness the bad players. And you're suggesting that with artificial intelligence and with transparency, those issues will be addressed? Is it possible that we'll create another large operator in the space?

Michael Moe: (33:49)
So, heretofore there is no... Despite the second largest industry in the world spending nearly 10% of GDP, there was no large education companies. You got to scratch your head and say, why? Well, there's a number of reasons we could talk about if of interest, but much of that has changed. And you're seeing [inaudible 00:34:07], BYJU in India has gone from nothing to valued at $16 billion today. You have companies like Coursera, which basically was a freemium model [inaudible 00:34:18] in the public market, six, seven billion. So I believe you're going to see many, many mega cap education technology company. And again, all that with success comes not only scrutiny, but same when you get network effects, which are happening in this business where you get a disproportionate gain to the leader in the category. More scrutiny or more regulations ultimately happening.

Michael Moe: (34:46)
You see which is now happening in China. Where in China some of the two largest education companies in the world were in China, and they've gotten destroyed over the last several months, because the Chinese government has said, what they're saying is that kids are studying too much. I don't really believe that's the real message. So now there's concern about what the future of these companies that are providing tutoring are, TAL and New Oriental.

Mark Cutis: (35:09)
Interesting. So you've also talked about kids going to university that perhaps they're better served, not going straight to university but experiencing different jobs and getting into the job sector, doing something different than the traditional out of high school into college into the workforce. How do you see that potentially developing?

Michael Moe: (35:33)
I think people need to reimagine education. There are certainly some people, they're not going to go through a traditional route. But there's many other people that are going to get knowledge and get skills from other ways, which could include jobs. And what we've got today is you no longer can go fill up your knowledge tank [inaudible 00:35:53] and drive off through life. You're going to continually need to be learning things on an ongoing basis. Some of that might come from your occupation, some of that's going to be coming from online learning, some of that's going to come from games. There's just a number of ways that you're going to be able to mix and match and really create what I call a knowledge portfolio that allows me the future opportunities. A small part of that is going to come from traditional education. I think there's going to continue to be brick and mortar schools that educate a bunch of people. But this ongoing learning, which is the huge market, is going to happen a variety of ways.

Mark Cutis: (36:25)
Thank you. If I may, Jim, I'd like to turn to you for a moment, you have a great company Juvenescence. And it has this breakthrough metabolic product, which is called Metabolic Switch, as you know, in this region, in the GCC 30 to 35% of the people have metabolic diseases. Tell us a little bit about that. And also, if you can weave in some takeaways as to what we should be doing after this program, because that's also I think, will be useful to our audience.

Jim Mellon: (36:57)
Okay. Well, so Metabolic Switch is part of the consumer division of Juvenescence. And it's a very different market to the one that we're traditionally in, which is pharmaceuticals and regenerative medicine. So we hired people from Weight Watchers as an example from Vitamin Shoppe in the US to head up the launch. And it'll be followed by several other products that will be good for, for instance, the next one is Spermidine, which is good for your metabolic health, sorry, your mitochondrial health. But what we're trying to do is to get products that are scientifically proven, and this one comes out of the Buck Institute, which you know very well. And not just some sort of quackery that sold in a health food shop. And so Metabolic Switch puts you into a state of ketosis straightaway and it keeps you there for 10 hours. And you don't have to go through the ketogenic diet, which most people can't tolerate, because it's too difficult to do. So it's a great substitute for willpower actually.

Mark Cutis: (38:01)
So you don't have to go through the ketogenic diet?

Jim Mellon: (38:03)
No, it does it for you.

Mark Cutis: (38:04)
Okay, maybe you can explain that to us.

Jim Mellon: (38:06)
Yeah. So it basically is, it induces ketosis through its mechanism. And in the same way, as if you went on a ketogenic diet, but without you having to watch what you're eating, basically. So it's fantastic for this region. And actually, we would love for it to be, once we're fully embedded in the US to be commercialized in this region as well, because it will have a very positive effect. One of the problems is that it tastes absolutely horrible. And so they're working on new flavors to try and make it palatable, because it's a breakfast drink that you drink in the early morning. But there are things that people can do today, the statement of the obvious, don't smoke, do some exercise, not too much exercise, eat healthfully. People know all about that. But that won't keep you alive, any way above your normal lifespan, which is around 85 for the developed world.

Jim Mellon: (39:06)
But I do think, Mark that in 20 years time, children will be born with a life expectancy of between 110 and 120. And then we have to rethink the world. And that will happen because about 20 years ago, the human genome was unveiled and the key pathways that cause us to age, they don't determine us to die, but they cause us to age can now be manipulated. So all of them have been proven in mammals and in some cases in human beings, to enable us to live a little bit healthier and a little bit longer. So one key thing that I'm not advocating this as a medical practitioner, but you can go into a pharmacy here and get Metformin. Metformin is a frontline diabetic drug, but it has been proven empirically and in very many studies, it's been around since 1957, to be safe and to be anti cancer, and to be anti Alzheimers and to keep you alive longer, and it's a generic drug. So it's available to everyone, it costs cents.

Mark Cutis: (40:07)
It's been around for a long time obviously.

Jim Mellon: (40:08)
It's been around for a long time. Many millions of people use it. So that's one thing that you could do today.

Michael Moe: (40:15)
[inaudible 00:40:15]

Jim Mellon: (40:16)
What you're doing, and you look great, by the way. The last thing I'll just say, as a little soundbite is I completely agree with what Michael is saying. The paradigm at the moment is we assume we're going to live to 85 or 90. And if we make it to 65, maybe a little bit longer. So that paradigm is you're born, you learn, you earn, you retire, and you expire. That paradigm needs to be ripped up, thrown away. And that's why what Michael is doing is so important, because as he said, education is a continuum, you won't be... You said fill up your tank of gas and 25 you're on the road. You have to continuously reinvent yourself. But you also have to think, first of all, how are we going to finance our lives? We're not going to be able to retire at 65 years old, governments will not be able to support that. And secondly, how you're going to occupy your life, it's like waking up in the morning, with 36 hours ahead of you, instead of 24 hours.

Jim Mellon: (41:13)
We need new structures, we need new ways of building relationships. And this is going to happen very, very quickly. So as I said, within 20 or so years, life expectancy at birth is 110 or 120. Will humanity be able to cope with it? I hope so I believe so.

Mark Cutis: (41:30)
That's quite the challenge. Please.

Michael Moe: (41:31)
I was going to say, reminding me, you talked about the treatment, the taste, the side effect it tasted bad. That's one of the issues which historically education, it tasted bad. And so you find the entrepreneurs that are really succeeding, some of them might advise you, if I would advise you, this was amazing. [inaudible 00:41:49] $16 billion market [inaudible 00:41:51], we serve you broccoli, but we put chocolate on it. And so they don't tell you put chocolate until learning. We have a concept called Hollywood meets Harvard, how do you make education entertaining and engaging? How do you create great professors to be stars, right? In all in a way that you're going to learn more, it's going to be more, it's going to make more of a difference.

Mark Cutis: (42:11)
But that will be different from... That will be an evolutionary process, because you mentioned, for instance, Korea, in Asia, where they subject the children to very long hours of studying. And the idea is rote education, right? And then you pass the test, and in many other countries too. That will have to evolve. And we'll have to, as humans will have to go to a higher level to begin to appreciate this.

Michael Moe: (42:34)
Absolutely.

Mark Cutis: (42:35)
This is the world of I guess that Peter Diamandis talked about, the world of abundance, where we're going to have infinite resources. And then we're going to have to spend time thinking through this is what you're referring to. I want to ask you, again, a very basic question. You mentioned Metformin, how about intermittent fasting for the people in the region who have these metabolic disorders? Do you think if they practice intermittent fasting, eating within these time, windows of six to eight hours, it can actually help them?

Jim Mellon: (43:03)
Absolutely. Absolutely. We have plenty people in the longevity industry, who do use intermittent fasting, including the guy who advocates Metformin, more than any other my friend Nir Barzilai from Einstein University in New York. He's also a practitioner of intermittent fasting. So absolutely. But these things will not keep you alive to the 110, or 120. It's the new therapies that are being developed now, that are based on biological change. Because all of the gains in life expectancy that we've had in the last century or so which is roughly double our life expectancy, have come from environmental gains, they haven't come from any fundamental biological change. If we took someone from 1900, and put them around us today, they'd live just as long as us, but in those days, they lived to 47 years on average.

Mark Cutis: (43:51)
Exactly.

Jim Mellon: (43:52)
So environmental change has been the key driver. The next stage of longevity increase is biological. And that's happening very quickly. The science of longevity is catching up with the aspiration of just about everyone to live a longer and importantly, healthier life.

Mark Cutis: (44:09)
Great. One more basic question. You also mentioned that not too much exercise. And in this region, there is this tendency for a cohort of young people to really work out hard and also to get pumped. How do you see that?

Jim Mellon: (44:26)
Well, all they have to do is to watch as I did last week, the match between Denmark I can't remember what the other team was. And the young guy collapsed with a heart attack on the field. That's the danger. Use drugs that are enhancing drugs, do too much exercise and you put tremendous strain on your organs. You certainly won't live longer as a result of doing that. So don't do it.

Mark Cutis: (44:54)
That's categorical. Thank you. On that note, I want to turn it back to Anthony.

Anthony Scaramucci: (44:58)
Well, it's interesting the exercise category people don't realize that but particularly as you age, you got to have moderate exercise because otherwise you'll, you'll hurt your kidneys actually. But I want to ask you both something for the common person. So let's start with you, Michael. I want to educate my seven year old, he's tied up on his phone, and he's tied up on his Nintendo Switch, and he's got a PlayStation, and an Xbox. Just kidding, he doesn't have all those things, but you get the point that I'm making. So what do I do as a parent, to break that stronghold? And to get them to start thinking more about the entertainment aspects of education?

Michael Moe: (45:43)
Well, I think that's it. Find things, put chocolate on the broccoli. Games is going to be an important way that people learn things, especially young people going forward. You look at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg both learned coding because of the games that they played. It's finding things that they want to do, as opposed to being forced to do. But also say, as a parent being engaged. One of the most important things for student's success is having an adult that has really taken an active role in their learning. And in fact, in I see some of the most successful schools, and that can be in very difficult situations. It's required to have at least a parent that's really on top of it, [inaudible 00:46:28]. And kids like a parent that's curious.

Anthony Scaramucci: (46:32)
And so the same sort of question for you, Jim, what do we do to get these kids... Obviously, can't bring the Oreos into the house or the Coca Cola. We saw Cristiano Ronaldo do that with the Coke the other day, drop $4 billion in market cap of the company. But what are some of the simple things that parents can do for their children to get them thinking about longevity and health?

Jim Mellon: (46:59)
I was shocked to see that 70% of 18 year olds in America are obese. That is unbelievable. There were almost none in 1950. One of the key reasons for that is the corn sugar syrup, which was subsidized and remains subsidized by the federal government in the United States. And food companies have been living under an umbrella of price protection for far too long. So yes, there's a parental influence. But parents can't monitor everything in the supermarket, they haven't got the time to pick out the best foods necessarily. But what I would say and I think this is really important in the year of COP26 and talking about global warming, with Joe Biden at the helm there, is that carbon taxes should be levied on conventional food producers that do damage to people's health. That should be a universal phenomenon. And it's great for governments because they all need money at the moment. But at the same time, carbon credits should be used to promote alternative protein and food producers to make alternative foods more commercially palatable for people to buy.

Jim Mellon: (48:13)
And so it's the parents I can't really say anything about except that most parents want the best for their children. But when faced with a panoply of rubbish in the supermarket, isn't it best just to get rid of that rubbish and subsidy with good stuff?

Anthony Scaramucci: (48:31)
Well, listen, I think it's, it's spot on. I think one of the problems though, is if I took you to the local diner here, the plate size in 1950 was this and the plate size now is that. And people they've created habits for themselves, myself included. Trust me, I have many nights of self loathing when I know I've overindulged. But I guess it's also education, isn't it, Michael? Isn't it an educational thing as well, in terms of creating these habits? Isn't the health component that Jim's talking about part of your education story?

Michael Moe: (49:10)
Absolutely. Again it's knowledge economy, and it's how people obtain knowledge to give them an opportunity to participate in future and health is obviously fundamental to that. I think it's made a difference, or at least has made a difference with many people I know, when they put the calories of a food on the menu. All of a sudden you're aware of it, gives you some information, you say holy cow, that's not worth 1,200 calories to eat this sandwich. It's just being informed and again, that we're in a world of infobesity, there's so much Information. So how do you create signals amongst that noise? How do you create crisp ways for people to obtain that knowledge? Because there's so much information out there that it's hard to know what's good and what's not. I just listened to my friend Jim, he tells me, no.

Jim Mellon: (50:01)
No.

Mark Cutis: (50:01)
I can just jump in for a second. I think the challenge of the modern age is not that we follow the elites is that the common man has to take responsibility for himself and herself. And this concept of infobesity, everybody knows that you shouldn't be eating that way. Honestly, everyone knows, no one is shocked. But they have chosen to eat that way, just the way people have chosen not to take the vaccine. So ultimately, as we go into the next, the New World, we're all going to have to be much more responsible for ourselves. The state will have to help people who try, but it's very tricky because we don't want the state to be heavy handed. And I think this is going to be an evolving political problem.

Michael Moe: (50:45)
Yeah. And, by the way, going back to a previous question, I don't want to imply that I think it's also... The secret to getting kids to learn is to give them corn syrup, right? I'm saying that creating things, ways to learn things that they want to do. You look at Roblox, Roblox has a $65 billion market cap. Kids love doing that and they're learning stuff, right? It's a creator economy. And that's the type of thing to think how you integrate that with obtaining real knowledge that can help you be successful is how I think about that.

Mark Cutis: (51:22)
Absolutely.

Anthony Scaramucci: (51:22)
Mark, if you don't mind. I have one last question for both.

Mark Cutis: (51:26)
Please.

Anthony Scaramucci: (51:26)
And then I'm going to let you conclude us here. We're talking about the democratization of your ideas. Both in education and in health and fitness and awareness and longevity to that common man. Mark is right, some people are making very bad decisions. But how do we make sure that everything that we're talking about today doesn't come across pedantic, doesn't come across elitist, and we can get it disseminated into those areas that they're so desperately needed?

Michael Moe: (52:00)
25 years ago, I wrote a white paper called The Dawn of the Age of Knowledge, and in that predicted or forecast the emergence of the knowledge economy and how the internet was going to change everything, and how education is going to be at the center, and how online learning was going to democratize education. Increase in access, lower the cost, and that ultimately improve the quality. The problem with that 25 years ago, not one part of the system was really ready to accomplish that, including me. John Chambers, 20 years ago, said, online education was going to be so big, it was going to make email look irrelevant. The problem with that 20 years ago, you didn't have the computer power, you didn't have video on the internet. Teachers weren't digital natives. They're digital immigrants. Every aspect it just wasn't ready, right? Today that's changed.

Michael Moe: (52:45)
And even poor kids, and again the ability. It used to be the dream to be able to provide cheap technology people [inaudible 00:52:52]. And there's some issues, but that's really not the issue. Cheap technology, whether a person's paying for... My daughter taught in most poor schools, basically in America, she said, every kid was, 100% minority. She said, every single kid had a smartphone. That shocked me, but that's what she said what the reality was.

Michael Moe: (53:14)
I don't think that's the issue. The issue really is about providing ways to not just put education, physical education online, but to reimagine how you can do this better, faster and fairer, more democratized. And by the way, that's what's so exciting, that's what gets me excited, when you see these... what I call weapons of mass instruction. So these rapidly scaling, easy to access, removing friction, from the ability to get the education or need to be successful.

Anthony Scaramucci: (53:48)
Jim, anything you want to add?

Jim Mellon: (53:52)
Yeah. I just say that an example of how we are living in better times is the fact that these vaccines would develop so quickly. This is the best example I can think of, in the olden days, it would take at least 10, 15 years to develop a vaccine. Within six months, US companies German company, a British company had developed a effective and now readily available vaccines, at least in the developed world.

Anthony Scaramucci: (54:16)
And safe vaccines.

Jim Mellon: (54:17)
Safe.

Anthony Scaramucci: (54:17)
It's important for us to [crosstalk 00:54:19].

Jim Mellon: (54:18)
Everyone should be having these vaccines. Everyone should be having these vaccines. They've done that really, really quickly. And that's an illustration of how first of all the collaborative power of the internet that Michael was talking about bring scientists around the world together very effectively. And secondly, our knowledge of biology, it's so much better than it was just 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. So I'm very optimistic that if in the last seven years we've been able to cure HIV, to cure Hepatitis C, to develop cancer immunotherapy and to develop CRISPR-Cas9, all of which are multi billion and very effective industries. What's the next seven years going to be like it's going to be even better. We should be very optimistic.

Jim Mellon: (55:02)
I feel that we're very lucky to be living in this age notwithstanding the pandemic, which will be gone quite quickly. All the good stuff that Michael's talking about, all the good stuff that you're doing Anthony. All good stuff that you're doing in Abu Dhabi. And the stuff that we're doing in our companies is just a small microcosm of all the great stuff that's being done by a collaborative humanity. Just don't listen to the noise and just let's be optimistic.

Anthony Scaramucci: (55:30)
Well, Jim, can you make me taller though? I'm just curious.

Jim Mellon: (55:35)
Yes, yes.

Anthony Scaramucci: (55:35)
Throw that in there before we... Okay, good. I'll be-

Jim Mellon: (55:38)
You're pretty tall already.

Anthony Scaramucci: (55:39)
I'll be talking to you after this SALT Talk to figure out how to do that. Again, and I expect it to be very easy. It's like a free stride-

Jim Mellon: (55:47)
It's hanging upside down for a couple of weeks. You look remarkably young, I have to say. You look the same age as your son. So that's a great tribute to you and your genetic makeup.

Anthony Scaramucci: (55:56)
That's because I'm a television person, I know how to do lighting better than anyone. That's why. Well, thank you guys. Do you have any follow up questions Mark?

Mark Cutis: (56:09)
Yeah, just one basic question. You're both here in Abu Dhabi. Tell us a little bit about that. And because you're doing some extremely exciting things that are pathbreaking. And you've chosen to be here, how does that fit into your game plans?

Michael Moe: (56:27)
So after having the opportunity to be here, a number of times and other places, I really believe that Abu Dhabi is going to give us a window to the future. And for a variety of reasons. One, we talked about before just the prioritization of going from an oil economy to a knowledge economy. But also just the smart people doing important things, but also just geographically. As this world becomes more global and more connected, which it is every day, Abu Dhabi as we know, it's a two and a half hour flight to Mumbai, it's a three hour flight to Tel Aviv, it's a four hour flight to the west coast of Africa. It's just so well situated. When we look at the power, I call it the VCIIP, Vietnam, China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, I mean, how could you be in a better place to reach these, where the world's going to be created for the future.

Michael Moe: (57:22)
And so the great leadership, of course, but the many, many smart people that increasingly are coming here. I think you're going to see the real network effects. And so we're going to plant a flag here as we said, we're going to be running money out of here. We'll be running innovation labs out of here. We're putting big conferences out of here. And we're going to be very active in helping. We hope to build this ecosystem, that I think in next 10 years, it's going to blow people away.

Mark Cutis: (57:48)
That's very exciting. Jim.

Jim Mellon: (57:50)
Well, I have not much to add to what Michael said, except I agree with it all. But I will just give you a little bit of historical flavor. When I started my career, I started in Hong Kong, where I have permanent residency as I do here as well. And I have to say, and I wrote an article about a couple of weeks ago. The minister of tourism, read somewhere that this is the new Hong Kong. This is the new Hong Kong, flat taxes easy to incorporate businesses, multicultural, very forward thinking. You just have to look around at the infrastructure as well. We are super, both Michael and myself super excited to be involved. An honor to be here actually.

Michael Moe: (58:34)
I have to ask you. What is your view of what is going on in Hong Kong right now? It's obviously quite troubling, since it will be in the new Hong Kong. Well, Hong Kong is going to be a bit replaced by [inaudible 00:58:45]. I think, again, and Singapore, which has been an interesting place. Again, I think there's so much opportunity, but what's your reaction to what's going on in Hong Kong?

Mark Cutis: (58:51)
What's happening in Hong Kong is very complex. But it certainly looks like, even to the untrained eye let alone to the professional. That there's a dramatic sea change that is underway. But for us, what we're looking at is that you have an ecosystem that we're building an ecosystem in ADGM, where the fact that you can now get golden visas, which was never the case before. The fact that you have very low taxes, the fact that the pandemic was handled very well. Because if you think about many Asian countries, they handled the pandemic very well. But then they shut down the country, so you couldn't come in and out. Whereas in the UAE, you were able to travel in and out most of the time. So if you combine that with the basic edifice of this country, which is low taxes, you have access to capital, because you have large sovereign wealth funds, you have the foundational pillars of ADGM which is common law, and a smart regulator. And you have expenses that are actually amongst the lowest in the world, particularly because of housing.

Mark Cutis: (59:54)
You're creating an environment where young motivated people who want to do things can come here. And that's the aspiration, is to create the future here. And to encourage innovation and to encourage people to come here.

Jim Mellon: (01:00:09)
And it's safe.

Mark Cutis: (01:00:10)
And it's safe. Exactly. Absolutely.

Jim Mellon: (01:00:13)
Which is a big consideration.

Michael Moe: (01:00:13)
And that's beautiful.

Mark Cutis: (01:00:15)
Excellent.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:00:17)
All of you forgot to mention the food. So since I'm Italian, I got to throw that in there. Some of the best restaurants in the world are in the UAE. But guys, thank you so much for joining SALT Talks with us in this new partnership that SALT has with ADGM. This will be the beginning, you guys are the inaugural part of this series that Mark and I will be doing. And so we're both very grateful to you. And I look forward to seeing you in Abu Dhabi soon. I can't wait to get over there. Mark's promised me easy entrance and easy exit. Isn't that right, Mark?

Mark Cutis: (01:00:51)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:00:53)
I can't wait to get over there. I'm going to have Jim pick the restaurant though. So that I know that it's plant friendly, and all that other good stuff. Thank you guys again for joining us.

Michael Moe: (01:01:03)
Thanks Anthony.

Jim Mellon: (01:01:04)
Thanks.

Mark Cutis: (01:01:04)
Thank you Anthony.

Jim Mellon: (01:01:04)
Thank you Anthony.

Sergey Young: Longevity Investing | SALT Talks #245

“There are so many ethical tradeoffs we need to solve before we embrace the idea of radical longevity. We have created the science and technology to extend our lives while we haven’t created the life we want to extend.”

Sergey Young is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of one billion people. To do that, Sergey founded Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all.

Sergey is on the Board of Directors of the American Federation of Aging Research (AFAR) and the Development Sponsor of AGE REVERSAL XPRIZE global competition designed to cure aging. Sergey is also a Top-100 Longevity Leader, who is transforming the world, one workplace at a time, with Longevity@Work – the first non-profit corporate longevity program of its kind.

Sergey Young discusses his Longevity Investment Fund, dedicated to the advancement of anti-aging and longevity research. As written in his latest book Growing Young, He lays out five buckets of behavior that contribute to living a longer and healthier life and predicts where the biggest healthcare transformations will come from. While longevity technology is rapidly advancing, Young stresses the importance of addressing ethical issues like inequality and humans’ impact on the planet if people are going to live longer.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

MODERATOR

SPEAKER

Sergey Young.jpeg

Sergey Young

Founder

Longevity Vision Fund

HOOKE3647.width-250.jpg

Dr. Dina Radenkovic

Partner

SALT Bio Fund

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Intro

03:40 - Longevity Vision Fund

20:19 - Longevity practices- five buckets

29:17 - Health data sharing and innovation

35:57 - Ethical considerations around longevity

49:45 - Building awareness and education around longevity

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone and welcome back to SALT talks. My name is John Darsie, I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conferences, which we're excited to resume here in the fall of 2021, in our home city of New York. But that's to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.

John Darsie: (00:45)
And we're very excited to bring you the latest in our series of conversations about healthcare and biotechnology with the great Sergey Young. Sergey is a longevity investor and visionary, with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of one billion people. To do that, Sergey founded the Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension, technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all. Now Sergey is on the board of directors of the American Federation of Aging and Research, and the development sponsor of Age Reversal XPRIZE global foundation competition designed to cure aging. Sergey is also a top 100 longevity leader who is transforming the world one workplace at a time with longevity at work, which is the first nonprofit corporate longevity program of its kind.

John Darsie: (01:35)
Sergey has been featured as a top longevity expert and contributor on CNN, Fox News, and Forbes. He's the author of several books, including most recently The Science and Technology of Growing Young, a fantastic read that we would highly recommend that you pick up if you're interested in the subject matter. He's also the mastermind behind the online life extension platform sergeyyoung.com. Now Sergey is passionate about sharing news from the exciting world of longevity, and definitely a premier thought leader in that space. Hosting today's talk to somebody who also knows a lot about longevity research, that's Dr. Dina Radenkovic, who's a partner at the SALT Fund, which recently raised a fund to invest in early stage programmable biology companies, which we're very excited to launch. Dr. Dina, thank you so much for joining us. I'll let you take it from here.

Dina Radenkovic: (02:26)
Thank you John, and Sergey excited to have you on our SALT talks.

Sergey Young: (02:30)
Hi John, hi Dina, hi everyone, I'm very excited to be here with you today.

Dina Radenkovic: (02:36)
Well, I mean, congratulations on the new book, it's a big achievement, and it managed to cover quite a lot in this field of longevity. When is it coming out? Tell us a bit more about that.

Sergey Young: (02:46)
Yeah it was a lot of fun, at least for the last three years. It's going to be published in August 24th, and we are already number one in three categories on Amazon, longevity, aging and preventive medicine. So I'm very proud even one month before the book launch.

Dina Radenkovic: (03:03)
And well we hope that success has its own longevity, and that it maintains post the book launch as well, we have no doubts about that. So, could you maybe tell us a bit more about your book in the project? We've seen, I guess, a bit increased interest in the field and several textbooks, including for example, David Sinclair's book, have tried to explain perhaps the science behind it. Certain books like the one from Peter Diamandis, trying to focus on the new technologies that will enable the science to be delivered. Where would you rate your book? Could you give us a bit more of a flavor while we wait to get the hard copy?

Sergey Young: (03:40)
Yeah. So Longevity Vision Fund is one of the few longevity focused funds in the world. And at certain point in time, we were like the largest font in the world which is 100% focus on longevity. This is not to say how great we are, this is to say that the space and a field of longevity is just right in the beginning of its growth. And, through my work in the fund, we're looking at 200 different companies a year, which are in the field of science and technology of living longer, and then the digital health. And I thought, this is what I can share with the world. We have a lot of books with scientific background, more kind of scientific view, but not a lot of books which talk about different technologies, which going to transform our ability and give us more optionality in terms of our lifespan and health span.

Dina Radenkovic: (04:41)
Fascinating. So it's basically like a massive overview for everyone who's interested in this field of longevity and to see what's coming up. And you mentioned your fund, and obviously we want to focus on the new content of the book but, you were one of the visionaries and you definitely had the temerity to go into this field of aging, which is evolving, and it's attracting more people, and it's proving its value. But can you tell us a bit more about raising and setting up that fund? You were one of the first people to set up 100 million funds solely focused on longevity and, how did you define the investments? What was your experience there of setting up a solely longevity focus fund, and putting it in the name as well?

Sergey Young: (05:22)
Yeah. So it's been pretty difficult road. Well the good news, I've been investing for last 20 years. So in fact, I have so many full time jobs, including the job of being loving husband and father of four kids, similar to some of us on this call. And so obviously it's all went through the experience, the outcome, and the failures, and successes that I've made through my private equity investment history. So right now I'm managing multi billion dollar private equity portfolio. So in a way, it was easy. But, what was difficult is to realize that longevity is an investment tail, it's so immature, it's almost like an orphan for huge institutions.

Sergey Young: (06:11)
And having said that, I thought if I want to support the space, if I want to give a kind of help to entrepreneurs and a scientist who's going to bring in more solutions for us to be healthy in this world, I'll just set up like a small fund, rather than reading news and books, I just wanted to write my own book in terms of investments metaphorically speaking. So I thought, I'll just set up $50 million fund. So then I met one of my investors, so I raised 50 million in the first five minutes. And I'm insecure overachiever, I couldn't really appreciate something which has been given to me like in five minutes, and I think it sounds very familiar to some of our audience, so I immediately raised the bar.

Sergey Young: (07:03)
I said, okay, it shouldn't be like 50 million because it was too easy, I'll raise 100 million. And it was amazing. Again, I've been doing investments for last 20 years. But like ... so we invested in LVF One, we invested in 16 companies. Our average holding period today is 2.5 years, and we already have four out of 16 companies public, and another three will be public by the end of this year, by the end of 2021. This was the fastest transformation from private to public I've ever seen in any of my portfolio. So that's been amazing. What else? We quickly realized that because longevity is such an unknown theme for the world, regulators, investors, portfolio companies, so we adopted the approach then we took intentionally broad definition of longevity, so our definition is like, whatever increase the average lifespan and health span on earth is longevity for us.

Sergey Young: (08:12)
So we invested in a lot of proper biotech place, but with only one additional side effect, they all need to contribute to healthy and happy living on the planet. And, again, since my mission is to change one billion lives, and some people ask me, "Sergey, why it's only one billion?" And what I've done is, we are focusing on affordable and accessible version of health care and longevity, so this is one of the investment criteria that we use, this technology, this intervention, this scientific discovery needs to have a profound effect in terms of affordability and give an opportunity for at least millions of people to benefit from that initial term.

Dina Radenkovic: (09:08)
Fascinating. And I mean, we both agree that longevity is a great space to build and invest and support companies. And I think you've proven it with the success in your portfolio so we can talk a little bit about that. But let's take a step back. How was it in the beginning? I remember once we met, I think it was in London about two years ago, you told me that, "Oh I caught the longevity virus." How is it switching and telling all these people? "Oh, I'm no longer just going to manage private equity, I want to set up a longevity fund." And what made you catch the longevity virus, or get interested and so excited about the field?

Sergey Young: (09:42)
Yeah. Well unfortunately I would say, we all start to develop interest into healthy living once we hit our own barrier, our own obstacle, we receive a wake up call. So I had two and they both on the personal side. The lung cancer case with my father back in 2005, he survived, but the quality of his life is never recovered. Or, I had, well back in 2014, I had my own health case. So I had high cholesterol in my blood. This is not rare, like 40, statistically actually, 40% of the people suffer from that around the world. But I've been offered to take study in this special class of drugs every day until the rest of my life, and I was not a big fan of this idea.

Sergey Young: (10:35)
So I started to experiment how I can achieve the same result, improve my health without necessarily taking medication every day. And that's it. And then the final thing, I started to push a lot of my friends and people who I know to do medical checkups, few of them discovered early stage cancer, and these days, unlike 20 years ago when cancer was kiss of death, your recovery rates, if you do a really early diagnostic of cancer can be as high as 95, even 100%, depending on the cancer type. So they all call me up and say, "Sergey, you saved my life, literally, thanks for pushing me to do this checkup, I owe you." And once you receive a few of calls like this, you're on the hook. You know I mean, you're just like, I have a bigger mission in life, I can change so many lives, and this is how this whole thing started.

Dina Radenkovic: (11:36)
Fascinating. Yeah, it's true with the new diagnostics, and you actually touched upon that in your book is that almost every cancer can be curable if discovered early enough. Okay, and then I guess, moving forward, you set up the fund, it was 100 million fund, and now we understand why it was that number and how you structure your investment. And you mentioned you already had 16 investments, a lot of them have done extremely well, I think the field has done a lot better than a lot of the skeptics thought initially. Could you tell us a bit more, you mentioned that it was obviously a very early field. And how do you pick your investments, you went for some really successful biotech firms. Tell us a bit more about that. You mentioned they all need to have a side effect to extend life expectancy, how do you assess that?

Dina Radenkovic: (12:24)
Because a lot of the companies that are get incorporated in longevity, almost feel like they need to mask as an oncology, like cancer company or a more traditional biotech because of all the implications that we have in the field of longevity. FDA does not recognize aging as a disease, they don't want to mention ... position themselves as to focus. The field is just getting moving. So. how are you picking, I guess, kind of being a pioneer and a very early stage fund with an extremely successful track record?

Sergey Young: (12:57)
Yeah. So what we've done, I mean, all you need to do is just look at statistics like, what are the reasons for death for the age 50 plus? And four killer monster diseases which are responsible for 90% of deaths after age of 50 are cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases. And the last one is actually breaking you. We still don't know what we don't know about dementia and scammers, et cetera. But for the rest of, for like three out of four, we have really good knowledge of like, what are the mechanism and root cause of these diseases and how we can treat them? So again, I mean just looking at the typical biotech or medical devices company, and you put it in a context of current mortality statistics, and exactly ... because, what is available to us today is, and a whole life extension strategy for the world in the last 100 years was eliminating early death.

Sergey Young: (14:09)
That's why if we look at this statistic, the life expectancy, lifespan, average lifespan on earth increased by two times. Somewhere from 40 to like 75 in the last 100 years. And this is not that we started to live longer, it was more about we were eliminating early death. Specifically like infant death or some other earlier stages of our life. But the maximum lifespan on earth was always the same. It was somewhere around 120 years, it is actually 122 thanks to this beautiful French woman who died 20 years ago. But, so what we doing is like 30% of our capital is invested into something which is relevant right now, like early diagnostic of cancer, or affordable medical diagnostic devices, or wearables.

Sergey Young: (15:12)
This is companies like Freenome, who have portfolio of cancers and use our blood tests to identify risk of colon cancer. This is super important because, in today's world to identify whether you have colon cancer risk or not, you need to do colonoscopy, and it's invasive, it's expensive, people hate that. I was delayed in my procedure for like two years, and I'm longevity enthusiast. So right now it's just, a few $100 and your blood sample and it's the same efficiency like the old invasive procedure. Or, affordable and accessible ultrasound devices. They're the size of our smartphone, the company called Echo Imaging that we invested in. This device costs like $2,000 while ultrasound device in the hospital next door is somewhere around between 100 and $200,000.

Sergey Young: (16:11)
It has the same efficiency, you scan, the holds a number of scans going to cloud, and then it's artificial intelligence pre analyze that before nurse or doctor can have access to the outcome of your ultrasound. So this is like 30% of our fund, like what we can do today. And 70% our fund is dedicated to what I call in the book neo horizon of longevity. This is the discoveries in science and breakthroughs in technology, which going to be available to us in the next five, 10, 15 years. So that's very important actually, to stay healthy now, because you need to stay on longevity breech, like Ray Kurzweil told us, for another 10, 15 years for your body and mind to be worth extending this resource in 10 years from now.

Sergey Young: (17:01)
But if you look at neo horizon of longevity, we're looking at genetic engine therapy. We're looking at regenerative medicine, in particular to organ regeneration, we all will have an ability to regenerate our organs, or to replace our organs if you want to imply here like an old car metaphor when you can replace certain parts and the life ... and the car extend its lifespan if you want. And some of this is in the field of drug discovery and drug development. I do believe that in 10 years from now, we're going to have a new special kind of drugs, which are longevity drugs or age reversal drugs, they're going to fight aging processes inside our body or in our DNA, unlike drugs that we have today which are very specific to one particular disease.

Sergey Young: (17:56)
So we trying to diversify portfolio like LVF One will have at least 20 to 25 companies in our portfolio, we right in the end of our investment period, just another 12 month remain. And literally this week, we just closed the first 100 million for LVF Two. We have a lot of interest from our LPs, from a lot of new investors so we raising the next fund, and we already completed the first call for that. So we have another 12 months to raise another 100 million for LVF Two as well. And probably final comment that, it's very tempting to look for one silver bullet solution to human health and longevity. And if you use your logic, if this would be possible, then it's either Mother Nature in the form of evolution or, talented human brains in form of science would have found a solution already.

Sergey Young: (19:00)
So it's not a silver bullet, it's going to be combination of the things that we need to influence to live longer, healthier and happier life. Well that's why a certain degree of diversification inside our portfolio in terms of technologies, geographies, different classes, is helpful.

Dina Radenkovic: (19:18)
Fascinating. Well, I'm a medical doctor by background and I certainly believe that health is very complex, and that it can ... I often get asked like, "What is going to be the single pill that's going to help us live longer, happy to 200 years?" And I tell them well, it might be a bit more complex. But you've touched upon so many things. First, congratulations on the fund and we're very happy that it's going well, your work really means a lot in the field. But you mentioned so many topics that we could just go and dive deeper. One of the first things you mentioned is this advanced diagnostics. And I think before we go and talk about the new test and the diagnostic kits, I think everyone is interested to see what did you do?

Dina Radenkovic: (20:04)
You mentioned that you were deferring your colonoscopy, you're a pioneer in this space, you're an advocate. And so, what is your longevity plan? What tests do you do? How do you optimize your own health?

Sergey Young: (20:17)
So, I'll tell you about five, our five main longevity choices. Like longevity which I put in, I call it five longevity buckets. But there's more information in the book, it's called bonus chapter, who wants to live forever quoting Freddie Mercury song, but it's about 10 things that I do, and actually the last, the bonus chapter is twice as long as any other chapter in the book. So it's just a lot of information. And this is the fascinating thing, this is why I started to do longevity and longevity investments, exactly for this moment when people try to change something now, rather than waiting for 10 years to become a healthy and happy version of themselves.

Sergey Young: (21:03)
So five buckets. One, when I have 30 seconds on longevity, I just push people to do their medical checkups every year. And I always say, this is the most important day of your life every year, as we discuss previous discussion, my wife has a little bit different view of what is the most important day within the year. But, otherwise, I'm doing my checkup every year, so I choose the place in California in San Diego, it's a human longevity center set up by Peter Diamandis, Craig Venter, so many great minds, but you can do a checkup in the hospital next door. It's not rocket science. And it's pretty standard procedure, just make sure they address to the maximum extent possible cancer, heart disease, diabetes risk. So that's your brief, this is the type of discussion you need to have with your doctor.

Sergey Young: (21:59)
And, well that's amazing, we have a lot of technology to help you to live longer, we just need to be mindful and preventive and proactive about your health race. So that's one, second piece is, I call it passive longevity award, don't do stupid things like tobacco smoking is just like, statistically, minus 10 years from your lifespan. Using seat belts in all occasions is plus two years to your life. What else? I just got a letter from my very good friend from California, she's amazing woman, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur. So she's going to climb the mountain called K2. And this is the most dangerous mountain in the world, mortality rate is 25%.

Sergey Young: (22:47)
And I couldn't really explain that, right? Like Russian Roulette 100 or 200 years ago was six, sorry, 17% risk of dying from the first shot. But she took a risk which is much harder than this crazy exercise. So it is about responsible behavior. So the third piece is about diet. And, there's a lot of disagreement in the academic space, what actually extends your life, but there's only one agreement, reducing the caloric intensity of, or like a number of calories that you take every day by 15 to 25%, going to extend the healthy portion of your life by three, five or seven years. That's it. Well that's amazing. I mean obviously it's easier to say than to do, so my life hacks, I eat a lot of vegetables because even if I have a half of my table full of vegetables here today for the dinner, they so intense in terms of calories, so this is great.

Sergey Young: (23:56)
And it's not a lot of harm you can do to your body and mind with vegetables. And obviously it's about controlling the quality of your meat and fish. And I'm avoiding industrial version of meat and fish, it's going to be a wild fish or organic meats, so this is extremely important. Industrial meat got certain substances that you want to avoid after like certain concentration like antibiotics, growth hormones, equally bacterias. I think it was statistics for US when 70% of antibiotics is consumed by animal and by fish on the farms. Well that's ridiculous. And I do fasting, but I do a very radical version of fasting, it's 36 hours, Monday evening to Wednesday morning.

Sergey Young: (24:46)
You don't need to go that far, but just a window fasting, like consume all your food within the day, within the like six hours interval or eight hours interval, I think would do fine as well. So that's like bucket number three, diet. Four is about physical activity. We have this binary mentality or physical activity so I'm either doing like iron man or iron woman, or I'm just sitting in my home and watching football. And we don't need to be that binary. Just use your wearable, whether it's Apple Watch, Fitbit, Whoop, Garmin, it doesn't matter. Count your 10,000 steps today, because you can integrate walking into the to many activities that you do, and that's it. This is like two thirds of your physical activity agenda for the day. And on top of that, if you like yoga, you can add stretching, you can add cardio, weightlifting, whatever you like.

Sergey Young: (25:46)
And the fifth is, I call it peace of mind. And every time we talk about health, we talk about physical health. While I think the mental aspect of that is sometimes much more important. I don't want to live longer or not if I'm not healthy and if I'm not happy. So it's sleep, and my rule is eight hours in the bed, which is seven hours of sleep, and I use wearing, some of the wearables. I have plenty of wearables. Like I have glucose monitor here, all of this. I'm recreating internet of body, similar to Internet of Things and I'm an example of that. So sleep, meditation and mindfulness, because we need to decrease the level of cortisol in our blood, our body and mind were never created by the God and Mother Nature to handle all the stress that we have around us so we need just to be decreasing the cortisol, dangerous stress hormone in blood.

Sergey Young: (26:52)
And then finally, it's about sense of purpose. If you think about spiritual leaders and people who have a big mission, or a big dream in life, they always look younger, they live longer, they're more happier, so even statistically they're going to live plus five, plus seven years and they're going to enjoy the life. So it's having sense of purpose, sharing the best of you with the world, helping other people to succeed, and giving more than you take is important as well. So that's my five longevity buckets.

Dina Radenkovic: (27:28)
Wow, fascinating Sergey. Well I'm glad that you, I mean, you definitely have this big mission so it's helping one billion people live longer. And it's really exciting to people now who have that all in this big, last chapter of the book so they can find and make their own longevity practices. Certainly agree that with this kind of five buckets or however you structure it, people will live long enough in order to live longer, to wait for the new therapies, which are the ones that we've discussed like gene therapy, and epigenetic changes, and other anti aging interventions that are coming up. But I guess the one thing that might be interesting to this class, and I think you mentioned it in your book, and it's still a bit of a controversial issue, is the data that is collected by the wearables, and the data that is collected by diagnostics.

Dina Radenkovic: (28:17)
And as we convince people to switch from a reactive to proactive medicine that, their day of medical testing is the most important day and the happiest day of their life, because they're doing something very useful for themselves, we're collecting data. We both have a continuous glucose monitor on right now, we can compare our blood sugar, see how you're responding even to this conversation. But you mentioned an interesting concept that, health or data privacy will have a fight and health will win. What are the implications of this data collection? And how do we maximize the use of that data without breaking the barriers that people have about just confidentiality of their healthcare data that has, to be honest, a bit prevented organizations from all over the world from collaborating, working with each other in sharing insights?

Sergey Young: (29:16)
Yeah. Well this is a huge problem, and this is the biggest opportunity that we have in terms of changing the regulation so people are not afraid to share their health data. Because what drives your skepticism about this is the sense and fear of expected inequality when you have any kind of job conversation, or you you're trying to buy insurance. Well, that's it, this can be easy to regulated. But obviously the value of health data stored in one place, and where artificial intelligence and human intelligence can work with that, is enormous. And for some of the countries it's going to be a source of competitive advantage.

Sergey Young: (29:59)
Well, this was one of my key messages in UK Parliament. UK had this enormous opportunity to leverage the data of its citizen, obviously in a way which respect their privacy for the benefit of the nation, and the benefit of humanity. And the same thing is happening in Dubai, in Singapore, not necessarily in the US. Well, the problem is US, and I say it with a lot of love, right? US has the most inefficient and most expensive health care system in the world. We in US spend 18% of our GDP on health care. Think about UK, it's 8%, or Singapore, this is 5% of GDP. And they have far better results in terms of increasing lifespan. In fact pre COVID. Last five years pre COVID in US, the average lifespan has been decreasing in three years out of five.

Sergey Young: (30:58)
Well that's ridiculous for a developed country of this size, and the level of this success and the history. So we need to change this as well. And again, we don't need to be binary about this whole thing. And right now we really binary like, health data in hands of big tech or healthcare authorities, no. But you know what's on the other extreme? Right now, in some of the healthcare systems, 60 to 70% of data exchange is done through fax machines. Guys, when was the last time you actually seen fax machine? Are you okay with your data, your health data is transferred through faxes?

Dina Radenkovic: (31:43)
Yeah.

Sergey Young: (31:43)
No, I'm not we just under leveraged this whole thing. Like, when was the last time you was trying to collect all your health file to have intelligent discussion with your doctor? You would need to come back to any cleaning and every doctor you see, and I'm trying to make a paper copy. I have these two big files in my offices because I still don't have one electronic health record, which collects my health data even for the last 10 years. So I'm not saying we need to be really radical and transparent about this whole thing but, what I'm saying, we don't need to be so old style about exchanging the health data through fax machines.

Dina Radenkovic: (32:27)
Yeah, fascinating. I mean there's certainly a lot of implications there but I absolutely believe that we could derive so much from the data, and if we could show and demonstrate to people that their health and their lives would improve, they would give the data away for an improved service and in care facility.

Sergey Young: (32:45)
Yeah, just one other comment. So when you think about healthcare today, what are the kind of players that comes to your mind? It's hospitals, insurance companies, big Pharma as well. In 10 years time, I do believe that the largest healthcare companies on earth are going to be called Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. If we will not do this through regulatory means, just by changing our policies and educating the public, and changing healthcare system, change will not come from old players doing new things, change will come from new players, disrupting the whole old system. Well that's why Apple is, and there's so many big tech companies, over investing in healthcare. Just, I think it was last year Morgan Stanley did a report saying, "Apple can do up to 50% of its revenue by the end of this decade from healthcare."

Sergey Young: (33:40)
And watch out Apple, they have a history of disrupting so many spaces, so the same change can come from Apple. And Apple Watch and so many other wearables are becoming our personalized healthcare device. It's not helping me to integrate with my WhatsApp, or count 10,000 steps a day, they would add couple of features in the next two years, and this is going to be 95% of my health data that I need to monitor every day. That's amazing opportunity but also, I would like for us to use this opportunity to the set of changes on the regulatory front, and in terms of changing the public ethics and social contracts for the benefit of everyone, rather than outsourcing this whole thing to Apple, or to Google, or to Microsoft, and then obviously enjoying this whole thing, but paying a lot of money to the big tech.

Dina Radenkovic: (34:44)
Yeah. And I think there's certainly space for new companies in this field, there's healthcare-

Sergey Young: (34:48)
Oh yeah.

Dina Radenkovic: (34:49)
... from consumerism, from paternalism, they can drive, and I think both the work we do on the investing side is really designed to support new companies disrupting the space. But I fully agree that, with the new connected devices we'll be able to do a lot more. And I like your, I mean people say futuristic, but I would like to say it's realistic, evidence based approach of the healthcare at home in the future. Perhaps you could give us a bit of an overview. I had a similar dream and people say it's science fiction, but I'm saying it's reality very soon that, you would wake up and you would have your medical devices in your home, and you would figure out what's the exact dose of vitamins and nutrients you need to take in the day. And then you're sleep monitored and you've already mentioned some of the few devices that you have, but they're advancing.

Dina Radenkovic: (35:43)
So, hopefully in a few years, you don't even need to go to the hospital, only for acute emergencies. So, I think there's a lot to do about that. And I think you actually talk about it in the book as well, and in a very illustrative way.

Sergey Young: (35:57)
It is yeah. So I have two chapters in the end, right before the bonus chapter, like what you can do today. For me this is the most important part of the book. But, so one describes our day in 30 to 50 years from now, so I'm going to define it. But the other chapter, the final chapter of the book is also important, it's called morality of immortality. There's so many ethical trade offs that we need to solve before we embrace the idea of radical longevity in this world. It's almost like, I just did a TEDx talk on that, again, it's called morality of immortality.

Sergey Young: (36:30)
And what I say, we have created the science and technology to extend our life, but we still haven't created the life that we want to extend. So that's important. So I'm going to be telling you all these beautiful things about human avatars in a minute, but we need to understand that, we need to start the global conversation about the future of the world, how we need to change that, in terms of closing the inequality gap, in terms of adjusting our social norms and social contracts like marriage, career, our approach to life. Or in terms of just resetting our relationship with Mother Nature. Right now, I mean you think you'll leave like 75 or 85 years, you can be irresponsible about your ecological trade offs.

Sergey Young: (37:23)
But in the future, when we all live radically longer, we're going to face the consequences of our own actions. So we need to sort it out today. Well, this was the ethical side, and I actually do believe, in 20 years from now, the biggest obstacles to use all these beautiful technologies, it's not going to be science, it's not going to be technology, it's going to be ethics and regulation. So, this is about the ethical side of it. So then, well let's take a look at the next 20 to 30 years. So how the world of medicine in our life will change. Number one, we will have a proven ability and very safe tools to modify our genes.

Sergey Young: (38:04)
So we can eliminate a lot of diseases, we can fight a lot of diseases and therefore increase our lifespan. So that's pretty clear. We're going to help people who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases to leave their highest quality life, because of the integration between human brain and artificial intelligence. And we people, we tend to be binary, it's either black or white, one or zero, so I don't think it's going to be either artificial intelligence or human intelligence, we're going to coexist, and it's all going to be very complimentary. So human brain, AI integration going to be essential part of it. We were looking at different non invasive interfaces but, seems to me that Elon Musk has his own way of building Neuralink and using actually invasive technology of electrodes to combine you with computer power.

Sergey Young: (38:59)
And this is not the last time that he was right and I was wrong, so I'm not make a prediction on what technology will win. So what else? We're going to be having options of using human avatars technologies, and actually my resolution for next year is to create the virtual avatar of Sergey Young. Because I want to change one billion lives so I need more guys like me participating in a conference, co-hosting ask me anything events, doing a lot of different things. And in 20 to 30 years from now, it's going to be okay to have a human avatar. I still don't know whether it's going to be a robotic avatar, and I actually interviewed the man who invented this whole concept back in 1980, he is Professor Susumu Tachi from Kyoto University.

Sergey Young: (39:55)
And she still call it telexistence, but we call it human avatars. So it's either going to be robotic on virtual avatar, and it's not going to be that scary, you will have an opportunity to replicate yourself in a virtual world in a controlled manner, and therefore leveraging up your efficiency, and fulfill more dreams and fulfill your mission in life. Similar to the concept of Internet of Things, it's going to be the concept of internet of bodies, we all going to be interconnected. We interconnected today anyway, but through very inefficient interfaces. So I'm using my eyes, my fingers to type the messages, my ears to listen but, it's all going to be seamless, we're going to be full of sensors.

Sergey Young: (40:45)
I'm full of sensors today anyway. But like, for the rest of the world, we can monitor ourselves. If I'm taking enormous care about my own car, I should take the same level of care, use a lot of sensors and technology to manage my most important tool, right, my body and my mind. So this is what going to happen. And we're going to have a completely new category of drugs in 20 to 30 years from now, which going to be drugs, which tackle aging at its core, rather than just trying to eliminate disease one by one. So that's just the view of the future, the picture of the future that I have. But guys you need to be careful, I'm always over optimistic, do we need to have a little bit of skeptical voices around this as well. So I'm totally aware of that.

Dina Radenkovic: (41:42)
Wow Sergey, well, again, so many points, I just want to say first that, we are really excited to be the first people to interview your avatar here at SALT so book us in straightaway, I want to be one of the first people doing that. But for sure, and I think what you mentioned is a really important topic. And Eric Topol was discussing it in his book, Deep Medicine about two years ago that actually, technology will no longer be a limiting step, but it used to be. Now we're there, we're kind of using the technology to solve problems in biology. But what will be a problem will be doctors who will ... like empathy. How do we empower the human connection?

Dina Radenkovic: (42:25)
And then the one aspect that you mentioned is this morality or immortality? And often when people ask you and you say, you work in the field of longevity, people say, "But we already have climate change and there's so many disasters, and a big population for this planet, why would we want to live longer?" They think of it as a resource limited, closed concept. So when you say that you want to extend life for at least one billion people to live to 200 years, and you've written a chapter, and you have a statistical approach that will, statistically likely to give effect. How do you deal with that? And how do you ensure and, what are the other things that we need to address? Like cellular agriculture, climate change, and in what ways so that we can ensure that this growth in human health and longevity is sustainable?

Dina Radenkovic: (43:22)
The other concept that you mentioned that I would like you to elaborate on is this idea of, when you live longer, you tend to optimize for longer term goals, this kind of stems from the Stanford socioeconomic selectivity theory of aging, right? That if we know that we're going to live only for the next 10 years, we won't care about the planet, we just try to consume all the resources. But if we know that we have 100 years left, we would trying to plan more carefully. So, how do you think we can use longevity to actually drive that innovation that is needed to make it increase the lifespan more sustainable or beneficial for the planet as well? And how do you address, because I'm sure you get similar questions.

Sergey Young: (44:01)
Yeah. So, well I do believe longevity and fighting aging processes inside our body can be one of the few unifying themes for the nations and countries, and for the world. Because inequality gap is increasing all the time, and I do believe the affordable and accessible version of healthcare is something that can unite. It's almost like part of your universal basic rights, or income, or the services mix that you you need to receive. So, few things, I obviously receive these comments a lot, so I've developed my own way to respond to that. Number one, I'm not particularly concerned about overpopulation of the planet. Because if you look at any sensible research on where we going with overpopulation, our reproductive rates in all the continents, beside African are well below two for every female.

Sergey Young: (45:05)
So, if you look at the mathematical model of population of the planet, using the status quo like where we are today, the population of the planet going to increase to 10 or 11 billion by the year 2050, and then it's going to decline to eight billion in the end of the century. China will lose 600 million people from its population, if China will not address that. Going down from 1.4 billion to 800 million. And the same for majority of countries in the world. So it's not like we have an option to extend our lives, it's our obligation, and a need to respond to this risk of decreasing population of earth, so that's number one. Number two, I'm not really concerned about resources side and my very good friend Peter Diamandis is probably the best example of speaking about this topics.

Sergey Young: (46:08)
This is just like resource limitation is our limiting beliefs, and look at the cost of renewable energy, and it's just always declining, or the cost of computer power. Or, well let's talk about food. Before we go into different like a vertical agriculture, or cell based illiberal meat, 45% of food goes to waste in US every day. From our supermarkets, from our table, from our households as well, 45%. We live in a abundant world, we just not really smart about how we using these resources. So that's important as well. So I do believe, I'm not really concerned about resources, but I do concern about the ethics of the society. I just don't think we ready for the questions that we're facing. And again, life extension and increasing the lifespan, it's happening whether you want it or not, we doubled our lifespan in the last 100 years on earth.

Sergey Young: (47:17)
And this trend will continue. And then it's up to you, whether you're waiting for the next 20 to 30 years, or you thoughtful and proactive and preventive about this whole thing, and you trying to respond to a lot of basic questions that all people ask, "How my life will change?" Will it be several beautiful mini lives? Or, what will have happen to my career? Can I have as many careers as decades in my life? Or what will happen to marriage? Will we switch to more kids raising partnerships? Two thirds of the families go to divorce today in the first three, five or seven years of their life, depending on the country which you look at. So we need to solve this problems anyway, it's not like some crazy guys arrive with the magic pill to extend our life and then we have all this disaster.

Sergey Young: (48:12)
We already have this disaster, we need to sort it out and longevity technologists and the progress in the science and technology of longevity is a great opportunity to start that conversation and our thinking process on that.

Dina Radenkovic: (48:27)
Yeah I actually like your response, I like that longevity could serve as a solution, or at least a driving force to address some of the needs and the problems that we already face, and you're right there are so many problems to address and hopefully living longer and healthier and happier will serve as some engine to help us power through these issues. And I guess Sergey just to kind of wrap up, because we could talk for-

Sergey Young: (48:56)
Yeah, forever.

Dina Radenkovic: (48:56)
... 10 hours and even longer, 200 years.

Sergey Young: (49:01)
Look I'm planning [crosstalk 00:49:01] to live 200 years so I have plenty of time.

Dina Radenkovic: (49:05)
Well I'm joining your longevity club, okay, and want to hang with the avatar for sure. So what does, coming up, you mentioned you have a new ... your fund, the portfolio has been growing incredibly well, obviously the book launch is in August, can you give us a bit of an update of the things that you're working on, excited about, you're preparing for SALT New York, covering all these ideas and advances in this longevity programmable biology space. Is there anything that-

Sergey Young: (49:34)
Yeah so what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to build awareness about the opportunities in longevity field for as many people as possible. So I just launched my longevity video academy. And and for someone who pre orders the book, if you go to sergeyyoung.com, you can pre order the book and you can have access to this academy. As well as like 12 videos, 10 minutes each, talking about different aspects of longevity and this beautiful today and beautiful tomorrow that we all developing. I've just done a, as I said, TEDx talk on morality of immortality, so this is going to be published very soon. I'm fascinated by the ethical dilemmas and trade offs that we all need to solve for that. Again my resolution for the next year is to build a virtual avatar.

Sergey Young: (50:23)
We're going to be working as a couple, together like real me and virtual me for the next few months until he will absorb all my intelligence and can replace me, and I can double down in effort on my mission with this. I'm looking for the country to change in the next 12 months because, if you want to change your health you have like three options, one you can try to do it on your own basis, and we are really lazy on discipline as a species. Or you can work with corporation, or you can work with a government to change the whole employee base habits, or the whole kind of nation, and implement and create longevity enabling environment in certain corporate environment, or in certain country.

Sergey Young: (51:16)
So I'm in discussion with few countries and one state in US, to help them to implement this, well I call it longevity at work because I've done it with few huge corporations all over the world. The largest project I've done was changing 300,000 peoples life. It was employee base of one of the largest financial institutions in 20 plus countries. And again, this is all pro bono, I'm not really taking any money from it. But it's fascinating how you can create a longevity bubble for so many people, and they all have an opportunity to live longer, healthier and happier life. Obviously investing in a essential part, I love to support the field with the money, with our scientific knowledge, rather than just making the public statements.

Sergey Young: (52:13)
And I do hope that early next day we can launch a age reversal XPRIZE, this pro bono technological competition. We expecting two, three, 400 different teams from 50 plus countries to fly, like who can reverse aging. And we just done the largest XPRIZE competition in the history of XPRIZE foundation with Elon Musk for $100 million, to remove carbon from the atmosphere and create the minimum viable products. It's $100 million price for this pro bono competition. So I'm trying to replicate the success. And we're going to launch another hopefully $100 million prize early next year. So then a lot of beautiful minds from scientific and entrepreneurial and technological background can compete and provide solution for aging, and therefore fighting all this killer disease.

Dina Radenkovic: (53:07)
Well, fascinating. And I'm really excited about the XPRIZE, I'll hold you on to that because, we do want a lot of young scientists and people from all over the world using all their talent to fight aging. And we'll wait to hear the announcement, it's going to be like bitcoin in El Salvador, right? That we give this country that is incorporating aging with Sergey Young. So, exciting to hear what's coming up. Thank you for sharing all the ... everything you're up to Sergey, it's incredibly inspiring. You definitely getting 10 years of extra life there in terms of happiness and sense of purpose. You've inspired me as well, I think you've inspired everyone listening.

Dina Radenkovic: (53:49)
It's really exciting to have you. I can't wait to get the hard copy of the book. I think everyone will try to get it. I think we're also having it in our physical event as well as, and in New York coming up in September. And, thank you once again for your time today. This is brilliant.

Sergey Young: (54:06)
Thank you. Thank you. If I can have like a one minute closing thought. Think about this, we outsource our health decisions to so many parties, to big foot, to government, to healthcare providers, to insurance companies. And, I do think we need to take back control and responsibility for our own health, we need to be a part of this conversation. And specifically today, post COVID, I think it was a wake up call for all of us. So, again, it's time to take responsibility for our own health. And we are here to help you stay healthy and happy.

John Darsie: (54:45)
Love it. Thank you, Dr. Dina for leading the conversation. Thank you Sergey for joining us on SALT talks. And thank you everybody for tuning into today's SALT talk with Sergey Young, one of the foremost experts in longevity. He has a great new book coming out that we're excited to give out to our attendees at the SALT conference in September. It's called The Science and Technology of Growing Young. So just another incentive for you to show up to the Javits Center expansion in September here in New York. But just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk, or any of our previous SALT talks, you can access them on our website on demand at salt.org/talks.

John Darsie: (55:18)
We post all the transcripts and show notes there as well, so a great resource if you're looking to learn about a variety of different issues that we cover. And also on our YouTube channel, which is called SALT Tube. We're also on social media, Twitter is where we're most active @SALTconference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook as well. On behalf of Dr. Dina and the entire SALT team, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.

Nina Burleigh: Anti-Expertise America | SALT Talks #231

“We now have vaccines that protect children from diseases that used to wipe out or cause traumatic illness… We’re spoiled. We don’t actually know what’s on the other side of this shield modern medical science has created.”

Nina Burleigh is a best-selling author, journalist and lecturer. Her latest book, “VIRUS: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic”, is a brisk, real-life thriller that delves into the malfeasance behind the American pandemic chaos, and the triumph of science in an era of conspiracy theories and contempt for experts.

Nina Burleigh explains why vaccine hesitancy has been caused in part by a lack of Republican leadership with many in the party enabling or propagating misinformation around the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. She details some of the mistakes made by the Trump administration during its COVID response and how it resulted in unnecessarily high death counts. Burleigh notes the game-changing nature of the mRNA vaccines, the first widely experienced example of this breakthrough biotechnology. Despite many of the major errors, she acknowledges the difficulty governments face in striking a balance around lockdown measures.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Headshot+-+Woo,+Willy+-+Cropped.jpeg

Nina Burleigh

Author

VIRUS

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - Intro and background

5:53 - Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation

15:50 - Trump administration’s COVID response

25:38 - Evaluating the WHO

31:28 - mRNA technology

35:05 - Misinformation echo chambers

37:42 - Finding balance in a government response

41:41 - Continuing COVID impact

TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie, I'm the Managing Director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. Our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conferences, which we're excited to resume in September of 2021, here in our home city of New York for the first time, but that goal is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.

John Darsie: (00:45)
We're very excited today to welcome Nina Burleigh to SALT Talks. Nina Burleigh is a national journalist and author most recently of Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic, in addition to many other best-selling books. That's her most recent book obviously, which is highly relevant today. She's most recently covered America under Donald Trump as a National Politics Correspondent at Newsweek, she got her start in journalism covering the Illinois State House in Springfield, and has reported from almost every state in the continental US, and has been based in Italy, France, and the Middle East.

John Darsie: (01:22)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci who is the Founder and Managing at SkyBridge Capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. With that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:31)
Well, Nina, first of all, congratulations on the book. I'm going to hold it up here, I like holding up the book of my friends. Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic. Which is obviously one of the tragedies of our time. Book is fascinating, it's a quick read, but you really go into all of the things that we did wrong.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:57)
So, before we get there though, tell us a little more about your background. You're talking to us from your friend's kitchen in beautiful Michigan, you're from Michigan, right? Tell us where you're from and tell us how you grew up.

Nina Burleigh: (02:11)
Well, first of all, I have to correct our millennial on the pronunciation of my name, it's Burleigh like a football player, not Burleigh.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:20)
Good, good, I love the fact that you corrected him, okay, -

Nina Burleigh: (02:24)
Thank you.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:24)
... because let me tell you something, he gets fan mail and I don't get any fan mail. So I just have to tell you, I'm very happy that [crosstalk 00:02:29].

John Darsie: (02:29)
I split the difference, I started Burleigh, and I said, maybe it's Burleigh.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:33)
By the way-

Nina Burleigh: (02:33)
I noticed you did that.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:33)
... on all of these names, [inaudible 00:02:37] and he's always pronouncing it perfectly and I'm stumbling over myself. So I'm very joyous right now. Continue, Nina, please.

Nina Burleigh: (02:47)
Yeah, so okay, so it's Nina Burleigh, I am a Midwestern, born and bred. I grew up in, as Anthony said, spent lots of my childhood here at Southern Michigan. Played a lot in the woods and just learned to swim here and learned to hang out at the library because there was nothing to do. So it started me off on my writing career, I have strong roots here.

Nina Burleigh: (03:18)
In the Midwest, I got started in journalism as you said, at the Associated Press in Springfield, Illinois, when state capitals still had state houses filled with press rooms with lots of media. Especially Springfield being one of the big states like Albany, tons of corruption, lots of competing interests, and they're microcosms of what's going on in Washington. So I really got a strong grounding and I think covering and understanding the issues of our time as they were developing.

Nina Burleigh: (03:54)
I go all the way back to the Reagan years, and in my view, that period really was the turning point for a lot of things in our country, including how labor was treating, the unions started to go down, and this growing disrespect for expertise, especially scientific knowledge, by the industries because industry of course wanted to make sure that let's say if you were RJ Reynolds, that there would be competing voices against the notion that tobacco and cigarettes cause cancer. Then of course after that, you get to the climate change era which we're in now, in which companies like Exxon have bankrolled these contrarian scientists who will speak up for the 3% of the scientific community that thinks that climate change is not happening and it's not caused by fossil fuels.

Nina Burleigh: (05:01)
So this is stuff that's been in my purview, is covering politics over the last couple decades. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. I could talk on at length about my career, but let's... whatever you want to discuss, Anthony, I'm game.

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:21)
All right, well let's go right to the book, then. Okay, the book, Virus, it's a brilliant story of the science of the virus and the history of vaccines and treatments. You and I know each other, you were on Mooch FM with me and we were talking about the phenomenon in the last 150 years as a result of vaccines. We've extended our lifespan, we're living healthier, and people are taking this for granted. Why do you think 25% of the adult population are vaccine deniers?

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:53)
By the way, my wife gets very mad at me, I might add, because some of her friends are actually college educated and will not take the vaccine. I look at them like they're imbeciles, and she gets very mad at me, but go ahead, I'm sorry. [crosstalk 00:06:06].

Nina Burleigh: (06:06)
Well, you know what? But that observation is very important, what you just said, because when we think of science deniers, we think of [inaudible 00:06:18] and people who didn't get very... they're low information, voters or people who will believe conspiracy theories over science, and so on, and we tend to think that they may be aren't as educated. In fact, that 25%, Anthony, a significant percentage of it, maybe not the majority, but a percentage of it certainly is among the educated. I call them the granola crunchy educated people. I've got friends in my circle like that too, where they won't say they aren't taking the vaccine because they know it's not cool, but you can tell where they're at because they won't say anything when you're talking about the vaccine. They go silent, look a little sheepish. Those are the people who believe that chemistry or chemical, manmade things are not as healthy as natural things.

Nina Burleigh: (07:14)
The answer to that, and for my book, I interviewed people who are in this world of medicine and the culture of science and society, the answer is, look, everything you eat is made of chemistry and chemicals. Bananas are chemical, and so and everything has genetic material in it. So that's the answer to them. You don't have to be chemo phobic to look at the world. So that's one segment of it. Maybe not the largest group, but it is a significant percentage.

Nina Burleigh: (07:48)
The other are low information, low information populations. Again, the low information population's in the white communities in the South, let's say, and some urban areas, black and Latino. There are very low vaccination rates among blacks and Latinos, and I think in New York still unfortunately.

Nina Burleigh: (08:12)
Then overall of this, the big umbrella is that you have or had a leader and have leaders still in political elected leaders in the House and the Senate. Of course, the former guy, I'm talking about who's not a leader. He's a leader in name still, but I don't think he's much of a leader, he doesn't exercise leadership, he is defacto a leader, who persist in refusing to correct, to lead their people and to say to correct these pieces of misinformation and to say, "You know what? This is actually really good. In fact, I got it and so did my children." I'm talking about the former guy. They won't step up for science, they don't want to step up for science because part of their MO, and I guess we can talk about the whole Republican Party behaving this way at this point, is to inject doubt into the fact-based world so that you can continue to press on with a big lie like the election lie.

Nina Burleigh: (09:26)
Okay, so that, we're talking about this distrust, the scorn for expertise, that there's always been that stream in Americans. Americans are, we're DIY, we're common sense, ride off in the sunset with the horse, I can fix it myself. That's a myth, but the 2016 election, the 2015 election really brought into the light this world of alternative information that people were living by, and literally making life decisions on. I can talk about some of the people I met at the Republican National Convention in 2016 whose decision making process was based on such false information that I almost wanted to stop. I almost wanted to stop reporting and start correcting them because I was worried about them. I didn't understand where these streams of miss and disinformation were coming from.

Nina Burleigh: (10:27)
The virus descends upon America at a point in time when we have this phenomenon of disinformation, misinformation, silos of information, and this giant challenging effect that's going on everywhere, and the refusal of people to agree on a fact-based reality. My book is I think what I tried to do was memorialize what they did, how this came about, what the last administration did and didn't do. Then also to really celebrate the science, the triumph of science here in the face of all this, that we then got this manmade miracle of a vaccine that's enabled us all to walk around without masks now.

Anthony Scaramucci: (11:20)
So let's set the record straight, just you make it very clear in the book. How successful have vaccines been in the modern era?

Nina Burleigh: (11:31)
Okay, so vaccines have been... I mean, we've had vaccine... the first vaccine comes around 250 years ago and it for the smallpox. Before 250 years ago and throughout the entire history of the human species, we had no defense against infectious diseases, nothing, only luck, or you could pray to your god or you can wear garlic or you could... it was sheer luck and supernatural belief. Then this vaccine comes along 250 years ago, they start to fight off, they start to be able to defend against smallpox. Then in the next century, microscopes get invented and humans begin to be able to understand, oh, there are these tiny little things that are in the bodies of cholera victims and tuberculosis victims. Gee, maybe we can attenuate those and you use those as a way to, similar to the cowpox, smallpox vaccine, what doesn't kill you will make you immune. So they would put these dead or weakened viruses and bacterias into people, and that was the vaccine. That is essentially what the platform of the vaccine has been up until this year.

Nina Burleigh: (12:48)
Then we have the 20th century where the developments of vaccines become more and more rapid, more and more effective, and also, mass produced. First big mass vaccination program in the United States, the polio vaccination program in the '50s, which they unfortunately hit a hiccup. One of the companies made a bad batch and they actually injected live virus into kids and that is one of the streams of vaccine... that provokes one of the streams of vaccine distrust that exists to this day.

Nina Burleigh: (13:25)
The vaccine technology or vaccines have like all science, it moves forward in fits and starts. Science, it's not perfect, it is, you experiment and as the data comes in, you alter your understanding. So vaccinations throughout the 20th century are history of these leaps forward, accompanied by on the margins, side effects that were scary, or ineffective vaccines, but overall, Anthony, and this is what we talked about before on your show. Overall, they have been a massive success story. We can see that in, if you were born in 1900, your lifespan in America was 48 and 49 for men and women. It's now 80, so we've doubled our lifespan. Now, of course some of it has to do with antibiotics and the type of food we eat, but most of it, a huge percentage of it has to do with the fact that we now have these vaccines that protect children from diseases, the names of which we can't event pronounce anymore, that used to wipe out or cause traumatic illness that people would remember for a lifetime if they survived it in children. Now we don't have that.

Nina Burleigh: (14:54)
So what's happened is, we have people walking around like your friends who are like, "I don't think I need the vaccine, it's not organic enough," and my friends who are that way, but even educated people walking around going, "Eh, I think I'll decide whether I want to do this or not because it doesn't seem like such a bad..." because we're spoiled, we actually don't know what's on the other side of this shield that modern medical science has created for us.

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:20)
I want to go to the politics again for a second because you're mentioning... it's a weird thing, the former administration wants to take credit for Operation Warp Speed. The supporters of that administration want to take credit for it, yet a very large block of those supporters do not want the vaccine. So, I don't understand that at all, I can't get my arms around that. I was wondering if you could help me with that. Go ahead, Nina.

Nina Burleigh: (15:51)
So, Anthony, I'm the... sometimes we get in conversations about the supporters of the former guy and we all just start to sputter in incomprehension because there's no logic to it. There's no logic to this blind following of the leader except for accepting that people do follow leaders blindly. I guess that's what's going on here, because they have turned off the rational logical side of the brain and they're just giving into this emotional reaction to this guy whose behavior and statements, they seem to admire so much.

Nina Burleigh: (16:34)
So no, they should get some credit for Operation Warp Speed, I mean they definitely... Operation Warp Speed was, they threw billions of dollars at these pharma companies and they said, "You, you, you, and you, and you, and you," they picked six of them. No big contracts, nontransparent but hey, it was an emergency. They said, "We're going to give you the money whether it works or not. Make a lot of it, if it works, if it doesn't work, you're still going to get to keep the money. By the way, we're going to shield you from litigation. So it worked, it worked great, they made this. It is a medical milestone.

Nina Burleigh: (17:11)
Now this had been on the drawing board for about 15 years but in medicine in America, the FDA has to approve things and these clinical trials can take years. They call it the Valley of Death in the medical world. They bumped it into Warp Speed and yay, it worked. The problem was, they did that, what they weren't going to be able to distribute it widely because the ideology of the former administration that held sway in their actions was that government should be shrunk to the size of pinhead. They weakened the agencies, and that they didn't really want to activate all the levers of government. They didn't want people to see all the government can do this for you, because they preferred that it be shown that private enterprise can do the job just as well.

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:08)
So let's go to the malpractice that took place, the public policy malpractice in the... How many lives could've been saved and what were some of the big missteps at the beginning of the pandemic that you write about in the book?

Nina Burleigh: (18:22)
Sure, well okay, we know from Deborah Birx, who was one of the administration top officials in this issue, that she has this since not being in the administration, that 100,000 Americans was probably what the number should've been, in terms of how many people were going to die of this. Instead, we're closing in on 600,000. Something went wrong. What was it?

Nina Burleigh: (18:54)
I think the early missteps were as we know, the... Well, the greatest misstep, the malfeasance that lasted throughout the year was that they put public relations above public health. He liked the numbers low, I like the numbers low, remember that? What's what he said. I like the numbers low.

Anthony Scaramucci: (19:22)
He didn't want to test people, he didn't want to bring the cruise ship in off the coast of California.

Nina Burleigh: (19:27)
He said that in relation to the cruise ship.

Anthony Scaramucci: (19:28)
He didn't want to increase the numbers of people, yeah.

Nina Burleigh: (19:30)
But he did, he said it also at a... the context of that comment had to do with the, they were at the CDC and this is actually how I open my book, this incredible scene where he's standing there with the MAGA hat and he's making up these numbers like, "Well, four million tests are going to be available to people at the end of the week." There was no such thing, there were not going to be four million tests. In the same press conference, because he has Tourette's syndrome and he blurts out whatever he thinks, which is great because you can track what's going on. He said, "I like the numbers low, I don't want the sick people coming off that cruise ship out there and put them in so we'll have higher numbers of COVID." Well, COVID was already stalking the streets and rooms at homes and hospitals and nursing homes, of New York State by then, and there were no tests to stop it. So that's the number one, that was the first error and first really preventable error.

Nina Burleigh: (20:31)
Then you had the masks issue, which they can share the blame for that with the WHO and other top officials because they were early on, the doctors were not... they were worried about running out of masks themselves so they were saying don't wear masks. They didn't fully understand that this is an airborne virus and that masks really do help. So they were like, eh, don't wear them. Then [inaudible 00:20:54] changed their mind, those who were opposed to any kind of government restrictions related to this crisis seized on that as a, hey, you know what? Look, they don't know what they're talking about.

Nina Burleigh: (21:09)
Again, that's people don't understand how science works. The doctors thought that it was not airborne and that you didn't need it, and then they realized it was. Well then they told you to do it. So you either have a science person in the White House standing next to you who respects that and who can explain it, and it is easily explained, or you have somebody like a man in a red hat on TV every night going, "Look, the scientists don't really know what they're talking about. You know what? I know what's going on and by the way, I'm not going to wear one. They tell you to wear one but I don't think I'm going to wear one." That's not leadership. He was a leader but he wasn't acting as a leader.

Anthony Scaramucci: (21:50)
What do you think the big lessons were from all of this?

Nina Burleigh: (21:55)
Oh boy, well, the big lessons are hopefully that you have somebody in the White House. Look, this is the richest country in the world, we are equipped to deal with these types of things, we have experts all over. What you needed was somebody in the White House who had a scientist on speed dial who could activate what was needed, and he didn't. He puts Mike Pence, evangelical in charge of the COVID response. Birx, Redfield, Azar, the head of the HHS, these are evangelical Christians, Anthony. Not that they're not... well, Azar is a pharma exec, but the other two were actually medical people but ultimately they will call on the supernatural in the end. You needed somebody... like what they've put in there today. There's a guy that the... sorry, the science advisor to Biden is an expert in genetic science.

Nina Burleigh: (22:55)
Genetic science is the future, genetic science has in leaps and bounds in the last two decades begun to change how medicine works. This mRNA vaccine is the first widely experienced example. A fruit of all of that knowledge, but it's really hard to understand for the average person. It's like a separate language. I mean, I had a microbiology PhD student at Standard helping me with this book just to keep talking to me, doing genetics for dummies because it's really hard to understand when you start looking at it. You can visualize it, DNA, RNA, made of proteins on a strand, but it's hard to understand it. So you need somebody who really knows what it is and knows what these things are and knows how to speak in that language. Then you need somebody who respects that and says to that person, "You tell the public or you tell me what I need to tell the public. Then you tell the public what the scientists and the medical community are telling you." That's number one.

Nina Burleigh: (24:01)
Number two, what would be another lesson? I mean, to me that's the first lesson. I think the second lesson is, this has to be a global response. We're not there yet but we again, we're the first generation of human beings who carry these things around with us, every single one of us understands using this little machine we have in our pocket, that every other human being on the planet was experiencing the same thing that we were experiencing in real time. We could see that, we can see it right now, we can click on and see what's going on in India or in Africa. It's in real time, we have so much data and so much information that we can't really walk away from this moment without recognizing that we're a linked species. We are one species on this planet and if we can't have a global response to something like... This was a global catastrophe like an asteroid hitting us or like climate change. If you don't start thinking in global terms about responding to challenges like this, you're not going to get out of them. You're always going to be down in the ditch with the lowest, the weakest.

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:14)
Well, one of the problems is, as you talk about a global response, and this feeds the conspiracists, this feeds [crosstalk 00:25:23]. Normal people in the establishment can make mistakes. As an example, the WHO, the World Health Organization, this probably wasn't its shining moment. Talk a little bit about that and your assessment of it in the book.

Nina Burleigh: (25:38)
Well, you mean about the WHO or about just this-

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:42)
Yeah.

Nina Burleigh: (25:42)
... sense of-

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:43)
Yeah, it didn't cover itself [crosstalk 00:25:44].

Nina Burleigh: (25:44)
... [crosstalk 00:25:44] paranoia about global [crosstalk 00:25:47]?

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:46)
Well, there's a combination of things going on. The WHO had some missteps, they had some missteps related to China, they had some missteps related to the protocols, and then that fuels the conspiracy even though they were perhaps, let's call them honest missteps as we were trying to understand what was going on.

Nina Burleigh: (26:04)
Yeah, well I mean the UN, UNISEF, the UNHCR, the WHO, all of these global bodies represent to a certain segment of Americans who supported the former guy, this sensation of our national entity is crumbling, the walls are crumbling, we're no longer a nation, we're now part of this world government. I'm old enough to remember when they were paranoid about black helicopters flying over Wyoming that might be coming from the UN. So this stream of paranoia remains very strong and the former guy provoked it. He also attached himself to it, they immediately when they got in there, immediately started disengaging from these world bodies. They got out of a bunch of them even before the virus, they were disengaging from UNISEF and complaining about the UN taking too much money and so on.

Nina Burleigh: (27:04)
Then the WHO, here comes this crisis that is a public health crisis, it's a global pandemic, and they fail to first of all, to get this mask things straight. They're giving miss or inconclusive certain information, and they are slow to respond. I mean, the whole China thing, the government, our government thought that there was something fishy about the Wuhan lab. They had been getting information for years that the bio safety maybe wasn't particularly up to snuff from their people over there. So they immediately seized on that because you had this Sinophobic, Peter Navarro and Pompeo and these people who had been just banging these drums about the Chinese and we need to stand up to the Chinese. So they did not like the way the WHO went along with what the Chinese were saying about what was happening. To their credit, I mean the Chinese did release the genome quickly, they did admit that there was something going on in January. Was it happening there earlier? I don't know, they claim that there were some sick lab workers but we have seen no proof of that yet.

Nina Burleigh: (28:23)
The point is, the globalization of the world is inescapable, we can't... the reason this thing is a pandemic is because we are linked, everyone is on airplanes all the time, the supply chains are messed up from COVID because we are so into... there are ships sitting in ports over in, I don't know, Portugal or China or Italy that can't go anywhere because there have been people locked down. So we are completely interrelated.

Nina Burleigh: (28:56)
I get why people object to, let's say the way the Chinese government operates, the authoritarianism, the intrusiveness of their... I mean, they'd lock down and they did get rid of their pandemic in a month or two, it was back to normal because of these extreme bio surveillance measures that they instituted, which we would never put up with here. I get that, but I think that when you're faced with a pandemic or global challenges, we need leaders who will sit down with other leaders and put that kind of thing aside and go, let's move on and let's talk about what we can do together to protect ourselves. One of those thing is, let's all get together and share this vaccine. I think that Biden trying to approach the patent issue, it's weak, he's not going to get around, they're not going to get around it because there's so much money in pharma, but people have to come together and look at this.

Nina Burleigh: (29:58)
I know it sounds Pollyanna-ish and like singing Kumbaya and so on, but sooner or later, we have to admit that we are one planet, one world, and it's very small, it's very small. We can have wars all the time and we can fight over borders and so on, but these types of species-wide challenges, we need leadership that will look at that and be willing to negotiate and compromise and work together on these types of issues.

Anthony Scaramucci: (30:29)
Well, I really appreciate it, Nina. I'm going to turn it over to John who has questions from our audience and his own questions. The title of the book, Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic, it's a great read, great invested research in it. With that, I'll turn it over to John, who has now learned how to pronounce your name, Nina, which makes me very happy.

Nina Burleigh: (30:56)
[crosstalk 00:30:56].

John Darsie: (30:56)
Nina Burleigh, it's a beautiful name and I'm proud to now be able to pronounce it correctly.

Nina Burleigh: (31:01)
Thank you, John.

John Darsie: (31:03)
But you talked about mRNA vaccines and we should all be thankful for the fact that there was this intersection between research that had been taking place on mRNA vaccines for the flu vaccine, for cancer research, and the perfect application for the coronavirus pandemic. Could you talk about the future of mRNA vaccines and just the potential that they have unleashed, in terms of vaccinations and treating a wide variety of diseases?

Nina Burleigh: (31:29)
I read a lot about it. I think in the book I address it a little bit. I mean, in terms of the possibility. They're even talking about the possibility that this could deal with the common cold, but it is a milestone, it's not as much of a milestone maybe as antibiotics, but it is up there with it because it's a synthetic, manmade little strand that they inject into your system. It's transient, it doesn't change your DNA, transient means it dissolves, it goes away. All it does-

John Darsie: (32:08)
It doesn't make you grow a third arm or leg or anything.

Nina Burleigh: (32:10)
It's not going to change, it's not going to make us grow a third arm, it's not going to make your... as my friend, nutty friend Naomi Wolf is running around saying it's changing women's menstrual cycles or other people are saying it's... god, I get emails now because I had this piece in the Time, an op ed piece, if you put something in the Times, you get this tsunami of responses because that's how many people are looking at it. All the responses that weren't sent to my private email were from anti-vaccine people saying, "You don't know what you're talking about. I know that people are dying of this. There this sensation that..." well anyway, we could talk about that more, these misinformation silos, but in general, yeah, I talk about it a little bit, I read more about it.

Nina Burleigh: (32:59)
I didn't put it all in there, but yes, it's going to change because it is a completely new platform. When we say platform, we mean the previous one was a attenuated virus or a attenuated bacteria platform, to this synthetic molecule, mRNA platform that changes... that tells your cells to make a response to a very specific part of a virus or in general, they're going to be able to do this again and again and again. They're going to be able to do it with other viruses, if another pandemic comes along, if another virus or another imminent or threatening pan... threaten let's say hopefully they'll be able to stop it from becoming a pandemic because they will be able to look at these genome and in this case within three days of the Chinese sending the genome over, within the three days the NIH had this mRNA figured out. They knew what they had to put in within three days.

Nina Burleigh: (34:06)
So I can envision at some point in the future there will be factories that will be able to... you'll just be able to farm up AI, I'll just turn it on and they'll start producing these vaccines within hours. I think that that's the future, and it's exciting and amazing. We should be optimistic about it.

John Darsie: (34:25)
Yep, god willing. You talked about your piece in the Times created all this vitreal that got sent to your private email and obviously that's unfortunate, but there's also an element on the right side of this, the right wing media machine led by Fox News and other outlets that are even more extreme these days, are partly to blame for sewing doubt in the vaccines, in the pandemic in general.

Nina Burleigh: (34:50)
Absolutely.

John Darsie: (34:51)
Calling it a hoax, things like that. How much of a role does that right wing media machine and social media, frankly, and the echo chambers it creates, contribute to the circular nature of a lot of these unsubstantiated conspiracy theories?

Nina Burleigh: (35:05)
I like the way you said circular because it just made me think of circular firing squad. That's actually what they're doing because they're killing their own people who are watching and participating in this. It's a huge part of it. I mean, I don't watch Fox News, I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I turn it on now, I am just blown away because these people are... Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are not ignorant and yet they're spewing this stuff out there to millions upon millions of people who take what they're saying as fact.

Nina Burleigh: (35:43)
So one night I had the TV on and I saw Laura Ingraham just rattling on about faceless bureaucrats in Brussels telling us what to do. I'm like, what are you talking about? Where are the people in Brussels telling us what to do? People in Brussels haven't even gotten out of their lockdowns yet. This was us, we made this vaccine here in America and our government put this out there. Our governors were forced to do state-by-state responses, lockdown or not, because the federal government wouldn't step up. So we're the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

Nina Burleigh: (36:21)
All of this, yes, the social media, the echo chamber, the siloed off information or misinformation, it's dreadful. I don't know what you're going to do about Fox, I really don't, because I think Roger Ailes, I always say this. Roger Ailes was the tumor and Fox News is the cancer, that it's going to take a generation to get cured of because I don't know. I honestly don't know how they're going to get beyond this, unless the government goes back to regulating that kind of information and we don't live in that kind of society, so.

John Darsie: (37:00)
As a country, the United States has always prided itself on freedom and an extreme free ideology as you write about in the book. The pandemic exposed some of the dangers of that, on the other hand, you have more authoritarian type societies, whether it be in China or other places that maybe were able to have a better pandemic response because of the heavy handedness of the way the government operates. How do you find the balance between those two? Obviously unfettered capitalism and the extreme free ideology that you talk about probably isn't practicable when you have to deal with situations like a global pandemic, but at the same time, people don't want government so heavy handed in their lives the way it is in somewhere like China. So, how do you find a balance between those two going forward?

Nina Burleigh: (37:44)
Well, it's tough, and that's why I'm a journalist and not a policy maker. I'm not Ron Klain, I'm not Biden, obviously I'm not working for them or in that business. As I've covered them over the years, I've become more sympathetic to people who are in those situations. I used to just like to take hot shots at them and look at what they were doing wrong and now I think it's really hard, that's a really hard question.

Nina Burleigh: (38:11)
My answer would be, moderation in all things. Try to find the middle road, try to bring people back around to a fact-based reality, that's the main thing, communications. Look-

John Darsie: (38:31)
Do you think the pandemic is going to change global democracy in the United States and elsewhere where you're going to see more government intervention, more government spending to [crosstalk 00:38:40]?

Nina Burleigh: (38:40)
Well, I don't know. I think obviously that's happening here right now. I mean, the Biden Administration is responded to being the opposite of the antigovernment ideology of the former administration. Now it's, let's throw as much money at this as we can. They're going macro, they're going to throw money at infrastructure, they're throwing money at the social services and so on. We're not getting [inaudible 00:39:03] out of it, which they could've started to but they could've moved the ball on that maybe, but in this country yes, we're swinging to the other side, at least for the moment. Let's see what happens in election 2022.

Nina Burleigh: (39:18)
But I was just talking to some friends of mine, Norwegians and Swedes, and this, what's going on there? I mean, those are societies where the people are much more trusting of each other. That was my, I lived over there lecturing, the months before the pandemic I spent in Norway. We talked a lot about government and democracy. In those societies, one of the reasons they don't have the problems that we're having here at least in terms of the rise of the right, and the breakdown of the democratic processes, is that people don't think that if the other side wins, they're going to be wiped out. There's a trust in your fellow citizens that we all are in this together, we want our country to thrive. Of course now, there is a rise, the right is rising in Germany and in Sweden, and they're having a crisis in Sweden. Part of those crises have to do with the lockdowns and the Norwegians and the Swedes have reacted against the lockdowns.

Nina Burleigh: (40:19)
I mean, so is this... and the French. I mean, you see people, they're just sick of it. They did start off saying, we're confident and that Macron is going to... they're going to figure this out. So they for the first two lockdowns in Paris, people were dealing with it, but then they had rolling more and more lockdowns and people started to resist. So as far as the west and these western democracies, it is a huge challenge to these leaders to figure out what to do. If they don't have the vaccine or they're going to keep telling people to lockdown. We are not going to do bio surveillance the way the Chinese do it, nobody would sit still for that. I don't think any of us would.

John Darsie: (41:03)
Last question I have for you is, the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on communities of color, and also there was socioeconomic issues. Poorer people died and suffered more from COVID than wealthier people, as well as communities of color suffered more. They're also among the most vaccine hesitant, communities of color, frankly. Why do more people of color first of all, die and suffer from COVID-19? How do we educate those portions of the population and build trust with them, in terms of accepting vaccines and the treatments that we need to mitigate these types of pandemics moving forward?

Nina Burleigh: (41:42)
Well, we know that the poverty and diabetes and those types of comorbidities and obesity go together, so there was a lot of that. A lot of communities of color, people work on the front lines. We could all leave our jobs and work from home, if you work at McDonald's or you work at a grocery store checkout, you can't just go and stay home. So they were on the front lines and I mean those are the main reasons. They're frontline workers and they also had a lot of comorbidities, they also tended to live in multi generational households.

Nina Burleigh: (42:26)
As far as the low information or the misinformation that they distrusted the vaccine in communities of color, I think that can be addressed over time. I think the churches, the pastors have to speak out, and as people become... it's really something that has to be dealt with from inside the community but with the help of urging of allies within the medical community.

Nina Burleigh: (42:57)
I will add that I just saw today, I think it's in the Times, red states are COVID states now. They actually are mapping it and they can see that it's really rising in these red states. It's not rising in the blue states, it's going up in all of these pockets, it's absolutely correlative to the support of the former guy. So I think you're going to see that tip a little bit, and I don't know what effect that's going to have on the 2022 election, but I think really the more that these smaller communities or these remote communities or the low information communities start to see that within their communities, oh my god, there's a refrigerator truck outside of our rural hospital, like in that Wisconsin town that the Times did a feature on a while ago, where suddenly all of these people in this little town that had been anti-mask are being fork lifted into refrigerated trucks right before their eyes. I think if... how sad that it's come to that and didn't have to come to that because if they're looking to their leader down there in Florida, their leader, all he has to do is stand up and say, "Get the vaccination," and say it over and over. It would make such a difference, it's such a simple thing, right?

John Darsie: (44:15)
He got the vaccine himself but refuses to encourage.

Nina Burleigh: (44:19)
[crosstalk 00:44:19].

John Darsie: (44:19)
He refuses to encourage his supporters to protect themselves in the same way he did. I think it's a perfect analogy for his presidency, not [crosstalk 00:44:27].

Anthony Scaramucci: (44:26)
What about all the Fox News' hosts? They all got the vaccine, and then they [crosstalk 00:44:31].

John Darsie: (44:31)
[crosstalk 00:44:31].

Nina Burleigh: (44:31)
Similarly, absolutely.

Anthony Scaramucci: (44:32)
It's very upsetting.

John Darsie: (44:34)
Well, Nina, it's fantastic to have you on. Obviously we love hosting these talks to educate people and your book I think did a great job at just looking at the science, looking at the facts of the pandemic, and drawing a series of conclusions, but it's also challenging as you mentioned, for policy makers to find that right balance in a country that values freedom and liberty the way we do in the United States, but to also make sure we protect people and protect the group. But thank you so much for coming on and doing this and helping to educate people.

Nina Burleigh: (45:01)
Thank you so much for having me.

Anthony Scaramucci: (45:02)
Nina, thank you. I'm holding up the book again, Virus, Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic. Thank you again for being on SALT Talks.

Nina Burleigh: (45:13)
You're welcome, take care, guys.

John Darsie: (45:15)
Thank you, thank you, everybody, for tuning into today's SALT Talk with Nina Burleigh. Just a reminder if you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous SALT Talks, you can access them on-demand on our website, it's salt.org/talks, or on our YouTube channel, which is called SALT too. Please spread the word about these SALT Talks in particular, we think these relating to public health and the pandemic are extremely important, that people learn if they're unfamiliar with the science or the vaccine or they're hesitant to watch talks like this and learn.

John Darsie: (45:44)
We're also on social media, Twitter is where we're most active at SALT Conference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook as well. On behalf of Anthony and the entire SALT team, this is John Darsie, signing off from SALT Talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.

Michael Greve: Forever Healthy | SALT Talks #221

“The rejuvenation biotech industry and shifting paradigm in medicine, keeping healthy people healthy, is going to be the biggest industry this planet has ever seen.”

As one of Germany’s most successful early Internet entrepreneurs, Michael Greve explains his pivot to investing in biotech and rejuvenation therapy start-ups. Greve notes that there are already significant advances in science and medicine, but a fragmented environment prevents efficient collaboration. For too long, Greve says anti-aging advancements have not delivered sufficient tangible results and he hopes to use his venture capital and network to help fulfill that potential. Greve ultimately believes the biotech industry, centered around keeping people healthier for longer, will be the biggest industry on the planet.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Michael Greve.jpeg

Michael Greve

Founder

Forever Healthy Foundation

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - Intro and background

8:03 - Transition from entrepreneur to venture capitalist

10:23 - Greve’s personal health journey

14:50 - Forever Healthy’s mission around biotech, rejuvenation therapies and anti-aging

21:20 - Approach to aging and disease

32:02 - VC in biotech and market potential

36:00 - Biotech start-ups vs. traditional tech

40:30 - Latest $365 million biotech investment

43:53 - Management approach and attracting more investorsEPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darcie: (00:07)
Hello everyone. And welcome back to salt talks. My name is John Darcie. I'm the managing director of salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance technology and public policy. Saul talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these salt talks the same as our goal at our salt conferences, which we're excited to resume in September of 2021 here in our home of New York city and our goal at those conferences and on these salt talks is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Michael brief to salt talks. Uh, Michael was one of the most successful founders of the German speaking internet industry together with his brother Mathias.

John Darcie: (00:57)
He created numerous ventures, including last minute dot D E a, which he turned into the largest last minute travel site in Germany. Most notably the brothers founded web dot D E and after a successful IPO, grew it into one of the country's most successful and largest internet portals and online media businesses. After the successful sale of his companies, Michael created the seed stage venture capital investment from Kazu, uh, that came to fund and mentor some of Germany's most promising tech startups, including babble Staffbase and Mamboo hosting taste talk is Dina Radenkovic. Who's a partner at the salt fund, which is an early stage venture fund and left investing in pro programmable biology, primarily life sciences, healthcare industry. Uh, now I'll turn it over to Dena for the interview.

Dina Radenkovic: (01:46)
Thank you, John. And thank you, Michael. I'm really delighted to share the stage with you today. Thank you for finding the time and calling us from and Germany. So perhaps we could start, obviously you have an incredibly interesting story and we'd like to find out more about it, but when John was selling your bio to kind of start with you are one of the most successful Durman tech entrepreneurs. Could you start by telling us a bit more about your early career? Like how did you become the most successful German tech entrepreneur, your brother Martinez? How did it become to develop last minute that the, that you sold last minute? And then, um, how did that evolve to create web D E

Michael Greve: (02:28)
Oh, yeah. That's a, um, uh, yeah, and interesting story there because, um, uh, actually I was my, my brother and I, we were always very, very interested in technology and, and I mean, we've lived through all the psych cycles of the tech world, basically owning one of the first apple, two computers in Germany, uh, teaching ourselves programming. Um, we both dropped out of university because we thought it's not that interesting to just learn stuff that numerous people already did before and started own software business and went to different stages. And, um, did software projects, uh, did software development for the Macintosh and, uh, and a lot of stuff. And then, um, at some point in time, this internet thing started and, um, and, uh, I was so excited about that. And, uh, that was really, really the super early days. So we had one internet happened, Germany that was in at the end, um, university of Tulsa, that was our hometown.

Michael Greve: (03:28)
And, um, I bought myself and, and, and a PC for, for, uh, uh, 86, uh, computer. And you had two very SCO Unix, or very, very complicated everything and your ISD and dial up networking. And, but I got ourselves an internet connection and the, one of the hops in Germany was university in Casa. So we made a deal with them that we could dive into the whole thing. And then we played a bit around with that. And then we saw the potential of the technology and we decided, okay, let's become an internet company. And we stopped all of our other business and said, okay, now we're going to be an internet company. And, uh, we were super excited about that thing. And, um, we went to, to seep it to the big computer fair by then. And we were on a small, um, uh, with a small booth there on the, on a shared booth with a big sign or company was called Synetic.

Michael Greve: (04:22)
And we said food service, internet, and, um, advertise that. And, uh, we went all over the show and talked to all the big companies and there were, sorry, everybody says, oh, internet, we don't need that thing. Or we have an it department, and yes, we have a server, uh, for, uh, Microsoft stuff, but we don't need this internet thing. So actually nobody wanted to have us. And, uh, the, the right next to us, there was not a small booth with the Greek guy and Manuel, and he wanted to sell, travel, uh, by using IST and to transfer the last minute bookings over IST and into PCs that were set up at, um, at the, uh, at, at the travel agent at travel agencies. And nobody wanted to have them either. So after the show, we said, Hey, we have to do something together. And then we said, you want to do this travel thing, but I stand is not the way to go.

Michael Greve: (05:14)
Let's do internet. And this is how we started last minute, Dottie. And, uh, basically as, as a, as a travel site and that by then people were still using modems to dial up to the internet. That was really, really early. And, um, we also started an agency business. We said, okay, we're going to develop a website and to all that stuff. And, um, and the question that always comes out, came up with the people I see, but yeah, this internet thing, but how would people find us? And we told everybody four months, yeah, there's this company, you know, Yahoo, they have this directory and somebody is going to do something similar in Germany. And, um, but actually nobody didn't. And then after a few months, like three, four months, I said, okay, we have to change that. And I wrote a little to put, to, to create a web directory. And then we just called in all our friends. And then, uh, over a weekend, we completely surfed the German internet. And by then there were 2000 websites in Germany and we put these 2000 websites in a directory and put that online under the name of web 30. And this is how it started from there. It just grew

Dina Radenkovic: (06:20)
Fascinating. Well, all the factors for successful second for nurse school, dropout learning, all being a bit discouraged by your idea initially, um, all the factors seem to be there. And, um, how was it working with your brother?

Michael Greve: (06:34)
Uh, well, actually we did, it was very good. So I mean, the, somebody I fully trust and we build, um, a web 30 to get the last minute to eat together. And, but when we sold last minute, but the, uh, somehow, or, um, entrepreneurial ways, part that he stayed a bit with the company when we sold it, uh, because we sold it to our biggest competitor and formed the largest internet business in Germany by doing so to compete better with Google and, and, uh, the American competition. And, um, so now I'm doing, we, we still have a shared office space and, but he's doing his things and I'm doing my thing.

Dina Radenkovic: (07:13)
Is there a lot of competition

Michael Greve: (07:15)
Between us? No, no, not at all. It's just the, uh, it's the, the, on the contrary we ate, well, we help each other a lot and we talk about our ideas and share. So, uh, I just had lunch with them, so it's really very, I'm really happy to have a very good connection to him.

Dina Radenkovic: (07:31)
Well, that's wonderful. I, it seems that you've had the great co-founder. And how has it, obviously, after, um, having and selling your company, so you went into venture capital and you had a very successful venture cap is a three-year as well by investing in some of the most promising Germany's tech startups, like Bob bell, fact-based bamboo many others with hizo technology. So how was it for you that journey from an entrepreneur to a venture capitalist and what are kind of the key take home messages that you would say to founder turns a VCs?

Michael Greve: (08:04)
It actually, it was just taking it to the next level and other time, because when we built web 30, I mean, we started out as a three, four people team. And in the end we have, uh, we had 700 employees and there was always a why we, we sold it because it was simply no fun anymore to run such a big company, because in the end, we really love to work with technology and drive things forward. And, uh, if you start growing your company and you're the, you're the CEO, I was the CTO. So you basically have your, all your product managers already that you're, and you have to coach them and make, make them successful. And, uh, once we sold web 30 is just taking it to another level because we, we don't see ourselves like just as financing people, but we really helped them to be successful.

Michael Greve: (08:50)
So this is our key, uh, approaches. We see ourselves as part of the founding team, we coach them, we mentor them. We really help them to build the equity story. And this is what I also, uh, enjoy most it's for me, it's not about, it was never about the money, but about the story that we could build, the success that we could create. And of course in the end, it really pays off. If you create something with a great story, that's very successful and with a lot of passion. So, and, uh, yeah, that's what we did. And then in venture capital, I mean, it's, it's a bit unusual in Germany in, in, in Silicon valley, it's the normal way to go. So once you're a super success, when you have all that experience, also all the growing pains, you know, if you grow from three to 700, um, there are a lot of, there's a lot of pain involved in doing that, and you have to learn a lot of things the hard way. And, um, and I had great, I had great coaches when doing that, um, that really helped us along. And we just wanted to pass that on. Uh, and, and to be helpful in that regards to our startups.

Dina Radenkovic: (09:55)
Well, it certainly turned out to be extremely fruitful. Um, and it's interesting to hear about your very hands-on approach, but investing, turning a bit more down the, the healthcare routes, you mentioned that you had the very unhealthy lifestyle of building your tech companies, as you can tell us a bit more about that. And do you really think that we need to have a compromise between healthy lifestyle while we're building and, and working hard? And w what's your view on that right now?

Michael Greve: (10:24)
Okay. So yeah, I had the super unhealthy lifestyle. It was like the epic tome of a hacker. You, you really could, if you would do this in a movie, you everybody would say, oh, really? Yeah. Uh, that can't be true, but it was true. So I was 20 kilograms, overweight, no sports. I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. I had two red bulls for breakfast. Uh, I had a bottle of red wine in the evening to calm down coffee all day. Uh, so smoking, smoking, smoke and meetings all day, and, uh, had a lot of fun working seven days a week, like 16 hours or so. And, uh, of course that was not super healthy. And at some point, uh, particularly after we sold web Dotty and bender the venture capital, I said, okay, this has to change. And, uh, and, uh, because I want to stay healthy.

Michael Greve: (11:11)
This is, uh, I say, okay, I can't go on like this. I didn't have haven't had any issues, but it became apparent that if I couldn't go on like this and to answer your second question, um, no, I don't think you have to compromise nowadays. I mean, 20 years ago that wasn't a wholly totally different story, um, to feed yourself, uh, to have a healthy diet or so that was something that was really uncommon by then. Um, nowadays, I mean, you have organic food everywhere. You can have paleo restaurants and you're in the cities. And, um, so it's, it's much easier from the environment to, to have a healthy lifestyle, but still it's a challenge because if you're really passionate and working on your thing, um, to find the time to exercise, to meditate, to sleep and to do all these things, it's challenged. Yeah.

Dina Radenkovic: (12:00)
Fascinating. No, I mean, for sure, and a lot of young people would say that they have to optimize for performance and that it's fairly easy to focus on health and lifestyle and wellness. Once people have a lot more time and resources on their hands, but obviously being a medical doctor by background, knowing that heart disease and atherosclerosis starts in adolescence, I'm very keen to kind of support this new wave of, uh, found well founded companies that have wellness, uh, at its core. And I think you, you totally explained it well that it's, we have no higher awareness. It's a bit more, it's a bit easier to do that. Right. So how has your lifestyle changed right now? You mentioned a bit of meditation. I don't know. You mentioned you had lunch. I didn't know if you had time restricted feeding. Was it later in the day, tell us a bit more about your longevity practices.

Michael Greve: (12:52)
Uh, generally I, I have a, uh, a very well organized schedule around that. So I, uh, I have my morning rituals. I, uh, I meditate, I do a yoga or Pilatus in the morning. Um, I do my stretching exercises. I do a gratitude journaling. I glued to affirmation. So all the psychology goes with that as well. Uh, I get my eight hours of sleep. I have a very good sleep hygiene and all these things. And then yes, I have a very clean diet, um, as well. So, uh, I, uh, look out for that, uh, as well. Yeah.

Dina Radenkovic: (13:31)
Okay. Well, you're definitely practicing what you preach and when you launch wherever healthy, I mean, forever healthy as an organization that does many things. So, um, it's a quite ambitious project. You will fund research at numerous incidents across the world. You do a lot of science education. So you run a conference and undoing aging that has now been moved for the spring of 2022. And you also, what I found really interesting is that you kind of grade this collections of medical knowledge basis and a research practical resources, depending for general public, to help them learn about longevity medicine. Um, and, um, obviously you also create companies in space. So which part of the forever healthy are you most passionate about and most involved on the day-to-day basis? Right.

Michael Greve: (14:20)
Actually, I have to say all, because right now, nowadays I don't do anything anymore that I'm not passionate about. That's the, uh, well, it was always that way, but it's clearly, it's clearly that, uh, that, that it's still that way. So I wouldn't do anything that, that, that I'm not really passionate about. Um, yeah, if I have a healthy, uh, is a mission-driven thing, um, we are completely private financed by myself. Uh, uh, I don't call it. It's a humanitarian effort, basically. It's about to enable people to extend the healthy lifespans. And, um, in order to understand what we're doing is if we have to understand what's going on in the world right now, especially in the world of, of, of, of science and medicine. So there are two really amazing facts. One is there is already a lot of medical knowledge that could be that if we would use it, uh, we could use to it to extend a healthy lifespans, but unfortunately that knowledge is buried in research, spread out over websites, special communities expert.

Michael Greve: (15:20)
So it's really, really hard to access even for medical doctors. So it's not really, really easy to access. That's one thing. And the other thing is that the world, as we know it, where we were completely helpless about our aging process and, uh, age-related diseases has started the transition to a world where we have aging under full medical control. And, um, H related, uh, diseases are a thing of the past. Of course we are not there yet. Yeah. But the theoretical groundwork has been done. Uh, so we know actually we know what we have to do in order to counter aging and through to, um, get rid of H related diseases, uh, on the theoretical basis. The basic research has started, uh, more than a decade ago. Uh, we have the first research results, um, uh, and even the first startups are there that take these, these initial results and try to turn them into therapies for human use.

Michael Greve: (16:18)
Of course we are not there yet. Uh, and we don't know all of them, this process will take it's it's, it's, it's a decade long thing. We don't know, maybe it's 20, 30, or 40 years. And, um, uh, but these two things together, the medical knowledge, that's not, that's, that's not used in this beautiful, uh, development of, uh, actually being able to reach of an eight people taking together that should enable us to extend a healthy lifespan quite dramatically if we use that in combination. So, and that is what we want to do. We want to accelerate that process. And so what we do is one-to-one, and we use, we want to use all the knowledge that's there today to bring ourselves to the future. And on the other hand, we want to accelerate the future. So the bring the future faster to us. And, um, this is also how forever healthiest structured.

Michael Greve: (17:05)
So one part of ever health is completely focused on what can I do today in order to extend my healthy lifespan, to a lower, the probability to have an age-related diseases and such. And on the other hand is what can we do to accelerate this future? And for accelerating the future, we are running the undoing aging countries, friends. We are, um, uh, we are funding research, uh, on, uh, the routine causes of aging and what we can do about them together with the [inaudible] foundation. And we also create startups in, in, in that area. Um, because I think this, uh, the, the, to really accelerate the rejuvenation, um, the availability of rejuvenation therapies, um, it's not enough to talk about this. I mean, if you talk to about, about to people about rejuvenation, it's totally sounds like science fiction, you know, and, and, uh, it's and you can talk as much as you want people to say, oh, okay.

Michael Greve: (18:02)
Interesting. But actually there's no emotional connection to that for foremost. So, um, right from the get-go my, my, my feeling was we have to deliver proof, and this is what we've set out with our venture capital company, because I've turned my venture capital company three years ago, completely on rejuvenation biotech. And actually we want to deliver proof and we want to prove that rejuvenation, um, is not, um, uh, science fiction anymore. And we also want to prove that, uh, Richard venation is not only for the Richards for everybody. Um, we want to prove that it's uncomplicated and we also want to prove that's the best business model ever. And when I talk about rejuvenation, we have to understand this. That's not going to be one pill or one shot that you get. And if you're 17, next morning, you wake up. You're 30. It's not working that way, but you have to understand aging. Aging is such a multifaceted process that you probably need like 50 or 60. Nobody knows how many different root causes and, and aspects we have to text. But what we can do is we can attack one after the other and, uh, reverse the damage that the body does to itself, just because it's an operation and, uh, reversed that step-by-step in order to extend a healthy lifespan. And this is exactly what we're doing with our startups.

Dina Radenkovic: (19:22)
Fascinating. So many things that will fall up, um, from what you've said. And I certainly believe that particularly in the, in the post pandemic environment and in the current climate, people are more interested, um, to firstly, more health aware and were instead invested in healthcare and in biological aging, and often kind of the barriers to entry into this field were from capital and talent perspective is exactly what you've said, lack of education. So I think what you're doing both with the academic conference, but also it kind of creating content for the general public and kind of democratizing access to this high end longevity medicine, which is just good preventative medicine, essentially. Um, it is really fascinating, and that is another reason why we got really interested in your work. And you mentioned obviously that there'll be multiple technologies, um, that are gonna focus on, on aging.

Dina Radenkovic: (20:16)
And you've invested in about a dozen off longevity companies and they each target when one's kind of looks at your portfolio, they each target a different pathway. Um, but often they have the aging as an indication, and sometimes it's another chronic disease or that is associated with aging or cancer. Which of these pathways would you, would you highlight from your current portfolio companies? And then secondly, do you think that we have a fundamental problem that aging is not classified as an and hence sometimes it's companies, even when they have good technology and good pathway to make sense? Um, they're, they're very plausible biologically, but they con go for aging as indication. So they almost need to find a plan B like another disease to go far. So they ended up spanning in clinical trials, even though the science is there, they're just not having managed to find the right fit. And how do you see that as a challenge in your current portfolio companies, but also in other companies in this field up for jubilation biotech as you called it? Okay.

Michael Greve: (21:21)
Yeah, that's a very good question. So, um, to answer your last question first, so, um, uh, aging as an indication, uh, is complicated. So because personally, I don't think that aging is a disease because, um, uh, you would, you wouldn't look at a house and say, this house has ages. The house has a disease. So aging is more a metaphysics. It's like the world, you know, uh, things age it's, things that just happen. So, uh, there's deterioration of something is an operation if your cost and operation, um, it ages, but it is, there's not a single process that you can say, this is aging. And, uh, uh, so, and also we have really, we have an issue to measure aging, so there's not a good way to measure aging and to quantify aging. So, um, so in that respect, what we're going for is individual root causes, and there are some root causes that are directly linked to diseases.

Michael Greve: (22:14)
For example, um, uh, let me give you an example, what, I mean, uh, one of our portfolio companies underdog, um, we are trying to get, uh, rid of heart attacks and strokes. So, um, uh, in order to, uh, understand what this has to do with rejuvenation is all the things that we see as age related diseases in, for example, heart attack, stroke, and even cancer are age related diseases because the prevalence goes up exponentially with age. So there's, there's, uh, uh, virtually no child, uh, at the age of 10 that has a heart attack, you know, but, uh, when you age, the, the, the, the probability of course goes up and in the end, we have to see, um, if we all would, uh, become old enough, we will have all, all each individual age related disease. It's just that one person dies of a heart attack sooner, and the other person dies of cancer, but in the end, we all have this deterioration that leads to all the age related diseases.

Michael Greve: (23:12)
So, um, uh, I think there's, yes, it would be nice if we have aging as an indication, but I think there's lots of things that we can do with the current regulatory environment. And underdog is a very good example. Um, uh, um, in order to understand what we are doing, there is an in how it relates to each of the nations, you have to understand how does a heart attack or stroke comes to pass. So in our bloodstream, we have cholesterol, uh, in particular LDL cholesterol, and that cholesterol enters the arterial wall. And in the, the cholesterol, the LDL is oxidized, and it's a recognized by the body as a foreign entity, then to get rid of it, the body causes the immune system to help. So the immune systems enter the arterial wall as well, and it sees the oxidized cholesterol and the immune system just, uh, gobbles that up the macrophages, the immune cells, and in the immune cells, you have a special, uh, waste processing plant called the lysosome.

Michael Greve: (24:12)
And so the cholesterol is pro uh, transferred to the lysosomes. And then the lysosomes, usually we have enzymes to break, uh, uh, things that we don't want down, and then they can be processed and released to the body or be disposed of, unfortunately, we don't have enzymes to break down, um, oxidized cholesterol, and that case it's seven Quito cholesterol. So then the body is really smart. Uh, the immune substance license has a plan B, so it says, okay, if I cannot get, if I cannot break it down and just keep it because it's harmful. So over time, uh, the macrophage and the license on when the macrophage, uh, gobbles up more and more of that, uh, oxidized cholesterol, and it grows, and then the license on growth and it, the, the, the macro fat grows, and it, it turns into a so-called foam cells. And these foam cells, they make up the plug in the arterial wall that grows first to the outside.

Michael Greve: (25:06)
Then it grows to the inside of the artery. And at some point the pressure is too high. And the arterial wall ruptures, the plaque goes into the artery and the body sees a, um, an injury. And then the platelets comes, you have to fix that injury by sticking together, and then you get a blood clot that blood clot closes up the artery, and then you have your heart attack. So, um, so what we have done now, we have developed a compound. It's, it's a funny thing. It's a, it's a sugar it's private, the most healthy sugar that you can think of. It's a cyclodextrin. And, um, that compound is able, you it's able to, through the bloodstream, enter their chair was entered the macrophages, enter the license zone, grab the C seven Quito cholesterol and transport it out of the whole thing and makes it disposable by the body.

Michael Greve: (25:56)
And by this re uh, turn the macrophages back into normal immune cells, deflate the plaque and no plaque, no heart disease. So basically what we do is reread juvenate the, the, the, the, the, the arteries by removing the, the plaque and restoring the youthful state. And it's a very good example of how rejuvenation works. Uh, um, we just remove stuff or we fix, uh, stuff that breaks and that the body cannot, uh, repair on its own. And by doing so, um, we, uh, no plaque, no heart attacks, let's say 80 to 90% of heart attacks are due to, um, uh, plaque summer, uh, through the chair cramping, but most of them are to no due to plaque. So, um, so this is how the technology works, and it's already pretty successful with so already demonstrated that we can grab the cholesterol, the seven keto cholesterol from foam cells and deflate them.

Michael Greve: (26:49)
So that's pretty cool. So now for accessibility, imagine you turn this into a, um, into a pill that, uh, and that is our vision appeal that in average cost $10 a month to swallow. So, and, uh, and this is also the, the, the big difference from the old type of doing medicine way by the paradigm was making sick people healthy. Again, I think we are at, at the, at the verge of a transition position and the new rejuvenation technology will allow us to do this transition to a completely new paradigm in medicine, which is keeping healthy people healthy instead of fixing things when things are broken. And so what I envisioned is a therapy that everybody over 35 can take that, but just prevent the buildup of plaque. Um, it's purely a smaller daily. And if, if you have that pill, no, uh, no heart attack, no stroke, beautiful thing.

Michael Greve: (27:44)
And, uh, our vision is that we can produce this pill for an average, let's say $10 a month, um, uh, maybe a bit more expensive in the Western world. And therefore in developing countries, let's say in India, maybe it's only $1 a month, but in the end, you have to see that we are talking about instead of a disease population. We're talking about everybody over 35 40, which is 4 billion people on the planet. And that also shows you that, um, it's going to be a super good business to keep healthy people healthy, um, because take 4 billion people that spend an average $10 a month. That's $40 billion per month, $480 billion a year. Um, let's say times 10 or 20 for a decent company evaluation. So we are talking about a market capitalization for the companies taking just this aspect of aging between five and $10 trillion. Just for that, I don't say this is going to be one company, but that's the potential of the market. And that's also something that we want to prove that this is a beautiful business model and a beautiful thing on your humanitarian, uh, side as well.

Dina Radenkovic: (28:55)
Fascinating. Well, I mean, Michael, you have quite a few interesting companies in your portfolio, and you obviously can to target most of the nine hallmarks of aging and a few additional things. You have a company like chondrial, hell, do you have a company? And it takes on a telomere raises. You have a company looking at cancer, you have a company with messenger and a technology, which is obviously an extremely interesting with the success of messenger RNA vaccines for SARS Coby, too. Um, but what I find fascinating is that the different approach that you're taking. So, um, just kind of to set a bit of a background is that for, for a big group of people in this, uh, aging research community, one of the necessary parts that needs to happen is the development of surrogate of aging. So they almost say like, if you, I mean, going with the old one, that if you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

Dina Radenkovic: (29:47)
They would say that it nothing really major can happen in rejuvenation biotech until we can quantify aging. And then we can slow in real time clinical trials that were conducted over five to 10 years, that the disease that aging is actually reversed. So, um, it's, it seems that you are saying that actually, we don't need to wait for the surrogate markers. We can start reversing this processes for chronic conditions associated with aging right now. Um, and when these come, they can kind of we'll incorporate in, but they're not necessary. Um, and, uh, the other thing is how do, what people often say is like, can we really fit this longevity companies into the standard venture capital model, right? Like, can they be as profitable as, I mean, you were in software and now you're turned into rejuvenation. So I've venture capitalists say like, yes, it sounds very interesting, but I can't, it's never going to be the same.

Dina Radenkovic: (30:43)
The, you know, it, within the timeframe solve the life of a VC fund, won't be profitable. It's more risky. Um, I mean, we focus very much on programmable biology, um, because we kind of use technology, um, and, and computational to solve problems in biology. So we believe that that the angle there is that it has a shorter translation time because this and this spectrum, whereas you have some really, really strong rejuvenation biotech company. So kind of going back from being a VC with softer companies, hands-on investment, how do you, how does that change when you, when you go to rejuvenation biotech, and you mentioned one aspect of making it profitable is essentially in trying to everyone, every adult should take it. Maybe we'll have it for, for every person, um, to kind of even stop, stop aging. But what are the other aspects that you think can be incorporated to make this more attractive for descender venture capital industry? Not just, yes, it's a good cause. And it's advancing the field that your reverts. So second one, okay. There is a bigger market because everybody ages at a certain pace. And is there anything else in addition, we can make aging research, particularly more biotech, play more fit for the VC model, or on the other hand, we need to change the financing model in order to advance this field.

Michael Greve: (32:02)
So, yes, uh, the nature. So, um, first of all, um, uh, I think one has to understand, and I strongly believe, um, the rejuvenation biotech industry and the shift, the shift in paradigm medicine, keeping healthy people healthy is going to be the biggest industry this planet has ever seen. So, um, it is, uh, I mean, if you look at, uh, uh, compare, uh, the, the value of having a nice mobile phone to, to what it's personally worth to you to know, I'm not going to age, I'm not going to have cancer. I'm not going to have a heart attack. I'm not going to have, so what is the difference, this and that. So what would you be willing to pay per year for having all this useful health for a long, long time? Whereas it's a new phone and now you see one company, uh, doing a phone has a market cap of $2 trillion.

Michael Greve: (32:53)
So that's one thing. And as you said, is, um, uh, in general for a VC or from an investment perspective, um, this is going to be the best business ever. I'm, I'm absolutely, uh, in, in for that, um, yes, financing might have to change. I think that, um, the, um, but, um, if you come from a D it is not the convention biotech play, I totally agree, but tech investors really get this, uh, approach that we are doing. So we're seeing a lot of interest from the crypto industry, from other tech investors. And also from my fund is, um, we are, we don't have partners, so we're just, uh, investing my own money and we're taking a very long-term view on the thing. So, um, we are thinking about 10, 15 years. Um, and, but there are people who can take that you, and especially in the tech world, there's a lot of money available and I think what it needs, and this is what we also try to do is by doing this companies and by showing what is possible to excite other peoples and in the end, it's just a matter of risk reward.

Michael Greve: (33:59)
Yes, it's super risky what we are doing, and it's especially risky, uh, what we're doing because we focus on category openers. So we invest in things that have not been done before, um, like a underdog or rebel, but we do it for example, uh, cross-link breaker decalcification. Nobody is doing this right now, but if we would succeed doing that, that's going to be a unique product, uh, with an enormous market potential and of course, high risk, but the reward is enormous. And of course, venture capital gets that. Um, so yes, you might have to restructure your fund. You might have to talk to your partners differently. Um, but there is a big, big upside, and we want to show this with our lighthouse investments that we do

Dina Radenkovic: (34:45)
Fascinating, but I, I'm a firm believer of that. And you've touched on two interesting things before I move on to the next section. And the first one is you go for new technologies and you make one bet per every technology and what it means technology. We often say in biology, we refer to a specific pathway. So often it's basically the first mover company that failed. Do you think that that can be, um, how often do you wait before you make a bet on a, on a certain field? So let's say in the field of San analytics or in the field of messenger and eight companies, or do you go with the first company that is driving the space and you think the first company has an unfair advantage that will start collect data as they go along and be the best. And then the second question that you touched upon there, you mentioned the link between cryptocurrencies and their interests. I mean, they're having a couple of Twitter threads, uh, quite recently about the link crypto and longevity, and that both that are kind of trying to, um, innovate in, in very kind of old, um, more, more central light industry, one kind of being financed, the other one being get traditional version of, of sick care medicine. Um, do you think there is an additional link, do you think we should get more people from cryptocurrencies interested in longevity or is that just naturally happened? Okay.

Michael Greve: (36:01)
So to answer your first question is, um, um, actually we don't invest in, if you take her, uh, if you really look at, we do not invest into, uh, companies per se, because it's not that the companies come along and then we invest them. We really helped to build, uh, especially our core startups, we help to build them. So it's usually in our experience, it was a two to three year process. We get in contact with the researchers, follow the research. In most cases, we even sponsored their research for two or three years, and then we help assemble a team. You need to see, oh, you need a good game plan. You need a development plan. Um, and it's not that easy. It's not like in, like in tech where you just have a few developers, they have a nice idea. You give them some money, everybody has a laptop, and then they do some programming and there you go.

Michael Greve: (36:49)
Um, it's completely different. So, uh, it is a two to three year process. So really we know the people for quite some time before we go. And there was the, uh, into the, uh, into company fund formation. It was the underdog with revel, with less strain and with Salvy, uh, all the same, we really went into the field and looking at the technology. And, um, and, uh, also this why we do this as Yardi is a lighthouse investments. And, uh, yes, I, I think that the first mover, it's not an unfair advantage is just a lot of hard work. I mean, uh, the, uh, if I look at rebel also, for example, when we tried to break cost links, um, they have been doing research for 10 years on that. So, and then, and then we respond to that research for, I think, three years, and now we're taking it to the company and still it is somehow at the research stage fund other three years. So it's a lot of hard work and nobody else is doing that work right now. So we're doing the work that nobody is doing. And, um, and, and, and, uh, yeah, we're doing this in, in a, in a company. Yeah.

Dina Radenkovic: (37:58)
And, uh, any notes on crypto on longevity?

Michael Greve: (38:01)
Oh, well, um, the things that we do or that sends to all the hallmarks of aging approach is this, um, basic old let's repair things that are broken. It's a very engineering approach. So it's, it's really like going to the root seeing what's going wrong, what's breaking down and then trying to fix that. And that also eliminates the need for complex markers. So if you see, if you have calcified tissue, you just decalcify it, and you can measure the decalcification. So there's no need for an epigenetic clock, for example, to do that. And, um, and, uh, it's obvious if something calcifies like your kidney and you can decalcified, it works better. So you get better rid of, uh, all the waste in your body. That's probably a very good thing. And, um, engineers get that the tech industry gets that the crypto community gets that.

Michael Greve: (38:50)
And I just expect that over time, more and more tech investors will move into the rejuvenation field, not so much the biotech investors. I think the funds are completely structured different. They have a different risk management, a different approach, um, uh, a different risk profile and, uh, take investors are used to making huge bets that prey pay off like a hundred times or a thousand times. You know, this is what people in tech look for. And also if you look at tech investing right now, um, the, the money that goes into tech, startups, dwarfs biotech investments in biotech, you're talking about all, we do an IPO at a hundred and 200 billion, a million that's already something. I mean, three of our startups already turned unicorns, hon, uh, before even going public. And, uh, we are in even pre IPO. We're talking about hundreds of millions flowing into our startups to gain market share. That's a totally different ball game. And I think we're going to see the same, same enrich of a nation biotech.

Dina Radenkovic: (39:56)
Yes. And I think that we're both on the, on the same journey, trying to bridge that gap between technology and biology and Michael, you recently made a incredibly impressive announcement offer to 360 million that you're going to devote to fund rejuvenation research. So, um, what do you plan to do with, with that, uh, money? Is it going to be through your funds? Is it going to be creating companies is going to be all of it? Can you give us a bit of, uh, an outline of your ambitious plan because you will have a decent budget to achieve quite a few things?

Michael Greve: (40:29)
Yes. So, um, that money, these 300 million euros or $360 million, uh, are in my venture capital company, keys zoo. And they are used to either form new startups, but category opening startups or support or key startups on the way to, uh, uh, to the clinic and to create product. And the, the idea is that we can track a stake. Uh, we can take a strong lead in our key investments, uh, which currently we have, uh, four of those and really support them all the way, um, uh, to, to the, to the end product. And by, um, taking a strong position, also encourage others to invest with us. So my, uh, I, I think that with, uh, taking the 300 million, um, we could, uh, enable and other three to four times, uh, the money in, in co-investments. Uh, so that's going to be a substantial amount of money that will really get our, um, uh, products, um, through the clinical phases, to the market, to price optimization, and to really get it to the masses at a very low price.

Michael Greve: (41:36)
So, because I think this is what is, what is needed most now in the market is success stories. I truly believe if we can show rejuvenation, for example, if we could show, I really hope for that. If we could show that we can remove plaque from the arteries in the end, by swallowing a pill every day, this is going to be really revolutionary. And then people will understand, oh, that is of a nation. It's not this machine where people are pushed in and then you push the 60 year old and then you get a 30 year old, but, oh, I just re we germinate. My Archer is, and I don't have a heart attack. Yeah. I get rid of DNA damage. Then I don't have cancer that is rejuvenation. And you do this in enough things. Then you, you, you, uh, keep a youthful body for quite some time. And, uh, once people would understand that the VC community will understand that will encourage other researchers to do this. So this is why I said, okay, we have to do this because we have been very fortunate with our internet investments. Um, as I said, we have three unicorns where we have been the founding investors and still on the substantial equity. And, uh, I just want to use these resources to really drive the, um, uh, uh, industry forward by creating successful companies

Dina Radenkovic: (42:53)
For sure. And I completely agree that we need a successful case study to really demonstrate the value and the purpose of this approach. And do you, have you carved out the percentage, what is for follow on rounds in your current companies? Because as you've explained, you have built your current company. So do you want to maintain the majority control over this? Company's hasn't moved fault, um, anything that you would have for creating new companies and what are your key partners on this journey? Often medical research happens in silos and aging kind of takes a step back to look at medicine instead of saying, oh, let's be hyper specialized led to say that many of these things that are likely to kill us just like here with aging. And there are similar disease processes related to nine hallmarks of aging and, and other things. So who are your key partners obviously sends Aubrey de gray and who is missing and w w what is missing in the ecosystem, um, that would enable you to do more.

Michael Greve: (43:53)
Okay. So, uh, to answer your first question, we're not going, um, uh, for controlling our startups. We don't want to have the majority. I personally, I'm a strong believer in strong founders. So we want to have the founders in control like that. That's not the case, usually in biotech because the founders are diluted to a negligible. And, but it's completely different in technology and technology. You need a strong founders and a few, we have to have the same here. Um, we just want to, uh, maintain a strong position to just help us guide our startups and be there for them. For example, it's very helpful if there's an investment round, you directly commit as an existing investor. Let's say I do 25, 30 or 40% of that round. So that, that, that helps the startup that gives the gifts, confidence also to other investors coming in, um, that also allows just non biotech investors to come in because the sell cake is always there. They're taking the lead, uh, which doesn't mean take the majority, but take the lead so I can just follow on. And this is already happening. Um, we have a lot of tech investors going along with us, they just say, okay, let him do the work. And we go along with it, but we also want to stimulate, um, uh, stimulate the whole thing. Yes.

Dina Radenkovic: (45:10)
Excellent. And anyone who are obviously sends, but any other key partners or

Michael Greve: (45:17)
Yes. So we are super open to networking. Um, we have one project running, uh, that's called the, the, um, rejuvenation network at QSU. We're building a network of a really loose network of venture capitalists, uh, universities, tech transfer offices, and really to create a community because, um, in, in biotech, especially with driven Asian biotech, um, the, the amounts of money that have to flow in the risk is very high and people like to, um, syndicate and to share the risks. So we are super open to that. We're really invite others to come in. Um, our main goal is to drive the industry forward to of course, to drive the, the, um, our startups in the, in this, uh, into, um, prove our key goals that it's working. It's inexpensive. It's for everybody. It's, it's uncomplicated and it's a good business. And, uh, but, uh, and this is also why we run the undoing agent conference.

Michael Greve: (46:12)
Our conference is a big networking event. Yes, it's about science, but hopefully next year, we're going to have the, the, the conference again. And the conference now has three tracks and one track is science. Second track is startups. And the third track is rejuvenation now. So what can I do now? And we're going to invite media as well. So we're going to have scientists, startups, investors, media, the blocker, but also the general media, uh, to prove that, Hey, there are things that you can do right now, the first analytics that can be applied today. And now it's not for the rich it's for everybody. I mean, you could take physically in as a supplement for us, might be a very good analytic, and that's just $30 a month. So that's not for the rich. Everybody could just buy that from Amazon, um, uh, to make that example. And so, yeah, I think networking and driving the whole thing forward is, is, is, is very important.

Dina Radenkovic: (47:08)
Thank you, Michael. And often we close it. What do you like to see play out in the next 20 years? But I think you've answered that in a sense that we're going to remove our cholesterol and one pill, and we're going to have one successful case study to kind of lead by example and in this field of longevity. Um, and, um, I guess what is the best way always you very active on forever healthy technologies is very transparent. You have a lot of information. Is there any other good way for people to keep up with, um, your, your team's work and your work online,

Michael Greve: (47:43)
Where you can, uh, go to our website, it's FIBA, uh, there shall be.org or.com. Um, you can subscribe to our newsletter. We have Facebook groups, we do regular online meet ups. You find that on our own page as well, where we talk about certain research that we do animal diseases that are a germination or maximizing health teams. We have scientists, uh, looking at, uh, all the latest research on certain topics and analyze that. So, yeah, we have to required a community around that, or you can visit the undoing aging conference. So we're very open if you want to collaborate as an investor, right. To ventures@qsu.com or find us on LinkedIn. Um, so we're really easy and we're very, very open, um, uh, to communicate

Dina Radenkovic: (48:29)
And share. Well, thank you, Michael. Thank you for finding the time and for sharing your impressive work. And we're very excited to have you in our network and John, over to you. Do you have any questions? Are you waiting for your cholesterol bill before you ask it? Yeah. You

John Darcie: (48:47)
Covered it pretty well. You know, I, I'm still a young guy, but, uh, you know, we could all use the cholesterol pill to help us out a little bit, especially in the pandemic. So, uh, we're, we're a few people have gained a, COVID-19 not just gotten COVID-19, but, uh, that's neither here nor there, but Michael, thank you so much for joining us on this week. Salt talk and thank you everybody for tuning into this week's salt talk. Uh, we love educating people on some of these massive breakthroughs that are taking place in the field of program biology and healthcare and life sciences, uh, that Michael has helped leading. And Dr. Dina has helped helping delete as well. Uh, just to remind you, if you missed any part of this salt talk or any of our previous episodes, you can access them on our website. It's salt.org backslash talks or on our YouTube channel, which is called salt tube.

John Darcie: (49:31)
Uh, we're also on social media. Uh, Twitter is where we're most active at salt conference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. And again, please spread the word about these salt talks. We love educating people. These are all free open for everyone to access. So if you found this conversation interesting, please share it with your uncle, your aunt, your grandfather, your, your dad, your mom, uh, and, and educate them about things that are going on in this space. But on behalf of Dr. Dina and the entire salt team, this is John Darcie signing off from salt talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.

Walter Isaacson: “The Code Breaker” | SALT Talks #212

"Jennifer Doudna invented, with her colleagues, a way to edit our genes. I think that’ll be the most useful but also most morally challenging technology of the 21st century."

Walter Isaacson is the Author of “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race”. The novel provides a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.

Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City. He is the past CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow, and has been the chairman of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine.

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Walter Isaacson

Professor of History

Tulane University

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Jim Mellon: Reimagining Aging | SALT Talks #211

“20 years ago, the human genome was unveiled as a map… scientists now know some of the key pathways that influence aging. We are not destined or pre-programmed to die at a specific age.”

Jim Mellon is a British entrepreneur, investor and author known for his ability to recognize emerging global trends. He’s most recently established himself as an expert in anti-aging and longevity research.

A constantly curious mind is necessary in identifying the next major global trends and investment opportunities. Anti-aging and longevity advancements will soon have massive impacts on life expectancy. The mapping of the human genome twenty years ago opened the door for scientists to begin understanding the different pathways that influence aging. Already drugs like metformin show promise in helping to extend life. “Within thirty years, the average lifespan at birth will be somewhere between 120-130 years. It is a fact, that with or without new technology, by 2100 there will be at least 100 million people 100+ years old”

AgTech represents another major industry primed to transform society. The adoption of alternative proteins will continue to grow rapidly as we look to address climate change while feeding a growing population.

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Jim Mellon

Chairman

Juvenescence

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Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darcie: (00:07)
Hello. Hello everyone. And welcome back to salt talks. My name is John Darcie. I'm the managing director of salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance technology and public policy. Saul talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these salt talks the same as our goal at our salt conferences, which we're excited to resume in the post pandemic period. Uh, God willing September of 2021 in New York, uh, which we're very excited about anybody watching. We'd love to have you there, but our goal on these talks and at those conferences is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And there's no bigger idea we think, uh, shaping the future, then the idea of longevity and just the amazing advances that we've seen in life sciences over the last several years.

John Darcie: (01:00)
So we're excited, very excited to welcome Jim melon to salt talks. Uh, Jim is a British entrepreneur and investor with a wide range of interests. There is private investment company, burn Bray group. He has substantial real estate holdings in Germany and the isle of man as well as holdings in private and public companies. Jim's investment philosophy is underpinned by his ability to recognize emerging trends that give rise to new industries or major shifts in markets. This includes the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 as foreseen in his first book that he co-authored, it's called wake up and subsequently in the new science and technologies detailed in cracking the code. The great book by Walter Isaacson and fast forward. Uh, more recently, Jim has established himself as a leader in the nascent field of aging research and longevity. His groundwork into the field is summarized in the book juvenile essence, which he also co-authored.

John Darcie: (01:55)
Jim sits on the board of trustees of the buck Institute for research and aging and the American Federation for aging research. He's also a trustee of bio gerontology research foundation and the lifeboat foundation as an honorary fellow at Orielle college at the university of Oxford and sits on the advisory board of the Milken institutes center for the future of aging. We're great friends with the team over there at Milken, but I understand that the AGA spent some time at Cambridge. I know you're an Oxford guy. Jim don't want to create any early tension here in the salt talk. If you guys start butting heads, I'll jump in and be the peacemaker. But, uh, hosting, today's talk returning to salt talks as AIJ Scaramucci, who is the founder and managing director of the salt fund, which is an early stage venture fund that we launched building on the salt ecosystem and making investments primarily in the life sciences biotechnology area. AIG can talk a little bit more about that. Uh, but with, without any further ado, I'm going to turn it over to AIG for the interview. Jim,

AJ Scaramucci: (02:53)
Jim, welcome. So, so lovely to see you, you know, I'd love to start this interview way, turning back the way back to the Oxford days, actually, where you were studying politics, philosophy economics. Take me into the mind of, of Jim at that time. What were you thinking? What were your aspirations? How were you imagining your career unfolding? Let's start there.

Jim Mellon: (03:15)
Uh, well, thanks. AJ thanks, John. It's really great to be on this, uh, program. Um, honestly, um, probably like you, I went to university very young. I was 17 and I graduated when I was 20. Uh, and the only thought I have was passing the exams, which were more difficult than I expected and, um, also getting a job and I had a wonderful time at Oxford. I had close links with Oxford as I'm sure. And I know you have with Cambridge, I'm deeply grateful for all the connections and all the opportunities that it afforded me. Um, but the most important thing really was to get a job. And so at the end of my time at Oxford, they had something that I'm sure you have the same quarter milk round when the employers come around and they interview people. And it's the usual one of investment banks and, uh, odd array of companies.

Jim Mellon: (04:14)
Uh, and I was offered three or four jobs. Uh, one was with a company called Clark shoes. I think they even sell their shoes in the U S um, and, but they'd been through several bankruptcies. I'm very glad I didn't go to that. Another one was with a well known investment banking company, and I'm glad I didn't go there either. Um, and the last one was with, uh, well, the one that I was considering, uh, very seriously was with a company that offered me a job in Hong Kong and it was in fund management and I didn't know what financial it was. I didn't know what a bond was, even though I had studied economics and I didn't know what a stock really was. And so I took that job because it was in Hong Kong and I wanted to leave the country, which I think is a great thing for anyone.

Jim Mellon: (04:54)
I think if you're living in the U S or the UK or anywhere, if you can go and travel the world, what a great opportunity. So I went to Hong Kong. I was, this is a long, long time ago, way before your time. I was paid 5,000 pounds a year. And then, uh, uh, the company was really growing quickly. It was called GT management. It's not a known as LGT or Lichtenstein global trust, the very big, uh, financial company. And, uh, they sent me to San Francisco where they were opening an office. And so I was able to, um, to be at the beginning of the big tech boom in the mid 1980s in the United States. And I can tell you this now, but I think I'm the only person ever to sat in a commercial aircraft going from Palm Springs to San Francisco. And in front of me with Steve jobs and bill gates together, talking in a friendly fashion on the flight hallway. Uh, and you know, we all think of them as being rivals and, you know, never speaking to each other, but they were there, they were in front of me. And if I'd had, uh, the guts that I have now, I would have gone and talked to them and my life might have been completely different.

AJ Scaramucci: (06:08)
Wow. That's, that's an amazing story. So, and, and Jim, as you've, as you've kind of entered into your investment career and culture, your craft, we're curious to know how have you developed that investment philosophy? What are, what are some of the heuristics you use in making decisions? And then also, what are some times in your career where you've, uh, kind of been challenged or you've, you've seen, you know, there, there was, there was an up or down that you had to had to manage or deal with.

Jim Mellon: (06:40)
Yeah. I, I, you know, you're the first person ever that I've spoken to, who's used the word heuristics, which is exactly the right word. So my, uh, condensed the motto, uh, and will be the subject of my next book is curiosity, adaptability and application curiosity is where you need, um, he eristics, you know, people like us read a lot regard that as being the job that we have to try and pick up, uh, the little sense that we need to understand where the next opportunity, uh, is rather than, you know, invest in the status quo, employee heuristics, and, and those heuristics are honed and developed over time and experience. I don't think you're born with them. I think it's just a question of, uh, really working at it. Uh, and so most of my morning is taken up with, uh, reading and reading widely on, on any subject at all.

Jim Mellon: (07:40)
Um, and then, you know, adaptability is particularly important now where the world is changing so quickly in a technological sense, young people are going to have to do multiple careers. We all know that, uh, so they have to be adaptable, you know, in my time you probably went into a job and that was it. And, uh, I know lots of people who've done it of my generation. Who've, who've done that. And some successfully, um, some unhappily, um, and the last thing is application. And we all know that unless your, one of the two geniuses sitting in front of me on the Palm Springs flight, uh, or Zuckerberg, or one of these very, very few people, Jack Mar, uh, that you have to work hard at it. You know, you don't, success is something that doesn't fall in your lap. And so, uh, curiosity, adaptability application that had been my, uh, watch words all well read throughout, um, my career.

Jim Mellon: (08:37)
And, uh, and I've kind of navigated. And you asked me about, you know, difficult times, wow, there've been plenty of difficult times. I mean, I'll give you an example. We were in, in the, on assumption of curiosity, I was reading and then the internet wasn't around in 1994, I reading about Russia, privatizing its, um, industries and, uh, doing it by way of distribution of anxious to every adult in the, in the Federation. Uh, and those matches with a sale and foreigners could goodbye those ventures. And so myself and my colleague, Jane Sutcliffe got on a plane. It was a rather complicated, uh, way of getting there, but we eventually ended up in Moscow. We ended up with $2 million in cash, body guards, all that sort of stuff. And we bought a $2 million worth of ventures at the vegetable market in Moscow, uh, to convert into, uh, chairs, the auction that was taking place of every single business, ranging from a hairdresser to the oil and gas companies in Russia.

Jim Mellon: (09:39)
And, um, it was a very successful investment. And within a year or two, we had billions of dollars invested in the former Soviet union. Now that was great. And, uh, in 1987, we made a very large amount of money, but in 1998, uh, Russia defaulted on its debts. Its currency was heavily devalued. And I remember getting a call from a former colleague of mine at Oriel college, Oxford, who was then the treasurer of Morgan Stanley asking for a margin call of $40 million. Now $40 million in 1998 was a lot of money. It wasn't my personal much call. It was the company's margin. We only just scraped that we got the $40 million, but wow. You know, to me it represented almost a 1998, was it wasn't a lifetime, but it was a big chunk of work. And it was almost about to go down the two. So you have to be aware of what might blindside you in either direction. Uh, you know, when we all know that when you're riding high is the time when it's most likely you're going to have a fault. So I'm very cautious these days about everything that I do. Yeah. Fascinating.

AJ Scaramucci: (10:50)
You know, there's, uh, we, when we were doing some, some research on your investment history, there's such a broad range from real estate and, you know, oh, markets bodies uranium for a time. And we actually had to some, some questions from our community around uranium. Uh, there's, there's a sort of an interesting dynamics at play is an emerging by-product of, of COVID, uh, there's been sort of supply shocks, uh, and you know, a decade ago, uh, or more when you, when you were, you were involved, uh, there were some similar kind of, there's a similar environment. I'm curious, is this something you're, you're kind of keeping track on having an opinion on?

Jim Mellon: (11:36)
Yeah, that's a great question. And basically, uh, when I got involved in uranium, I, it was a serendipitous moment because I have a friend who's a business partner and he happened to have a potential uranium deposit in Namibia. We were in my pub in London, uh, where a lot of good ideas I happen. And, uh, and you're, you're both very welcomed to come into a pub with me in London if you want. And, um, we put in $50,000 into this prospect and within two years it was sold for two and a half billion dollars in cash. Uh, now that was because uranium obviously representing nuclear power was the interregnum between fossil fuels and renewable energy. And the reason that that mine has never gone into production is because the price of uranium, which had gone from $20 to $140, a pound collapsed post Fukushima. And, uh, the Germans also shut down their uranium.

Jim Mellon: (12:42)
But today, and it's interesting, you should mention that I don't have a uranium, uh, prospect, but I've invested in Chemico as an example. Um, because I do think that, uh, nuclear is going to have it stay again, that we just can't move straight from fossil fuels to renewables, uh, with certainty and without huge costs, without putting nuclear, which is a clean energy somewhere in between. And the Chinese are building lots of, uh, uh, nuclear power stations. I think that even in the UK, we're building two or three, I guess, in the U S you'll be building some as well. So it's a it's, I think it's a good one to invest in at the moment.

AJ Scaramucci: (13:23)
Yeah. And so Jimmy in parlaying a bit, I mean, you're, but what's so fascinating about you and your background is you, you really put your, put your money where your mouth is, and you have a really strong conviction in certain vectors, certain mega trends. And the two more recently is the one of, of aging as the fundamental indication, longevity, uh, dressing the nine hallmarks, et cetera, uh, switching the paradigm to preventative as opposed to reactive forms as medicine and therapeutics, and then on the food and ag front, right pivoting into a world where cellular agriculture, synthetic biology and fermentation are the status quo and traditional agriculture goes to the wayside. And I'd love to understand, you know, as you were developing that, that mental model, both in writing, and then also manifesting in a company today, do you have an essence in it? And, and, and another one in the food and ag space acronym. Nomix how did you walk us through that, that process as well as, uh, give us a sense for why, like, what, why, why were those, why are those two things as so compelling and interesting to you?

Jim Mellon: (14:35)
Okay, so I've got two wonderful biotech partners. We've created a number of biotech companies, and we've invested in biotech for the last 15 years. One is dat Dubin who was formerly the head of drug research at, um, Pfizer. And the other is Greg is a well-known funder of, uh, biotech companies. And, uh, Greg and I were talking, he more about the, you know, how to live longer with the technologies that were then available, which is basically exercise, you know, reducing harmful inputs into your body. Uh de-stressing et cetera. And me more along the lines that, well, the science behind aging is catching up with the aspiration of us all to live at least healthier and the, towards the end of our lives, um, if not longer. And so having created a number of biotech companies, a couple of which are listed in the United States, we decided to create juvenile essence.

Jim Mellon: (15:35)
And do you have an essence is an interesting company because we don't know exactly what's going to modify aging, but we know that something's going to modify aging. So we created the back 20 bats. If you want to put it that way across, uh, multiple projects, uh, to where we only need one or two to work. And the first goal is to compress the period of what's called morbidity at the end of life. So that's having a dread disease post the age of about 70, which almost everyone, thousands, you know, so that could be osteoarthritis, or it could be cancer or diabetes or whatever it is, and trying to reduce the impact of that, uh, given that people are living longer, even, you know, in the pandemic period, their life expectancy generally is going up around the world. Uh, and then ultimately trying to modify aging so we can slow or reverse it, or even, I mean, this is the goal of some people like Eric Burdon, for instance, or Aubrey degrade of halting it.

Jim Mellon: (16:40)
And, uh, so the way that I, I create these, uh, opportunities is to write a book. And I can tell you that if you write a book, you get access to people who otherwise wouldn't talk to you. So I drove around the U S three and a half years ago. And, um, uh, which is by the way, was a wonderful experience. I mean, it's just such an incredible country and, uh, interviewed all the key opinion leaders that I could find. And, um, uh, they speak to you because they've gotta be in a book and then juvenessence became the template for our, for our company, which does no raise the back $250 million of equity capital, and is, um, in the process will, will be public, uh, sometime this year. And, um, well we have some exciting stuff. We have a consumer facing division that now has a product on the market, which comes.

Jim Mellon: (17:33)
And I know you're very close to, uh, Dr. Eric Burdon. Um, it comes out of his lab and the buck Institute, uh, it's called metabolic switch. It's on sale in the United States. It's really a remarkable product. And then we have an organ regeneration program, our subsidiary called late Genesis, which is in phase two trials in sick patients to regrow livers in situ. Uh, so, you know, we're getting there, but we're feeding our way towards it. The longevity industry is at the dial-up phase of the internet equivalent. We're in the very early stage. And as far as agriculture is concerned, uh, the, I got really interested in cellular agriculture, uh, because that comes out of biotech processes, using bioreactors media growth factors, et cetera, to create replicas of meat and fish and, and materials. And so that's why we got involved in that. And now we're the biggest investors in the world in this area.

Jim Mellon: (18:35)
Now that sounds like a major boast, but I can tell you it's a bit like being an Admiral and the Swiss Navy, it's still a very small sector. So, uh, so AIJ, um, you know, I think the two are very linked. They're linked to sustainability, they're linked to the need to reduce, uh, emissions and the need to improve our human health and in so many ways and so long life. So at the end of maybe not the end of my career, but the tail end of a long career, I am making, I hope that impact is positive for everyone. Yeah.

AJ Scaramucci: (19:09)
Yeah. And, and three and a half years ago, when you came to the us in that exploratory mindset, speaking with people like Aubrey or Eric at, at, at the buck Institute of aging, what were some big standout takeaways for you when you, when you look back at that experience? What, what surprised you, uh, what, what was unknown to you? How did, how did, how did that experience refine your, your heuristic perhaps, and sort of manifest what became juvenile assets?

Jim Mellon: (19:41)
Yeah, so, uh, I think it was basically a confluence of, um, I mean, it was a happy coincidence that, you know, Aubrey nearby lies another great example, David Sinclair, uh, Eric, um, and we'll be working on this for literally decades. And, you know, because the Alexia review has been chased by mankind for millennia without success. In some ways it was always regarded as the realm of crackpots and, uh, you know, almost religious cult type people. And so, but 20 years ago, the human on the human genome was, uh, unveiled. It was unveiled as a map, which couldn't be well-read and as time has gone on, and computer power has got greater and there's been great scientific collaboration across the internet. The unveiling of that, uh, map has become a reading of that. And we now know, or at least the scientists know about the, some of the key pathways, at least that influence aging.

Jim Mellon: (20:54)
We also know that we are not destined or pre-programmed for data specific age, and they know that in at least a mammalian and, uh, species, that it is possible to manipulate key pathways to, uh, keep, uh, mammals and ourselves living longer. And what really struck me was the work that was done in some, you know, compounds that are widely available. Um, but for different purposes, like a very good example is Metformin, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, uh, which is effectively a wonder drug and which nearby has been trying to get, uh, funding for his trial for, for a long time. Uh, but you know, as far as I can see almost every single person in the longevity industry is taking Metformin on a daily basis, um, and near thinks that will add six to eight years, uh, to lifespan. And I think Nick is a wonderful, wonderful person.

Jim Mellon: (21:53)
So what really impressed me was that the first of all, the collaboration of people in the longevity industry, positive collaboration, which is so great, then, you know, there's not a competitive landscape, is if anything works in this field, then it's going to be the biggest industry on the planet. Because there isn't very, there aren't many people who don't want to live longer. Even my dad who's 92 will be signed up for all the, uh, all the drugs that they want. Uh, and, um, so that, that was one thing. The second was the, the fervor and the, the, the, the years and years and years of grinding work that people, Aubrey, Eric have been doing to advance the cause. And I just felt that, you know, it was an inclusive family and I wanted to be part of it. And I feel that I am now a part of it.

Jim Mellon: (22:40)
And I'm very, very grateful, uh, to, to have been included in that, even though I'm not a scientist, but I understand enough to know that we can and will make an impact. And I also make the assertion today, but within 30 years, average life span will be at birth will be somewhere between 120 and 130 years, I mean, absolutely possible. And it is a fact with all, with that new technology, with new technology, be an even bigger figure, but by 2,100, uh, there will be at least a hundred million people of a hundred years old plus on the planet. And that's up from half a million in 1990s. So, you know, the progress is incredible. Yeah.

AJ Scaramucci: (23:25)
And being on the front lines and making those bats that you made at at Juven essence, what do you, I know these things are malleable in the last second will change, et cetera, but which one of these is it, is it the nav boosting? Is it similar Lytics? Is it something in the computational drug discovery or wind pathway on the front lines today? If you, I know you've, you've created a portfolio approach, but when you're speaking with the research scientists, uh, downstream, what, what today feels like the most promising, uh, mechanism that can unlock, uh, the most net years of both health span and lifespan?

Jim Mellon: (24:04)
Yeah, I think it's, uh, there's no Polly farmer. I mean, it is a farmer approach. There's no single pill that we're gonna be able to take that will keep us alive for over 30 years, at least not now. Um, and, uh, what I'm very excited about is a regenerative medicine, uh, you know, effectively that the image of the class that you've seen this before, a kind of state car that's restored, uh, to, uh, as is the, as was state, uh, we are very keen on trying to find ways in which, uh, organs that are failing can be regenerated, uh, in vivo. And that's a major push for us. And I think that we were getting close to that actually working. And the fact that the FDA has allowed like Genesis to go into sick patients, uh, using, uh, lymphnodes as a topic bioreactors w seated with, um, uh, with hepatic cells to, uh, basically regrow liver tissue, uh, to take over the burden of a fading that, um, is, is a very big positive.

Jim Mellon: (25:09)
Um, but that platform can be used to regrow the famous where your T cells are produced, regrow the pancreas, uh, ultimately regrow the kidney or, uh, as well. And the big issue with, um, transplants is a first of all, there aren't enough, uh, organs out there to be transplanted, uh, particularly in livers. Secondly, it's a very expensive and very long, uh, operation in the U S to have a liver transplant is $800,000, and it's about a 15 hour operation. And the third is that you, uh, need immunosuppressants, uh, for the rest of your life. And just imagine that you'd had a transplant and you're on heavy immunosuppression and the COVID comes along. I mean, you're not even allowed to see anyone, uh, you know, the whole period of COVID because the slightest infection will take you away. So what we're trying to do is find a way of amalgamating science.

Jim Mellon: (26:05)
And so our company Ajax, um, has got a stem cell line called HLA G, which is a maternal stem stem cell line. That means that the mother doesn't reject the fetus. And we're trying to use that along with like Genesis technique, which is by the way only about $130,000 compared to the $800,000 for a transplant. Plus it's an inpatient, uh, sorry, that patient procedure, as opposed to an inpatient procedure and use that to avoid the need for immunosuppression. So the opportunity in regenerative medicine, I think is number one in my list of, of what we can do, um, in terms of, uh, you know, what drug C might want to take. I think that analogs or tweaks of Metformin or rapamycin will, are absolutely something that we're seriously interested in. Um, send analytics have so far been disappointing as you well know, and unity failed in its first trial. It's now engaged in a second phase three for age-related macular degeneration. I hope. And I pray that it works because on paper said, analytics should be working, but so far they're not, but as I said earlier, we don't know exactly what's going to work, but we know something's going to work. Definitely.

AJ Scaramucci: (27:19)
Yeah. That's super comprehensive. Yeah. I mean, I think there, there is something for sure in this regenerative medicine realm, the cellular therapeutics realm, and whether it's placental derived tissue, as an example, in the case of cellularity or trying to populate kidney or lung scaffolds with mesenchymal stem cells, you know, the work of Martine wrath, Blatt, et cetera, there's there, there is a lot of converging, um, areas that are really showing, showing early signs of promise. Uh, it's extremely exciting. So today, so today Jim, for yourself, cause people are going to want to know you're taking Metformin. Are you taking some kind of NAD booster or what, what is the constellation of things that you do for yourself, uh, has given you, you have become a champion of, of longevity research?

Jim Mellon: (28:09)
Well, they always say a J the best tailors, the ones that are less stressed, um, I'm, uh, taking, uh, I do I've, I've actually started on Metformin, uh, because at the urging of my colleagues, um, and I'm not taking NAD boosters, I am, uh, I'm now drinking the ketone Ester from juvenessence metabolic switch, which actually tastes absolutely horrible. But if you remember your mum giving you, um, you know, medicines and saying that if it tastes bad, it's good for you. It's the same, it's the same concept, I guess. Um, and I do feel better actually. I've been on it for about two weeks and I feel better for that. Um, and, uh, so, uh, I'm not doing a lot other than I look exercise. I think given that we are not at the point yet where the stuff is in wide dispersal, uh, I think exercise is the most important thing, and it can be anything even walking, but doing, you know, a lot of steps every day. So I do a minimum of 15,000 steps a day, but don't look at me. I think my colleague Greg, uh, takes it to extremes and I'm somewhere in the middle of the night. I'm probably the slouch. Um, you prefers to watch some Netflix and follow all the advice that I could

AJ Scaramucci: (29:26)
Fair enough. Fair enough. And yeah, the parlay there, I mean, there's, there's, you know, an enormous amount of capital, particularly in the age of COVID that has been coming down into pharma or MRN research or, or what have you. And, you know, longevity really does seem to be like this secret hiding in plain sight. Right. I mean, it, it really is. Uh, as you said, you know, it's kind of like the dial up days and perhaps we will look back a decade or two and, and look back maybe on even this conversation and say, wow, this, this truly was the beginning. The question I have is, is how do we get more investors interested in longevity, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, institutions, what watershed moment do you feel needs to happen in order for that wave to really, really ignite from a capital perspective?

Jim Mellon: (30:20)
Yeah, that's a brilliant question. I mean, I think that, uh, the pandemic has done two things. One, it has shown up the need to build up the immuno resilience and the elderly cohort cohorts, because as in the United States, as in the UK as, and everywhere else, the average age of people dying of COVID is more or less at the average age of life expectancy. I mean, in the UK, it's actually one year ahead of average life expectancy. So older people who have reduced immune systems, uh, building up those immune systems, I think is going to be really important and any breakthrough there. And again, that's a major focus of, as a juvenile essence is going to show the capability of extending, um, life, uh, and, uh, also start garnering the money that is necessary to really propel this thing forward. I completely agree with you ha this is a monumental industry in the making, but as yet, because there isn't anything that it's, you know, you can put your hand on and say, this is really working.

Jim Mellon: (31:37)
Um, uh, it's not got the hype around, for instance, cannabis or cryptocurrencies running, even though it deserves to have a much, much bigger priority than those things. Um, but we're, we're not, not far off the point. Um, you know, there are, there are good companies in this field. Uh, some of which you're very familiar with, you know, Peter Diamandis, his companies as an example, um, the data Sinclair's life bio-sciences, uh, and one or two of us will have something in the next one or two years that will be mind shattering and will propel huge amounts, uh, into this field. We're not quite at the point, but on the other hand, but when not finding a great deal of resistance to people putting money into the concept. Um, and, uh, although my money raising is always difficult as, you know, we are, we're doing pretty well on that school. And, um, I'm, I'm, I'm confident we'll get enough money to, to progress our programs.

AJ Scaramucci: (32:39)
Yeah. Yeah. And do you feel that, uh, sort of recognizing aging as a disease or an indication, uh, is, is sort of a linchpin in this, or a lot of aging companies seem to be pursuing aging or, you know, one of the nine hallmarks as an example, but they have to masquerade as traditional pharmaceutical companies and pursuant of, you know, X, Y, and Z oncology indication. And you, do you, do you feel, I mean, that is in this iced a bit, do you feel like that is, that is of critical importance?

Jim Mellon: (33:11)
Yeah. My colleague, the chaperone Coff runs in silico medicine, which was our first investment in juvenessence, which is doing very well, um, is a big illness, you know, getting aging recognized, uh, by the who as a, a disease in itself. Uh, I think he's been making along with his, uh, partners in this, uh, in this mission, some success, and it is important because let's face it apart from viral diseases or bacterial infections or some rare childhood diseases. Uh, aging is the number one cause of disease. Uh, the proliferation of disease as you get older is quite incredible. And, um, so we need to look at aging as the fundamental cascade from which all the diseases of aging come. And I, I'm totally with you on, in that. I think that will be a big moment. Uh, and, uh, we're working on that with, uh, with, uh, partners in the other companies and other organizations, uh, in the aging space to try and make that happen.

Jim Mellon: (34:18)
But I have to take my hat off to Alex because I think he's the, he's the main driver of this, but it's a very, very good and well noted point that, you know, as soon as aging is recognized as a disease, and maybe we move forward. Now, I wouldn't say companies are necessarily imposters. What they are doing is they're navigating the FDA and the rules to find a commercial application because no company can hang around for 30 or 40 years. And seeing if, you know, Aja lives to 150 or a hundred, um, and well, it's a lot longer than 30 or 50 years. I know, but in my case, let's say, and, um, they, uh, so they need to find some way of getting a drug or a therapy that's commercialized. And then in the near future, we're no different to that. You know, we're looking for near term commercial opportunities, which then measured with biomarkers, and you talk about the whole monks of agent, but measured with accurate biomarkers are getting better and better, uh, allow scientists to see if there is actually an aging or anti-aging effect from the therapies that people are taking.

Jim Mellon: (35:21)
Um, but, uh, as you know, Metformin is a prescription drug in the United States, but it's not here in Spain and, uh, I can go buy it in the pharmacy. And so it makes it slightly different for you guys in the U S

AJ Scaramucci: (35:33)
Yeah. So Jim, uh, you know, I, it kind of pivoting into new book moose law, which came out last year. Uh, you know, you seems like a similar story. You interviewed an enormous number of experts in the space of cellular agriculture and food and ag tech more broadly. Uh, and similarly you're, you're making waves here, uh, as an investor and as an entrepreneur, love to learn you again on the front lines of this industry in particular, what are you seeing? What is, what is, what is promising, what is investible today that can see, uh, you know, some, some rate of return. I mean, we've seen impossible and beyond, and even just, and sort of the plant, uh, sort of protein alternatives start to really garner one market share, but to enterprise value cellular agriculture seems to be a bit more nascent, uh, things like fermentation and synthetic biology may be here even more ahead. I'm curious how, as you map that landscape, what seems that it is within our grasp in the next five to 10 years?

Jim Mellon: (36:40)
Yeah. Well, uh, you described it extremely well. I would say that, you know, rather like longevity has come into its own because of a single event, which was the unveiling of the human genome. The rise of alternative proteins has come into its own, uh, for three or four reasons. One is the desire to change the outcome and climate. It is a fact, and, you know, you can dispute the percentages, but about a fifth of noxious gases come from intensive farming, and it's more than any other form of human activity, including transport. So reducing intensive farming is a really good thing for the environment. Secondly, cutting down the rainforest, which everyone is justifiably upset about is being done to grow soy beans, which then get fed to animals, which are very inefficient, uh, converters of plant protein into meat. Uh, in the case of Kansas, about 25 to one in chickens, it's somewhere between six to nine to one, uh, that's highly wasteful.

Jim Mellon: (37:53)
And also it adds to further environmental damage. Thirdly, you've got the Indians and the Chinese demanding more and more animal protein, and quite rightly, why shouldn't they eat, uh, as they get rid of the same stuff as Americans or Europeans, uh, do, but in, so doing what's happening is that you're putting unbearable strains on our environmental system and on potential human health. So 80 that's eight, 0% of antibiotics go into intensively farmed animals. Now, what that does is to create antibiotic resistance in human beings, because we're, I don't because I don't eat meat, but people are eating these, uh, meats and they're becoming more and more antibiotic resistant. Um, one day, uh, it could be, it'd be, and I know bill gates has been banging on about this, but it could be that we just antibiotics and work anymore. And if we got a bacterial pandemic, rather than the viral pandemic we have now, where the whole world is being shot down, 3 million people have died a week.

Jim Mellon: (38:59)
It could be looking at a much, much worse situation. We could be looking at a blank deck and, you know, people's holder, that's all possible in the mobile world. The black death was in the middle ages. Well, how was our responsible for vaccinations? So this pandemic, it wasn't much better than it was in 1918 or 1920. So we need to reduce the consumption of antibiotics. And 80% of them go into intensively found animals. Now you've also got the overfishing of the seas I've done, if anybody, to watch cease bursty, but it's a harrowing tale. Um, uh, and, uh, you know, this is going to be a massive disruption and it's happening very quickly. You asked companies are investible. We think about 30 in the world of which we've invested in 14. Uh, and yeah, and none of those companies are public, but I would imagine that one or two of them will go public in the states.

Jim Mellon: (39:53)
You mentioned each just possibly a spec, uh, Memphis meets in the states blue, which is the leading, uh, fish sell a company will go public. And of course you rightly point out in plant based meats you've got beyond and probably impossible game public shortly live kindly go in public and openly Cletus company. Um, making oat milk will go public quite soon. 10 years ago, half a percent of the U S market was alternative loans today. It's not good between 20 and 25%. The two biggest us little producers of Bombas borderland Dean foods. That's before you put your taught rightly about precision fermentation before the precision fermentation companies come along like perfect day or legendary out of butter Lynn, and they produced absolute replicas of whey Kasey making up milk, cheese, yogurt, et cetera, without any dairy cows being involved. So I make these predictions, I'm sorry I'm buying on here, but I'm very passionate about it.

Jim Mellon: (40:59)
10 years time, the dairy industry, as it currently exists, where you think of cows and being Milt that others getting to stand it, that backs breaking off to two or three years. And whereas they would normally live 20 to 25 years. Miserable lives back industry is gone, gone almost all around the world and we'll be drinking the perfect days or the Oatley or whatever. In terms of meat, 50 send to the meat market will be either plant based and everyone knows the brands, meatless farms call and impossible, uh, and, uh, or cell ag. And the reason I fundamentally prefer sell ag is because there's IP around it, but it's a, it's a, it's a moat that creates in my opinion, more value. And so companies will be able to produce these foods in labs and basically on an industrial scale, as the price comes down, uh, will become more valuable than the plant based foods.

Jim Mellon: (42:02)
And they're probably better for human health, but we know contaminants, no bacteria. So the food, the shelf life will be longer. Um, in fish there'll be no mercury microplastics, which are a disaster for fish at the moment. Uh, no antibiotics, no hormones, um, et cetera. And the total addressable market for all these things for dairy for meat or fish is about $5 trillion, which is twice the size of the whole UK economy. And about a quarter of the U S economy. This is not a trivial market. You know, if Tesla is worth $800 billion on the back of electric vehicles, and these companies are worth peanuts by comparison, they are addressing a fundamentally bigger need. We don't all need to get into a car every day, but we all need to eat. So this is absolutely transformational. And, uh, this is a long side, uh, longevity in juvenile since my other main passion. And I, I don't need to do anything else in my life except focus on these two because you know, they're both transformational.

AJ Scaramucci: (43:12)
Wow. Yeah. I mean, we personally, we feel the exact same way. I mean, we have stood up a vehicle at salt specifically to invest in program biology at the intersection of longevity and food and ag. And we are investors in companies like Xi Rue, which has mentioned in your book. I went to school school with Ryan at perfect day. We've been friends with fantastic friends for the last eight years, been involved in that company since the beginning. Um, and you know, it, it really, it really is, uh, it is happening, right. I mean, I think the, the gaining, the gaining function in, in cellular ag really is the cost related to the recombinant proteins being fed during the culture expansion process. I'm curious if you've seen, have you seen, uh, again on the front lines, some novel approaches to this, so that'll really kind of move the needle. I mean, moose law, I think is a great, a great analog or our heuristic to think about this. Um, but do you feel it'll look, it'll sort of just just happen or w what, what fundamental, uh, breakthrough do you feel needs to happen to unlock this for, for humanity at large at scale?

Jim Mellon: (44:20)
Yeah. Um, so there are three, the reason I think that I call it griddle parity, but the cell ag products have the potential over time to be lower in price than conventionally fund meats in particular will fish is because the input ratios at scale hence moves law are lower. We think about too to one compared to, as I mentioned that 25 to one, four a cow. Um, but you're actually right. The growth factors have to come down in price. Now the proteins recombinant proteins are, are currently extremely expensive because they are derived from biotech processes, but we know that in biotech at scale. So for instance, insulin would be a good example. Uh, the price comes down dramatically and in the case of insulin, it's about $4 a gram. And, uh, we are pretty confident that those same transcriptions will happen in cell ag. Similarly, the bioreactors that are used at the moment are relatively these small and they need to be scaled up.

Jim Mellon: (45:32)
And so companies like Sartorius in Germany are working on scaling them up to enormous sizes that you can produce a hundred thousand people's protein from one single factory. Uh, and I believe that will happen in the next two or three years. Uh, and then, uh, lastly, you've got the media or the, um, nutrients, and we know that they're coming down in price quite dramatically as well. So we're to, it's an iterative process. I don't think there's gonna be one single massive breakthrough, but it's going to be actually, I don't know, but I don't think it's going to be totally transformative, but I, I can tell you that if you graph the price of the initial burger unveiled by my passed in 2013 in London, who's now the chief scientific officer of Mosa meat costs about 300 pounds as in U S dollars. And now it's down to about $10.

Jim Mellon: (46:28)
It's following the trajectory of Moore's law, Gordon Moore, his original law of these, of these semiconductors. So it's only a matter of years before you get down to Gribble parents, the, and below, I'm absolutely confident that we're going to get that. I think the bigger roadblock it's going to be number one, the agro Luddites, particularly in the United States to, um, uh, uh, you know, representing capital pharmas and all very empty this stuff. And I can understand why they are, but in a way they should be embracing it because they might actually make some money out of it. Uh, and number two, the regulatory process, um, uh, and then third is of course, consumer acceptance, will people accept eating food that's made in a, uh, industrial way. And I think that will happen. Um, and I, to give you an illustration of that, I was reading about Libby pasta and pasteurized milk, and it it's amazing, amazing to me that pasteurization was all around for a long time before it was used mandatorily in United States and people were dying because they were drinking unpasteurized milk, which caused huge amounts of, uh, uh, gastro problems, uh, in, in the U S uh, and, uh, only when the science was proven to the satisfaction of the regulators, was it made mandatory, but consumers embraced it straight away, even though it might heating up the milk to 130 degrees Celsius, and then couldn't get it straight away.

Jim Mellon: (47:55)
Um, so it was a novel foods are easily embraced that they represent convenience, taste, texture and price, and those are the four key factors that will drive this industry.

AJ Scaramucci: (48:07)
Sure, sure. I think that's a really interesting, uh, analog, and it leads me to my next question, which is the consequences of, of this stuff, both in longevity and in food and ag. I mean, do people really want to live forever if they had the option? Do you, uh, or in the food and ag ecosystem, will, will people, I mean, uh, my gut is yes, they will accept cellular ag as a mainstay, but there's definitely going to be friction there. I'd love, love to hear a little bit from you on, on the kind of downstream second, third order consequences of, of these technological inevitabilities if you,

Jim Mellon: (48:47)
Yeah. Well, I mean, the consequences of, uh, people living healthier for longer are, uh, you know, incredible, um, in some ways, you know, people do live routinely to a hundred, 110. Um, it's like adding another 12 hours to your day, instead of making out with 24 hours away, couple of 36 sites, what are you going to do with that time? And that will be a big question for a lot of people. Uh, it obviously upends all sorts of financial products, you know, pensions insurance, uh, government structures and all that sort of stuff. And there's not enough attention paid to that. So we do a longevity forum every year in London, uh, with my collaborators, including professor Andrew Scott, who wrote the a hundred year life to try and educate people about, you know, what are, what are the consequences of this? And by the way, it's an unstoppable trainers it's going to happen.

Jim Mellon: (49:40)
Um, and, um, the, uh, so, and in terms of agriculture, well, luckily, uh, there are two parts of agriculture. One is growing crops for human consumption, which is a very profitable business, generally speaking. Um, and, uh, then there's also growing crops to put in animals and grain the animals themselves, both of those, hopefully it will reduce an intensity. They have to reduce the intensity. Uh, but if farmers divert their attention to growing CrossFit humans, they can make much better margins than they currently do. And a lot of them are just living precariously, trying to grow animals and, and cross to put into animals. Uh, and, uh, there is opportunities for farmers to other stuff where they land, like for instance, building houses since only 1% of the workforce in developed countries works in agriculture. It's not going to be highly disruptive. There's not going to be like the horse and cart being displaced by the motorcar. This is a, it's going to be all the minds, being miners, all losing their jobs. This is a much lesser change. And the major part of agriculture is actually processing marketing, consumption, retaining a food that will stay the same.

AJ Scaramucci: (51:02)
Definitely. And Jim and Jim, you know, uh, where can, where can people find you interact with you? Are you active on, on, on social media? How do people keep up with, with your work? I know you're, you've got these recent books coming out, perhaps another one down, down the pike, but give us a sense there.

Jim Mellon: (51:23)
Um, I'm on LinkedIn and anyone can contact me on LinkedIn. I'm not on any of the other things, because I think LinkedIn is the only one that's polite and, you know, has a special purpose. Um, so I'm on that, a contact me on that, and I'd be very happy to connect anyone to my colleagues if they want to talk directly to any of them. Um, and, uh, as far as the books are concerned, the profits go to whatever. And the, and this case, the moose law, uh, all the profits go to the good food Institute, which is the leading advocacy group for trying to reduce intensive farming. I mean, my own motivation by the way, ha or intensive farming is not to make money, but to reduce animal cruelty. And, um, you know, as a, I can see John's wearing his dog, uh, don't think, and I'm sure you're a big animal lover as well.

Jim Mellon: (52:22)
H I'm sure you are. Uh, and, uh, we can't have any more of this. I mean, you know, chickens in 1950, where one third, the size of chickens today, the chickens today live an average of 23 days. Uh, the male checks are shoved into basically the butchered, uh, when they arrive in the world. Um, and cause, you know, live 28 months before they're slaughtered and most of them never see the daylight until the day they are slotted. Uh, we know about fish. I mean, th this is a, it's a cruel and horrible industry. And my motivation is to sorry, is to reduce this as much as possible,

AJ Scaramucci: (53:05)
Definitely with that geo, I mean, it has been such a pleasure to speak with you. We'd love to see you again on, on salt talks in the future. And one of our events, uh, in New York or Abu Dhabi, Singapore, is as the world opens up. Uh, but with that, I mean, John, uh, I mean,

John Darcie: (53:22)
I, I think Jim, we would obviously love to you in New York, in September, but a beef, a warrior station right now is definitely not a bad move. So I don't blame you if you decide to, just to kick your feet up on the beach and continue the great work you're doing, but we would love to see

Jim Mellon: (53:36)
You. I, I would love to come with we're longing to travel actually. And, uh, it would be super, uh, to be included in one of your events. I really appreciate it. And, uh, it's been an absolute pleasure, ha and John, thank you for having me

John Darcie: (53:51)
And thank you for joining us and thank you everybody for tuning into today's salt. Talk with Jim Mellon of Juven essence. Just a reminder, if you miss any part of this talk or any of our previous salt talks, you can access them on our website. It's salt.org backslash talks and on our YouTube channel, which is called salt tube. Uh, we're, we're more active on social media than Jim we're on Twitter at salt conference. That's not to say we don't get some, some hate messages every once in a while. They'll probably be talking about how I'm, uh, you know, not dressed properly or, or wasted too much time in the introduction before we got to the good stuff with AIG and Jim get all kinds of, you know, hateful messages on social media, but we try to keep our self-esteem in order and block it out. Um, but uh, also spread the word about the assault talks. We think these issues related to longevity, as we talked about, you know, the animal cruelty issue is obviously very important and also just helping people live healthier, longer lives, we think is a very noble mission and a great cause. So on behalf of AIG and the entire salt team, this is John Darcey signing off from salt talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.

Deena Shakir: Transformative Technologies | SALT Talks #204

“Intersectionality is not only my actual identity, but also very much my career path. Whether it’s the intersection of health and technology, or computational biology and food, it’s very core to my thesis.”

Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital where she invests in transformative technologies. She’s particularly interested in contrarian and underdog founders building digital health companies.

As the daughter of Iraqi immigrants, 9/11 had a profound impact and served as motivation to build bridges between communities through work and service. This included a stint at the US State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow before pursuing a career focused on sustainable economic development. A wide-ranging career has helped establish a deep and interconnected network that plays an important role as a venture capitalist. “Everyone has their superpower they bring to the table… I’m never going to be the smartest person in the room, the most technical or most experienced. My superpower is my ability to connect.”

When identifying start-ups and their founders, it is hugely valuable to find someone who has not only expertise, but also the ability to tell a story. Communicating a company’s mission through a story is vital to sustained success, whether it be fundraising or hiring.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Deena Shakir.jpeg

Deena Shakir

Partner

Lux Capital

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darcie: (00:07)
Hello everyone. And welcome back to salt talks. My name is John Darcie. I'm the managing director of salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance technology and public policy. Saul talks are a digital interview series that we launched in 2020 with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these salt talks is the same as our goal at our salt conferences, which we're excited to resume, uh, in September of 2021. And we hope our guests today will be able to join us at that event. But our goal is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Deena Shakira to salt talks. Deena is a partner at Lux capital, a multistage venture capital firm with around two and a half billion in assets, under management, where she invests in transformative technologies, improving lives and livelihoods she's particularly interested in contrarion and underdog founders, building ambitious companies in digital health and sits on the boards of companies, including H one, all stripes.

John Darcie: (01:14)
And she wrote she's the daughter of Iraqi immigrants, and Dina has had a very non-linear journey into venture capital, always orienting around tech and entrepreneurship with an impact focus prior to joining the lock. She was a partner@googleventuresandledpartnershipsformoonshotproductsatgoogleanddirectedatsocialimpactinvestmentsatgoogle.org. She was a presidential management fellow in the Obama administration where she worked in secretary Clinton's office and the U S aid on program supporting global entrepreneurship, a passionate advocate for diversity inclusion and equity. Deanna is also on the boards of several non-profits. She's a Forbes contributor, a Kauffman fellow, and as a council on foreign relations term member, she lives with her husband and two young children in the San Francisco bay area. But I think she's escaped. Uh, I have three kids as well, so I know how it goes. She's escaped the zoo. That is the household during COVID and is in the Lux offices today. Hosting today's talk is AGA Scaramucci.

John Darcie: (02:11)
Who's going to be increasingly joining us as a host here on salt talks. He's done a few previous interviews. I know we did one with Joe Lonsdale a few weeks ago, AIG, but AIG is the founder and managing partner of the salt fund, which is a new fund that we've launched, leveraging the community and ecosystem that we've built here at salt that's incubating and investing, especially in early stage life sciences oriented companies. So I know a lot of overlap with what we're doing at the salt fund and what Dina does over there at Lux, but, uh, with no further ado, I'll turn it over to you AJ for the interview.

AJ Scaramucci: (02:42)
Thank you, John Dina. So good to be with you. I mean, there's tons of rich things in that background before we dive into your role at locks and, and perhaps some of the investments you've made. I'd love to just contextualize that a bit. How did you get here? Well, how did you get to, to, to Lux capital? Let's start.

Deena Shakir: (03:03)
Yeah, sounds great. Thank you, John and AIG for having me. And that's probably the question I get asked the most, um, just behind it, if you look at my LinkedIn background or my resume, um, it certainly is, uh, nonlinear and non-traditional um, although, uh, I would contend that said there really is no traditional path into this field, you know, for me grew up in the bay area. Um, as you mentioned, John, my parents immigrated from Iraq. Um, my father came to the bay area to complete his residency at Stanford in psychiatry and just fell in love with the bay in the seventies. And so, um, you know, I had a very privileged childhood compared to most of my relatives and that were very, very much informed my identity, especially, you know, being in high school when nine 11 happened and feeling perhaps for the first time in my life, that my hybrid identity as an Iraqi, as a Muslim and as an American, all of a sudden to out it to anyone on the outside seemed at odds.

Deena Shakir: (04:09)
And so that really informed, it informs my career path, my, my educational journey and ultimately my, my goals in life. I wanted to help contribute to a world where that would not happen again. I wanted to sort of do what I had. I've always done when any third culture kid, any child of immigrants has done, which is to build those bridges and to be able to seamlessly transition between worlds and to do that in service of, uh, of impact. And so, uh, went off to the east coast for college. I went to Harvard, um, and, uh, and really thought I was going to do a PhD in anthropology. And I thought academia was going to be the path for me to do that. We studied the middle east, of course, at Harvard studying the middle east meds, you know, reading ancient at Katie and tech and setting Sumerian, Sumerian of philology, because very interesting, but not necessarily what I, what I had in mind.

Deena Shakir: (05:01)
And so I spent summers abroad and, um, and, uh, and then went off to grad school at Georgetown. And so ended up in DC. I graduated in 2008. Uh, in fact, I delivered the commencement address that year and the speaker right after me was that former chairman Ben Bernanki. And, uh, if you go back and look at the footage from that speech, I actually turned around to thank him and he had disappeared. So there was clearly something going on in that summer of 2008. Um, and of course, several, uh, several months later, we, we, you know, we came to see what was happening with the financial crisis, but bring that out because at the time, you know, the class before mine, class of 2007, 1% of Harvard undergrads went into wall street or consulting. It was just the thing you did there, wasn't really a clear path, um, between these sort of this dichotomy of doing well or doing good.

Deena Shakir: (05:55)
So you could go, you know, maybe you could see a doctor or you could be, um, you know, a human rights lawyer, or you could be an academic, or you could do what all the kids did and, you know, make a ton of money. And, um, and, and that's really unfortunate because it took me, you know, over a decade to realize that there is not only a gray area, if you will, that perhaps a more impactful area towards sustainable economic development, uh, in between. Uh, so I was pursuing the academic path and ended up in DC, as I mentioned. And that was a very interesting time, um, for the country, because it was there when Obama, who you may see in the, in the photo here behind me was, uh, elected was inaugurated and then ultimately took office. Um, and while I was in grad school, just, uh, as, as was the case, while I was an undergrad, I was working all the time.

Deena Shakir: (06:45)
I paid for both college and grad school by myself. And I was lucky enough to get an, a number of scholarships, but also was usually working one to three jobs at a time and happened to, um, one of those jobs happen to be as a journalist very briefly. Um, and I was on air, but I did a bilingual, Arabic English news show. I'm not sure if you can tell based on my presence with getting actually, it was very difficult because let's just say, I thought my Arabic was good, but when you ha when you have to do a news show on air and Arabic, that's a whole nother story. So happy to be on air anytime, but please don't ask them to do it in Arabic in the future. Um, but, uh, the ended up interning with the BBC and covering the white house when Obama gave his canonical speech, which became known as the Cairo speech in 2009.

Deena Shakir: (07:28)
Um, I know we talked about this before Aja, so I'm, I know you remember it, that that speech was a watershed moment for relations between the last and the middle east. And for me as someone who had grown up in the bay area, who was passionate about, uh, economic development and who specifically knew the power of technology in particular, um, to, to not only build bridges and product for impact, but also to enable livelihoods, I was really motivated by that speech. And I dropped my niece in career in journalism and made it my job to make that my job and find out who was going to be running, um, the policies coming out of that speech. So, uh, was lucky enough to get a presidential management fellowship ended up at, uh, initially it was at USA ID and then at the state department, um, and spent several years working on a number of initiatives around the post Cairo portfolio, specifically enabling, um, and, and funding, uh, programs for entrepreneurship in the region.

Deena Shakir: (08:26)
And so how, how did, how did that lead to, to venture, um, as a, is a good question. And, and a lot of it also has to do with another watershed moment for the region, which was the Arab spring and being in the U S government as an Arab American. Um, when that was happening was, was really interesting. And I was witnessing changes on the ground in the region that I didn't think I would see in my lifetime. Now, back then, we were all a lot more hopeful. Um, uh, you know, uh, certainly looking in retrospect things perhaps didn't end up the way that many had hoped, but what I was seeing was that technology was enabling change in a way that was truly revolutionary. And that to me was incredibly exciting. So it was a combination of seeing that, you know, the beginning of, of what we were, what we now call the fourth industrial revolution.

Deena Shakir: (09:12)
And I was coming out to the bay a lot for work. My job working in secretary Clinton's office, uh, on public private partnerships was to facilitate those types of relationships with startups, VCs, and, and, um, and also large tech companies. So combination of like feeling this, the, the energy here in the bay, recognizing that this, this place I had grown up in which when I left, I honestly never thought I would come back. It didn't seem like there was an opportunity for somebody who wasn't, you know, just, uh, maybe a chip engineer or, or, or perhaps a software engineer, but Silicon valley and the technology in general was not just a separate sector anymore, but a way of doing everything better, more effectively, efficiently, and in some cases more democratically. So, uh, that's when I decided I wanted to, to, to learn how to build product, and that's a, not an easy transition and it was early, you know, there's definitely a diaspora now of folks from DC in, uh, in the bay.

Deena Shakir: (10:09)
But back then, this is 2011, 2012. It wasn't a clear case to make, um, as to how someone with my background who literally studied the most non-technical degree, you could get at Harvard social studies and near Eastern languages, and civilizations would be qualified for a job on the product side. So very difficult, um, but ultimately ended up, um, being fortunate enough to get a really cool opportunity. Um, and so spent five years working on early stage product partnerships at Google, including some, uh, social impact initiatives, including, you know, Google's elections products and so on, but ultimately, uh, lands in, into healthcare. And that's what led me to venture. And it was leading Google's first HIPAA compliant, uh, product effort, meeting, incredible entrepreneurs who were doing things frankly, better than my team of hundreds of engineers at Google. And recognizing that big tech probably was not going to be the source of innovation in these really intractable fields.

Deena Shakir: (11:08)
Uh, and, and I just felt that same energy I felt when I wanted to work in the administration and that same energy I felt when I wanted to move into Google. And now I knew that it was the, it was working with startups that, um, would be my, kind of my life's work. And so, um, met some amazing entrepreneurs invested in some of them, myself as an angel, very small checks source. Some of them, some of my friends didn't venture. Um, and then that made my way over to GV where I was for a couple of years before joining Luxe. So that's, that's the not so short story.

AJ Scaramucci: (11:38)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, having that sort of systems level approach, having those varied experiences in politics, in journalism, even in academia, and then eventually in technology as given you, I think a very unique perspective on venture. I think that's a perfect segue. I mean, an Atlas and you give us a sense, give us a flavor of your own investment philosophy in the context of the broader firm and perhaps even call out a few investments that you've made that you feel particularly

Deena Shakir: (12:08)
Compelled. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so at a high level you Lux has been around about 21 years, started off in the early days as a small seed fund out of New York that, um, my partner is Josh and Peter started with this hypothesis, that there was a really unique opportunity to invest in the earliest days of company creation and in funding, contrarian, rebel entrepreneurs who were taking on some of the most challenging problems. So we're literally turning science fiction into fact. And if you think back, you know, at that time there, wasn't such a clear venture return profile for that type of a business. Now we call it frontier tech, deep tech, hard tech, and every venture firm is trying to do it. But back then, that was pretty much a category creating, um, and bold mission. Um, and so, you know, I have so much respect for Josh and Peter for doing that and doing so in their early twenties, no less.

Deena Shakir: (13:00)
Um, and, and that's how it started. And they, you know, in the early days that a lot of nanotech and nuclear and clean tech and the fund has evolved quite a bit since then. So we are no longer a small seed fund. We now have 2.5 billion AUM, and we are a multi-stage fund, but we are very much still true to that core of, uh, of a deep conviction in science and technology in improving and advancing, uh, humanity. And very much still love to be there at the earliest days of company creation. So we're quite flexible. We can incubate, we can be first capital in, we are investing out of our sixth venture fund, which is a $500 million fund. And that's really for everything from pre-seed to series B ish. And then we also have our, our second opportunity fund where we not only double down on our existing investments, but also can make growth stage investments and companies like Benchling, which we just announced another round.

Deena Shakir: (13:55)
And yesterday, like Everly health formerly I really well, um, applied intuition, uh, and others. And so, um, you know, in terms of me and my thesis, you know, one of I had a couple of different opportunities that I was exploring, um, when I was thinking about leaving GV and had been at Google and alphabet broadly for almost eight years. And, um, it Lux was one of the easiest decisions I've had to make in my career. I was very, very lucky. It was clear to me that everything about their investment philosophy was just very aligned with my values. And also my, my background Lux loves to invest in the intersections and intersectionalities, not only my actual identity in terms of who I am, but also very much so my, my career path. And so whether it's the intersection of health and technology of hardware and software of computational biology and food like Shiru, um, and, and so many more that that is core to, to what they do.

Deena Shakir: (14:54)
And it's very much also kind of core to my thesis. So since I joined, I've made a number of investments. You've mentioned a few of them. Um, I probably spend the majority of my time, maybe 60% or more of these days looking at human health and population health. And I, one of the, our most more recent investments is in a company called steady MD, which, uh, Lux led the series B four. And I joined the Bora board of, and that company is really revolutionizing the expansion of digital health, again, from this notion of being a separate field to being sort of the rails that's powering virtual care across industries. Um, so, so that's a company I'm super excited about as somebody who, you know, worked on digital health product at Google in the very early days. And it's been recognized, you know, what it takes to succeed there.

Deena Shakir: (15:46)
And also, you know, frankly what the last year has taught all of us, um, about the importance of, uh, healthcare moving into the home of the decentralization of clinical trials and clinical research, um, and of the ability of technology to enable access at large, uh, to improve human health. So that's one example. Um, another is Shira, which was actually my first investment at Lux and the company that I am proud to continue to serve on the board for. Um, and so Shiru is applying computational biology and machine learning to the development of novel plant-based ingredients. And so for me, this is a massive opportunity to Kent, to, you know, contribute to, um, taking on climate change through, you know, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it's also a massive opportunity for a tremendous generational company. Uh, as again, we've seen in the last year, although I made this investment and, you know, before the pandemic, there is not only an increasing consumer demand for plant-based ingredients, but there is a, a really large challenge on the food supply chain.

Deena Shakir: (16:53)
That is that that is contributing to, uh, the bottom line for a lot of these food companies. And so rather than creating the next impossible burger or beyond meat or a chicken alternative, which Shira was doing is actually using machine learning to develop new ingredients. That will be the building blocks of those companies, but also enable the large fortune 500 food companies of the world to replace egg protein, or gelatin or various other ingredients in their foods. And that, and that is something that is incredibly exciting to me. It's a model that's worked quite well in healthcare and pharma for a long time. Uh, and, and Jasmine, um, with her company, Shiru is the first to actually apply it to food. So very excited about that one as well.

AJ Scaramucci: (17:37)
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, just to jump in here, I mean, when you think about it, I mean today, I mean, we're living in a, in a time where there is truly an abundance of capital where even pension funds, sovereign wealth funds are coming down and doing direct investments really for the, for the first time. And, you know, the question here is how does, how does locks, how do you, when you approach entrepreneurs, what does it mean to be founder friendly? Uh, what does it mean to really add value, uh, in, in the context, uh, of Luxon differentiate amongst the many, other many other funds, like when you work with say Jasmine, that she wrote would love to understand, you know, how you, how you win deals, but also how you empower and catalyze the, these entrepreneurs to tremendous

Deena Shakir: (18:22)
Success. Yeah, it's a really great question. Um, I, it's funny because when I speak to family members of mine who are very much outside of the venture capital world, they find it baffling that the check writers are actually the ones who are doing most of the selling and the hustling and trying to win. That's certainly counter-intuitive, but you, you absolutely hit the nail on the head. It's like, it's the, it's the nature of the business capital is everywhere now. And recently more so whether it's, uh, a family office, a corporate VC, or an entity these days, very, um, aggressive individual angel investors like getting access to capital is not the problem, uh, for entrepreneurs. So, so there is very much a, um, uh, a selling process that's important, but, you know, for me, it's, it's, um, a lot of it is grounded in authenticity and that is, believe it or not, uh, rare to find in this industry.

Deena Shakir: (19:16)
Um, and so, you know, having my voice out there, standing, uh, standing up for what I believe in across the board from an investment thesis perspective, from a corporate governance perspective, from a diversity and inclusion perspective is something that's very important. Um, and one of the beautiful things about this job is that we have the ability to meet with the inventors of the future all day, every day. Um, and so in a way it's been almost a return to academia for me, and almost a little bit of an anthropological exercise that I've been taking and really forcing myself every now and then to take a step back and actually produce some content. So I've been doing some writing, um, and, uh, and that was something that I really kind of just did for myself initially, but I've actually found that to be quite helpful in, um, attracting co-investors and entrepreneurs who are able to see who I am and what I stand for.

Deena Shakir: (20:12)
That's not necessarily a formula and venture. There are some of the most incredible VCs out there literally are not on Twitter and don't write anything. So, you know, that that's just something that has been helpful for me. Um, and, and the other, the other thing to note is that, you know, you might be, you might have a PhD in a very technical field investing in a technical company, but you're not going to be sitting there writing the code or, you know, developing their prominent proteins yourself. So it's important to have the fluency and the product to be able to understand what it takes to build a team and very much what I did in my, in my prior world. But it's also important to, uh, to, to understand what it takes to scale a business, and importantly, to have a network, everybody has their super power that they bring to the table.

Deena Shakir: (21:01)
And this is the advice I give to a younger folks that I mentor in terms of how, you know, different paths to get into venture. It, it's not about a formula, a template and pathway it's really about like, what is it that you bring that's different than somebody else? What is your superpower? And I am never going to be the smartest person in the room. I am not going to be the most technical, uh, and I'm not going to be the, even the most experienced, but my super power, which dates back to what I mentioned earlier, even in my childhood and my upbringing is the ability to connect the ability to bring people together. And the, the sort of diversity of my background in terms of different jobs and lives that I've held at all throughout being focused on partnerships has really enabled me to build a, not only why, but very deep network that I bring to bear, whether it's through commercial relationships that result in, you know, non-dilutive capital for these companies, whether it's through, um, different co-investors we can bring to the table, or whether it's through relationships with future board members or hires.

Deena Shakir: (22:07)
That's, that's my thing

AJ Scaramucci: (22:10)
Makes a ton of sense. And, and when, when you make that, make those investments decisions, Hey, you know what, we're Luxe, we're going to lead, lead that round. You're going to join these boards, as you think about all of the various input parameters that go into that decision, whether it's team market, et cetera, how do they wait for you if you were to kind of allow us to delve into your mind's eye there PA what is the weighting of those? Those are

Deena Shakir: (22:35)
Right. The great question. I mean, it's, it's almost a cliche, but truly it's about the people at the end of the day. Um, and the more I, the more I've been doing this, the more I realized just how much truth there is to that. Um, you can have an incredible idea. Um, and that idea might be enough if you're working on a product within a large tech company, because, you know, you can swap out team members, you know, it's, there's, there's more kind of fungibility there, but when you are putting everything at risk to start a company and going through the incredibly, like, you know, psychologically draining process, that, that, that it inevitably turns into no matter how successful you are, it's about the people. And so that definitely team is very important and, you know, a lot, some of that has to do certainly with the, with their background, you know, their, their, uh, understanding of the markets, but also their ability to communicate.

Deena Shakir: (23:31)
That's really important to me. And so we, we invest in, uh, quite a few scientific solo founders, um, and there are a number of companies, um, probably the majority of companies in my portfolio fit into that bucket. Um, that it's very, when we find someone and Jasmine is a great example and are certainly others, including a few investments, we'll be announcing that in the coming few weeks where they not only have the technical and professional, uh, expertise, but they are incredible storytellers. And that is important because it reduces financing risk down the line. It, uh, empowers them to hire, well, obviously there's, you know, a marketing and kind of growth element associated with that, but it is something that is important at all stages of the company. And I've actually said this before, and I really believe it for me, it's not my Harvard degree or any of the experiences I had in my professional career that I think is the most valuable that I've had. It is literally my speech and debate experience in high school that I think has been the most valuable skill asset activity that I have ever done in my life. And so that's something that I do spend time as well with our, with our, with my founders and coaching them on. Uh, and that Luxe in particular also is, um, ha has a wonderful program where we help, um, founders with that as well.

AJ Scaramucci: (24:50)
That's fine. Definitely. You know, you, you've been a, a huge voice and very active on the diversity front in Silicon valley. And, you know, th this is, this is a topic of continued discussion on, on Saul talks. We'd love your take on what, what ways, what techniques would you suggest, or how do you think about, uh, diversity in the context of venture capital, like literal partners, uh, as well as entrepreneurs and how we can sort of reorient ourselves to be more inclusive, more, more broadly?

Deena Shakir: (25:25)
Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know, I, I think back to the, the first few years that I was at Google, where, um, you know, as you might recall, Google was the first major company to release their numbers in terms of the demographic data and specifically on there, on the technical side. And it was damning, it was bad. And so I actually helped put together kind of a, uh, an internal SWAT team to try to figure out how can we address this both internally, but importantly, you know, given the convener that Google is and the ecosystem, and that was actually a very valuable exercise, you know, almost a decade later. And how I think about the problem now from venture capital, what we realized through that is, you know, specific then to, how can we increase the number of, uh, of, of women and people of color graduating with computer science degrees, that there are points of attrition throughout the, the, the life cycle of an individual, uh, and shaft, you know, recent data actually has shown that some of these biases and preferences start as early as 18 months of age, um, uh, you know, and maybe John as a parent and certainly myself as the parent.

Deena Shakir: (26:32)
I think about that a lot when I, you know, w w w when I'm doing my own parenting. And I think back to my own childhood, I grew up with three brothers. And, you know, that that is certainly something that is important. So in addressing issues around representation, diversity, and inclusion, there are so many, so many ways that we need to work on it, and no one solution or no one point of attrition is going to be enough at Google. You know, they've funded programs like the Gina Davis Institute, um, where they, first of all, worked on actually mapping out data within, within, uh, TV shows within Hollywood, within media. And that helped to actually write characters into TV shows to, to offer examples, um, and, and, and role models to children and, and also to, uh, to, to adults. And that was something that has worked well in stemmed more broadly in the medical field in particular.

Deena Shakir: (27:23)
And so, you know, there's definitely the element of media, which is quite important. Um, there is the elements of a child early childhood education. This is something I'm also very passionate about personally, first and foremost as a parent. Um, but also, um, as, uh, you know, as, as someone who's focused on what the next generation will look like. And so there's, there's much to be done now, but we need to start earlier on. So I actually wrote a children's book, which will be coming out soon. Um, that is specifically about a, um, a, a young girl who, um, started the company and goes through, uh, the process of, of fundraising and what that's like, I, you know, and, and, uh, specifically as a young woman of color. So, uh, there, you know, there are many ways to address those. I do think the last few years have certainly been a reckoning for the world and everything from, you know, me to, to, um, you know, to the venture capital industry.

Deena Shakir: (28:17)
And there's been quite a bit of progress. And I know this because I, I wanted to, you know, enter VC before any of that happened. And I felt a market difference in myself, but there has not been nearly enough progress. And unfortunately, uh, the pandemic, uh, in many cases has exacerbated existing inequities and biases, um, particularly for women and particularly for women of color, uh, not just in terms of, you know, the number of, you know, the, the, the mortality rate for COVID itself, but actually for, you know, the folks who are dropping out of the workforce, it is devastating and there's much work to be done there. And if we can't even keep women in the workforce, imagine how much work there is to be done, uh, on the fundraising side. And so this is something that continues to be a huge problem. I'm very, very happy to say that there are incredible organizations, like all Ray is like him for her, um, and a number of others out there, women in VC, et cetera, that are really focused on this, um, that have raised money and have institutionalized and happen are being incredibly thoughtful, starting with research and all the way through kind of programmatic activities.

Deena Shakir: (29:25)
So I think that I'm hopeful and I'm optimistic, and I'm involved in that, um, that these things are, are long-term problems and require long-term solutions.

AJ Scaramucci: (29:35)
And when does this, when does this book come out? Well, what can, when could it be expect this to, at the shelves where I'm very about that

Deena Shakir: (29:41)
TBD TBD, it's still a, it's still a work in progress. I mean, the book is done. We're just going through the process of getting it published. So stay tuned for that. Um, but I'm very excited, John, hopefully you can, [inaudible] the baby's born.

John Darcie: (29:56)
The oldest, my oldest is a girl too. So obviously looking to surround her with positive, uh, you know, female role models. And as she grows up, I would love to, uh, to introduce her to

Deena Shakir: (30:06)
You. Absolutely. And she can hang out with my daughter who's around the same age. So for sure love

John Darcie: (30:11)
It. We're going to have a playpen at salt in New York. It's like,

Deena Shakir: (30:16)
So nice. Nice.

AJ Scaramucci: (30:19)
So, uh, so I think this, this could serve as a great segue. Do you sort of the second chapter of the interview here, Dina, we're really gonna, uh, go into some kind of broad existential topics. LA love, we'd love your take. So I think the first one is not quite the softball, but what do you think the world will look like in 2050 and generation from now? I mean, you could take this in any which way direct and in a direction you so pleased, but give us a sense as you close your eyes, what do you see for the world in 2050 for better or worse?

Deena Shakir: (30:55)
I dunno if that's a softball, that's a hard one. She asked somebody that in 2019 before the pandemic, um, you know, I I've been really interested, um, just intellectually, but also from an investment perspective and, uh, gen Z. Um, and, um, I just find the, the sort of the preferences, the behaviors, the, um, the epistemic choices that they're making very markedly different from the generation before. And so that's kind of what I think about when I think about the, sort of the change makers of, uh, you know, who will be, uh, you know, shaping the next generation, whether it's their focus on, you know, environment, the environment and climate change, their inherent, um, comfort with stigmatized topics like, you know, mental health and seeking therapy, um, whether it's a sort of digitally native experience that, you know, it is different, you know, as a millennial myself, you know, yes, I was on AOL as a child.

Deena Shakir: (32:04)
Um, and you know, all of that, but this is, this is different. Now this is, this is not just about communication. Um, it's about creation and it's about, um, and it's about, uh, the next wave of invention. So I'm, I'm incredibly optimistic and excited. Um, you kind of have to be as a VC. That's one of the things I love about this job, you are, you are, you know, these are long-term investments, right? I'm not, I'm not, uh, you know, buying stocks, right. I'm, uh, I'm taking, uh, you know, making investments in, in the future here. I see, um, an incredible opportunity on the science side. I think that what we've seen over the last year is remarkable. It is incredible. I, I have to like, you know, when, when I got my, my, uh, my vaccine, I, I, uh, like many, I cried not just on a personal level. It like, you know, we're getting through this, but holy, this is such an amazing achievement for humanity, that the speed at which we were able to uncover the incredible innovation behind it, the collaboration that it took. Yeah. There were some snafoos along the way, but if that's what we can do now, you know, I'm pretty optimistic about what 2050 will look like.

AJ Scaramucci: (33:17)
Yeah. I mean, not on this point here. I mean, it, the fact that it took us 10 months, really from the embryonic phases and the breakout and Mohan to, uh, to not, not just one to really, uh, compelling an efficacious vaccines and Pfizer Moderna and maybe a handful of others to go to be seen on the, uh, the J and J side that societal immune system was quite compelling. Like, I mean, it, it was, it was bad. Don't get me wrong, but I would, I would say props to us. I mean, it's a real time horizon for Vermeer drug to market 10 years in 10, we'll take, we'll take 10 months. And I think it's, uh, a good experiment for, for things to come. How do you think, I mean, with COVID and your, your investments in healthcare and such, how has COVID really materially impacted the healthcare system and your view, and it has, has COVID in the aftermath or the continued aftermath impacted your, your investment thesis, uh, in that category. Yeah,

Deena Shakir: (34:22)
Yeah, no, it's a great question. Um, you know, we we're, we have been investing in healthcare, certainly Lux as part of my even joining for, for decades. And I have been working on a prior to COVID, but this is, this is such a cliche. I hate to even say it out loud, but it truly was, you know, it was a watershed moment for digital health. And, uh, and I can kind of elaborate a bit specifically on how and why, you know, a lot of my secret sauce or my sort of super power, as I mentioned, was around the people. And so I've been having conversations for the last decade and developed relationships with the decision makers at the C-suite of some of these top insurance companies. So payers, health systems, so providers, um, and, and research facilities. And I know I worked on and I tried, uh, I know how difficult it is to, uh, to, to, to, to make change, especially when it comes to these deep rooted kind of challenges around, uh, incentives and provider behavior and so on.

Deena Shakir: (35:20)
It is not easy. So the, the last year forced change, empowered regulatory change that might've taken decades, it impelled behavior change that might've never happened. It catalyzed, um, these technologies from niche nice to have into permanence into essential. Then if you look at the last couple of months, they're the sort of investor calls of some of the largest payers and, and, you know, the Aetnas and the anthems of the world, the Humanas the world, as well as even retail, um, CVS and Walmart. And so on, everyone's talking about digital transformation, everybody's looking for these solutions and they realized, perhaps not, not at their own choice, um, that it works. And certainly there's still a place for, of course, for, you know, interfacing care, but healthcare moving into the home is here to stay. And that is across the board, not just in terms of care delivery, but another element that's quite important to us.

Deena Shakir: (36:20)
Um, and to me personally is also on the research side and the decentralization of clinical trials, the virtualization of clinical trials, the incorporation of digital biomarkers, and so on is not only important to us, to accelerate research and enable us to have, you know, solutions like these vaccines quite quickly, but also to, um, to, to be more inclusive in our research, which has been a systemic problem for a long time, women have been drastically under-researched resulting in issues like dosage, um, you know, miss Smith's dosage recommendations and ultimately sometimes deaths as well. And it's even worse in general for, um, uh, looking at racial considerations. So a large part of that has been just how difficult it is and consuming it has to be a part of clinical research. So that's one thing that's exciting. And we're in companies like science 37 and electro labs, uh, and H one, which are really at the forefront of enabling that, um, virtualization and de-centralization using technology.

AJ Scaramucci: (37:17)
Yeah. And, and on the, on the government side of the house, the regulatory side of the house, uh, when we're sort of crafting legislation and so on and so forth, if you were in, if you were in that position, if you kind of went back to your, your government days, what pieces of legislation would you be drafting to enable and empower, uh, the entrepreneurs, whether it be on the healthcare side, or even on the therapeutic side, on the FDA side of the house.

Deena Shakir: (37:45)
Yeah. Um, that there, there would be a lot of suggestions that I would have, but, you know, certainly it's not as easy, of course it's writing legislation, as you know, because there are really entrenched interests that play here that can make it difficult, whether you're thinking about, you know, cross border licensing for physicians or, um, you know, uh, what it takes to, to, um, to, to regulate a new device and regulation is there for a reason, regulation is important. Uh, we need that. We need, uh, you know, checks and balances and safety measures in place, but we also need to, um, facilitate and fund innovation. And I think, you know, what we've seen, certainly in the last few months coming out of, um, uh, the administration has been a renewed focus and interest on that. And I think that's promising. Um, but that there's a lot of play there. So let's see. I mean, it remains be seen how much of the regulatory changes that, um, you know, whether it's around HIPAA compliance or, uh, or so on how, how much of that is here to stay, but again, I'm optimistic. Hmm.

AJ Scaramucci: (38:46)
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of interesting regulatory considerations for these truly game changing paradigm shifting technologies in the life science sector. I mean, one of course is gene editing and the use of use of CRISPR, particularly if you're going after the germline of a given species. And I'm curious when, when it comes to genetic modification of humans, you know, if we had the ability to, to, to really do that in a pinpoint precise way, and we understood the, the ramifications, should we, should we take that, take that leap? I'm curious what your take is there.

Deena Shakir: (39:26)
Yeah. You know, I'm going back again to my childhood. Uh, you know, my, my grandfather in Iraq was a pediatrician and worked with the world health organization and he was actually involved in the early days of the, of the human genome project. And I, and as I think about, and he passed away, um, over 10 years ago. But as I think about the advances in the last decade, I always think back to what I, what would he think? And could he even have conceived of just how much opportunity there is now with these, um, you know, the cost reduction on sequencing, the human genome and our ability to uncover variance. And, uh, and hopefully from there discover therapeutic treatments, you know, Lux is, uh, is in a company called variant, which is doing just that. Um, we are, uh, we'll be making some additional announcements soon. Um, but I am long on poly genetic testing. I am long on, um, you know, pharmacogenetics. I think that there's just incredible opportunity toward the personalization of medicine, um, which has been a long time coming. And, um, and these advances on the genetic science side are, are, um, really groundbreaking. And so we're just at the cusp of that innovation

AJ Scaramucci: (40:41)
And w and one thing we think about, which is kind of a segue to that is, wow. I mean, lifespan is also extending about every year that goes by, we gained about a fourth of a year in life expectancy. That's been the case since the industrial revolution then kind of do some extrapolation over the next few generations. It is foreseeable that humans will be living a well over a hundred, perhaps even to 150 years of age. And that has tremendous ramifications on the healthcare system, on the insurance system, as well as, you know, all kinds of others, uh, related to the workforce here's as you, as you think about that or yourself, but also in the context of locks, how is that increased lifespan, uh, affecting the way in which you're thinking about these different ramifications in health and life science?

Deena Shakir: (41:32)
There is. So there, I mean, one of the big things that I'm, uh, and Lux is really thinking a lot about is at CNS and sort of, you know, cognitive science and, and, you know, that is one area where there's still tremendous. Um, just so much that we don't know, um, and, and so much opportunity there. And, um, and I had family members, um, who I've seen go through, um, you know, Parkinson's and dementia and so on. And so it is also very personal to me. So that's one area where, you know, I'm, I'm excited about the potential for transformative innovation. Um, and then in general, you know, on a more short-term, uh, level also just the idea of aging in place and what we saw through us again, through the last year, and, um, a lot of what we saw in revealing issues with nursing homes and so on.

Deena Shakir: (42:20)
But, uh, you know, as we have an increasingly digitally savvy, uh, elderly population, and as in particular, going back again to this issue, uh, uh, question around equity and gender women, finding themselves in the sort of sandwich generation where we are care-taking for our parents and also for our children, what are the types of technologies around care coordination? Um, and so on that can help to, um, to facilitate that and enable that again. I think there's, it's still quite analog in many ways and a big challenge for a lot of people. I'm sure everyone listening here has someone they know is not themselves personally, that's going through that. So I think that there's quite, um, quite an opportunity there and, and luckily a lot of venture dollars going to toward those types of companies.

John Darcie: (43:06)
And I have a question for you. So you do a lot of investing. You've done a lot in your life to change the world, but you also work at a venture capital firm where the expectation from your LPs I assume, are that you drive returns. So when you're looking at investing in life sciences companies or deep tech companies, how do you balance sort of this sales, marketing, and commercialization part of the thesis against, wow, they're doing really interesting things. I'm not that concerned about the monetization piece at the moment.

Deena Shakir: (43:35)
Yeah. You know, it goes back to sort of what I was sharing in terms of, um, graduating from undergrad and thinking about this sort of doing well or doing good. And, and the evolution of my own perspective over time, part of our investment thesis is that we are investing in entrepreneurs who are taking on massive problems, and those massive problems are there for also massive opportunities on the business side. Uh, but there are also opportunities to improve human health and to, uh, you know, in the case of Shira, for example, you know, contribute to, uh, reducing greenhouse gases, et cetera. So we are not an impact, you know, VC, we ultimately are stewards of capital for our LPs, who by the way, also represent some of the most effective from anthropic institutions, institutions, and endowments that are out there, which is another element of the impact, uh, to venture that is not often talked about, but it's something that is, is real.

Deena Shakir: (44:36)
And I feel very good about that when I know that not only are we creating value for, uh, you know, for the farming for these companies and for these individuals and creating livelihoods and, you know, stimulating for further innovation down the road by enabling ecosystems and so on. But we are also returning cap well to our LPs who are, um, you know, who, who are educational institutions and endowments and charities and so on. So that's, that's another piece of it. Um, in terms of your question on monetization that, you know, that is something that, um, is a risk and an informed risk that you take when you're an early stage, you know, a science investor. Um, but it's not a bet. It is, um, it is a calculated, um, decision that is made based on a deep understanding. And we're very thesis driven here. So a deep understanding of what it takes to get to, to, you know, to get to monetization what the market looks like, you know, deep relationships with the customers, if you will, down the road, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's, it's, it's certainly, it's never foolproof, but we, we, we are very calculated in how we make those decisions.

John Darcie: (45:44)
I'm going to ask you one more question before we let you go, Dina, it's about a super intelligent AI. So you talked about how she Ru is an example, and I'm sure plenty of your other investments incorporate AI, uh, uses AI to discover new plant proteins and things of that nature. Do you think we'll ever develop super intelligent AI or true AI? That's able to learn like a human learns, how far away might that be and what are the implications of that for the way we think about society and our workforce?

Deena Shakir: (46:12)
Yeah. Um, I mean, it depends how you define that because some might argue we already have that, but, you know, there's obviously a massive problem which has been, um, you know, which has come to light in particular with, uh, some large, um, companies with pretty, pretty serious news events in the last few months around, eh, you know, AI and ethics and AI and bias. So that isn't, that is another, uh, you know, interesting, uh, example where this sort of intersection of technology and, and, and, and, um, you know, artificial intelligence, computer science and humanities needs to come to play. So, you know, one of the, um, I think it was two years ago now Stanford launched the center for humane artificial intelligence, which I am a huge fan of. Um, and I love the intersectionality. They, they bring to the, sort of the innovation there.

Deena Shakir: (47:01)
Uh, if you look at companies like the one I mentioned variant, you know, which is ultimately focused on, on genetics and science, one of their first hires, uh, was an ethicist. Um, and so having that really deep in the DNA, no punt intent, no pun intended of these companies is, is, is quite important. So, you know, NLP, to some extent, uh, or, or, you know, is already almost approaching that level of kind of incredible with, you know, the, uh, how good the AI is in a number cases out there, but, um, there will need to be, um, checks and balances, particularly around bias.

John Darcie: (47:37)
Well, Deena, thank you so much for joining us on salt talks. It, it, uh, it's very encouraging to hear people like you with such a diverse background, uh, thinking about things like ethics in addition to investing in innovation. Um, so we're very excited. You're on the forefront of all these breakthroughs and look forward to doing hopefully more with you, uh, with the salt fund and other things that we're working on. And like I said, we'd love to have you at the salt conference in September. And, uh, if, if you need a babysitter, we can, we can collude on that. Um,

Deena Shakir: (48:07)
You might regret making that offer, but maybe I'll take you up on it. Thanks. Thanks for having,

John Darcie: (48:17)
And thank you for joining us again here on salt talks. And thank you everybody for joining us for this conversation today, with Dina Shakir, from Lux capital w one of the most fantastic, uh, venture capital firms, we think out there in the marketplace today, uh, solving big problems in a way that's also benefiting the world. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous talks, you can access them on our website. It's salt.org backslash talk, and also on our YouTube channel, which is called salt tube. We're also on social media. Twitter is where we're most active at salt conferences are handled, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. And please spread the word about these salt talks. If you have people that are interested in how venture capital works and a lot of the innovations that they are helping to invest in, uh, please share this salt, talk with them, but on behalf of AIJ and the entire salt team, this is John Darcie signing off from salt talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.

Professor Peter Hotez: Preventing the Next Pandemic | SALT Talks #191

“We’re in this bizarre period of anti-science. It’s globalized; it’s become its own empire.”

Dr. Peter J. Hotez is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Hotez is an internationally recognized physician scientist in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development.

Anti-science sentiment has taken hold in America and spread globally. This has been a main obstacle in slowing the COVID pandemic, nearly half the country flouted CDC guidelines as a sign of political and cultural allegiance. Disinformation has been difficult to counteract as its dissemination is so pervasive across the Internet. This was made especially difficult when the Trump-led White House executed a textbook anti-science disinformation campaign, undercutting the health and science community’s efforts. “I’ve had multiple epiphanies but the latest and most horrifying was seeing the anti-science COVID disinformation campaign come out of the White House about a year ago. I’ve seen this before. This is a deliberate anti-science disinformation campaign.”

The COVID vaccines have proven highly effective at not only preventing symptomatic illness, but also asymptomatic spread. The next major challenge is getting the rest of the world vaccinated, particularly Africa and Latin America where large-scale vaccination plans have yet to be developed.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Professor Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD.jpeg

Peter Hotez

Dean

National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darcie: (00:06)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to salt talks. My name is John Darcie. I'm the managing director of salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance technology and public policy. Soul talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these salt talks is the same as our goal at our salt conference series, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And in my opinion, and I know Anthony shares this opinion as well. There's no topic more important today than talking about vaccines and public health. And we're very excited today to welcome professor Peter J Hotez onto salt talks, uh, to talk about these issues. Uh, Dr. Hotez is the Dean of the national school of tropical medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor college of medicine and Waco, Texas, Dr.

John Darcie: (01:01)
Hotez is an internationally recognized physician scientist in neglected tropical diseases and vaccine development as head of the Texas children's CVD. He leads a team and product development partnership for developing new vaccines for diseases affecting hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide. In 2006 at the Clinton global initiative, he co-founded the global network for neglected tropical diseases to provide access to essential medicines for hundreds of millions of people. He obtained his undergraduate degree in molecular biophysics from Yale university in 1980, followed by a PhD degree in biochemistry from Rockefeller university in 1986 and a medical degree from wild Cornell college medical college, uh, in 1987, in 2014 to 2016, Dr. Hotez served in the Obama administration as us Envoy, focusing on vaccine diplomacy initiatives between the us government and countries in the middle east and north Africa in 2018, he was appointed by the us state department to serve on the board of governors for the U S Israel by national science foundation.

John Darcie: (02:05)
And he's frequently called upon to testify before us Congress, and also in major media outlets. He's also going sort of off script here. He's been called the OJI villain by people in the anti-vaccine movement, including Robert Kennedy Jr. Who's sort of the face of a lot of that movement. So that's a huge badge of honor, uh, for Dr. Hotez to get that distinction within that community, because it means he's spreading truth and sort of, uh, one of the people that's evangelizing truth around the need to get vaccines, especially for something like COVID-19 that has ravaged, uh, so much of the United States as well as the world, but it's a pleasure to have you on Dr. Hotez hosting. Today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge capital, a global alternative investment firm. And he's also the chairman of salts. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview. Anthony is not a doctor, but I know he has a lot of very important things to say about

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:54)
That, correct. Hotez he starts in every day, every day, he's got a little wise Alec remark, trust me as we get towards September and it's bonus season, I look taller and thinner to Mr. Darcie. Okay. Just so you know. So I, he gave

Peter Hotez: (03:08)
Me a very generous introduction, unfortunately, we're almost out of time, but it was a great introduction.

John Darcie: (03:12)
Yeah. Well, now I'm doing much,

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:17)
I'm doing your book at this service or which I apologize for, cause I ha I've read it on my Kindle. Uh, but what we'll do is obviously we'll post it up for people and we'll put it up on our social media, but the book is about vaccine diplomacy in a time of anti-science. And I think the book is absolutely fascinating on a number of different levels because we're in the age of disinformation SIRS, you clearly point out of the book and we're in an age where I would have thought as you and I were roughly contemporaries. I would've thought at this point in our lives, science would have mattered more. Uh, but it feels like we went instead of into the 21st century, we're sort of back in the 17th or 18th century, even skipping the 19th century. So, so my question to you, sir, why did you write the book? What can our viewers and listeners learn from purchasing the book, which I strongly recommend that they do?

Peter Hotez: (04:11)
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Anthony, you know, we're, we're in this bizarre period of what I call anti-science, it's almost, it's big and it's globalized. It's become its own empire, which we'll talk about more. But the reason I wrote the book was, uh, from my time as us science Envoy, um, in the Obama administration, I was there in the middle east and north Africa at a very difficult time. Uh, 2015 into 20 14, 20 15, 20 16. It was during the Syrian conflict, the civil war, the ISIS occupation, the proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians were starting in Yemen. And the Arabian peninsula had de stabilize the [inaudible] war and political collapse was bringing back a vaccine preventable diseases, neglected tropical diseases like leishmaniasis, this huge rise and in Aleppo, and while everyone was focused on the geopolitical consequences, what I saw was a massive eruption of disease and also noted how we were seeing this in Venezuela with the Maduro regime and in central Africa and the, and the Boca Harambe areas in Northern Nigeria.

Peter Hotez: (05:20)
And then even what was happening on Texas and the Gulf coast and realized that the kinds of forces that were bringing back diseases were things that is a MD and a PhD physician scientist. I was never trained to think about poverty, war, political collapse, climate change anti-vaccine anti-science movements. And yet these were the disease drivers and all that, that book was finished about a year before COVID-19 erupted. So that COVID-19 was in some ways I see it as a culminating event rather than something extraordinary. This was all predicted and predictable based on the, uh, the huge unraveling we're seeing.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:00)
So I wanna, I wanna, I wanna ask you about the moment. Was there an epiphany? Uh, you're obviously a medical doctor university professor, uh, you've had this, uh, work as a political public servant for our country. Thank you for that. But was there a moment, was there an epiphany where you were like, oh my God, there's a tremendous amount of disinformation out there. And that just information is in a Prairie fire situation growing at a time when we don't need that. Frankly, we need scientific fact on the ground and data. When did that happen,

Peter Hotez: (06:38)
Sir? Well, I've had multiple Epiphanes, but the latest one and for me the most horrifying was when I saw the anti-science, uh, COVID disinformation campaign come out of the white house about a year ago at this time. Uh, and you know, going up against anti-vaccine groups for years because I have a daughter with autism and I have four adult kids, and I have a daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities and wrote a book about it called vaccines did not cause Rachel's autism to debunk all of the fake claims that vaccines cause autism from the anti-vaccine lobby and what autism is. And, and so I became by default, an expert in anti-science disinformation campaigns. And then I saw it happening in front of my eyes, going on CNN and MSNBC, listening to the stuff coming out of the white house. And, and of course it came out of president Trump, but it was Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow and this guy Meadows, and even the white, even Kaylee, Macanese the white house press secretary.

Peter Hotez: (07:39)
I said, you know what, I know what this is. I've seen this before. This is, this is not just a one-off thing. This is a deliberate anti-science disinformation campaign and called it out as such. And, and I was one of the first to call it out. Not because I was so brilliant, it's just that I had decades of experience going up against these groups and it was coordinated and it was really scary. And that was a tough time for me because, you know, as a scientist, you're always told, just stick with the science. You're not an expert on politics. Don't try to become a political expert, but in order to tear apart, the anti-science from what was being said, you know, you have to call it out. And that was, uh, that was a very dark period for me.

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:22)
Let let's say that we're speaking today to anti-vaxxers, uh, they they're, we've got a hundreds of them, millions of them plugged into this and they were trying to move them. What would you say to anti-vaxxers? And by the way, I'm going to point out something to you, which is astonishing to me. I have a high school teachers that are friends of mine, uh, elementary school teachers, very smart, educated people. They won't get vaccines. They, they absolutely think that the coronavirus vaccine is going to do something to genetically mutate them. Uh, and so what would you say to these people? How, how do you reach these people, sir? Is there a way to change their hearts and minds?

Peter Hotez: (09:02)
Well, one of the things that I point out is, and thanks for the question is that this is no longer a fringe group. Anti-science anti-vaccine sentiments activities are now mainstream in American public life. And, and although it started around vaccines causing autism about six, seven years ago, it in order to re-energize cause in part, because I had been debunking all the fake autism links in order to re-energize, it found a way to glom itself onto the Republican tea party here in Texas and Oklahoma. And that re-energized it. They started forming political action committees. They started getting a lot of money from T D T party donor support. And, um, and then it glommed on in 2020 protest against mass and social distancing. It became this full-on anti-science movement of that. And you saw it happen, uh, in the last summer you saw how the virus accelerated through the Southern states, um, mostly red states and then into the central, uh, upper Midwest, all because people showed their political allegiance by defying masks and social distancing.

Peter Hotez: (10:10)
And, and now we've got multiple surveys, including one of ours that we did with Texas a and M and then one that, uh, the most recent on PBS news hour finds that quote, white Republicans are now the leading anti-vaccine evac, most vaccine hesitant group. And it all began about six, seven years ago, uh, with under this banner of health, freedom, medical freedom, and it's, it's not become mainstream. And this is, this is a huge issue in, so trying to combat the disinformation is, is not easy because it dominates the internet there more than 480 fake anti-vaccine websites, all revved up on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. If you go to amazon.com and look on, look up books on vaccination, they're almost all fake anti-vaccine books and COVID conspiracy books. So Amazon is the single largest promoter of vaccine, uh, disinformation. And then of course, as if that weren't complicated enough, you've gotten out of the export of this to Western Europe, you had anti mask, anti, uh, vaccine rallies and London and Berlin Paris and Berlin, the tried to storm the Reichstag or it was reported.

Peter Hotez: (11:23)
It was linked to Q1 on. And, and then if that were not complicated enough, then you've got what U S and British intelligence report is a systematic program of weaponized health communication. That's the term they use coming out of Putin and Russian government. So this is a mainstream movement now, and it's as big a threat, I think to our country is anything that we build infrastructure to combat like nuclear proliferation or terrorism. I think it's reached that level, you know, in the end that killed 530 540,000 Americans was not only the SARS coronavirus. It was the SARS coronavirus, aided and abetted by this anti science movement. And there's some new numbers saying that a majority of the deaths and COVID-19 in the U S were, were because of this. So this is, this is a crisis

Anthony Scaramucci: (12:11)
30, 35,000 people are dead in Florida. Uh, yet governor DeSantis is out there, uh, championing his economic policies and his policies towards handling the virus. And as you know, many people find his decisions to be quite popular. What's your, uh, as a scientist, what's your view of that?

Peter Hotez: (12:33)
Well, you know, he's, he's done everything he can to encourage this kind of fake health, freedom, uh, sentiment and attitudes. And he most recently held a press conference where he brought in Scott Atlas. I'm sure he's someone you've you've met before. And yes, no. I know Scott and, and all of these, all of this great Barrington nonsense that came, comes out of the American Institute for economic research. And, and now it's got a quote, its own intellectual underpinnings, even though it's highly flawed. And, and, uh, but, but it has the veneer of a serious, uh, uh, well intellectually thought out program. And again, it's, uh, but the [inaudible] in here, this is not a time to mess around. This is we know that variant is much more contagious than anything we've seen higher mortality. New paper came out in nature magazine last week. So this is a, this is, you know, we're not, we're not far away. We, we still can. I think we can vaccinate our way out of this. We just have to minimize loss of life between now and then,

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:36)
But the current vaccines on the market right now are somewhat protective of that variant, is that fair to say or

Peter Hotez: (13:44)
That's right. So it looks as though all of the operational warp speed vaccines, which by the way, is another terrible name is, um, are not only protective against your original lineages, but against the [inaudible] variant, which is going to be the dominant one in the foreseeable future. That's the one that came out of England and what's more Anthony, which is really exciting. Now studies out of Israel in Scotland are showed the vaccines are not only stopping symptomatic and illness, which is what we knew from the phase two clinical trials last year. But now we know it's actually stopping documented infection, meaning PCR positivity. And what that means is the vaccines are stopping virus shedding from the nose and mouth. It means that I'm working at stopping asymptomatic transmission so that, uh, I'm pretty confident. Now, if we can vaccinate most of the American people, we can actually vaccinate our way out of this epidemic. We can actually haul virus, transmission and get back to something that resembles something very normal. And as you know, I've, I mean, no one has been more straightforward about giving bad news to the American people than I've been. So this is a very optimistic thing I'm saying, and I firmly believe it that we can, we can conquer this virus in the United States. We have a big problem globally, but in the United States,

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:02)
Well, I, you know, listen, I, I found you throughout this whole process to be a voice of reason, sobering facts-based, but also a voice of reason. And I think, uh, you know, I owe it to you and people like you and, uh, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, et cetera, for telling the truth to people and also helping us conform our behavior to create more safety for our families and even, you know, elderly people in my family. But, but, uh, I'm going to take this, I'm going to cut it and I'm going to send it to about a hundred people. I know that will not get the Corona virus vaccine. And, you know, listen, I'm not trying to profile here, but they are white and they are Republican. And they've been watching a lot of Fox news and they listened to president Trump and they not going to take the vaccine.

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:52)
And you, and I both know, uh, that taking that vaccine and I'll fully disclose everybody. I'm about to get my second dose of the modern, a virus vaccine. Um, you and I both know that that's going to stall our ability to create this herd immunity. So you've got the stage, give me your best sale. I, you know, you got, you got a great gown on I'm, I'm, I'm loving the doctor's gown and the Baylor logo and everything. You've got the stage, but you got to channel your best salesmanship now. And you've got to convince this, this group of a hundred people that I know personally, that will not take this vaccine. What are we saying to them

Peter Hotez: (16:30)
Today? So we've been working, I've been working our groups and working on Corona virus vaccines for the last decade. We make vaccines for lots of tropical and neglected infections. And we adopted a coronavirus vaccine program a decade ago. We showed that the best way to prevent Corona virus infection is to deliver the spike protein to the immune system, to create virus, neutralizing antibodies in your system. We now know that those virus neutralizing antibodies from a vaccine will save your life. Well, that

Anthony Scaramucci: (17:02)
Will make me sterile doctor.

Peter Hotez: (17:05)
Yeah. They won't make you sterile. It won't modify your DNA. In fact, we've put out a series of articles now, deep debunking, all of the fake assertions ranging from that, it's going to modify your DNA, creating genetically modified humans to five G nonsense. And, um, and the list goes on. What we know is that by getting vaccinated, getting virus, neutralizing antibodies, that's the closest thing to a guarantee that you will not go to a hospital or an intensive care unit because of COVID-19. And we know that the only way to get back to a normal quality of life in the United States is to get just about every adult vaccinated. And if we do that, um, I think the masks didn't come off. I think the, um, we can get back to school, get back to college, get back to ball games, get back to everything else that we like to do.

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:00)
And in 2000, I think that's brilliant and I'm going to cut that. And I'm going to try to reach as many people with that as possible. In 2012, David Quammen wrote a book called spillover, uh, and he talked about the animal population and the human population running into each other. Now, as the population of humans is spilling over into the animal population, seven plus billion of us, uh, and it causing these transfers, the zoological or zoo Tropic transfers of viruses from mammals to humans. Um, what is your opinion of that more of that going to happen in our future and are these M RNA vaccines, can they be reprogrammed to help prevent the next big pandemic?

Peter Hotez: (18:48)
Yeah, a lot to unpack there. Well, first of all, what's happened now for the first time more people live in urban areas than rural areas. That's been a trend that's been accelerating over the last decade. So if you've projected decades out, you know, the human race is going to live in a series of mega cities, massive, uh, urban structures that outstrip, um, water and sanitation. And, you know, we're looking at a mega city is a city over 10 million people. So consortium and Legos and DACA and Bangladesh for, to laser. These are going to be massive cities, and they're going to encroach upon forested areas where bats live. And we know bats, uh, not only, uh, are, are natural reservoirs of Corona viruses, but also Ebola virus and lip a virus. So we should expect more of this kind of contact going on. And, and particularly in areas where there's enormous amount of crowding that outstrips infrastructure that's just can ignite a virus, uh, along one of these big mega cities. So unfortunately this is going to be a new reality, and we now need to take steps globally, uh, in order to get ready for this as a. So what I've been saying is we've had SARS in 2003 mayors in 2012. That's when we started getting involved in this, making those vaccines, we've got COVID in 2019, we'll have COVID 26, we'll have COVID 32, and we need to get ready for that as well.

Anthony Scaramucci: (20:22)
Um, 500,000 plus deaths in the United States, obviously very tragic. And some of those we both know could have been avoided at, we had better unified theory around public health and safety, and obviously a bigger output on the vaccines. We also both know that president Trump and his family took the vaccine, but didn't want to tell people about it because they prey on these peoples conspiracy theories in their anti-vaccine situation. Um, what would you say to president Biden who is now at the helm? How do we cleanse ourselves of this, this, this information? What do we do from a public perspective, a private perspective to try to get this right going forward?

Peter Hotez: (21:09)
Well, first of all, I would like to say, you know, he is responsive to the scientific community or has been, and I, and I've worked with president Biden when he was a Senator around neglected tropical disease legislation, very committed to things like this. And he, um, you know, he came out right after the inauguration saying he was going to vaccinate a hundred million people in a hundred days and said, we're going to fully vaccinate the American people by the fall. But those of us in the scientific community saw that [inaudible] he said, oh, this isn't going to work. He's got to do this by late in the spring. And they responded, you know, they, they were, they were responsive and they figured out how, how to do that. So I have to tell you, that's one of the more impressive things I've seen in terms of responding to a pandemic threat by, by an entity in the U S government, what he has to do now, which so far, I haven't really seen.

Peter Hotez: (22:01)
Maybe there are things going on behind the scenes is reaching out to the other side, reaching across the aisle. And I know he's capable of it. He's had his Greg great track record of doing it. But, um, this, this vaccine resistance, this anti-science component of the Republican party is real. And as I say in the past, it was just, you know, from the, you know, pretty extreme people down here in Texas, in Oklahoma, under health, freedom, medical freedom, it's mainstream, and the Republican party right now, you have multiple members of Congress now publicly stating they're not going to get vaccinated and we've got to fix this and we have to fix it soon because it's eroding the strength of our country. I mean, uh, I, I'm a believer that the greatness of our nation is built on a lot of things. And one of them is the greatness of our research institutions and universities and the water.

Peter Hotez: (22:54)
Why do people love America? And that's a major reason. And this is, you know, our greatest victories were achieved through science, whether it's defeating Nazi-ism and fascism in world war II or the cold war, or putting humans on the moon. Um, we have always been a science driven country for the last hundred years. And, and to get away from that is so self-defeating, and, and this means reaching out to the Republicans and I haven't been doing my part I've well, first of all, we had a lot of vaccine hesitancy among African-American groups. So I started going on talk radio shows and podcasts that reach black and brown communities, and now I've made it no. And then I've been doing it going on conservative news outlets, and then trying to get back on Fox. I was on for a while. And then, then I was off trying to get back on Fox. And even I did was on Newsmax. So it was on a daily caller and we have to do this in order to fully, you know, solve this problem. And I think we can, but it's going to take a lot of work. There's a lot of in people right now.

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:57)
Yeah. And, but, you know, and it's also has spilled over frankly, to continue to use that word into election fraud. We had the secretaries of state of Michigan and the secretary of state of Georgia on our, our series here to talk about the accuracy of that election. Yet there's 40 or 50 million people think that it's a fraudulent election. So we, we have a fever going on in the country right now of disinformation. And that's why people like you, sir, our national heroes, because you're willing to brave that fight despite the attacks on your personhood and who you are. Um, I know I

Peter Hotez: (24:32)
W I always say, no, the Republican party was never anti-science right. I mean, national academy of sciences was formed under Abraham Lincoln, Eisenhower launched NASA, George W. Bush launch PEPFAR. You know, it was never this way before. And so at am. I try to educate people about that, to say, you know, this, these are not the droids you're looking for. I don't know why you're going in this direction when it's, so obviously self-defeating and scary and, and, uh, and, uh, an, a security threat for the country. This is as great. A Homeland security threat is anything we'll face.

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:06)
So I, I have a theory about this, sir. Not that you want to hear my theories, but I do believe that there's economic desperation in the land. Uh, there's a very large group of people that don't feel the aspirational arc of America that perhaps our generation and our parents felt and a result of which they're pointing fingers. And they're looking to conspiracy, and they're looking to breed this disinformation. It helps almost a swash where they're going directionally. I think we've got to provide more jobs, more opportunity, more real income.

Peter Hotez: (25:37)
I totally agree. I mean, it's, you know, it's become tribal and, and all I'm trying to do now is say to the tribe, this is not the one you want get, right. Don't get, get rid of, get rid of the anti-science good, right?

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:52)
Because obviously science is our future will lead to more prosperity. I've got the erstwhile millennial that needs to ask questions. If we don't bring them in dock the ratings, don't apparently he's very, very popular this guy. I mean, he gets, he gets fan mail and all kinds of different stuff, but I have one last question before we bring in Mr. Darcie, and that's related to the accusations going on, uh, in the Wu Han laboratory and the origination of COVID-19. I was wondering if you could, uh, opine on those theories, which your opinion there, if you have one

John Darcie: (26:25)
And former CDC director Redfield just came out with an op-ed basically expressing his opinion than it did originate from the lab and move on.

Anthony Scaramucci: (26:34)
What's your opinion there, sir, if you have one,

Peter Hotez: (26:36)
Well, you know, it's, it's not impossible. The, well, one of the things I've said is, you know, China's always been the perfect mixing bowl for zoonotic viruses, because we used to do a lot of work in China. We kept the lab in China, in Shanghai for many years, and you see it in the outdoor markets, you know, it's this perfect mixing bowl of ducks and pigs and chickens. And, and it all comes together in contact with, with humans. And that's why we see all of the avian flus, poor sine flus come out of China. That's why you see, you saw stars arise out of China. So the point was, there was never a reason to invoke human orange or man-made oranges, uh, for this, for this virus. So it's not impossible. I just never saw the, the urgency to, to focus on it because we know that China is a place that we do active virus surveillance for, because of it's a vulnerable, vulnerable area.

Peter Hotez: (27:34)
So let's, it is possible. Um, I think proving it is going to be really tough, you know, trying to get ahold of, uh, an email chain or, uh, or a smoking gun in terms of record. But it's, you know, I've been talking to a number of people, uh, in, in law enforcement and in, and other branches of the government, uh, last year about the possibility. And that's what I said, yes, it's possible, but I don't know the need to, to, to, to, uh, to focus on it. And then, because, uh, there's a lot of, there are a hundred other reasons why that quarter of ours could have arisen out of China. John Dorsey, go ahead.

John Darcie: (28:16)
All right. So you talked about how in the U S we're on a path, and we were talking about this before we went live on a path. There was an op-ed written recently, or an article written recently in the New York times about how the current dilemma facing the Biden administration is what to do with the oversupply of vaccines, which is obviously a, a high class problem to have when six months ago, or nine months ago, we didn't know what the timeline was going to be for even developing a vaccine. So it's promising the arc of vaccinations in the U S is relatively promising, not withstanding the anti-vax movement, but around the world, it's a much different picture. So a lot of countries, whether it be an Africa or, or, uh, middle east areas that you covered under the Obama administration or Asia, there's certain countries that a lot of countries that have zero vaccinations. So how do we look at our role in the world as, as the United States, as a leader around the world? Uh, not just for altruistic reasons, but also for selfish reasons in terms of really extend, extinguishing this virus, uh, in a way that will be lasting for hopefully the foreseeable future. How do we think about vaccine distribution in a way that can help the world and also help us?

Peter Hotez: (29:21)
Well, you know, my op my optimism about the U S and to some extent, the UK and Western Europe is tempered by my profound pessimism for what's going to happen in Africa and Latin America. I mean, look at, look at the size of, of the undertaking. There are 1.1 billion people living in Sub-Saharan Africa, 650 million people in Latin America. You're talking. So roughly almost 2 billion people, two doses of vaccine, that's 4 billion doses of vaccines, where where's that going to come from? The big picture problem is this. Everyone was so focused on the innovation and making and, and using that high technology to make high-tech very good vaccines for the U S and Europe is, and nobody really gave thought to simple, durable, non fussy, easy breezy vaccines for Africa and Latin America. And that is the reality. So, you know, Pfizer by and tech said, they're going to donate 230,000 doses of their vaccine to Rwanda.

Peter Hotez: (30:24)
It's great. It's a drop in the bucket. And, and even if the us were to give all of the rest of its supply today, um, it would help a little bit, but it's still mostly a drop in the bucket. We still have not figured out what we're going to do, and it's not because there wasn't a commitment to equity. Uh, the international policy makers who Gavi sucky created the Kovac sharing facility, it's well-designed, and it's, uh, in its structure, but the vaccines just aren't there because we were so focused on the shiny new toys in terms of the types of vaccines that were going to make the nobody gave attention to that. So we, you know, early on started making in low cost recombinant protein vaccine for COVID-19 that now we've licensed to biologically and Hyderabad there, like serum Institute of India, one of the big manufacturers, and they have the capacity to make 1.2 billion doses, which is what they're doing.

Peter Hotez: (31:20)
But it was interesting when I, you know, in 2020, as I was calling out the disinformation campaign in the white house, I was also on the phone trying to raise money because nobody cared about our vaccine because it wasn't a high-tech cool vaccine. It was something that it's the same technology you use as the hepatitis B vaccine that's been given for four decades. And we did, we raised around four or $5 million privately, um, including from Tito's vodka. So if you, um, and the, the clay brick foundation and JPB foundation, so if you order a cocktail tonight and it has vodka in it, it's gotta be teed up. So my,

John Darcie: (31:57)
My mother-in-law is going to my mother-in-law is going to take care of that herself, uh, tonight. So, so Tito's is well supportive in my household. Trust me

Peter Hotez: (32:06)
Ahead. And, um, but you

Anthony Scaramucci: (32:08)
Know, I was starting and his grandmother-in-law to lay my head, but let's keep going. Cardi.

John Darcie: (32:12)
If Bacardi was involved in, uh, in the vaccine distribution, then that would be covered by my grandmother-in-law, but

Anthony Scaramucci: (32:20)
We're certainly open to hear from Bacara while her diet. And just so you know, and I want everybody to know this is diet Coke, and Bacardi seems to be going very well for her at age 83. And counting, go ahead. And this is,

John Darcie: (32:32)
I don't want to waste too much time with this, but speaking of her, she's 82 years old, her husband got COVID thankfully survived it a tough couple of weeks, but she slept in bed with him every night that he had. COVID-19 never got it, never got infected. It was the most bizarre thing that we couldn't figure out what was going on. It's just goes to show you the weirdness of this disease.

Peter Hotez: (32:52)
It really, for, for so many reasons, it's so odd. So the point is, um, and so in terms of what the Biden administration should do with the excess is they should provide it to the Kovacs facility and let them distribute the vaccine. What I prefer not happen is to, for the, for the Biden administration, do what the Russians and the Chinese have been doing, which is using their vaccine as a bargaining chip in a very transactional way, making one-on-one deals with countries, um, uh, in what's now being called vaccine nationalism. You know, we've got a good Kovac sharing facility. If they're going to provide vaccine, don't use it as a, as an instrument of foreign policy, use it, use it as, uh, to provide for the equity mechanism that's been set up, but I think that's probably something like that will happen, but again, it's still not enough.

Peter Hotez: (33:45)
Um, I'm really worried. And now at that [inaudible] variant the south African variant going out from South Africa to Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, I'm worried it's going to destabilize the African continent. We've got the P one variant coming out of Brazil that could do the same. This, this could be a real, uh, as terrible as things have been, this could be, uh, even even more concerning humanitarian catastrophe. And so I hope our vaccine can make a difference. Um, and, and I worry about the bad press around the AstraZeneca vaccine, because that was one of the other workhorse vaccines that we were counting on for low and middle income countries. So the, this could be the next phase, the next crisis of the pandemic, the us UK Europe looks after itself and the rest of the world suffers dramatically.

John Darcie: (34:38)
Are you worried actually about the efficacy of the AstraZeneca AstraZeneca vaccine at all? Or do you think it's purely something that, you know, the PR has gotten out of control and it's going to damage a pandemic response as a result?

Peter Hotez: (34:51)
Well, you know, it's, it's a race to the bottom. The say it was a worst who was the worst public health communicator? Was it the white house coronavirus task force in 2020, or it was, or was it AstraZeneca? Um, they certainly have not done themselves any favor, but the individual European countries made a lot of mistakes, too. I'm in Germany, the Paul Ehrlich Institute set out such a damning press release, uh, uh, the, uh, uh, day before the European medicine agency said it's safe to use. And so this creates a lot of confusion and we have to remember this anti-vaccine anti-science empire as deeply infiltrated the low and middle income countries. It's an India, it's an Africa it's in Latin America. So we're going to get a lot of people who will die refusing, um, COVID vaccines in Africa and in the Americas. And so this is going to be a huge issue.

John Darcie: (35:43)
Um, in terms of the vaccines, are you worried about their ability to, uh, inoculate against these variants? How concerned should we be generally about the variants and, you know, not just the fact that they're more contagious, but they're potential resistance to Primis that we've developed so far.

Peter Hotez: (36:00)
So all of the vaccines work equally? Well, it looks like against the B 1, 1 7 variant, which is the dominant one now in the U S and it'd be dominant for the foreseeable future down the line. We may see a rise in that P one from Brazil or B 1, 3, 5, 1 for South Africa, it's here, but it seems to be out competed by the [inaudible] variant from UK, as we get this under control, it might become a problem later on. So I'm already giving a heads up to people. Don't be surprised if you have to get a third dose of your Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, or a second dose of the J and J vaccine, either later on this year or next year. And that boost may be slightly reconfigured to target those particular variants. I don't think we're going to need to get vaccinated every year, like, like flu, but anticipate at least in at least one additional boost.

John Darcie: (36:54)
Yeah, that, that was sort of my next question. You know, I actually had COVID myself in early December. I got the first dose of the modern vaccine a couple of days ago, and it knocked me out for 24 hours. It was sort of the classic COVID symptoms. And so it was just, I was curious about, you know, re vaccination, whether it's going to be like the flu, but you sort of answered that. Do you anticipate, remember

Peter Hotez: (37:16)
If you've gotten COVID in recovery, that's almost like your first dose of vaccination exactly. For your first immunization and some people, unfortunately, uh, don't handle the second immunization as well. So Anthony, if you get vaccinated today, this afternoon, don't make big plans for the next 1, 5, 5

Anthony Scaramucci: (37:37)
PM today. And, uh, you know, my wife had what was COVID arm, which I'm sure you've heard of, right. It was a 1% of the people, her arm grew up, you know, like a bee sting. Um, but like she always says is better than the alternative. And I think that's the thing we have to tell people. Uh, what you're doing is priming the immune system. You're, you're allowing the immune system to recognize the virus and respond to it and kill it before it starts to wreak havoc on your system and causes an overreaction, potential blood clotting.

Peter Hotez: (38:10)
Remember, it'll save your life. And, uh, that's the only, it's not socially, not social media is I use the word guarantee and people jumped on me for that. But it's about as close to a guarantee as you can have that you won't die from COVID. Uh, if you get, if you get fully vaccinated,

John Darcie: (38:29)
Where do you think we are? I have young kids. Anthony has young kids. Where do you think we are in terms of the research process around vaccinations for adolescents and children? And when do you think we'll have some finality on knowing what the best course of action is?

Peter Hotez: (38:43)
Well, today, or last night, Rutgers university announced they're going to require vaccinations for their college kids. And I think all the other colleges will follow suit about half a million college kids got infected, uh, last year. And then there were a hundred deaths on college campuses, a lot of that from staff. So I think it's very reasonable because we'll have the vaccines here for all universities, college campuses, especially for those living in the dorms to require vaccination. I also think we may have the data by the fall to immunize adolescents and 12 say 10 or 12 to 16 to 18. And, and that will make junior high schools, high schools, very safe places of teachers, staff, and the kids are vaccinated. I think for the little kids were probably a little further out, maybe by next year, we'll have that data maybe sooner, but I, I don't think it would be 10 next year.

Peter Hotez: (39:41)
And then some decision will be made. How, uh, how far down in age group you go, you know, maybe this would be given something like a measles vaccine and about one year of age. And the reason I say that if you're vaccinating pregnant women, now it looks like pregnant women will have antibodies on board in double transfer to the placenta and fetus and protect newborn babies for a period of time, but it may limit vaccine effectiveness in the first six months of life. So I'm guessing it may, could over time projecting way out in the future could be given almost like a preschool or measles vaccine,

John Darcie: (40:15)
Right? And my wife is pregnant having another child be breaking this news to some of my friends who maybe watch salt talks, but she got vaccinated, uh, at the urging of our doctor. And fortunately didn't have the same type of reaction I did to the first shot. Not that I am saying in any shape or form that I, it,

Peter Hotez: (40:36)
Well, first of all, mazal Tov, which has got vaccinated, the, um, you know, the pregnant women have not done well with this virus, very high rates of hospitalization, ICU admissions, much higher than non-pregnant women of the same age and a lot of deaths. Unfortunately. So even though we don't have all the I's dotted and T's crossed in terms of safety and efficacy data, um, there's now new data coming out about the, that works really well in pregnant women. We're still finishing all the safety studies, but the risk of what happens if you're pregnant and getting COVID, especially now with the [inaudible] variant is so concerning that most of us are recommended. Go ahead and get vaccinated. And, um, and now the American college of obstetrics and gynecology is saying, getting get vaccinated and the maternal fetal medicine society to saying get vaccinated. So you did the right thing.

John Darcie: (41:29)
Well, that's good to hear from you for sure. Last question I have your is about preparing for the next pandemic. So obviously we're, we're learning a lot from the, you know, in some ways failed response. And in some ways the response as it relates to vaccine development has been very encouraging. Do you think we're more prepared now for the big one? You know, it's, it's hard to even say that we got lucky in any way with COVID because you have in the U S more than half a million people dead and, and others, you know, sort of wounded from the vaccine as well as many others around the world, but this wasn't sort of the ultra deadly type of virus that could wipe out large parts of the human population. Do you think we've learned enough from this, you know, this pandemic, that the time, uh, that may be one that's more deadly around and we're going to be ready for

Peter Hotez: (42:14)
It? Well, this has been a tough virus because it's had this Janice face is to face on the one hand, you had people going into ICU and losing their lives. On the other hand, you had at least half the individuals with no symptoms and shedding, a lot of virus in their nose and mouth and walk, going into bars and, and public venues. And that's what made it so complicated. The way I respond to that is with each pandemic, we've learned something and we have improved infrastructure. So after SARS, in 2003, we had international health regulations, 2005 with after H one N one pandemic flu in 2009, we'd built the global health security agenda and, and, and, uh, and put in new infrastructure for monitoring flu, and then thereafter, Ebola and 2014 at Davos Sepi was created the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovation. So we do learn from epidemics.

Peter Hotez: (43:09)
I think the things that a few things have to happen for this one after this one, one, we need greater involvement at the G 20 countries, where it's, we still focus too much on the you that U S U K some of the Western European countries and the country known as the bill and Melinda gates foundation. It's it's, it's not enough. We've got to get full and vote always somehow after figure out a way to get China on board Russia on board, um, Japan, more on board, uh, Indonesia, all the Brazil, all the G 20 nations, that's gotta be a priority to G 20 summit to work together. We have to build capacity for making vaccines right now. No vaccines are made on the African continent, barely anything's made in Latin America, nothing was in the middle east. So building that infrastructure is going to be really important about the number of discussions about that.

Peter Hotez: (44:01)
And lastly, we've got a defeat anti-science and for that, I've been pushing hard on the Biden administration. If they'll do it to create an inter-agency task force, to really decide what they're going, how they're going to conquer this, recognize how deadly a threat this is. And it means not only bringing in the usual suspects, the health and human services agencies, but they're going to have to bring in a commerce and justice department. You're going to have to bring in state departments to do something about the Russian of weaponized health communication. Uh, and I'd like to see that the United nations level as well, uh, uh, bringing all the UN agencies to tackle this, because I see it as, uh, as I've said at the beginning of the program, I said, I see this as a bigger threat as nuclear proliferation, or terrorism. It's an arguably it's killed more people than those two things combined right now. And, uh, and yet there seems to be very little political will to want to do anything about it. That's so far, I'm sort of the lone person rattling the cage on this one. That, that just be, and maybe it's maybe I'm overreacting, just because I've had the bins so targeted by them for decades. I've lost my perspective, but, uh, I see this as something very serious. We need to confirm.

John Darcie: (45:22)
Yeah. I mean, people in their mind, they, they get worried about things like, uh, foreign terrorism and other things, but this is much more pernicious. And if you look at loss of life and damage to public health, this is much greater, but it doesn't crystallize in people's mind the same way.

Peter Hotez: (45:38)
I still haven't found a good way to talk about it, because what if I scare you see if I start to go on long enough, I start talking about human on and Neo Nazi grips and potent. And I start myself sounding the next was Luther since that the TV at night. So I need to find a, I mean, you know, if you listen to me long enough, you kind of understand it and, and, and start to agree, but, uh, I've got to figure out a way to say it in a more elegant way.

John Darcie: (46:04)
We don't blame you given the fact that you've been labeled the, you know, the O G vaccine king Republican. I mean, number one by the

Peter Hotez: (46:11)
G O G O G villain. Oh, gee villain.

John Darcie: (46:14)
Okay. Oh, gee villain. We'll leave it with, it's great to have the OJI villain on salt talks. Anthony, you have a final word for Dr. Hotez before we left.

Anthony Scaramucci: (46:21)
You know, I, I, you know, I don't want to sound like a fanboy doctor, but I have an enormous amount of respect for you because when you're in the public guy and you know, I've been rolled on a few times, you know, when I got fired from the white house, I got rolled in bro broken glass by the nation's comedian. It was a, it was a, it's a brutal time, uh, for your family. And you're out there every day and you're taking buckshot every day. So for those reasons, I see you as a national hero, uh, and a global hero in this fight against the disinformation. And so it's a, once again, a public service announcement from the salt talks and all of us here, please get yourself vaccinated. The vaccines are safe, they'll protect you and your family they'll protect your loved ones, particularly your children. You're providing them a shield until we can get a vaccine up and running for them. And so if I got any of that wrong back, let me know, but, uh, that's our message. Brilliant.

Peter Hotez: (47:16)
That's brilliant. After the year in great public health communicator, we need more, we need more and we're,

Anthony Scaramucci: (47:21)
We're, we're thrilled to have you with us, and I hope we can invite you back. Uh, and the title of the book is preventing the next pandemic vaccine in a time of anti-science. And so I encourage people to read that book and share it with people that are reluctant to get the COVID-19 vaccine from one of the providers and started, thank you again for being on with us.

Peter Hotez: (47:43)
Thank you as a real honor, and enjoy speaking with both of you. It's been great.

John Darcie: (47:48)
Thank you, Dr. Hotez for joining us and thank you everybody for tuning into today's salt talk, you know, again, a big part of this battle is educating people. Uh, so please spread the word about this salt talk in particular, it's an important public service announcement. You know, both Anthony and I have gotten the vaccine. Dr. Hotez has gotten the vaccine. My pregnant wife has gotten the vaccine. Uh, everyone in my family has gotten the vaccine and, and everybody doing well and feeling a huge burden lifted off the mentally, which is another issue that's arisen, uh, from this pandemic is the mental health crisis that's been created by the fact that we can't go out and live relatively normalized, which getting vaccinated will allow you to do that. But, uh, just a reminder, if you miss any part of this episode or any of our previous episodes, you can access them all on our website@sault.org backslash talks, and also on our YouTube channel, which is called salt tube. Please follow us on social media. Twitter is where we're most active at salt conference, but we're also on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And again, please spread the word about these salt talks. I say that about every episode, because I think every topic we cover is important for its own reason, but none more important than this one, but on behalf of Anthony and the entire salt team, this is John Darcie signing off for today. We hope to see you back here soon again on salt talks.

Dr. Yossi Bahagon: Israel's Vaccine Rollout | SALT Talks #167

“As human beings, some of our behaviors will evolve. The first thing that’s evolving is how do we [and the health care system] approach our health care.”

Dr. Yossi Bahagon is a family physician and serial entrepreneur who founded and managed the digital health division at Clalit Health Services – the second largest health maintenance organization in the world. Dr. Bahagon is a founding managing partner at OurCrowd, a global venture investment platform.

The pandemic will inevitably force human behavior to evolve in many ways. This is especially true for our approach to health care and its delivery. Israel has been an early adopter of health care digitalization and telehealth. Clalit Health Services was created over ten years ago and allows 100% of Israel’s population to access one’s own health information through a phone or computer. Empowerment through digital access creates a more collaborative relationship between patient and doctor, a dynamic termed participatory health. “Participatory health is about how do you make the patient a true partner in his or her own health care… this is what the digital health revolution is all about.”

This digital health foundation in Israel has been central to its successful vaccination efforts. Citizens have become familiar with the digitalization of their health care which has made communication and delivery of vaccines into patient arms more seamless. “Within a month and a half, 45% of the Israeli population is already vaccinated. If things continue at this pace, in a month or two, we will gain herd immunity.”

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Dr. Yossi Bahagon.jpeg

Dr. Yossi Bahagon

Founder & Manager

Clalit Health Services' Digital Health Division

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:12)
Hello everyone. And welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the Managing Director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is the same as our goal at our SALT Conferences, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.

John Darsie: (00:44)
And we're very excited today to welcome you to the latest episode of SALT Talks that we're doing in partnership with OurCrowd, which is an Israeli-based crowdfunding platform. And today's episode is going to focus on the miracle of the Israeli rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, something that we could definitely learn a lot from here in the United States, as in various parts of the countries, we're achieving success and in some cases not achieving success in rolling out the vaccine in a efficient way.

John Darsie: (01:13)
But our guests today on this SALT Talks episode is Dr. Yossi Bahagon. Dr. Bahagon is a clinically active family physician, a serial entrepreneur, and a global key opinion leader in the field of digital health. Dr. Bahagon founded and managed Clalit Health Services Digital Health Division. CHS is the second largest health maintenance organization in the world. CHS's digital activity led the digital transformation of the Israeli healthcare system and became a global benchmark for nationwide digital health deployments. It serves today millions of patients in tens of millions of interactions monthly, and they were definitely ahead of the curve in what is now a mega trend in terms of telemedicine. Dr. Bahagon has also been a founding team member of several successful digital health companies and co-founded Qure Ventures, Israel's first digital health focused investment fund. Dr. Bahagon serves as the special advisor for the World Health Organization, as well as an advisory board member of Best Buy Health and Almirall Pharmaceuticals and a mentor at Microsoft's Think Next Accelerator and Biocat's Digital Health Accelerator.

John Darsie: (02:28)
And hosting today's talk is David Suisa. David is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, the largest Jewish weekly in the country, Los Angeles being one of those locations I was referring to earlier that could learn a lot from Israel's vaccine rollout. For the past 13 years, David has been writing a weekly column in the Journal that earned him the Best Columnist Award by the LA Press Club and First Prize for Editorial Writing by the American Jewish Press Association. Prior to journalism, David was a founder and CEO of Suisa Miller Advertising, a marketing firm that was named Agency of the Year by USA Today. In 2005, he sold that company so he could dedicate himself full time to the Jewish world and we're very excited that David is joining us as a first time moderator here on SALT Talks. And with no further ado, I'm going to turn it over to David to conduct today's interview.

David Suisa: (03:22)
Thank you, John. Thank you to SALT Talks and to OurCrowd. I have a special fascination with our subject today. For one thing, every time I go to a doctor's office, I still have to fill out all the forms on real paper with an old pen. And all I see is hundreds and hundreds of old paper files. And I always ask myself, when are we going to enter the digital age here in America? But then at the same time, recently, I have a sensor on my skin that has really changed my life, because it helps me measure my glucose. So I've tasted both worlds, and I'm delighted to be able to talk about this subject with Yossi today.

David Suisa: (04:07)
So I'd like to start, Yossi, with something you wrote 10 years ago in a medical journal that caught my attention. And let me quote from what you wrote. "In the upcoming decade, digital platforms will be the backbone of a strategic revolution in the way medical services are provided, affecting both healthcare providers and patients. Digital-based patient centered healthcare services allow patients to actively participate in managing their own care in times of health, as well as illness, using personally tailored interactive tools." That sounds like a wonderful world, Yossi. When you think back of what you wrote 10 years ago, how does it look today?

Yossi Bahagon: (04:52)
So first thank you, John. And thank you, David and OurCrowd for connecting the dots here on this SALT Talk. Hearing what you are quoting me, I probably should read back what I wrote a few years ago. Maybe I will know how to read the future better. So definitely we are speaking over Zoom in a world that half of it is under lockdown. And unfortunately that COVID led to the revolution that we are experiencing today in remote care services.

Yossi Bahagon: (05:35)
But actually this came true faster than I imagined. It's just a year, a year and a half ago, people, as you described, every time had to go to the physician's office for every routine check, for every child check, for an ear pain and so on. Things have dramatically changed these days and accelerated and COVID which accelerated this change. We see a world that is actually going today through what you just read. And I believe that what we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg, meaning COVID is going to stay with us, whether we like it or not, even with the vaccinations, which we will speak about later on, it's going to stay with us for the months. And maybe even for the two, three years to come, if everything will go right.

Yossi Bahagon: (06:40)
And some of our behaviors as human beings will evolve and started evolving during this period. And since it's a healthcare crisis, the first thing that is evolving is how do we approach our health care and how does the healthcare system approach healthcare? So exactly that, how healthcare is delivered and how healthcare is perceived.

Yossi Bahagon: (07:13)
I think the main thing that I pointed out back then, and I can still reiterate it today is what I like to call participatory health. Participatory health is how do you make the patient a true partner in his or her own healthcare? So the technology aims that we will speak about later on, we need to remember that they are only means for this objective of making the patient a true partner, just like you hinted with regards to your continuous glucose monitoring that is attached to your arm, which gave you the power to know where your glucose stands with a glimpse of an iPhone or a smartphone that you get nearby the sensor. So this is exactly what the digital revolution is all about.

David Suisa: (08:20)
You know what I find also fascinating is that there is an acronystic system that seems very, very difficult to change, which is a human being entering a doctor's office. And that's something that's been with us for hundreds of years. And I still feel that it's like granite. It's like an old school. The doctor expects it, the patient expects it. I go into an office and I see a doctor in person. And what I've noticed is that we've been forced to change that during the pandemic, because we had no choice. So now we're entering telemedicine, whether we like it or not. And I'd like to discuss now the situation in Israel, because it seems to me that you were better prepared for the pandemic and for the spread of the vaccine, especially than other countries. And you personally, Yossi, you were involved with creating a digital health system in Israel through Clalit, correct? Could you spend a few minutes discussing how you helped create this digital health system and how it helped you when the vaccine finally came, helped spread the vaccine so quickly?

Yossi Bahagon: (09:45)
Sure. Happy to, thank you, David, for the question. I don't know if you and the audience know that, but for more than 10 years now in Israel, 100% of the population, 100% of the population have access to their personal health record. Meaning I can with one tap, go into my smartphone and enter my personal health record. And not only I can see all my data there, meaning diseases, medications, hypersensitivities, my last x-ray, my last lab test and so on, everything. I can also act upon it in various ways. So having telemedicine sessions, ordering my chronic prescriptions, all the data is analyzed at the background so to enable personalized medicine. So for example, the system crunches the data in order to find a woman who have a higher risk for developing breast cancer and send them proactively notifications for doing preventative medicine in order to find it in early stage.

Yossi Bahagon: (11:10)
If you ask me why am I personally attracted to this field beyond the cool stuff and technology, which will... It's about the ability to change people's life in the masses. When I was a physician in a clinic, I had 1,000 patients that were under my responsibility. When we established the Digital Health Division at Clalit, as John said, it's the second largest health organization in the world after Kaiser. Now, and this is what I told my team, it's not about technology. It's about the human experience that you create. And it's about touching the lives of millions of peoples through this digital platforms and changing their lives. We can point out to this specific woman that because of the system that we built, we saved their lives from a deadly breast cancer. And similarly with regards to men, that we saved their lives from a myocardial infection from a heart attack.So it's not numbers and digital. It's people's lives and people's experience.

Yossi Bahagon: (12:32)
From this platform, again, I'm speaking 10 years before COVID. When we started it, I told people telemedicine, they asked me, "Tele who?" So today, obviously everybody knows what telemedicine is, but this platform was the foundation of the great success that we are experiencing this days and in the vaccination rollout. We are moving from a startup nation to a vaccination. So I can describe you my experience. I got the text message inviting me with the date and place and with a QR code, got there five minutes before time, the gate opened based on me presenting the QR code. 10 minutes later, I was out. A day after, I got a text message for my second vaccine booking, together with an electronical form there to fill if I had any adverse effects. This system is built on what we built, what we are building for the last 10, 15 years in which enables now that's 45, within a month and a half, 45% of the Israeli population is already vaccinated.

Yossi Bahagon: (14:01)
And if things will move forward in this space, in a month to two months, we will get in what is supposed to be the herd immunity. And we are already starting to see the numbers go down and we are already starting to see that the economy's opening. And this is because again, yes, you can call it digital health, but it's essentially, now digital life.

David Suisa: (14:31)
What I'm hearing from you is that the digital technology is encouraging a model of cooperation between the doctors, the providers, and the patients. Now here in America, I've seen something different. When people encourage patients to take ownership of their health, they tell you to do your homework on Google, find out and almost interrogate your doctor. Ask questions, and also look for second opinions. From the doctor's standpoint, he pays huge malpractice insurance. So he needs to protect himself against malpractice. There's almost, I don't want to exaggerate the point, almost a confrontational thing where so many of us, first of all, are taught to really trust the doctor completely or interrogate them. What I'm sensing hearing you speak now is a completely different model, where the doctor sees the patient in a kind of a partnership model, where the technology encourages partnership.

David Suisa: (15:41)
And it's amazing, because I've been living this partnership for only two weeks now because of my Libra Sensor, and I emailed back and forth now with my doctor. So this is the first time in my life I'm actually living through this and I see it as a real game changer, but it's happening because I have the kind of doctor who is willing to work with me as a partner. So is this what we're hoping for, for the future of healthcare around the world, to create a model of partnership that may even be introduced in medical schools as the model to strive for? And hence technology can be a facilitator of that new, more productive model.

Yossi Bahagon: (16:26)
You describe it in a beautiful way, and I can only fully agree. Maybe I will give one example to anchor to what you just said. So what we are seeing today is that the digital platforms are entering the traditional healthcare world and they are providing the physician and the patient better tools to provide better and more personalized medicine. This is supposed to create a situation where the physician, instead of focusing on crunching the data and collecting the data himself, will be able to go back to the traditional model of the interaction between the patient and the physician, meaning humanity. Because this is something, that at least for the foreseeable future, digital platforms are not supposed to do. So, for example, if you just ate lunch and your blood glucose is above the target, you will get the message, "Hey, David, your glucose levels is 183. If you would walk now for seven minutes, based on your past logs, you will bring your glucose levels back to target." So it's combining advanced data science with behavioral science and user experience in order to improve your clinical outcomes.

David Suisa: (18:05)
Yossi, I want to get more personal if you don't mind. You are a doctor who is now the managing partner of OurCrowd Qure. I'm interested in how you've added the investment side to your life. What made you think of adding this component to your life? And tell us a little bit more about OurCrowd Qure.

Yossi Bahagon: (18:34)
Yeah, so it's a good personal question. My grandmother, when people asked her, "Your grandchild is a physician, what exactly does he do?" And she didn't know to tell, "He's an expert in medical infomatics." She didn't know how to explain it. So she said, "Oh he's some kind of physician of computers."

David Suisa: (19:05)
Sounds like my mother.

Yossi Bahagon: (19:09)
There is the personal things that you are attracted to. So I was attracted by technology, but at some point I saw early on that this could change so many people's lives. Usually when people ask me about my background, I say, "This is digital [inaudible 00:19:27] is not what I do for a living. It's my life's mission. It's my passion. It's my way to bring back good to the world." That I'm saying it though, it's very, very personal. I'm saying it here because I feel it's genuine enough to put it on the table.

Yossi Bahagon: (19:48)
I want to tell you a story about one of the things that led me to where I am today. So I was sitting there one Friday in my clinic, and I got a call from a patient of mine. She was back then in a small island in Thailand called Ko Phi Phi. I remember it because you will understand in a second. And she told me that her son, a four-years-old son is suffering from fever and is coughing for the last three days. And can I help her because it was an island without any communication and so on. And I told her I opened, I think it was Skype back then, and I looked at the child and I said to her, "Rachel, I really want to help you, but I can't. Why? Because you are there and I am here. And I can't listen to the child's lungs and diagnose whether he has pneumonia and you needs some antibiotics and so on."

Yossi Bahagon: (20:52)
After this call, I gave a call to two entrepreneurs that I knew, and I asked them, "Listen, can we build a solution that will enable me to send a long hand from Israel to Thailand, and not only see my patients, the way we talk to each other now, but also check them up as if they were now entering my clinic." Seven years later, there is this Israeli company called Tyto, which is now used by tens of thousands of families in Europe, in US, in Israel, which enables exactly that, to enable not only remote visits via video, but to enable actually remote examination as if you were entering the physician clinics.

Yossi Bahagon: (21:52)
Now these are the type of experiences that you say, "Hey, it's not about the funding. It's not about the return." These are, I don't want to say side effects. It's not. Good business usually leads also to good execution, but the motivation lies in the doing good. And the investment side is an enabler.

David Suisa: (22:19)
I'll tell you another thing, Yossi, that fascinates me. When we talk technology here in America in terms of healthcare, we often talk about the kind of technology that has made healthcare exorbitant, that had made the costs skyrocket. For example, new surgery techniques, new big machines, and new technologies that a lot of times doctors feel they got to use. Sometimes they overuse any, and it skyrockets healthcare costs in America. And what I'm hearing from you is a different type of technology, the type of technology that actually makes healthcare not just more human and more cooperative, but also more efficient and cost effective.

Yossi Bahagon: (23:09)
Definitely.

David Suisa: (23:10)
So when you consider, because you're always exposed to these kinds of new innovative technologies as the leader of this OurCrowd Qure, do you make a distinction between those two categories?

Yossi Bahagon: (23:25)
So definitely. And this is also an opportunity to say a bit more about Qure. So Qure, as John described at the beginning, is the first fund in Israel that was purely dedicated to digital health and we've so far invested in 12 companies in different areas, in genomics, in telemedicine, in preventative care and so on. And the criteria that you just expressed, meaning it the fact that it's a cool tech is by far not being enough. And we put a rule. It was one of the things that when we started investing was in front of our eyes. If it makes medicine more expensive, it's not for us, because the hurdle is how to gain better care, with better partnership from the patient and to reduce the costs, because the costs are already going through the roof, especially if, you mentioned the US and it's about, I believe today, 20% of the US GDP. So indeed this was one of the criteria of how do we take the costs down? And it's an important criteria.

David Suisa: (24:51)
Now another thing I've noticed with technology is sometimes you just have really, really cool gadgets and the new generation, they're used to having cool gadgets, new apps and new social media. Everybody's on Clubhouse now. And I'll give you an example. All right, gadget happy. I go for walks every day. And my sister in Montreal also goes for walks. And my mother is getting on my case because my sister counts all her steps through her iWatch, right? And my mother bugs me every day. "Why aren't you doing what Judy's doing? Count your steps. She does 10,000 a day." And I'm saying, "Mother, I'm not the gadget type of guy." Right. I go for an hour walk, whether it's going to be 8,000 steps or 11,000, it doesn't make a big difference for me. I'm not gadget happy. However, the Libra is unbelievably useful and game-changing. So I'm wondering if that's also one of your criteria, that you stay away from stuff that may look too cool. And does that come up in your [crosstalk 00:26:04]?

Yossi Bahagon: (26:04)
Actually it comes up, it comes up a lot. We were in a discussion with the large global pharma company just a few days ago. And they asked exactly the same question. This is a very good point that you bring. Many times, the people that suffer from chronic diseases are not the ones that go to jog three times a week at the Central Park. On the contrary, they are are the ones that are less tech savvy. There are the ones that you need to motivate in order to encourage them to do work. They are the ones that are standing in front of Apple Stores all the night to get the latest version of Apple. And, you know, guess what? This is 80% of the chronic patients, the type of people that I just described.

Yossi Bahagon: (27:01)
We have a very strong collaboration with Johns Hopkins, with regards to doing clinical trials with these digital health solutions. So one very important point to emphasize is that digital health is more health than digital. Meaning if you want to bring solution, you need to verify that it brings results. And the only way to verify it brings results is to create this evidence together with leading organizations like Hopkins, as an example. And in choosing the population that will come into these clinical trials, you need to choose not only the young ones or the tech savvy. On the contrary, you need to see how it affects the average Joe was is 75-years-old, who is low to medium socioeconomic state and so on in order, indeed, to make sure that you point and you target to the masses. This is where the change will come from.

David Suisa: (28:11)
I saw an interview with Steve Jobs years ago, and I never understood why he started crying. It was after the iPad came out and he said of everything he did in his life, that was the one thing that touched him the most deeply. And I never really understood that. And then I went into a place that was for crippled children, and I saw how they were using iPads to discover color and sounds. And then 10 years later, I saw my mother, who never used a computer in her life. Finally press a finger on an iPad to see videos of her grandchild in Israel. And I understood. The reason he cried that day is because he understood that that was the ultimate product for the masses, because all he was asking was something that was true millions of years ago, which is the ability to just touch.

Yossi Bahagon: (29:06)
Exactly.

David Suisa: (29:07)
The ability to touch. And what you bring up is such an interesting point. If 80% of the people that are severely ill don't have that high tech capability, then those kinds of innovation now are going to have to have that high-touch component. Can you give us a few examples, Yossi of some of the innovation that is happening right now under OurCrowd Qure that you're excited about?

Yossi Bahagon: (29:34)
Yeah, for sure. So I gave already two examples of Tyto, the remote physical examination solution and of Sweetch, which is an AI-based solution for chronic disease prevention and management. Zebra, who is the company, if we started our discussion from the data that was accumulated in Israel during the last 15 years, so Zebra collected tens of millions of images from different healthcare providers in Israel, and based on creating this smart algorithms, the company, the system now knows how to diagnose in a very precise way, a variety of health conditions. If we want to connect it to COVID, so we know, one example is, when a patient enters the ER and the staff takes a chest x-ray, based on this chest x-ray, Zebra is able to predict which patients will be prone to a more severe disease, so they need more medical attention and which can be just with a watchful waiting.

Yossi Bahagon: (31:04)
Again, when you combined large data sets with advanced data science in order to improve clinical outcomes, and likewise Side Diagnostics, Side Diagnostics is clinic-based lab, which can use one drop of your blood to get a full, a complete blood count reading based on a technology that uses higher again, advanced data science together with advanced imaging solutions. And you can get in 60 seconds exactly whether you suffer from a most probably from a viral infection or from a bacterial infection. So these are just a few of the companies that we've invested in out of hundreds of companies that we've screened along the way.

David Suisa: (32:07)
So when John from SALT Talks introduced us at the beginning of the show, he brought up the idea that's probably the highest subject of interest, where I live anyhow, the vaccine. Everywhere I go, it is the number one subject of conversation. Everyone wants to know did you get your first shot. Did you get your second? How did you do it? It's unbelievable. I have really wealthy people that I connected that have not been able to get a shot. High-risk people that have not been able. It's just the number one subject. It's seen as a miracle, and everybody wants to get their vaccine.

David Suisa: (32:45)
So you mentioned, we are fascinated here in Los Angeles by what's happened in Israel and how fast you did it. So you mentioned at the top of the show that the data management was absolutely critical. In fact, I remember interviewing the head of the prenatal center at Sheba, and he mentioned that as soon as a baby is born in Israel, they immediately go into the data bank. I don't know if that's accurate, but that's what I recall from interviewing. So you really have a huge importance on getting this consolidated data, ID database, but is that the only reason why the vaccine has had such a rapid rollout?

David Suisa: (33:30)
I heard that your Prime Minister called the head of Pfizer 17 times. This is from the head of Shaare Zedek, Jonathan Halevy.

Yossi Bahagon: (33:39)
Yeah, Jonathan Halevy.

David Suisa: (33:42)
He told me that Prime Minister Netanyahu called the head, Bourla at Pfizer, 17 times. I wish we had that same kind of, I don't know what you call it, chutzpah maybe. And they paid extra. Basically, there was a sense of urgency that started from the top in terms of we're going to do absolutely everything we can to acquire as many doses as possible. And I almost said that there's been almost an army-like execution. Can you talk more about the success of the rollout?

Yossi Bahagon: (34:19)
So I think it's a combination of several factors. The political thing that you've mentioned and the data played, we've discussed at the beginning of the show, but the truth is that it goes back to what you said about chutzpah. This is a very important point when it comes to understanding the Israeli innovation, and why we don't get no as an answer. It's as simple as that.

David Suisa: (34:53)
No. Is there a request for more information?

Yossi Bahagon: (34:57)
Yeah. So I don't know if the story about Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and the 17 calls is a reality, but I'm sure that it reflects a reality and it's reflects a very Israeli thing. We don't get no as an answer, whether it's we have an issue that is related to defense and security issues, so we need to build Iron Dome in order to continue our normal life here. Or we have an issue with overcrowded roads, so we need to build the Mobileye for autonomous driving, or we have an issue with chronic diseases, so we need to build an interoperability system that will consolidate all the data. And at the end, this spirit of innovation that simply doesn't get a no as an answer. The common thing, you ask why, if you would ask me at the beginning, who would be the country, that when there will be vaccines will unroll it the fastest, I will tell you Israel because of this main fact.

David Suisa: (36:09)
Now there is a backlash, right now. It's what I call the dark side of technology. Everything has two sides, the plus and the dark. And right now the dark side of technology that I'm sensing both here and in Israel, which is the spread of misinformation throughout social media, where you see these videos of so-called experts that are talking about how vaccines are dangerous, that vaccines are not necessary, that the COVID itself is just like the flu, and they're getting, Yossi, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views on the internet.

David Suisa: (36:50)
And in fact, I was reading an article this morning in one of these Israeli papers that show that there's a rise in the number of Israelis that are skeptical of the vaccine. So it's not obvious that every Israeli now wants to get vaccinated. And we need a certain amount percentage of the population to get vaccinated so we can get to herd immunity. Now are you aware of this backlash? And can you talk a little bit about it? Is that something that concerns you?

Yossi Bahagon: (37:24)
Of course, something that I think we are all over the world are suffering from this fake news related to the vaccine and we all pay the price. So the only thing, there is the media that can fight it, but there is also, us as human beings, every one of us have to push the close and far interactions that we have and to state it in a very clear way. We want our life back. So it has a pathway which we can walk through and discuss that these vaccines did went through proper clinical trials. And these vaccines, the numbers now in Israel, they are already very loud. I'm speaking about millions of people that, for example, in Clalit. Clalit published a study just last week of 1.2 million people that were compared to a group that was not vaccinated. And the results are outstanding with regards to the immunity and with regards to stopping or reducing the infectious factor of the virus.

Yossi Bahagon: (38:49)
So it's no longer a clinical trial. It's already real world evidence. And for people who ask me, you don't know what the longterm effects of this vaccine will be. No, there is a very simple answer. It's the risk-reward question. Nobody also knows what the long-term effect of getting COVID will be. And if I decide in which hands to be with regards to long-term effects, whether in the hands of scientific evidence or in the hands of a virus, I prefer to take my chances with the scientific evidence.

David Suisa: (39:32)
Well my rule of thumb is, I ask my doctor friends, "Is this something you will put in your body?" And if they are willing to put it in their body, they have quote, unquote, literally skin in the game, then who am I to say no? Before I let you go, Yossi, I'd like to talk a little bit more about OurCrowd. I knew OurCrowd before it was born. I'm a big visitor of Israel. And then I saw OurCrowd when it was born and I visited your offices. And over the years, it's become this phenomenal global investment platform. I'm curious if I can get your impressions of OurCrowd in general, what brought you to be associated with them and give us a little bit of an overview of what OurCrowd brings to the picture?

Yossi Bahagon: (40:25)
So OurCrowd today is one of the largest, I believe the largest and the most active VC in Israel. So it fuels the innovation that we spoke about in many areas, whether it's automobile and healthcare and cyber security and digital consuming and so on. And it actually became, I joined OurCrowd four years ago after I did my own diligence and met with the leadership and understand what are the values behind this. So there is the democratizing of investments value. So today if you have even a small amount, relatively small amount that you want to invest, you can do it just like the big ones. This is a big value. And we hear about it a lot today with regards to companies like Robinhood. So think of OurCrowd as a Robinhood, not for investing $500, but for investing $10,000 or $5,000 or $50,000. For a bit of the larger amounts, where all the investments are validated by a professional team before they are brought to the platform. So this is one value.

Yossi Bahagon: (41:49)
The second value goes to Israel and OurCrowd in many aspects became the window for Israeli innovation. Just a year ago, last February, 2020, there was the famous OurCrowd Summit happening in Jerusalem. 15,000 people, for more than 80 countries came to this conference. And if this is not a [foreign language 00:42:22], I don't know what is. So now, bringing the data about vaccination to the world, bringing Mobileye to the world, bringing all the other weeks that helps companies build the digital based solutions, Tyto, Sweetch, Site Agnostic, Zebra, Brain Queue, which we didn't even discuss that is utilizing AI to make people who suffered from a spinal cord injury walk again.

Yossi Bahagon: (43:04)
So for me, what OurCrowd is, it's building a healthier and a better humanity. And that's the core value. And from that you go to the investment thesis and so on. Part of the success is it all starts and ends with the people that you have and the quality of the people that you have and the values that they carry. So if we talk about the OurCrowd success, I believe it belongs to the people who created it and who will maintain it on an ongoing basis. Maintaining, we discussed it before, to maintain the high-tech touch and the human touch.

David Suisa: (43:50)
On that note. I want to show you my screen. Check my glucose. This is my Libra. And this is the example of everything you spoke about today. I want to thank you so much, Yossi. I know it's late in Israel right now, and you took a whole hour to really discuss some really, really important issues. And I'm very grateful for you taking the time. John, do you want to have any final?

John Darsie: (44:16)
Yeah, I'll say a few words just to send us off here, but thank you, David, for joining us as a first time moderator here on SALT Talks, and Dr. Bahagon, thank you for joining us as well. Hopefully we can learn a little bit from the amazing technology that is taking place and has been taking place in Israel, as well as everything you guys are doing to contain the virus and now roll out the vaccine. So thank you so much for joining us.

Yossi Bahagon: (44:41)
Thank you, John, for hosting us and thank you, David, for the great moderate.

David Suisa: (44:46)
My pleasure. God bless. Stay safe.

John Darsie: (44:48)
Thank you everybody who tuned into today's SALT Talk as well. We always enjoy doing these episodes with our friends over at OurCrowd. They bring us fascinating guests and interesting companies that are doing interesting things and innovating in a variety of different fields. So just a reminder, if you missed any part of this episode or any of our previous episodes, including ones that we did with OurCrowd back in December, you can access our entire archive of SALT Talks free on demand on our website at salt.org/talks, and also on our YouTube channel, which is called SALT Tube, where we have a fast growing subscribership there.

John Darsie: (45:23)
Now we're also on social media. We're on Twitter @saltconferences where we're most active, but we're also on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram as well. And please spread the word about these SALT Talks. We think a lot of the topics that we cover, it's important to educate people about things that are going on in the world. And on behalf of the entire SALT team and our hosts today, David, to signing off from SALT Talks for today, we hope to see you back here again soon.

Venture Capital & Early Stage Science Startups | SALT Talks #156

Joe is a co-founder of Palantir, a multi-billion dollar global software company best known for its work in defense and finance. Most recently, he was a founding partner at Formation 8, one of the top-performing private funds and the precursor to 8VC.

Dakin Sloss is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is the Founder and General Partner of Prime Movers Lab, the world’s leading partner of breakthrough scientific startups. He has led investments in and is a Board Member at Momentus, Heliogen, Covaxx, Tarana, and Carbon Capture. Prime Movers Lab I is on track to be one of the top-performing funds of 2018. Prior to founding Prime Movers Lab, Dakin served as founding CEO of Tachyus and OpenGov.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKERS

Joe Lonsdale.jpeg

Joe Lonsdale

General Partner

8VC

Dakin Sloss.jpeg

Dakin Sloss

Founder & General Partner

Prime Movers Lab

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie, I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership platform and networking platform, at the intersection of finances, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is replicate the experience that we provide at our global conferences, the SALT Conference, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.

John Darsie: (00:41)
And we're very excited today to welcome two fantastic technology investors to SALT Talks, in Joe Lonsdale and Dakin Sloss. Joe Lonsdale is a general partner at 8VC. He was an early institutional investor in notable companies, including Wish, Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, Blend, Orca Bio, Relate IQ, Joby Aviation, Synthego, Guardant Health, as well as many others. And 2016 and 2017, he was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List. Joe is a co-founder of Palantir, a multi billion dollar global software company, best known for its work in defense and finance. Most recently, he was a founding partner at Formation 8, one of the top performing private funds, and the precursor to 8VC. Together, these funds manage a total committed capital base of about three and a half billion.

John Darsie: (01:33)
Before that, he found Addepar, which has over two trillion managed on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which modernizes various processes for over 2000 municipalities and state agencies. He's also a found of Affinity, Anduin, and Esper. Previously, Joe was an early executive at Clarium Capital, which he helped grow into a large, global macro hedge fund. And sorry for the banging above me, there seems to be some construction going on in the building. But that's just part of what we get here in the quarantine era.

Joe Lonsdale: (02:04)
They're getting tired of the bio, it's too long John. They're saying move on, we don't want to hear about Joe anymore.

John Darsie: (02:07)
Exactly. He also worked at PayPal while he was at Stanford, and that's the condensed bio for Joe, if we're being honest. He could have gone on for at least five more minutes with all the things that he's done. But we appreciate him packing about, I don't know, 50 trillion dollars worth of value that he's created into that short bio. So thank you, Joe, for that.

John Darsie: (02:25)
Dakin Sloss is the founder and general partner of Prime Movers Lab. Over the course of the last decade, he's created billions of dollars of enterprise value, including founding two breakthrough startups, OpenGov and Tachyus, investing in extraordinary early stage companies, like Boom Supersonic, and coaching dozens of prime movers, founders who invent breakthrough scientific inventions to transform billions of lives. And prior to Prime Movers Lab, he served as the founding CEO of Tachyus, where he built the leading prescriptive analytics company in the oil and gas industry. And before Tachyus, Dakin co-founded OpenGov where he was the CEO and recruited the core team, secured millions in angel funding and venture capital, and arranged the initial pilot partnerships, and launched the world's most advanced smart government platform. Before OpenGov, Dakin built California Common Sense, the premier California open data and government watchdog nonprofit, and California could certainly use some common sense. So thank you for doing that, Dakin.

John Darsie: (03:26)
Hosting today's talk and making his SALt Talks debut, we're very excited to have AJ Scaramucci, who as you might have guessed is a son of our typical host, Anthony Scaramucci. But AJ is an absolute beast in his own right. He started his career working at Google, then served as an entrepreneur in residence with Peter Diamandis, graduated from Stanford Business School, and has now launched the SALT fund, which is an incubator focused on life sciences companies, so we're excited to welcome AJ here to his debut on SALT Talks, and hopefully he comes back for many more episodes. Although he's busy building about seven different companies, so we try to squeeze him in in his spare time. So with that, AJ, I'll let you take it away for the interview.

AJ Scaramucci: (04:07)
Thanks John. Yeah. So I think what's unique about today's interview is we actually have two friends on the line, people that really know each other very intimately, have a long standing history with one another. I'd like to start there, actually. I'd like to start with how you guys met, as well as how you guys came up with the idea for OpenGov and created that together. I mean, Joe or Dakin, feel free to jump in there.

Joe Lonsdale: (04:31)
Yeah, well I remember Dakin was one of the brighter, more ambitious people at Stanford. You're not that much younger than me, but it felt like you were at the time. I feel like it was much-

Dakin Sloss: (04:39)
But I want to pretend I'm a lot younger than you, because the bios really make it seem-

Joe Lonsdale: (04:43)
I think you may be a decade younger than me, that's fair. But Dakin, we spent a lot of time meeting the top talent at Stanford, the different various groups, and entrepreneur groups, and policy groups there. And Dakin and I got along right away. He had a lot of strong opinions, and he wanted to do big things, and we became partners very quickly in a lot of different schemes.

Dakin Sloss: (05:04)
Yeah, I was just really lucky to have Joe as a mentor who's a bit further down the path and building amazing things that really help people transform their lives. And I certainly couldn't have created the things that I've gotten the privilege of working on over the last 10 years without learning and absorbing lots of lessons from Joe's successes and failures before me.

AJ Scaramucci: (05:26)
Absolutely. And so you guys both have... dabbled is not even the right word, you very much so have been intimately involved in building companies in the gov-tech space, whether it be OpenGov or Palantir. This seems to be a generally under invested in area in venture capital.

Joe Lonsdale: (05:50)
It's a very tough area. It's a very tough area to build companies in. I'd probably be in some ways wealthier even today if I had not spent time in gov-tech. That we're not going to make money in gov-tech, it just is very hard to do. I think Dakin and I are both very mission driven people, we both see problems in the world, and we say we're going to go and we're going to fix those problems. And obviously, the way our firm looks at it is just conceptual gaps in the world. There's how things should be working, and there's how things are working right now. And government has some of the very biggest conceptual gaps, so it's a really compelling area to work, and we do a lot of other things in healthcare, where there was lots of big gaps. We do a lot of things in logistics, in the deep tech. But government has so many big gaps, that yeah, it's something that really appeals to me to fix.

Dakin Sloss: (06:31)
And I think it's really important to note also that in today's day and age, government is, for better or worse, involved in almost every industry in the world deeply, and so whether it's a direct gov-tech company or not, if you're working in energy, transportation, infrastructure, defense, manufacturing, life sciences, all of these things involve huge aspects of interfacing both with domestic and international governments, and all the challenges and opportunities that come with that.

Joe Lonsdale: (06:57)
That's true, Dakin and I are doing some fun things in defense, that's true. We've co-invested on some things there lately, there are a lot of good opportunities there especially.

AJ Scaramucci: (07:05)
So yeah, I mean I think that's a natural segue, so both of you guys are at the helms of your own funds, you said you're very intrinsically motivated, which is very obvious given both of your track records and pedigrees. Can you articulate to us in a cohesive way what the investment thesis is for both Prime Movers as well as 8VC, and paint us a picture of this year, and out of this fund, what you are investing in today and why.

Joe Lonsdale: (07:33)
Dakin, why don't you take that first?

Dakin Sloss: (07:35)
Sure, yeah. So as John said, our mission is to invest in breakthrough scientific inventions that have the ability to transform billions of lives. We're basically investing in six areas, energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture. And basically, the unifying theme across all our investments is that there's some sort of fundamentally very valuable intellectual property. Some sort of scientific breakthrough that's been invented, that opens up a big new market opportunity. And I think when I talk about Prime Movers Lab, it really boils down to two things that we're doing that I think are quite unique in the context of venture. It's this exclusive focus on scientific startups, and then it's really a service mindset.

Dakin Sloss: (08:16)
We treat our founders like customers and we have a whole set of portfolio support resources, executive coaches, talent partners, folks helping with PR, government relations, marketing, to make sure that the least useful thing we're providing to our companies is capital. And I will give a shout out to 8VC. I think there's been a lot of inspiration, because they're one of the few other firms that does think, I think, in a way that really supports founders so that they're not just building great companies, but they're learning and personally growing themselves, and enjoying the process in building companies as well.

AJ Scaramucci: (08:50)
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, Joe feel free to...

Joe Lonsdale: (08:53)
Yeah, sure. So 8VC, we do a lot of different things. I think the number one role of a top venture capital firm is to focus on knowing where the very top technology talent is going, and what they're doing, and being a place where they're going to come knock on your door, and they know you are. And so Dakin's getting to this place with his firm too with a lot of success. We've been lucky to have a lot of things work, so in the last seven months we've had eight companies go public. When you have these things you backed early that are now going public, there's lots of people there doing new things. And so I think number one is we're managing talent, I'd say, if I'm honest about my job. I think it's more fun to talk about the macro stuff than the tech stuff. But managing talent, and having talent want to work with us, that's one.

Joe Lonsdale: (09:34)
I think number two, the question we always try to ask is what's possible now that was not possible five years ago? If you look at the role of venture capital in the global economy, and why are we investing venture capital, it's because it's helping the economy evolve. It's exploring new ideas. You couldn't have Uber, or Lyft, or Didi, or ride sharing work before the mobile phone existed. Once it existed, those were great investments. Now that they've existed for 14 years, you're not going to make 100X on those investments anymore. A venture capitalist should not probably be looking at that area. And so the big question always for us is what's possible now that wasn't possible before.

Joe Lonsdale: (10:07)
And there's a lot of good answers. Probably the most compelling answer might be the renaissance in biology, but there's still a lot of things with big data and cloud and AI, applied to big industry's processes. There's a lot of things with how healthcare works, and how risk works, and how you can use incentives, and accountability, and markets in different parts of healthcare to deliver healthcare better, with preventative medicine more affordably to everyone. Obviously a big issue for our country. So wherever you see gaps in the world where something new is possible or a better way of doing things are possible, that's venture capital's job. And if you find those areas, you own networks, you own platforms, and you're betting on the top people to go after them, you're going to make a lot of money.

AJ Scaramucci: (10:45)
Definitely. Yeah, both of us you seem to have a real keen interest in life sciences and biotech, and this is something has its origins perhaps in Boston, but is very much so now permeated Silicon Valley. Software is infecting wetware for the first time meaningfully-

Joe Lonsdale: (11:04)
That's right, a lot of biology is becoming information science in a lot of areas.

AJ Scaramucci: (11:08)
Absolutely. So I'd love to lean into this topic a little bit more. I know Dakin, you've been investing pretty aggressively here, both in response to COVID-19 with companies like COVAX, as an example, which I obviously know super well, given Mr. Diamandis. But I'd love to hear from you where in that landscape you're seeing opportunities in the near-term, long-term, whether it be synthetic biology, mRNA, or something else.

Dakin Sloss: (11:38)
Well yeah, as you said COVAX is one of our portfolio companies, they have near three billion dollars in vaccine sales this year, and hopefully can play a big role in ending the global pandemic. Not just here in the US, but with a vaccine that can actually be distributed safely, effectively, cost efficiently, to under developed parts of the world, where a lot of their business is. Beyond vaccine development, we're really looking at three areas in life sciences, neuroscience, longevity, and agriculture. And those are all obviously very broad areas, but we have companies like Elevion, that have identified the underlying growth factor that's responsible for parabiosis, where basically young blood can have rejuvenative effects for older organisms or people. And they're commercializing that first for targeting stroke recovery, but also for other indications as well.

Dakin Sloss: (12:33)
We've got companies in the neuroscience area, things across brain-computer interfaces, one of the areas I'm most excited about now actually is the application of psychedelics for the major mental health problems that we face as a civilization. I think there's 300 million people around the planet that have some sort of mental health challenge, and we've got compounds that have thousands of years of historical data. Not necessarily scientific data, but anecdotal data, that indicate they could provide some value there. And then in the world of agriculture, we have a major portfolio company, Upward Farms, which is using aquaponics rather than hydroponics to produce leafy green vegetables in urban areas at higher yields than anybody else in the market can. So that they can actually be economically scalable.

Dakin Sloss: (13:18)
And when you look across each of these areas, they fit the criteria that Joe was talking about of major things have changed, particularly in the application of computation to these areas. But in other discoveries and breakthroughs that have happened within these fields, that mean they're on the cusp of major commercialization revolution, not just scientific revolution.

AJ Scaramucci: (13:38)
Definitely. Definitely. And on this topic of in the subset or matrix in there, we find longevity, which is an interesting subarea. This is an area that circles around the nine hallmarks of aging, or in fact that aging is the fundamental indication that it is a disease in and of itself. This is something that is becoming perhaps more popular, with nodes like Peter Diamandis, or Dr. David Sinclair, or whoever. Is this an area, Joe, that you also are seeing an uptick in momentum? Actually longevity, preventative medicine, et cetera, as opposed to some of this indication driven traditional biotech?

Joe Lonsdale: (14:25)
Yeah, no it's definitely becoming a hotter area. Our fund is focused on things that maybe sometimes we don't take as much technology risk in very new technology, but I think there's a lot of things that are going to work there, and they're going to be really valuable. So we're probably not working on my end on nuclear fusion or on things that will prevent death, or et cetera, in a quiet stream way, but there's lots of things we're working on.

Joe Lonsdale: (14:55)
For example, in going after cancer, and going after Alzheimer's and cell therapy, that are all part of this longevity wave. And as we understand these things better... For example, I'm really fascinated right now with the whole idea of applying Yamanaka factors, which are these factors you trigger in a cell, that will put it back to being basically age zero. And one of our more advanced companies that's raised billions of dollars now is applying, one of the things it does is it applies these to white blood cells and it turns a white blood cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, turns it back into a young white blood cell. Suddenly it can fight cancer better.

Joe Lonsdale: (15:28)
So if you're able to fight cancer better, and it's working, you're using a mechanism that's changing something back to age zero, why not in theory couldn't you change other parts of the body back to age zero? So it's actually a really fascinating age where we're just right in the middle of, we call it a renaissance. Because every month or two, we're using these new tools with gene editing, and with cell therapy, and with synthetic biology, to discover how life works at a fundamental level, and to try things and to learn from it. And so yeah, I'm very, very bullish on the progress that's going to be made. I tend to take, and I know Dakin's done a great job at this too, take things that are possible to do now, as opposed to things that are really high in the sky that might happen in 10 or 15 years. But even those things that are possible in that area now are advancing the area, which will lead to these great results, hopefully.

AJ Scaramucci: (16:09)
Definitely. And what would you say, which area in this life science theme is not being invested in the way it should be? Which area is actually in fact under valued, or where is-

Joe Lonsdale: (16:23)
I think there's too much AI for drug discovery, as a default thing where they're just exploring. There's just a lot of like, "We're going to use AI to discover drugs." And I actually think AI is more useful in these much more narrow applications of helping. So I think AI, like to tweak how antibodies work, and we already have something working, and we're making it work better. Or AI to tweak how certain things are understood with the tools. There's applications of AI that require you to have the best scientists, and be working hand in hand with those scientists very closely, as opposed to these pure tech companies started by a lot of my friends, who may be the best in the world in computer science, but don't necessarily have a PhD in biology.

Joe Lonsdale: (17:06)
So I think having to go to the forefront, and spend the two or three or four years it takes for a smart person to really get to the forefront of some of these areas of science, at least to understand what's going on, and then help them by applying AI? That's not helping nearly enough. That's not happening nearly enough. People are working too independently from scientists.

AJ Scaramucci: (17:22)
Sure.

Dakin Sloss: (17:22)
Yeah, I think often at the beginning of these revolutions or renaissances, it can feel like, from a public perspective, that it's over hyped. And that already, too much money is going into bio. I think it's almost always, though, the exact opposite, which is it's extremely under hyped. So if we look forward 15 or 30 years, I think people are going to think it's a joke, the things that people were dying of, the things that people were sick from, the things that people were struggling with. And our current understanding of the human body, of physiology, and of how to prevent disease, rather than respond to issues that pop up, is so unsophisticated relative to what's actually possible now, based on the latest things that are happening labs.

Dakin Sloss: (18:05)
So I would say almost universally, all of these things are being under invested in. Specifically, I would say neuroscience in particular. I think neuroscience is a relatively novel and new field, and we're still very limited in our understanding of the brain. And if you project forward 20, 30 years, what is going to have made a massive difference in how human beings are functioning on this planet, and how we're expanding as a civilization and species, neuroscience is clearly going to play a crucial role there. And we're just at the very beginning of that wave of bio funding flooding into neuroscience.

AJ Scaramucci: (18:39)
Yeah, I see that. That resonates with me as well. It may be switching topics a bit here. In a world where capital is unbelievably abundant, where sovereign wealth funds, pensions are coming down and doing direct investments, where there's truly hundreds of billions of dollars now per year being injected into venture capital at every stage, how do each of you differentiate yourselves in the eyes of the entrepreneur? Why do they take your capital, which they do, very often, as opposed to another firm. I'd love to unpack that. I mean, Joe, if you want to start, go for it.

Joe Lonsdale: (19:19)
Yeah, sure. Well I mean, in a lot of cases, they or their close friends have worked with us over the last couple of decades, and they knew who we are, they know what we can do. You've got to find ways of creating unfair advantages for your entrepreneurs. Building a company is just fundamentally a very, very hard thing to do, and the world's usually against these new things, and usually crushes them. And it takes amazing perseverance, and so any advantages you can get are really key. And so the question is, what are types of advantages that you can create?

Joe Lonsdale: (19:45)
And obviously, if you have a brand and you have great people around you, that's one advantage. A lot of firms, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to build new advantages, so for example, we do a lot in logistics, that's another area we're very bullish on, how it's changing in the next 10 years. So five years ago we got to know the guys around logistics for four or five of the biggest companies over the last couple decades, like the guys who used to run it for Walmart, or guys who used to run UPS, or guys who used to run it for Coke.

Joe Lonsdale: (20:09)
And we got to know these guys, we made them our senior advisors, we got them involved in the firm, and then we got to know a bunch of their friends with conferences we host. So we got to know 30 or 40 of the CEOs, CCOs, of these places. We hired a couple of them as senior execs and residents, and some they were part of a network, with these leaders. And so now we introduce all of our companies to that space to them, they help give them feedback, give them deals. Now we're looking to build something new in the space, we're looking to partner with it, people know that we're the guys who know everyone there.

Joe Lonsdale: (20:37)
And so you do this in a handful of industries, and you start to get some pretty big advantages. And the more wins you have, the more the industry trusts you, the more the industry is going to look at, and going to help, and going to do deals with your new things. And of course, you spread the upside around, you have these companies make people advisors. So I think a big part is just the autocorrelation of venture capital is this very cool thing, because as you have more money, as you get more people on your side, and you have that. So I think that's a big part of it. But just in general, you have to have people who are running the firm who are admired and who are liked, and who are, ideally, in the same spectrum of the people building the company.

Joe Lonsdale: (21:12)
So our firm, even though we have 40 people, most of them are actually young entrepreneurs, mostly habit entrepreneurs were our partners, and for us that works really well. There's different ways of doing it, but you have to create some way in which these people relate to you and in which they see they're getting advantages from working with you and are excited to do it.

AJ Scaramucci: (21:30)
Yeah.

Dakin Sloss: (21:31)
Yeah, I agree with everything Joe said. I'll highlight just one of the things that we focus on. So one of our partners is Tony Robins, who's one of the world's leading business strategists and executive coaches, and basically in business, 80% of success is psychology, 20% is mechanics. And so when you talk to early stage VCs, I think everyone recognizes the biggest risk any company faces is the founder's psychology, the founder's development, the founder's leadership, and the dynamics across that leadership team.

Dakin Sloss: (21:58)
That being said, I think it's really under focused on how do you actually mitigate that risk? And so we have full time executive coaches, we have leadership training programs, we have a whole suite of things that we're doing, and when we originally started the firm, I figured that would attract less experienced founders, more than it would attract the more experienced founders. But I think the more experienced founders recognize how unique that is actually, and serial entrepreneurs recognize that if they can get a 1% improvement in how they're functioning, that can translate to a 10% or 100% improvement in how the business is functioning.

Dakin Sloss: (22:29)
And so we've really had a lot of serial entrepreneurs love that focus on their personal development and their expansion as a means to serving the company, and I think that's attracted a lot of founders to us. Because we're genuinely, I think this is something Joe and I, and 8VC and Prime Movers Lab have in common, we're entrepreneurs who happen to be running venture capital firms, and we're not just investing in cutting edge tech, we're rolling up our sleeves and helping to build a business. We're not taking control, or being a pain in the butt to deal with, but we're doing whatever it takes to help make sure that the company succeeds, and that's one example of the kinds of services that we offer. And we've built the firm like a startup, where it's like the founders are our customers, what are they most wanting? And then we figure out how to deliver that to them, and build our team to deliver that.

AJ Scaramucci: (23:16)
Absolutely. Yeah, I think both you guys have done, clearly, an extraordinary job. And Joe, I've seen first hand, perhaps Dakin is a great example, right? There was a real relationship there, there was a company built together, and all these years later, you're on this SALT Talk, you're interacting with each other, I'm sure you-

Joe Lonsdale: (23:36)
You've got to invest in the people you work with, you've got to keep learning from each other, and you've got to find things to do together. And we both... Dakin's done a lot of great things with people that have really benefited our firm, and we've tried to bring him into some things as well. And that's how this world works, it's very positive sum world in venture capital, if you have a big network doing this, that's just to your advantage.

AJ Scaramucci: (23:54)
Definitely. So I was catching up with Zach Rifkin a month ago or so, and I've seen some action on the interwebs related to this city, apparently, that is being built near Austin. Uh oh! So I'd love to get into that, Joe, what is going on with that, please?

Joe Lonsdale: (24:17)
Oh, we're still exploring ideas. We're still exploring ideas. But a lot of us, I wrote this obnoxious article in the Wall Street Journal op-ed that a lot of you may have read, about leaving California even though we love it, because there's just so many things that are broken, and so many things that are hard about doing business and hiring people there. And there's just lots of levels of problems that are hard to fix. And so a lot of my friends have moved to Texas, we have obviously, publicly Elon Musk is here and nearby, who we do a lot with, and there's like... I don't even know, I shouldn't mention all the names, because I don't know who's in public and who's not in public. But a lot of prominent entrepreneurs have moved here. It's usually either Texas, or Jackson Hole, where Dakin is, or Miami pretty much. Maybe a couple of other places and a lot of these entrepreneurs have moved to.

Joe Lonsdale: (25:01)
And a lot of people are realizing they can work from anywhere, but they still want to be around these clusters of other entrepreneurs around town, they still want to spend time with them. I was in Jackson Hole with Dakin and a bunch of friends even just a week around, and teaching my three year old how to ski, but also there for business purposes as well. And so there's just all these people on the move, there's all these people looking for better places to live and build and work, and a big gap in the world, we think, is how cities work. So we talk about our job is to identify gaps, obviously government could be better. It's not just the government itself, it's actually the way the city's designed, the way a city works. I don't believe in this whole status thing, where you can just design a city top down exactly, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm very much about free society and organic, and evolution.

Joe Lonsdale: (25:42)
But I think you can give a skeletal structure and order in ways the city works, that make it work a lot better. So I have quite a few friends who are names you would know, that we've been chatting for a while about this. And we may buy a bunch of land somewhere and decide to build one. And the boring company to me makes it even more exciting, because we can dig... It sounds crazy, but we have. We've proven it now, we're digging this very, very cheap tunnels, and if you could do really inexpensive tunneling, that could really change how a city works, and how access to a city works. Economically, even, as it gets more expensive for everyone. So we would love to make a world-defining city, to teach the 21st century how these things should work, and do that with friends.

AJ Scaramucci: (26:16)
Our you keen on selling some [inaudible 00:26:19] to back-

Joe Lonsdale: (26:19)
You know, I think Elon's extremely clever about how to fund these things, and so it's one of these things where I think we may, especially if we have the right people like him involved, and we get a city going that's designed properly, and we make it lower cost of living, we make it easier to access, we make it cool in lots of different ways. I mean you could think about underground speakeasies with a boring company, right? Who knows. There's all sorts of fun stuff we could do with this stuff. I'm not sure we're going to have to worry too much about funding it, I think people are going to want to come right away. So it's a matter of finding the right place, and right leadership, and the right time, because all of us are so busy building what we're building. But I think it'd be really fun to work on something like that.

AJ Scaramucci: (26:52)
Definitely. Yeah, so I mean both of you guys, as well as myself, have origins in Silicon Valley, right, I mean you guys all went to Stanford here, we started our careers there, and so on and so forth. But now we're dispersed. I mean, I'm spending most of my time in Miami, and-

Joe Lonsdale: (27:12)
But we have these networks, and we know each other because we're from the same networks and we're excited to work together. Obviously I'd love to do more with you, AJ. And so I think it's an advantage, because we do have these networks we've built. That's why we can be dispersed.

AJ Scaramucci: (27:23)
Definitely. But is it, I mean the fact that you're in Austin, and you're in Wyoming, have we gotten past a sort of event horizon in the Bay Area such that it is a point of no return? Our people are truly leaving, I mean you can see in the news, we've got 70, 75,000 people leaving the state of California in fiscal year 2020. That seems to be a trend that has, if anything, accelerated into 2021. Is this here to stay? Is California on the decline? I'd love, Dakin, if you want to jump in and answer that.

Dakin Sloss: (28:04)
I mean, to put it bluntly, California has been mismanaged for decades. In any business, if you spend dramatically more, and commit to dramatically more obligations in the future, then what you're receiving in revenue, you go bankrupt. And we are running a grand experiment at a societal level about... not just at the state level, but at the federal level... how much can we outspend our means, and how long can we survive doing that? And California is the leader, unfortunately, in that, and I don't think it ends well.

Dakin Sloss: (28:35)
Now, none of us can predict when or exactly how, but I think the much more interesting and exciting story than California's decline is the rise of so many other places. And I think what the... I moved here three years ago, a little before it was trendy to leave the Bay Area, and already at that point you were seeing this wave of entrepreneurship happening around the country in teams that were being built that were remote teams from day one. Where there might be a particular location that's attractive for manufacturing, like Florida. There might be a particular location that's attractive for customer support, like Salt Lake City. And you have these tremendous benefits that have happened for the bay area, and for a relatively small group of people from the tech world over the last 20 years.

Dakin Sloss: (29:21)
And I think a lot of what's going to happen over the next 20 years is that benefit is going to be much more widespread across the country, and to many, many more people, because we are literally sitting at this point where almost every single area of our lives is being changed exponentially. And as a result of that, you end up shifting where the economy is. Most of the economy is not going to be sitting in the big companies that were the big companies 30 years ago, it's going to be sitting in startups and self-run businesses, and more distributed teams, which I think is exciting for just the average human being's lifestyle and quality of life.

AJ Scaramucci: (29:55)
Definitely, yeah. There seems, whether it's human capital dispersion, it's tax considerations, it's sunshine, there's many, many factors that are at play here, and have created a little bit of a shift away from California.

Dakin Sloss: (30:11)
I think on the tax piece, it's important to point out, because obviously no one likes taxes. The two inevitable things are taxes and death, nobody wants either of those. We're trying to fix death, but I don't think that... It's mis-covered, and often the first question I get is, "Oh, you left town because of taxes." No, I'm happy to pay taxes if I receive services in return. I'm not happy to pay taxes and then have my wife walking through the city and find heroin needles and nothing cleaned up. And so I think that the issues is much less about taxes, and much more about mismanagement of what services are being provided by governments.

AJ Scaramucci: (30:47)
Definitely. Definitely, yeah. I mean you've got over a million employees in the government, there's definitely, a lot of polarization, some mismanagement, lots of confusion, et cetera. I mean, are there some things just though that we can... Is there a way to inject some vigor back into the government? Is there a way to get real great human capital perhaps from Silicon Valley?

Joe Lonsdale: (31:15)
Yeah. Oh yeah, there's lots of ways. And so I have a policy group called the Cicero Institute, 14 full time people in there working specifically on issues like this, and it's purely how to help society, it's not cronyism, in fact we're trying to stop cronyism in all these areas. But what you basically need in government, is you need to make it look more like how a free society works. The way a free society works, is we try lots of stuff, and the ideas compete, and the good ideas win and the bad ideas lose. The problem with how government is set up right now is there's not a mechanism for a competition of ideas. So you'll have things happening in certain governments, like the way we run certain prisons is amazing. There's certain prisons with programs where there recidivism falls down below 10%, because they're doing some really clever, really inspiring work. And there are other ones, they're still using shock therapy and have over 90% recidivism. In fact, in New York State even they're doing that in one prison.

Joe Lonsdale: (32:03)
So you're like, wait a second, what's happening? And then you realize that the things the government touches, they don't have a mechanism for competition of ideas, then it's very, very hard to have this fresh thing going. Ti's like for example, the DMV in lots of states is a classic example. No one likes going to the DMV. For most places, it's horrible. Here's what you do, let's say you have 20 DMVs in an area. You should put one person in charge of 10, another person in charge of another 10. Just give them a little bit of a budget, ability to hire and fire their top five or six people, just they actually have the ability to change who's working for them and running it at the top. Ability to use the budget to try some innovative things, and then give them two years.

Joe Lonsdale: (32:38)
And for each one of them, we'll see how it works, and whoever wins gets a bonus, and whoever loses, they get pushed somewhere else, and someone else gets to try again. And just that competition... You know, just do it based on MPS scores from the consumers. So just a really basic set up of a competition of some control, some ability to innovate, wouldn't be that expensive. You could actually massively improve how DMV works. Same thing for every area of government, it's called accountability, and incentives. And without accountability and incentives, you should not expect government to work, it's just going to keep decaying, and keep getting worse. And so this is a very simple idea, but it's one of those things where just for whatever reason, people are really bad at this stuff.

AJ Scaramucci: (33:16)
Yeah, I mean this past year and even still now, the pandemic, COVID-19, has really pierced through and reared its head, and shown a lot of the huge issues we have in our healthcare system, in our ability to access supply chains, the FDA approval process. We've truncated some of that, a 10-12 year time horizon to bring a vaccine to market has been shrunk down to a little less than a year, which in and of itself is promising. But as you see the virus continued to tear open not just the United States, but the West, what can we learn from this? How do we adapt? What other countries and governmental bodies do you feel are doing a good job, and how can we come out of this as United States 2.0, instead of this perhaps continued decay? I mean, Dakin, if you have some thoughts there, jump in.

Dakin Sloss: (34:15)
Yeah, I mean I agree with what Joe was saying about looking at how do businesses work, and what are the lessons we can take from that. And it's not like every lesson in business is going to apply to government. I don't think that there's phenomenally inspirational examples of perfectly run governments in the world today. We live in general in a world today where the state is progressively playing a larger and large role in people's lives, rather than individuals in free society, and I think that there's these two opposing trends almost, right? One is the amazing technological progress that's happening, that has the potential, well used, to basically solve every major material problem that we face. And then there's these massive societal tensions that feel in general, and the way they're covered in the news, feel like we're moving backwards. And it feels like those two forces are against each other.

Dakin Sloss: (35:06)
I think ultimately, we need to come upon more flexible governance structures, that are designed for the world in which we live. And I think regardless of where one is on the political spectrum, you don't have to be critical of any particular political orientation to see that the way in which it made sense to set up a country 250 years ago or 100 years ago is super different in a completely globalized world, in a completely interdependent world, and I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Joe, I think, is doing a great job exploring ideas in that landscape.

Joe Lonsdale: (35:41)
I tend to have a lot of respect for the philosophy of 250 years ago, I think a lot of it was quite good. I think it was a high [crosstalk 00:35:48]-

Dakin Sloss: (35:48)
I agree with the philosophy, too. I think structurally, though, basic things. I think it's difficult to imagine, and Joe and I may actually disagree on this one, it's difficult to imagine a couple hundred years from now, that we're going to end up with these big mega countries like we currently have, where people identify as American, or Russian, or Chinese. That, in a very global world, that's going to change a lot. And I think the way travel has been shut down over this period of time has shown how crazy and silly that is. I think you're going to end up with communities, like the type of city that Joe's talking about building, that people organize around, and you're going to end up with simpler, more adaptable structures. Which I think is even the spirit of the founding of America, not necessarily in its current implementation.

AJ Scaramucci: (36:34)
Yeah, I mean one of the linchpin problems that has been percolating or bubbling for some time is wealth inequality. If you have assets in an environment where things are imploding, you invest those assets, you will in turn compound them, right? So that is very much so what has happened over the last 12 months, and seeing things bubble, whether it's in the cryptocurrency or blockchain ecosystem, or even something like this GameStop run up we've seen, is a way to stick it to the man, if you will, or create-

Joe Lonsdale: (37:11)
A lot of assets lost a lot of them in that run up.

AJ Scaramucci: (37:13)
That's true. That's very true. Yeah, I mean I'd love to hear your thoughts and perhaps opine on some solutions to this wealth inequality, and...

Joe Lonsdale: (37:23)
Yeah, so I think it's always there's something weird going on there, and it's worth bringing up. I tend to not like the framing wealth inequality so much as how do you create opportunity for the least well off, right? And I think there's a couple things there. First of all, we do have a very unfair system in the sense that the fed is printing a lot of money, and it's creating a lot of asset inflation. So our government policy is specifically giving lots of money to those who own assets and those who are very wealthy. I think that's probably the biggest source, if you're going to talk about the word inequality, is just we are making assets worth more than they should be thanks to what I think is a very naïve monetary policy that it's ironic that the Democrats are even more in favor of it than the Republicans. They're just going to print like mad, and so that is interesting, that does help the wealthy more.

Joe Lonsdale: (38:12)
But I think we have to step back and say, what we really care about is let's look at an index of opportunity and of wealth, and of prosperity, and of wellbeing, for the bottom 20% of our society, the bottom 50% of our society, and first of all, they're way better off than anywhere else in the world. So we're not doing that badly. Overall, we're doing quite well on most metrics there. And you'd much, much, much rather be a bottom 20% socioeconomic person in a country where there's rich people than in countries where they've banned billionaires. Because the countries where they've banned billionaires, that's where you get real poverty, and you get a real mess. Because there's no one growing and extending the top ideas.

Joe Lonsdale: (38:44)
So you don't want to be in a poor country where there's not billionaires. But then second, what do we do to help the bottom of society? And this is where my policy work comes in, the policy group comes in. There's lots of things we've done to accidentally make it tough to be poor in America. We've made cost of living way higher. We've made commutes way longer than they should be. We've stopped building in major cities. So it used to be, if you were poor you could go to a big city, you work your way up, you can't do that anymore. It's too expensive. So a lot of policy that Cicero Institute focuses on, that I focus on, is not about the gap about rich and poor, because it's not about bringing down. If I go start another company, like next year, I obviously, Palantir's worth 55 billion dollars. My fund's setting back three billion dollars this year. I can go sit on a fucking... pardon my language, I can go sit on a beach, but if I go start another company instead, I'm increasing wealth inequality.

Joe Lonsdale: (39:28)
So obviously wealth inequality is not the right thing to think about, because obviously I'm increasing it by choosing not to go to the beach. If you really wanted to lower wealth inequality, you can just force me to go to the beach. That's obviously not good for anyone, it's good for me to create more things. So the question is not how to bring down creators, the question is what do we do to help the least well off. And there's so many ways, education, healthcare, cost of living. There's so many policies we could fix there, so that's what I'm focused on is how do we help them.

Dakin Sloss: (39:51)
Yeah, I agree with Joe's framing on this. Another thing I would add is, I think one thing we don't spend enough time talking about in these polarized topics is we're all part of a shared human family. And if we think of everyone in the US, or everyone in the world as part of a human family, one question that's worth asking is, if these are all my brothers and sisters, when would I want them to be born in history? Would I want them to be born in feudal society 300 years ago, where the richest king in the world couldn't fly halfway across the world to go see a movie, much less look at an iPhone and all the incredible abundance that comes with that. Or I'd rather that king, 300 years ago, be born today, as one of the poorest Americans?

Dakin Sloss: (40:34)
I would rather he was born as one of the poorest in America, because the thing that the inequality framing misses is the average human being's quality of life today is higher than it has ever been at any point in human history. And I think that's extremely exciting, and we should feel really good about that. Would it be attractive for the average human being's quality of life to go up further? Absolutely, that's what we're all working on, and that's what we're all investing our time and energy in, rather than going and sitting on a beach. And I think that's important, and I think as you have... One of the places this has come about a lot from, frankly, is how the news works today. The news is designed to polarize and shock us, and grab our two million year old brain's attention through negativity, rather than covering, wow, isn't it amazing what the average human being's quality of life is?

Dakin Sloss: (41:20)
And I'm not saying we should stop working on it, we should absolutely keep working on it, but I think we have to look at it, why did it change over the last 300 years? And a lot of why it changed over the last 300 years is good systems for innovation, and for encouraging people not to go sit on a beach, but to go pursue fantastic ideas and create novel products, and services, and tools that help the average human being's life quality go up. So I feel quite actually optimistic in this area. And philanthropically, the place we focus is feeding people abroad, in international countries. I think 10 years from now, you're not going to have people who don't have enough food. That's crazy that that's going on, and that is largely a structure due to poor governance in places, not to lack of resources. There's plenty of resources for everyone at this point, and it's a matter of execution, and a matter of governance to make sure that people benefit from the tremendous resources that they're already benefiting from at an even higher level.

AJ Scaramucci: (42:18)
Yeah, I mean one element to this opportunity gap, perhaps, is the idea market itself. So circa 1990s, early 2000s, companies would start and go public in a four to seven year time horizon. Today it's 10 to even 14 years.

Joe Lonsdale: (42:38)
Yeah, well it will be interesting to see if SPAXX change that, because Dakin and I are experiencing recently, some of our companies, three of our eight are SPAXX. I think Dakin's the king of SPAXX right now, they're all chasing him. So I agree, I think it could be faster, there could be rules to make it faster. At the same time, there's lots of other ways we could share benefits. Not everyone has to necessarily invest and be part of a tech company to hopefully benefit from it. Hopefully the things we work on and the policy we work on could lead to a better future for everyone regardless.

Dakin Sloss: (43:07)
And I do think that's a perfect example, right? So part of the reason that the IPO market and the time to go public changed so much was it became much more onerous to become a public company. And it's, you can see all the sides, right? People in government wanted to protect retail investors from bad actors in public companies, not disclosing things, not reporting things. Which, there's always going to be bad actors somewhere, but they're usually the minority in almost any system, not the majority. And the rules that were put in place made it much more attractive to stay private longer, and rather than actually protecting the average public market investor, a firefighter, or a teacher trying to grow their retirement account over time, the opposite happened, in that all the growth started happening in venture capital and growth equity, and stuff that the average investor couldn't access.

Dakin Sloss: (43:56)
And so I think it's exciting right now that through SPAXX, there's an opportunity for the average public market investor to get exposure to much earlier stage, higher risk tech companies than they would have gotten before, which is both going to produce some failures and produce some phenomenal returns. And help your average person grow their retirement and participate in the upside of all these things.

Joe Lonsdale: (44:20)
Yeah, I'd say that's a positive as well. We do need pensions to perform, otherwise we're in trouble. So there's a lot of good stuff we can do there.

AJ Scaramucci: (44:26)
So these SPAXX very much so seem here to stay. I mean, as you pointed out Joe, I mean Hims and Hers recently went public, I know Momentus is in the process of going public-

Joe Lonsdale: (44:40)
Joby just announced they're going, my flying car company, they're going to raise a billion it sounds like, in SPAXX.

AJ Scaramucci: (44:46)
Fascinating. So are you guys actually back putting together your own SPAXX at 8VC and Prime Movers-

Joe Lonsdale: (44:52)
I've been helping some friends, I've avoided it so far. There's argument that we should be. There's so many right now that I'm just a little bit cautious about it. I think it's a mechanism that's a great mechanism, and lots of my smart friends are doing them. They've done very well. My guess is the fees go down a little bit. I like making money in ways that are based in creating value over three or five years. Palantir is public now, it took us 17 years. That's a little long, may not want to wait that long for things I do, but I think making money over a longer period of time is a better framework for doing it. So I'm not really too focused on SPAXX. That said, if people are giving away money, probably should, nothing wrong with people doing it, you know?

AJ Scaramucci: (45:27)
Sure, sure, sure.

Dakin Sloss: (45:28)
Yeah, I mean we've got six different companies going public via this right now, and I think the thing that's really under reported on about this is the main innovation in SPAXX is the ability in the process of going and raising from a SPAC to do what you already do with venture capitalists, of showing forward looking financials. And those forward looking financials allow people to form a realistic perspective on the business, because none of the companies three or four years in look phenomenal from a rear looking financial perspective. They've been spending money and investing.

Joe Lonsdale: (45:56)
No, yeah, the fact that you did the forward looking is really good.

AJ Scaramucci: (45:58)
Dakin and Joe, thank you so much for joining us today on SALT Talks. I've found this conversation super dynamic, very interesting, we covered a lot of ground. John, feel free to jump in and wrap it up for us.

John Darsie: (46:10)
Yeah, thank you again Joe and Dakin, and thank you everybody who tuned in to today's SALT Talk. A lot of great information about building companies, trends that we're seeing, as well as how to fix public policy. We sort of covered the whole gamut here. So thank you guys, and thank you everybody who tuned in. Just a reminder, if you missed any of this talk, or any of our previous talks, or you want to sign up for future SALT Talks, you can go to salt.org\talks, we have our entire archive there, as well as fields where you can be altered to upcoming talks on subjects that interest you.

John Darsie: (46:42)
A reminder too, please spread the word. We love growing our community, which we've done a great job of during the pandemic, during the quarantine period. We're going to continue to do these SALT Talks even when we return to our in-person conference series. But please spread the word, and please follow us on social media, we're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, our YouTube channel is SaltTube, so please follow us there, we have a fast growing subscriber base that gets alerted to all of our new content. So on behalf of the entire SALT team, this is John Darsie signing off. It was great to have you here for your debut on SALT Talks, AJ. We hope you'll come back and moderate one soon. But thank you everybody again for joining. We'll see you soon.

Dr. Jonathan Simons: The Evolution of Cancer Research | SALT Talks #152

“Cancer research is not a zero-sum game… in curing prostate cancer with gene-based treatments, you’re talking about finishing off 73% of other cancers.”

Dr. Jonathan Simons is the president and CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) which focuses on research and resources for a disease that 1 in 9 American men will be diagnosed with and claims 34k lives per year.

Except for skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men. After his own prostate cancer diagnosis, Michael Milken was central in changing the equation around research and medical advancements through his invention of venture philanthropy. The rapid growth of investment and philanthropic partnerships with biotech and pharma has seen amazing progress in detection and treatments. “[Since that work began,] there has been a 53% reduction in the death rate from prostate cancer, the largest decrease in death rate of any of the major cancers.”

57% percent of prostate cancer runs in families, making it the most inherited of the major cancers and highlighting the need to be aware of family history. This is especially important among black men who are twice as likely to die from the disease. There are even greater breakthroughs on the near horizon in the fight against prostate cancer using gene-based treatments. These advanced treatments would also offer the ability to eliminate over 70% of other cancers.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Dr. Jonathan Simons.jpeg

Dr. Jonathan Simons

Chief Executive Officer

Prostate Cancer Foundation

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone. And welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we launched during 2020 with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conference series, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. We have another great talk focused on community impact and philanthropy and science today. And when we can find that intersection, that's really the sweet spot that we'd like to cover here on SALT Talks.

John Darsie: (00:54)
And our guest today is Dr. Jonathan Simons. Dr. Simons is the president and chief operating officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, PCF, which was founded in 1993, and it focuses on research and resources for a disease that one in nine American men will be diagnosed with in their lifetimes, and which also claims 34,000 lives each year. Just as a quick personal anecdote, my father had prostate cancer and was cured and has lived many years beyond that. So thankful for the work of Dr. Simons and his team at the Prostate Cancer Foundation on that piece.

John Darsie: (01:32)
But the fight is personal to Jonathan as well who is the husband, son and grandson of cancer survivors. He's board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and did his residency at Boston's Mass General, as well as a clinical fellowship in medical oncology at Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. Before joining PCF in 2007, he was the distinguished service professor of hematology and oncology at Emory University School of Medicine, my alma mater, and professor of biomedical engineering and material sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech.

John Darsie: (02:12)
Dr. Simons is the founding director of Emory's Winship Cancer Institute and co-director of the National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at Emory and Georgia Tech. Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm, and he's also the chairman of SALT. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:37)
John, thank you. And Dr. Simons, thanks for being here. You mentioned cancer and cancer survivorship. It's obviously all very personal. Your grandfather survived. I believe your dad was one of the first people treated at the National Cancer Institute for Lymphoma and was cured or put into remission. Your wife is a cancer survivor. My wife is actually a cancer survivor. She had bladder cancer at the young age of 21, which was sort of hard to believe, but they say it was related to drinking water around the Love Canal, where she had gone to school up in University of Buffalo. So we have cancer in our lives, unfortunately. Just about everybody listening has a cancer story. Tell us about the journey that brought you to your cancer research.

Jonathan Simons: (03:27)
Well, my story, like so many stories, is not that unusual. One in three American families will experience cancer, and I'm glad John, your dad's doing well and I'm glad Anthony, your wife's doing well. But what was formative for me is, my father was cured after relapsing several times from Hodgkin's Disease on a clinical trial. So as a kid interested in science, if I couldn't make it to the Major League Baseball career, and I thought basically cancer research was heroic, because I literally saw the curability of the incurable illness unfold in our lives. And my father recurred several times. So he faced an existential threat.

Jonathan Simons: (04:22)
But I think that's a story that so many families can tell in different ways. But that's really mine, so I was interested in being a doctor and a cancer scientist in developing new treatment and got very interested in prostate cancer as a consequence of a baseball coach who got prostate cancer before there was a blood test to detect it and who succumbed in under 12 months of diagnosis. So I got interested in prostate cancer because I was interested in seeing prostate cancer go the way of Hodgkin's disease, which went from incurable to curable.

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:01)
This is an interesting disease. I'd like you to lay it out for people. It's obviously a male disease. Breast cancer is probably 97% women, but there's a small percentage of men that also get breast cancer. But yet this is a male disease. Treatable. We have way more understanding of it as a result of your research. So take us back to 1993 when you were awarded, as a scientist and a doctor, you were awarded a research grant from the Prostate Cancer Foundation. What were you researching then? Where are we today? Build the continuum for us.

Jonathan Simons: (05:41)
Sure. So you're right. Prostate cancer is the most common, non-skin cancer in men, and basically one in eight men, and actually one in six black men will get prostate cancer in their lifetime. Even though now, if caught early, the ten-year survival for prostate cancer is 98%. But in 1993, it was woefully behind. Given the amount of it and basically the public perception, it was a disease of old men. It took somebody to change the equation. And that was a 40 year old man named Michael Milken, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer, told he was terminally ill. He sounded pretty good on the phone yesterday. And he said, "I'm going to change the course of medical history and accelerate work on this cancer." And really, Mike invented, as we now really understand it, entrepreneurial or venture philanthropy for cancer research, but basically used every relationship he had, used his entire Rolodex in order to try to assemble partnerships between philanthropic support, biotech and pharma investment, and a significant government investment to basically deliver new treatments and better detection.

Jonathan Simons: (07:14)
And really, if you're looking at return on investment, and I know your viewers are interested in ROI in a lot of things, there's been, since Mike was diagnosed, a 53% reduction in the death rate from prostate cancer. And John, your dad's a part of the story, right? That's the largest decrease, absolute decrease in death rate in any of the major cancers. And that's a consequence of a heavy investment in research, public awareness and partnerships. But we must still do better. An African-American man is still twice as likely to die of this disease as a white man in the United States. And for every man and his family, we have the opportunity in this decade to really put prostate cancer in the rear view mirror as a major public health threat. But prostate cancer hasn't stopped in the pandemic and neither has a prostate cancer research in our foundation.

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:16)
Tell us about ways men need to think about it. How do they potentially prevent it? Michael Milken obviously has come to our SALT events. He's spoken many times. Once in Singapore, a few times in Las Vegas. He's always talking about nutrition, Dr. Simons. Tell us a little bit about what men can do to protect themselves. Obviously the PSA tests, et cetera, but give us a portfolio of things that people can do.

Jonathan Simons: (08:45)
There are three things that a man could do. They can talk to their family about risk, because in the same way put on seat belts because there's a risk of a car accident, they can talk about risk, they can get screened. I can talk more about that. And they can really take charge of the future of their health. And the way to do that is assume that you're very likely to get the disease and you'd rather live into your nineties and not die from it.

Jonathan Simons: (09:20)
Second, it's 57% of prostate cancer runs in families. It's actually the most inherited of the major cancers. So at 40, if you have a prostate cancer running in your family, not only do you need to be get checked, you need to be checked at 40. And certainly if you're, African-American, given the fact that you have a higher lifetime risk of getting the disease, you need to take charge of your health once a year, and basically have a conversation with your doctor at 40 if the disease is running your family. At 45, if you're African-American. And we believe at 50, if you're of European descent.

Jonathan Simons: (10:06)
Those are the three things. And basically, prostate cancer is to men as breast cancer is to women, we just have to assume far more family interest in our health as men, as women do, in caring for families and caring for themselves.

Anthony Scaramucci: (10:26)
When you look back, is there anything in the prostate cancer research that you've done that has led to transformations in the research of other cancers?

Jonathan Simons: (10:41)
Yeah, I'm grateful for that question because it's a really important one. The discovery of checkpoint inhibitors that have made melanoma curable. It extended the lives ... In the Superbowl, you hear about treatment for lung cancer using the immune system. That discovery was made by James Alison and won a Nobel prize, but was originally funded, first real foundation support was from the Prostate Cancer Foundation, asking the question, "How can you turn the immune system on against prostate cancer?"

Jonathan Simons: (11:13)
So in fact, we've delivered 13 FDA approved drugs, which have significantly extended the survivability of prostate cancer over the years with 800 million in R&D that our foundations invested. But we've really pushed forward, rather profoundly, progress in over 11 other cancers. And cancer search is just not a zero sum game, particularly as we've come to understand how genes work. And right now we're really prosecuting research on new drugs that target prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, cancer through a gene called [Wint 00:11:56] pancreatic cancer, colon cancer.

Jonathan Simons: (11:59)
And in fact, in curing prostate cancer with these new genomic or gene based medicines, you're really curing prostate cancer by making these new precision medicines, you're really talking about finishing off 73 other forms of human cancer, including childhood brain tumors. One of the things that my community doesn't do very well is market itself, because it's much more interesting to talk nerd to nerd about how interesting these genes are. But fundamentally, this revolution and understanding how genes work through the human genome and then making medicines against genes that are rogue and abhorrent, and a cancer means that cancer is no longer just anatomic. Cancer care isn't just where the cancer came from. It's genomic. It's making medicines against the genes.

Jonathan Simons: (12:53)
And in the next few years, we're going to see extraordinary progress. This isn't Pollyannish, in basically making new classes of medicines that are going to treat the genomics, not the anatomics. So we'll see FDA approvals, not so much based on did the tumor come from the breast or the bladder or the prostate, but against really the Achilles heel, the genetic Achilles heels of these tumors.

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:23)
Let's talk about the money raising aspect of this and how important it is to your research. And give us a sense for who is underwriting cancer research today. Is it mostly private citizens and foundations and drug companies? Is the government also in there? What does the mix look like now in terms of the R&D going into these things?

Jonathan Simons: (13:49)
The ecosystem has three major investors and they're all vital to each other. And they're codependent if the goal is to end death and suffering from cancer. Foundations like ours can often make the higher risk, most [inaudible 00:14:07] first series A round insightful investments. Our National Institutes of Health, our National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense invest millions in ... Maybe perhaps in thinking about validating or series B and C, or expanding on a discovery. So philanthropic support, although it's only 4% of the pie, it's some of the most essential of all the investments, because it can be more nimble and it can identify what we would call breakout opportunities, Anthony.

Jonathan Simons: (14:47)
But biopharma is essential in scale. There are extraordinary and healthy partnerships. Mike Milken and others really developed a new kind of ecosystem in the nineties and two thousands. When I started at Johns Hopkins, we were told never to go to a drug company research meeting because we were pure and they were purely profit driven. That whole culture evaporated with the excitement of university scientists and scientists, and project managers, and biopharma trying to accelerate getting a scientific development to patients.

Jonathan Simons: (15:30)
And our government, probably one of the things that our country still leads the world in, regardless of your views on American exceptionalism. Sorry, that's just the way it works right now with COVID. Regardless of your views about American exceptionalism, we've been an exceptionally generous people at funding basic research. I mean, one of our greatest exports, I think, is actually medical progress. And our National Institutes of Health, and you saw it with the development of COVID vaccines at just meteoric speed, but that meteoric speed in developing these vaccines is happening in cancer research all the time now. But NIH has just been a huge partner in the reduction of deaths as well.

Jonathan Simons: (16:31)
It doesn't mean that getting funded for a breakthrough idea is easy. It's actually harder, and it's going to be harder in the COVID economy, probably. But it's a proven ecosystem, our cancer research ecosystem. It just has lots of areas where we could still now go faster if we concentrated on solving some of the problems and choke points. And a really good example that's an African-American detection. Basically, an African-American disparity or health justice. Robert F. Smith made an enormous philanthropic commitment this year to accelerate the development of a test. You could test blood, or you could test saliva to identify African-American men, really men of West African ancestry, that have a two to 11 times higher chance of getting prostate cancer. And this whole idea of transforming even how we screen for cancer, by understanding genetics, it is built on NIH funding in trying to understand how genes work in family. But also an impatience for true health justice in trying to invest now in the actual development and testing and final really reduction to practice in communities of color.

Jonathan Simons: (17:55)
So the entrepreneurial philanthropist is still the most important part, we believe. Entrepreneurial donors, entrepreneurial biomedical research foundations, we think are still the vital driving force, where there's 10X from the government if you can move along the data.

Jonathan Simons: (18:19)
That was a long word answer. [crosstalk 00:18:21] I get cranked up on this topic because I-

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:25)
No, I let you go because it's so interesting. Our resident millennial, Dr. Simons, is dying to ask a question here. So I have to put myself on mute. Don't let him out shine me, however. They try to talk over me.

John Darsie: (18:39)
That's impossible. My IQ is not nearly high enough relative to our guest here today. But just to go back to what Anthony said, we can't give Michael Milken enough credit for the work he's done as a venture philanthropist in the field of medicine. He has done so much. I don't think people realize how much capital he's driven into the space and the outcomes that it's generated. So we're very thankful to him.

John Darsie: (19:02)
But I have a question. The New England Journal of Medicine noted last year that the pandemic threatened public health, not only because the risk of COVID, but because of its effects on patients with other diagnoses, including cancer. It could be because risks of immune compromised people visiting offices, for example. How does the data show that playing out over the past year?

Jonathan Simons: (19:26)
There's no question that we don't have all the data on how disruptive COVID-19 has been in terms of delaying the standard of cancer care. I'm sure it will be unhappy. All I can do is speak from my own small, but real practice of prostate cancer oncology, and talking to colleagues. It's slowed down getting surgery or starting radiation, just the logistics of getting patients in and out and tested because we're trying to stagger them. And what's been very challenging is, it slowed down clinical trial accrual for cancer medicines that may be breakthrough medicines or really be very, very important part of developing new therapy.

Jonathan Simons: (20:14)
But the good news is that I think cancer patients have learned that telemedicine is here and that it may be possible to develop ways of actually more efficiently and actually more compassionately interacting with patients using telemedicine on a lot of issues that, until COVID, we wouldn't have considered. The key is going to be getting herd immunity established as soon as possible so we can get further and further towards the normal patient flow. And no question, as well, cancer screening rates are down, but I don't know what they are most recently. And we're very concerned about that. And particularly in lower socioeconomic environments and communities where we're so concerned about improving cancer screening rates.

John Darsie: (21:12)
Yeah, it's the problem that obviously the COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate negative impact on communities, people of color. We talked about that with Paula Schneider of Susan G Komen, and it's rampant across a variety of different diseases and circumstances. But President Biden is arguably more dedicated to cancer research than any president that we've had in the history of the country. How optimistic are you that we could take a giant leap forward? And from a public policy standpoint, what would you like to see done that hasn't been done before, or maybe has been done, but not on a large enough scale to accelerate progress that we're making in cancer research?

Jonathan Simons: (21:52)
Well, first of all, I think you're right. I think President Biden will be the most nonpartisan or bipartisan champion of accelerating progress against cancer. And we've had some presidents that have experienced cancer and their families for certain. I worked directly with Vice President Biden and his staff on Vice President Biden's cancer moonshot. And actually, I have very specific answer. We think that our program with the Veterans Administration in delivering precision oncology. So if you're served your country first, you should be first to get cancer research breakthroughs for prostate cancer. We think that, in this administration not only will medical care and cancer care really in the Veterans Administration, but there's an opportunity to take the nation's largest health system with actually the best electronic medical record and really push forward how clinical trials are delivered, how we basically learn how to deliver precision care for all forms of cancer.

Jonathan Simons: (23:01)
And second, I think President Biden's going to be a champion of basic cancer research or basically fundamental discoveries that could bring breakthroughs in earlier detection or medicines. But also, I think this administration's going to be very interested in all the choke points.

Jonathan Simons: (23:21)
What's slowing us down? Well, the ease of letting rural Americans take place in clinical trials, or Americans in urban areas take place in clinical trials, because right now only four in a hundred Americans are taking, with cancer, even participating in a clinical trial. So even if we got that to 20%, that would be five times as fast as delivering to the FDA packages of data that show benefit.

Jonathan Simons: (23:51)
And last, I think, I think this administration is a real champion also for the important role of nursing. And our system needs to readdress, in our healthcare system, in particular, how vital for the future health of our country, nursing is, in particularly advanced practice oncology nursing. And here I am a physician scientists talking about nursing, but I think that these are going to be very positive developments.

John Darsie: (24:24)
Yeah. And how has data improved our ability to process data relevant to cancer? I feel like we talked to a lot of people in the healthcare space and they talk about how we haven't because of legitimate rules around privacy and things like that, haven't been able to sequence enough data, large enough data sets to really make huge progress. I had somebody I knew in New York, their brother was a founder of Flat Iron health, which you might be familiar with, backed by Google, acquired by Roche, that was trying to gain greater access to that data and process that data in a more effective way. Are you optimistic about breakthroughs in data processing as it relates to oncology generally?

Jonathan Simons: (25:10)
I'm aspirational and hopeful. I feel like the way we handle data in medicine is like January 1942, after Pearl Harbor, we had Navy prepared for the last war, right? We only had four aircraft carriers, even though air power was going to be the essential element for winning the war against the fascist. We all know in oncology, we all know a medical research, that the silos of data right now between the laboratory and the clinic and data scientists are woefully antiquated, given the opportunities. If you can sequence the human genome for less than one third the cost of a CAT scan, but you can't get that information to a doctor and to a pharmacist and to researchers. Just look at our challenges right now with sequencing COVID. Basically defining the genetic. This is like a surveillance problem that's trivial in terms of its genomics.

Jonathan Simons: (26:25)
But just look right now at our public health system challenges in terms of assembling data on variants. I'm hopeful that we completely reevaluate how we can protect patient privacy, but also put the patient first from the standpoint of getting the benefits of all this scientific and medical knowledge. And currently, our electronic health records are designed for reimbursement. They're not designed to ideally care for the next patient based on the science we know. So we're going to have to put patients again first in terms of how we think about big data. And we're going to need to allow data to be analyzed by all kinds of people in ways where we protect privacy.

Jonathan Simons: (27:19)
So in the long-term, I'm optimistic, but we haven't seen ... Well, there's been a lot of talk. We haven't seen a great example yet of a fully integrated health system. And again, I'm cranked up about this. That's why we're so optimistic without the Veterans Administration, actually, because they actually collect outcomes data independent of reimbursement. And I'm not saying reimbursement isn't important, but what I am saying is that we need a complete redesign in how we look at medical data and allow data scientists to make these important observations.

John Darsie: (28:05)
Well, I could ask you a lot more questions, but I'm going to turn it back over to Anthony to see if he has any final words before we let you go, Dr. Simons. So you can get back to your important work that you do every day.

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:15)
Well, my question is about the future, Doc. You seem like you're on the cusp of a lot of breakthroughs and you seem like you've helped to integrate the narrative around cancer therapies with other types of cancers through your research. So where are we five and 10 years from now if things go well? Build us an optimistic case, if you don't mind.

Jonathan Simons: (28:39)
I am optimistic based on the facts in that there'll be no clinical decision without precision. Your genes will be sequenced. The expressed RNA will be sequenced, we'll be treating the right patient with the right drug at the right time or making the right clinical decision based on an extraordinary understanding of the disease that you have that.

Jonathan Simons: (29:06)
Second, if we can solve our access to care issues, if we can solve basically the delivery of these amazing things, I see a real steep drop in cancer deaths by the end of the decade, because we're also going to be doing precision detection like this Robert F. Smith test or the polygenic risk test effort. Basically, pediatricians will be able to help families understand their lifetime cancer risk. And getting back to nutrition, we'll have a very good understanding of food as medicine, not trendy thinking as medicine, but we'll have the core metabolic understanding of what makes a healthier lifestyle and then we'll have apps and I think reinforcing products that allow us to really live healthier lives.

Jonathan Simons: (30:11)
I actually think that this is not only going to be the greatest decade in the history of medical research, just the breathtaking speed of the COVID vaccines or the fact that we had seven FDA approvals. Hidden in plain sight with COVID, we had seven FDA approvals for prostate cancer, which is a record year. All really driven by, again, early stage funding by our foundation, and then leveraged by the government and biopharma. I think it's going to be a decade where patients will be partners in their care, whether they're millennials, John, or not. I think health apps and the general understanding that with good health information, you can be a partner in your care is going to actually improve the care of everyone. So I'm actually very optimistic about the decade. If we can just, again, if we can just stay very focused on supporting cancer research and more broadly, biomedical research is one of the most important humanitarian things we could be doing in this country for the world.

Anthony Scaramucci: (31:22)
Before we let you go, you mentioned the vaccines. So have you been vaccinated, Doctor?

Jonathan Simons: (31:26)
I have.

Anthony Scaramucci: (31:27)
And are the vaccine safe?

Jonathan Simons: (31:29)
Yes, that's what the data says.

Anthony Scaramucci: (31:32)
Okay. But what would you be concerned about, because we have ... Just play this out for me, because we have people that are concerned about the vaccines. The data says they're safe. Do we need more data or was the data acceptable for you to get yourself vaccinated? So tell us what you think.

Jonathan Simons: (31:48)
We need more data in areas where ... We constantly need more data. In fact, what we need is a learning health system. That would have been the punchy answer to your big data question. So we need a lot more data, but by everything we know, it's much better to be vaccinated than not. And we're not over Coronavirus infections, as the variants show. So we need to become confident again that our health systems and our biomedical research efforts keep good ethical values, but are trying to basically save lives.

Anthony Scaramucci: (32:34)
Well, no, I appreciate it. It's just, unfortunately, we are in the age of tremendous amounts of information. But we're also in the age, unfortunately, of tremendous amounts of disinformation. And so you and I, John, Michael Milken, we're believers in science matters and facts first. And so would you recommend this vaccine to your patients and family members?

Jonathan Simons: (32:59)
I am.

Anthony Scaramucci: (33:00)
Okay.

Jonathan Simons: (33:01)
Actually, Anthony, you're very articulate, you're a student of history, and you know that at any moment in history, there's more that's unknown than known. So we have to be comfortable with continuing to learn. Learn about this disease. But we also have to be comfortable with evidence, and the evidence from randomized clinical trials, which is our best way of doing this, not the fastest way to do this is, the best evidence is to be vaccinated, to prevent yourself from dying of COVID-19 and spreading it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (33:48)
Amen. All right. Well, I want to leave it on that, I think. I think it's an optimistic note. We don't know everything, but we are advancing and we're doing the best that we can. It's in the best interest of our citizens in our society to get vaccinated. It'll protect them against the pandemic and future potential variants, et cetera. Anything else you want to add, Darsie?

John Darsie: (34:13)
That's it. Just want to thank Dr. Simons.

Anthony Scaramucci: (34:15)
You want to call him Peter or something like that before we leave? [crosstalk 00:34:17]. There's a P in prostate. So do you want to call him Peter before he leaves? I'm just asking.

John Darsie: (34:23)
I think I got this one nailed down.

Anthony Scaramucci: (34:25)
All right. I'm just checking.

John Darsie: (34:26)
[crosstalk 00:34:26] with Paula Schneider of the Susan G Komen foundation. But I just want to thank you Dr. Simons for all the work you've done. My father's one of millions of people. He's both a prostate cancer survivor and a skin cancer survivor. So all the research that you've done both directly related to prostate cancer, as well as the other cancers that you and Anthony were speaking about earlier, it's allowed him, this is more than a decade ago now, to live a long, healthy life, and he's now been vaccinated. So we hopefully don't have to worry too much about Coronavirus with him or my mother as well. So thank you for all the work you're doing.

Jonathan Simons: (35:02)
Well, thanks for the time today and good luck with delivering the truth to people.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:09)
We're working on it every day, sir. It's a work in progress every day.

John Darsie: (35:13)
It has been since the dawn of man.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:15)
Amen. Amen. It's getting a little bit tricky now, man. We got a lot of disinformation out there that we're trying to fight back. [crosstalk 00:35:26]

John Darsie: (35:26)
But thank you again, Dr. Simons. And thank you everybody who tuned in to today's SALT Talk. Just by tuning in and learning and spreading awareness of the progress that's being made, as well as the facts on the ground, you're doing a service, not just to yourself and your family, but to society as well. So if you have the means to donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, please do. We always put our money where our mouth is and contribute to these causes that we feature here on SALT Talks. And if you're able to do so, please do.

John Darsie: (35:54)
If you can't, protect yourself and protect your family. Go get checked, go to the doctor. If you have a history of cancer in your family, you especially need to get checked frequently. But encouraged family members and friends to get checked as well and encourage them to follow the facts and get vaccinated and get checked for a variety of different diseases.

John Darsie: (36:11)
But thank you for joining us. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk, or any of our previous SALT Talks, or want to sign up for our upcoming talks, you can do all of that on our website at salt.org/talks. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel where we host all of our videos for free to try to broaden access as much as possible to these ideas that we feature here on SALT Talks on a variety of issues. And please follow us on social media. We're, as well as being on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. And on behalf of the entire SALT team and Anthony, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT Talks for today. We'll see you back here again soon.

Paula Schneider: Breast Cancer Research | SALT Talks #151

“Part of being a survivor is you’ve walked in their shoes… I had 40 rounds of radiation, 6 months of chemo. I understand the devastation it causes families.”

Paul Schneider is the CEO of Susan G. Komen, the world’s largest nonprofit source of funding in the fight against breast cancer. Until her own breast cancer diagnosis in 2007, Paula Schneider was an accomplished executive in the fashion industry. It was her own experience facing cancer that inspired a career pivot to help in the fight against the deadly disease.

The Susan G. Komen foundation focuses on three pillars: medical research, legislative advocacy and community involvement. Raising awareness is central to the foundation’s mission so women can understand the preventative steps available in identifying signs or risk factors such as genetic predisposition. Because the pandemic has slowed routine doctor’s visits, there will inevitably be screenings and diagnoses delayed. "There are about 40-70% less cancer diagnoses right now. It means people aren’t getting the screenings they need to get a diagnosis… We will have a breast cancer boom after people are less afraid to go to their doctor."

Much work remains in closing the equity gap for black women who are 40% more likely to die from breast cancer. Susan G. Komen is leading campaigns in major cities using technology to help close the gap by identifying the key areas for improvement.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Paula Schneider.jpeg

Paula Schneider

President & Chief Executive Officer

Susan G. Komen

MODERATOR

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone and welcome back to SALT talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conference series, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future and we also love providing platforms for great causes as well. And when you can combine big ideas, big scientific ideas that are shaping the future with great causes, that's where we love to live at that intersection. So we're very excited today to bring you a SALT Talk on community impact with two great speakers, the first of which I will introduce to you now.

John Darsie: (01:00)
We're very excited to welcome Paula Schneider to SALT Talks. Paula is the president and chief executive officer of Susan G. Komen, the world's leading nonprofit source of funding for the fight against breast cancer, serving millions of patients in more than 60 countries, and helping to reduce the breast cancer mortality rate by 40% since 1989. Paula is responsible for the strategic direction and day-to-day operation of Komen's multi-million dollar research, community health, public policy advocacy, and global programs. For her it's not just business, it's personal because Paula herself is a breast cancer survivor and her own mother died of metastatic breast cancer.

John Darsie: (01:43)
She's been featured as a speaker at thought leadership forums, such as Fortune's most powerful women's summit, at the Milken Institutes Future of Health Summit. Paula was also named as one of Los Angeles business journals 500 most influential people for 2016 and garnered the National Association of Women's Business Owners Inspiration Award in 2010. Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner at SkyBridge Capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:21)
John, thank you. Paula, thank you so much for joining us.

Paula Schneider: (02:24)
My pleasure.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:26)
I want to start right away with your experience with breast cancer and how it led you to this Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Paula Schneider: (02:36)
Yeah. There's sort of a silver lining because nobody wants to have breast cancer, but it did set the stage for my future endeavors. And I was in fashion my whole career and running some pretty major fashion organizations all throughout Los Angeles and global organizations. And I had breast cancer in 2007 and my mom had died of breast cancer shortly after I got it. And I have two daughters, so enough said. I made this massive pivot because I was actually getting an award for being one of the top female retailers in the country. And when I got up to give a speech, I was supposed to give a speech about empowerment and it was supposed to relate back to something that was empowering about retail and I had nothing. So I got up and I started to talk about being the most empowered when I was the least physically powerful when I had breast cancer.

Paula Schneider: (03:32)
You have to have some sort of grace that allows you to take help from people when you have breast cancer and that was one of those moments in life. I got up, I got my speech, I sat back down to a friend of mine who was CEO of another big company, and she had just received an email from some recruiters who were in Dallas that had asked if she knew of anyone that would be interested in becoming the CEO of Susan G. Komen. And so she asked me, "Would you ever consider doing that?" And I said, "Yes I would."

Paula Schneider: (04:01)
And literally that was on a Thursday, Friday I made the decision I was going to go forward. I was running a publicly traded company, on Monday I gave notice. I didn't even have an interview, but to me I just decided that I didn't care if I sold one more pair of jeans to Bloomingdale's. And if I wanted to do something that was really meaningful for me, I was going to have to start. So I did and it took a few months of discussions back and forth, but ultimately I started here and it's been the best move I could have ever made.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:32)
It's an amazing story about purpose and finding your dream job.

Paula Schneider: (04:39)
Yep.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:40)
I'll segue for a second. One of my closest friends, after 9/11, had retired from Goldman Sachs. 66 people died in 9/11. He went to volunteer for the company. I mean, obviously 3000 people died, but in this one specific company, Sandler O'Neill. And he went there to help rebuild that company and help the survivors and their families and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of his life. And so congratulations on what you're doing, but can you tell us how your experience as a survivor has shaped your leadership at the Komen foundation?

Paula Schneider: (05:17)
Yeah. I think there's the part of being a survivor, like you walked in their shoes, right? Other than having metastatic disease, which thank God I don't. I have gone through all of the treatments and they were rough. I have gone through truly the year of living dangerously, I call it, which is I had a double mastectomy. I had, I think it was 40 rounds of radiation. I had chemo for six months and it was a very aggressive form of cancer. And so these are the things that once you've been through, you really understand what people are feeling and how to make a difference.

Paula Schneider: (05:56)
We are a patient centered organization. We are an advocacy organization for patients. So it's easier for me to be able to talk the talk and walk the walk because I know what people have gone through and I know what it means. And I know what the devastation that it causes to families. I'm one of the lucky ones that got out on the other side and hopefully the more work we do, the more opportunities we have for more families to stay intact and not lose their moms, and dads get breast cancer too. Men get breast cancer too. It's a far smaller percentage, but still, it happens. So for me, it's a personal thing of being able to bring my experience, my real life experience to the cause.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:39)
Let's talk about the pandemic for a second. How has the pandemic changed treatment protocols, if any? How has it changed diagnostics, if any? Give us the landscape of operating in a pandemic for breast cancer patients and their therapeutic potential-

Paula Schneider: (07:02)
Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:03)
Outcomes and so forth.

Paula Schneider: (07:04)
Yeah. If you think about it, cancer isn't canceled folks, just letting you know that right off. There's about 40 to 70% less cancer diagnoses going on right now. And that doesn't mean that it's because they don't exist. It means because people are not getting the screening that they need to be able to get a diagnosis. So for all the women that are out there that are listening to this or all of the gentlemen that are out there that have wives or girlfriends that are in the age of getting screenings, you got to put your big girl panties on and go because we will have a very big breast cancer boom after people are less afraid to go back to their doctors.

Paula Schneider: (07:46)
So it's really bad and it's not just breast cancer, it's all kinds of cancers and the screenings that it takes because to have that many people, almost half as many diagnosis, that just means that it'll be further along by the time it's diagnosed. So don't let yourself be in that position.

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:09)
Your plans over the next five years to grow and expand the foundation and the awareness that you guys are achieving in breast cancer, tell us a little bit about that, Paula because I think you are a great visionary.

Paula Schneider: (08:26)
Well these are tough times for any kind of philanthropic organization. Most philanthropic organizations have about, I'd say there's about 80% that have only six months of runway. So there will not be a lot of philanthropic organizations that survive the world of COVID. We're going to be on the other side of it. So it's looking out and seeing what we do. There's no one that would take the place of Komen because we've had our fingerprints on every major breakthrough that's ever happened. We sort of have three legs of the stool. We have research because nothing is going to cure cancer other than research. I usually say nothing cures cancer other than cash because cash pays for research, but nothing will cure cancer other than research. We have over 250 research projects that are going. Most of them are on metastasis because it's not the cancer that kills you, it's when it spreads.

Paula Schneider: (09:17)
So that's part one of our sort of three legged stool and we have some really, really interesting programs that we're working on there. And some of which we're actually putting together ourselves for our own Komen led research where we have a registry of patients that are giving us their genomic and their genetic information because we're sort of the trust broker and we have the ability to be able to get to the best scientists in the world. And there's a lot of information out there, but it's siloed and we are the ones that can share. And we can get that information to the top scientists in the world to do their jobs, to really figure out why does cancer metastasize? So that's a big part of what we're doing and that is actually using a lot of technology to do so by building this pretty massive patient registry that allows us to get that information.

Paula Schneider: (10:10)
That's just one part of what we call our Komen health cloud, which is the ability of following a patient all the way through their journey. And what you hope to find is that people will care about their breast health before they need help. Right? And going through the world of having breast cancer and understanding what that means, and this is where I can use my personal experience again, Anthony is I had one woman that helped me out through my journey. She was my patient navigator. And on average, if you will have breast cancer you have between 11 and 14 doctors. It's extremely complicated, even if you are educated and you have the funds and you have good insurance and a great support system, all the things that I had, it's still incredibly complicated.

Paula Schneider: (11:00)
So there was this woman that helped me and her name was Susan and she was my patient navigator that helped me navigate this really, really complex world and helped me figure out, as a thought leader, what is the best treatment plan for me, who are the best doctors that are out there, et cetera. And I want to replicate that for women that are going through the journey and that Komen can help them with in creating a patient navigation app that allows women, whether you're in the rural Mississippi or whether you're in New York City, to be able to sort of use it like telemed where you take this person with you into your doctor's office and you have the ability to have someone else listen to what's happening in your treatment schedule and what are the best things that you can do.

Paula Schneider: (11:44)
So I think that there's a lot of ways that we're using technology to help us through and it's easier to scale. So I think that that's one of the more important things for us is being able to use technology in our research, in our own research project because we could really crack the code. So that's one. And then the third part is, or the second part is advocacy. We have about 11 state led bills that have happened to improve women's health care that have been passed that are Komen led bills in the last 12 months. And there's a boatload to say about women in pink with pitchforks because we're really powerful and we bring it. So that's really exciting for us. And then the third is all of the work that we do in communities. And many of you have probably seen a walk or run because we bring over a million people together annually, or we did before the COVID pandemic, to do walks and runs, but we're still doing them virtually.

Paula Schneider: (12:43)
But in communities, we have a very big African-American health equity initiative that isn't just the flavor of the month for us. This is something that we have been working on for years and years, where, on average, if you're black and you get breast cancer versus me, you're 40% more likely to die. And that's just the average. And in some cities it goes up to like 75% and DC is one of them. We have DC, LA, we have Dallas, we have Philadelphia, Memphis is the highest of all. These are not little Podunk cities. These are major cities where there should be more opportunity to get people to the health care that exists. And if you did that, we'd probably decrease deaths by about 30%. So a lot of the work we do in community, we're using technology to enable our work in community. We do a lot in equities in our community work. So it's a pretty robust 360 degree view of how we help women with breast cancer.

John Darsie: (13:49)
So Susan jumping in here, you mentioned that-

Paula Schneider: (13:52)
Wait. It's Paula because it's Susan G. Komen. But people do that all the time.

John Darsie: (13:56)
I almost did that when I read the introduction and I stopped myself.

Paula Schneider: (13:59)
No worries.

John Darsie: (14:00)
Paula, but Susan obviously we hold in very-

Paula Schneider: (14:03)
My middle name, so that's helpful.

John Darsie: (14:05)
There you go.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:06)
Can we just stop for a second Paula?

Paula Schneider: (14:07)
Sure.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:08)
I am savoring the mistake, Mr. Perfect just made, okay? So can we just-

John Darsie: (14:13)
Oh man.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:13)
Allow that.

Paula Schneider: (14:14)
Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:14)
To just [crosstalk 00:14:15].

Paula Schneider: (14:15)
The end of it now.

John Darsie: (14:17)
I know.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:17)
Over the internet. Let's just let it marinate, okay? It's like a symphony to me. Go ahead Darsie.

John Darsie: (14:22)
My webinar hosting career was taking off until that. I'm never going to live that [crosstalk 00:14:26] Yep.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:28)
Well you [crosstalk 00:14:29] never forget that John Susan Darsie. Go ahead. Ask Paula a question.

John Darsie: (14:33)
I'm almost going to do it again. It's hard. Paula.

Paula Schneider: (14:36)
Yes.

John Darsie: (14:36)
You mentioned the stat about people of color, African-American women in particular, who I believe the stat is they're 40% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. We see similar statistics as it relates to COVID-19. There's a variety of different factors that lead that to be the case. Why is the percentage of mortality so much higher with black women than it is for white women? And what is Komen doing, in addition to those technology initiatives you mentioned, to address sort of that inequality and allow people to get both the right prevention and the right treatment for their breast cancer?

Paula Schneider: (15:14)
Yeah. There's a lot of factors, right? There's first and foremost, it's where you live shouldn't determine whether you live. What you look like shouldn't determine whether you live. A lot of times in the African-American communities there's later diagnosis and the type of breast cancer can be much more difficult to cure. So there's that. Then there's the cultural implications of actually talking about your breasts. We did a whole thing on know your girls, right? And it was sort of a play on words because it's know these girls, it's know your sisterhood and your friends and you know all about your friends and your mothers and your aunties and all of those, but how well do you know these girls? And that was a really successful campaign for us in the African-American community because you have to be able to talk about it.

Paula Schneider: (16:08)
We have history tools that can look at your family history to see what are the challenges that your family might have. So it's looking at every aspect of why. And there's a lot of reasons that are very apparent and there's a lot of reasons that are underlying causes. When we have these 10 cities that we're working in, we've done it like a full blown landscape analysis as to the why. Because it's not just handing people vouchers for mammograms and then it all goes away because it doesn't. We tried that. But we had a pilot in Chicago that we helped fund that had looked at what's the story behind the story? Why is it not happening? Why are all these disparities happening?

Paula Schneider: (16:52)
And this was specifically that there was a challenge in reading mammograms correctly. And in some of the clinics in the south side of Chicago where they were actually lessening the amount of people that had breast cancer. They weren't reading them correctly. So we have to look at why. And then there's interventions that are specific interventions for each of these cities. It's very hard work. It's very expensive work, but it's work that actually saves lives on the ground every single day.

John Darsie: (17:27)
Yeah. And just an important note, and this is personal for me. My wife's grandfather actually died of breast cancer. So my wife's family on her dad's side have actually spent a lot of time and resources educating the public about male breast cancer as well. I don't know the statistics around it, but women are the majority of breast cancer cases.

Paula Schneider: (17:48)
97%-ish.

John Darsie: (17:49)
Yeah. Yeah. But male breast cancer is a real thing.

Paula Schneider: (17:54)
Yeah.

John Darsie: (17:54)
And it's important that people are educated around that too.

Paula Schneider: (17:57)
Your genetic information is really important. Like if you're Ashkenazi Jew, you have a one in, I think it's one in 40 to carry the BRCA gene mutation, which then means that you can pass it on to your children. And then they have a 50% chance of getting the BRCA gene mutation if you're one parent. So on your side, you may want to look into that. Any time that there's breast cancer in your family, you want to figure out the information, right? Because knowledge is power.

John Darsie: (18:28)
Yeah.

Paula Schneider: (18:29)
You can make all kinds of great decisions if you know. It's scary. I get it. When I go in for my MRIs that I have to get regularly and my heart pounds before I go because I know I don't want the outcome to be bad, but you know what? I'd rather know. And-

John Darsie: (18:44)
Yeah.

Paula Schneider: (18:44)
There's so much opportunity now to get genetic testing and to be able to tell if there's anything that you're predisposed to so that you can do something about it.

John Darsie: (18:54)
Yeah. I feel just anecdotally that I see a lot more people getting sort of preemptive mastectomies where having that knowledge allows you to get out in front of it and rather than living your life in fear that every time you go to the doctor you're going to get that bad news that there's a pretty significant percentage that you're going to get, you just go ahead and get out ahead of it and prevent yourself from having to live with that type of fear.

Paula Schneider: (19:17)
And it's significant. Like if you carry the BRCA gene mutations it could be up to 60 to 80% that you will get either breast or ovarian or both in your lifetime.

John Darsie: (19:26)
Right.

Paula Schneider: (19:28)
It's good for you to know that and if you do know that, then you have the opportunity to do something about it because there are a lot of prophylactic ... like Angelina Jolie was one that made a lot of news because she carries the gene and therefore she did the prophylactic mastectomy. I was really happy to see that because it brought it out into the public. I mean, I talk to women that are doing it all day long every day, but-

John Darsie: (19:53)
Right.

Paula Schneider: (19:54)
It is important. Who wants to live like that? And then you have to live scan to scan and be concerned about everything that you do and when is it going to hit me? And it's always better to take the prophylactic approach. No. That doesn't mean that everyone needs to go out and get a mastectomy if you carry the BRCA gene mutation. You have to talk to your doctors, but listen to the guidance and figure out what is the best opportunity for you?

John Darsie: (20:22)
Yeah. One last question before we get into how people can have help support Susan G. Komen. A big part of what you guys do is you're very effective at developing new partnership. Could you tell us what you've done in the past in terms of developing partnerships and what you plan to do going forward?

Paula Schneider: (20:38)
Yeah. There's a lot of ways that we do partnerships. I'll use a couple of examples here. We've worked really hard in being more transformational than transactional. Like I'm very happy if there's a partner out there that would like to give us a pin pad where you give money at the end of your transaction and that's wonderful because again, nothing's going to cure cancer other than cash. But what we did was we worked on a really wonderful partnership with Walgreens. And Walgreens has given us the money, the beginnings of the money, we still have to raise more, to build our patient registry.

Paula Schneider: (21:15)
And that's the patient registry where we're going to get 10,000 women to join and give us their genomic and genetic information and if we do that, that's a significant dataset and it allows us to be able to give that information and slice and dice it any way we want to the top scientists in the world that can actually help find a way to cure cancer from metastasizing. So we could crack the code. And again, because we are a trust broker and because we're neutral, all we care about, I mean, the only thing I care about is figuring out ways that my daughters are never going to get this and your wives and daughters are never going to get it. So if we can figure that out, then there's ways for us to work with the top people in the world to do that.

Paula Schneider: (22:01)
So that's like a transformational partnership that we have. The other partnerships, there's many partnerships that we have where we are working with different companies on our African-American health equity initiative. And it seems to resonate more now because of all the world that's happened in the last six months or year. But this is something that we've been working on for a long time. And I think that leaders need to stand up and they need to figure out ways that they can participate. And it's not like giving Juneteenth off. This can't be symbolic. If you're going to say you're doing something, do something. So we provide turnkey ways that organizations or businesses can help and really be effective in saving lives every single day. So our African-American health equity initiative is one of our biggest initiatives that we have going. And it's one that is gaining more and more notoriety and more strength because it's very sort of cutting edge, but helping people right now today. So anyone who wants to help with that, we got a place for you.

John Darsie: (23:09)
All right. Fantastic. You guys are like an API for philanthropy. I love that.

Paula Schneider: (23:16)
Exactly right.

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:16)
Excuse me. Before we talk about donations and how people can donate, I just have a question. I realized that neither of us are doctors, but when people call you and say, "Okay. Are there things I can do to prevent breast cancer, if possible, or is it a genetic disposition?" What does the foundation typically say to people as it relates to breast cancer prevention, if anything?

Paula Schneider: (23:42)
Well, I would say, going back my own diagnosis, I was in my 40s. That was before my mom had it for the first time. And I don't carry the BRCA gene mutation. And I an athlete and I eat healthy and all. I wasn't a candidate. But everyone is a candidate. The two things that make you a candidate are being a woman and getting older. So everyone is a candidate. Certainly, if you have a genetic mutation, there's predisposition for it, but it is kind of luck of the withdraw. Now we know a lot of alcohol isn't good, we know a lot of sugar isn't good, but there's very few things, like specific things, that you can do that will ward it off, if you will. So it really is just something that more research is going to have to be done so that we can understand what is the cause, what is the root cause, and how do we stop it? If you're out there, you're one in eight. And one in eight will get it in their lifetime.

Anthony Scaramucci: (24:42)
Right. And so how do we donate? What do we do to increase-

Paula Schneider: (24:47)
Well.

Anthony Scaramucci: (24:48)
The awareness. How do we get you more money? Because I do think you're right. The research obviously is the cure, but you need the money first. So how do we do that? How do we help?

Paula Schneider: (24:59)
If you just go to komen.org, there's always a donate button. It's very helpful for us. And know that the work that we do is really, really, really impactful. We've had our fingers, our fingerprints, if you will, in almost every major breakthrough that's ever happened in breast cancer for the last 35 years. I've been with the company three years. For me, it's the greatest role in the world and the most meaningful, but there are real life things that have come out of this. Like there was a study that we did that Komen was in invested in called the TAILORx study. And this is one that was led by one of our head doctors in our scientific advisory board at Stanford who's an amazing, amazing human being, where we'd looked at whether or not all women had to have chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Paula Schneider: (25:47)
And it was determined that there's about 70% of women that didn't need chemotherapy. Do you know what the difference now that people have that information? And you have to go to your doctor. It's not like you can determine you don't need chemotherapy. It's where you fall on a scale. And it's all very specific, but the fact that so many women now do not have to have chemotherapy. Because that's a bitch. I mean, it's like the hardest thing that I have ever done and I'm tough as nails. So it's one of those things that these are real life impact that happened because of the work that we do at Komen. We save lives every day and we make life more pleasant for those who have to go through this journey. So if you feel it and you care about any of the issues that we brought up, it's at komen.org, or if you are running a corporation or an organization that wants to partner with us, we have many, many ways to partner. We are in contact with 30 million people a year through our organization.

Paula Schneider: (26:49)
And that's a huge community that we have that we can bring.

Anthony Scaramucci: (26:55)
Anything else from you, Mr. Millennial who-

John Darsie: (26:58)
No.

Paula Schneider: (26:58)
What was your [crosstalk 00:26:58]

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:00)
Got Paula's name wrong.

John Darsie: (27:01)
Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Susan for [crosstalk 00:27:04]

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:04)
Oh my God. It's so good. It is so rich for me. I just have to tell you, it is literally like [crosstalk 00:27:11] Paula, I'm sorry. It's like eating a box of chocolates. I just got to tell you.

Paula Schneider: (27:15)
I get it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:15)
It's so rich for me. It's so enjoyable.

Paula Schneider: (27:18)
He's never going to hear the end of it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:20)
No. Never. Forget about it. I mean, he knows I have a 10 year shelf life on most things that he does that are improbable. [crosstalk 00:27:28] In all seriousness though, the work that you're doing is so inspiring to so many different people. And unfortunately, I would say just about everybody on this call, everybody that's listening to us, and everybody that will listen to us, unfortunately has been touched by either the scare of breast cancer or the unfortunate tragedy of breast cancer. So just encouraging everybody to give. Of course we will through our foundation and personally. I just want to thank you so much for all the great work that you're doing.

Paula Schneider: (28:02)
Yeah. And thanks for letting me talk about the work we do because I'm pretty sure that people have seen the women in pink and the walks and the runs and a lot of people think it stops there. It does. That's just the beginning. That's just one of the mechanisms that we have to bring our community together to raise money so that we can work on all of these aspects all at once. So appreciate the platform guys and really [crosstalk 00:28:23]

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:23)
You've done an amazing job of increasing awareness. And even though I brought baby Yoda with me today, you have crushed us on room raider as well, okay? So that must be your fashion trend.

Paula Schneider: (28:35)
No. This is not a ... like look. When I go like this, this is my actual office. I designed [inaudible 00:28:40]

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:40)
I love the wallpaper.

Paula Schneider: (28:42)
Thank you. Thank you.

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:43)
And the shutters. I mean, it's just a great look. And I love the fact that you're beating John Darsie in the room rating as well. I have to tell you-

Paula Schneider: (28:50)
Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:51)
That's also [crosstalk 00:28:52]

Paula Schneider: (28:52)
Well that's not very hard if you look at his room rating.

John Darsie: (28:54)
I'm in a sterile office that nobody's here because of COVID.

Paula Schneider: (28:57)
Okay.

John Darsie: (28:57)
So it's not very hard to beat me, but at least she didn't have to donate money to the person in charge of room raider to get 10 out of 10 Anthony.

Anthony Scaramucci: (29:04)
That's true.

John Darsie: (29:05)
Just for the record.

Speaker 4: (29:06)
I am the Jared Kushner of room raider. I have to admit that, okay? The way he got into Harvard, I got my 10 out of 10. Okay. Just want to let everybody know. All right. So go ahead, Darsie.

John Darsie: (29:16)
Thank you everybody for tuning in to today's SALT Talk with Paula Schneider of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. A fantastic mission. Anthony and I are both married with daughters so it's a cause near and dear to our heart, especially given our family history and my wife's history with her grandfather who passed from male breast cancer as well. So thank you everybody for tuning in. Just by tuning in and learning more I think you're doing a great thing and spread the word about what Komen is doing. komen.org. As Paula mentioned, a lot of philanthropic organizations are struggling during the pandemic because of lack of engagement and physical events.

John Darsie: (29:54)
People are used to the Komen walks as well as people are struggling financially. So any help you can provide in this great mission is very much appreciated. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk or any of our other talks, we have other talks focused on business as well as focused on philanthropy, including one coming up with Dr. Jonathan Simons of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. You can watch all of our past talks and sign up for all of our future talks at salt.org/talks.

John Darsie: (30:21)
And again, please spread the word. I say that after every episode, but this one is incredibly important that you spread the word about this talk and about this cause. And please follow us on social media. We're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And with that, this is John Darsie from SALT signing off for today. We'll see you back here again soon on SALT Talks.

A New Era for Psychedelic Medicine | SALT Talks #143

“11% of Americans contemplated suicide in the month of June. We need novel solutions and treatment paradigms.”

Sa’ad Shah is the co-founder and managing partner of Noetic, a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in emerging and early-stage psychedelic-based wellness, therapeutic and pharmaceutical companies. JR Rahn is the co-founder and co-CEO of MindMed, a leading psychedelic medicine biotech company that discovers, develops and deploys psychedelic-inspired medicines and therapies to address addiction and mental illness.

Psychedelics in medicine represent an entirely new biotech asset class. Psychedelics still carry with it the stigma of its recreational use in the 60s and 70s, but its application as a therapy is intended help people with mental health and addiction issues. Psychedelic-assisted therapy involves a trained therapist who guides the patient through the experience. “The science has been incredibly compelling. The efficacy rates cannot be ignored.”

The current approach to treating mental illness and addiction continues to fall short. The opioid crisis is going to cost the US $2.5B over the next four years with 300 people per day dying of overdoses. Mental health is likely to decline even further because of the pandemic. “With the lingering effects of COVID-19… the pandemic is going to turn into a mental health epidemic.”

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKERS

Sa'ad Shah.jpeg

Sa’ad Shah

Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Noetic

JR Rahn.jpeg

JR Rahn

Chief Economist

Exelon Corporation

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:11)
Hello, everyone and welcome back to the SALT Talks. My name is John Darcy. I'm the Managing Director of SALT, which is a global Thought Leadership Forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is the same as our goal and our SALT Conference Series, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to bring you a talk focusing on the future of medicine within the psychedelic space with two fantastic guests.

John Darsie: (00:53)
Our first guest today is JR Rahn, who's the Co-founder and Co-CEO of MindMed, a leading Psychedelic Medicine Biotech Company that discovers, develops, and deploys psychedelic inspired medicines and therapies to address addiction and mental illness. JR, is a former Silicon Valley Tech Executive, who was previously at Uber and attended the prestigious tech accelerator Y Combinator. After his own struggles with mental health and addiction in Silicon Valley, he began looking for a new treatment paradigm with the potential to solve mental health and addiction related issues. JR began personally investing in psychedelic medicine projects and research through his family office run capital, and then went on to found the biotech company MindMed to focus on developing psychedelic medicines, under the federally compliant FDA pathway. MindMed was the first psychedelic medicine biotech to publicly list on a stock exchange, and the company now garners a one billion plus market cap.

John Darsie: (01:51)
The company has filed an up listing application for a potential listing of its shares on the NASDAQ. And our second guest today is Sa'ad Shah, whose firm Noetic is actually an investor in MindMed. But Sa'ad is the Co-founder and managing partner of Noetic, a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in emerging and early stage psychedelic based wellness, therapeutic and pharmaceutical companies around the world. Sa'ad has spent the last 22 years in capital markets and the asset management industry, with a focus on alternative investment strategies. Prior to founding Noetic, Sa'ad was a Managing Director at the Carlyle Group. He's also the Co-founder and managing partner at Grey House Partners, a venture capital, at Alpha Partners, and an affiliate partner at Lindsay Goldberg, and adventure advisor to Learn Capital, LLC. He's also a filmmaker, a scriptwriter, and producer, and a board member of the Necessary Angel Theater in Toronto, and the Council of Advisors for The Windy Museum in Los Angeles.

John Darsie: (02:52)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:05)
Well, guys, thanks so much for coming on. I'm going to start with JR if that's okay. I would like you JR to give our audience a broad overview of the thesis behind psychedelics for medical use, but also take us through your personal journey to how you got to MindMed.

JR Rahn: (03:23)
Oh! Thank you, Mr. Scaramucci. Look, I think psychedelic-

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:27)
You got JR. You got to call me Anthony. Okay, because in a few minutes, John Darcy and I are going to be beating the hell out of each other. Okay. And I have to feel young for that experience, because you got to call me Anthony.

JR Rahn: (03:39)
All right. You got it Anthony. Look, I think, if we take a step back here and look at this space, we're really have created and founded a new asset class. This is a new biotech asset class that is focused on mental health. And while it might be based on substances from the 1960s that have associations, like LSD and psilocybin, really what we're focused on is mental health and how do we heal people. And that's really where the journey for MindMed began, which is the first publicly listed psychedelic biotech company. I was at the height of my career in Silicon Valley, I was working at Uber and then went through the Y Combinator program and was faced with some severe addiction and mental health issues. And to the outside world everything was going fine. I was struggling with my addictions but, working well and getting things accomplished in Silicon Valley, until a friend really told me-

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:47)
If you don't mind me asking because I'm from a family of addictive disorders. So what was your addiction of choice or what was not choice, but what was the thing that you were drawn to right? And I want to stipulate for the purposes of SALT Talk, coming from an addictive families that have addictive disorders, I recognize that it is an illness. It is not a choice. I didn't mean to say it that way. But what was drawing you in JR?

JR Rahn: (05:17)
Well, I think you do have the choice to do something about it right? I think, definitely isn't an illness, but it takes-

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:23)
Definitely we have a choice to do something about it. But I do think that once you're caught up in it, it's a hard cycle to break because of the biochemistry in your body. Would that be fair to say?

JR Rahn: (05:35)
Totally. So, my drugs of choice were cocaine and alcohol. And I really struggled with this, basically from the beginning of college, right? And even in high school, I think that goes back to your struggles with ADHD and mental health being put on stimulant based medicines from the age of 13, you really start to develop patterns. And you're right, it is a brain illness, and it is a mental illness. And those patterns start early as a kid. And so they know that really culminated in Silicon Valley, for me. And I had a friend turn to me at one point and say, "Look, you're going to put yourself into a grave. I had other friends die. These are folks that were working, at large tech companies die of overdoses, die of these are really serious diseases." And so I decided that I wanted to make a change, right? It was I was either going to die, or I was going to solve the problem. And so I didn't really see the traditional routes of addiction treatment and how we treat mental health in America as really effective ways of dealing with these problems.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:58)
Okay, so let me interrupt again, if you don't mind, just talk a little bit of that for our viewers. So the traditional treatments are a 12 Step Program. And you see Alcohol Anonymous Manual is going to a rehab center, perhaps for 28 days. There's some psychotherapeutic treatment to that. And then there's also the conditioning process of attending meetings, either a Nar-Anon meeting, or an Alcohol Anonymous meeting, where you're laying out your story, and you're sharing. And so one of the things that we have found with these diseases, by making it communal, and bridging a gap and having people help each other creating that matrix, it sustains people's ability to stay off of the, addiction. And so your therapeutic idea is what JR?

JR Rahn: (07:49)
Well, look, I just want to call out that I think that Alcoholics Anonymous and NNA are important pieces to solving addiction.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:58)
Yes.

JR Rahn: (07:59)
I think there are, actually, what people forget, is that the 13th Step of the AA was actually supposed to be an LSD trip. But that was what it was originally thought up to be by the founder. That never happened because of the 1960s. But I think it's important to point that out. Our paradigm really is looking at how do we create catalysts for change in your behavior, that when you're dealing with addiction, and ruminating thoughts about anxiety or depression, you really need that catalyst. And some people can do it without a psychedelic. But what I found was that psychedelic medicine is not going to be a panacea to solve all our problems in society. However, they can be catalysts for us to change our behavior, and there's still a lot of work that needs to go in and after-

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:50)
Before we get to Sa'ad, and we are going to get to him in a second, I want to push you a little bit on psychedelics. So because there's a stigma of psychedelics, right? We had that the mushroom, the LSD, and the hippie. It's gets created this 50 year stigma of psychedelics, but yet, there are people that attributed psychedelics to giving them major breakthroughs in life, and major transformation in the way they think about Planet Earth. So step back for people that don't know a lot about psychedelics. Tell us a little bit about the origin and side, forgive me for one sec, we're going to get to you in a moment. But I want you to give this introduction to people that are not familiar with psychedelics and don't need to be afraid of psychedelics, they need to be informed about them. So go ahead JR.

JR Rahn: (09:37)
Yeah, so I mean, modern psychedelics, the things that we talked about, like LSD were really invented inside pharmaceutical companies. They were invented at Sandoz Laboratories, which is now part of the pharmaceutical group Novartis. Many folks might have heard of something called Bicycle Day, which is the infamous day that LSD was actually discovered by Dr. Albert Hoffman, who's a chemist at Sandoz. He was riding home and he liked to test the molecules that he was working on. And after getting home, he realized that there was something very powerful in the experience that he had with LSD. And I think the reason that they've been stigmatized is simply due to headlines that happened in the 1960s, it probably wasn't a, great idea to give everybody a bunch of LSD and ask them to go off and fight a war in Vietnam at the time.

JR Rahn: (10:30)
And so, I think what we're still dealing with as an industry is psychedelics do have this stigma, but in many ways, they can be deeply therapeutic. And we talk about psychedelics. But really what it is, is psychedelic assisted therapy, there's a therapy component to it, you will take a psychedelic, you will sit with a therapist or psychiatrist, and they're guiding you through an experience to realize why you're having some of these underlying causes, to your addiction, to your anxiety, to your depression, to your PTSD. And ultimately, this is the new paradigm to use a drug in combination with therapy, ultimately, is what we are pushing forward as an industry.

Anthony Scaramucci: (11:19)
So, Sa'ad you have this prolific career in institutional investing, you've been at some of the more premier places. Why do you? Why are you excited about the psychedelic space as it relates to an investment outlook in psychedelics?

Sa'ad Shah: (11:40)
Sure. So first of all, Anthony and John, thank you for having me here. Quite frankly, I really missed the old SALT conferences, the live conferences that were incredibly informative, insightful, and-

Anthony Scaramucci: (11:52)
We're going to be doing LSD trips at the next one, so I may or may not be two hours away, oh! LSD boutique over there. But go ahead Sa'ad. Tell us why.

Sa'ad Shah: (12:01)
So it's a mix, really. It's a mix of a personal journey for me. And an investment sector that makes a hell of a lot of sense for many reasons. So from an investment perspective, Anthony, in a previous life, we ran a fund of funds that focused a great deal on Esoteric Strategies. They were very new in their life cycles, we actually sought them out. And in many cases, we seeded many of them. Strategies like reinsurance and whether derivatives in commercial litigation, finance and music, royalty, business, pharmaceutical royalty business, that's one that dovetails very well with what's going on here. But a key aspect of that was that these strategies were quite new in their lifecycle, and a lot of the capital initially stayed away, because they found it complex. So what we did was, we put these strategies together in a portfolio for investors, predominantly institutional investors, and said, "We will manage the complexity for you."

Sa'ad Shah: (13:03)
But there's definite and distinct Alpha, it may be fleeting, but the Alpha is there, the ability to generate returns greater than what the markets are delivering. But the best part of it was that these strategies were very uncorrelated to the market. So in years 2008 2011 they did well. When we've been following what's happening in psychedelics for a long time, and what's been driving us to the psychedelics apart from the personal, journey, which I'll get into, is the fact that the science has been incredibly compelling, the efficacy rates here just cannot be ignored. And ultimately, we bet on the fact that everything will follow the science, the money will follow the science, capital will follow the science, institutional investors will follow the science.

Sa'ad Shah: (13:48)
And it's utterly compelling, right? There have been on three occasions now that the FDA has designated psychedelics as breakthrough designation BTD, you can go onto the FDA website and take a look at every instance, they've designated anything as BTD. So it's a big deal, which really means that they're saying that, okay, well, this has over 70 75% efficacy rate, to treat that particular ailment, give it the green light, let it go to phase one, let it get, let the process start. And, there was 2017, 2018 and 2019, twice with psilocybin or magic mushrooms, and once for MDMA. So, but the complexity comes in, and when you've got the DEA at the same time saying,"Well hold on a sec, this is a schedule and abuse list." And these are harmful, so they need to stay on that list.

Sa'ad Shah: (14:42)
But as these things get through their, clinical trials, which are fast approaching, they're going to get off the DEA list. So for us, this is a prime example of a strategy that early this life cycle complex, it's mispriced as a result it's under priced, right? And, the efficacy rates will start to be quite readily apparent to, the public to the markets. And these things are going to be priced accordingly. So for us, this is, it's also disruptive, massively disruptive. It makes sense. And, it there's a seven year history behind it that people tend to forget that thing. It's just something new. This has been going on for a long time.

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:26)
So you have but you have this interesting intersection of activity, right? So let me read you some of these statistics, a 40 million Americans suffering from anxiety annually, only 37% are seeking treatment. You've got 11% of the American adults reported seriously considering suicide in June, at the height of the pandemic, you have the potential reality of 800 million people being out of work as a result of automation coming. And you've got addictive disorders, the opioid crisis costs two and a half trillion dollars to America, at least that's the projection over the next four years. How can this help? Tell me let me ask you, I'm a person has anxiety, I've contemplated suicide, what would be the therapy JR? What am I doing? I come to MindMed and then what happens?

JR Rahn: (16:25)
So MindMed still developing drugs, right? We're going through an FDA federally regulated process, and I hope that we can eventually help folks that have considered suicide and also have anxiety. So we're our project, Lucy, which is LSD assisted therapy, went to the FDA in December for a Pre-IND meeting. And we sat down with them and said, "Look, we think that our LSD assisted therapy can be used with folks that are having generalized anxiety disorder or anxiety. And we want to conduct some clinical trials around that." And so they gave us a very, it was a very successful meeting, we had a very open dialogue, we didn't originally anticipate that it was going to be so open because LSD has a stigma. But I think what's interesting at the FDA, is they're very open to conducting these clinical trials, because the FDA focuses on two things.

JR Rahn: (17:26)
It doesn't focus on politics. Focuses on is something safe and is something effective. And that's really important because the mental health dilemma and situation of America right now is far worse than the political divide we currently have. I mean, 11% of Americans considered suicide in the month of June, that's up double from what it was a year ago, before COVID started. This is, we need novel solutions and treatment paradigms. And so eventually, what we want is for you to come to a clinic or in the comfort of your own home, and be having a psychedelic experience using LSD assisted therapy, with either a transit psychiatrist or therapist that will, guide you through this experience.

JR Rahn: (18:14)
We also are working on some interesting tech that if the experience, one of the major things Anthony that people ask me is, well, what if the trip is too much for me? I have anxiety and I have considered suicide. But what is this experience that you're suggesting to me as a medicine, it's just too much? How do you stop the trip? So one of the things that we're working on is an LSD trip stopper. And it will effectively allow a therapist or psychiatrist, if the experience is getting out of hand, if you as a patient aren't feeling comfortable, we can actually stop it. It's not our preference to, but we feel that in order to get mass adoption by both psychiatrists and potentially-

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:57)
You're giving somebody a kill switch if they need it. But so, and I was mentioning this to Sa'ad before we started our SALT Talk. There's a fabulous new biography on Cary Grant. Scott Ehrman just wrote it, new information. He was using LSD, he was suffering from anxiety, suffering from depression. And he was using LSD with the help of a psychotherapist back in the 30s, and 40s. And it was revelatory for him, and it helped him break the cycle of anxiety and depression. And so, how does it do that? For either of you? How does it break that cycle? What happens to the mind with a psychedelic that would cause that breakage?

JR Rahn: (19:44)
So I think there's two things and I'll let Sa'ad also answer but I think that the two main components that one should really look at here is around neural plasticity of the brain, actually breaking the patterns that have rumination. For example, on anxiety or depression, those things that are making you anxious, actually looking at it and talking through the underlying causes of why they are creating anxiety for me. I discovered an LSD experience that the reason I was consuming lots of cocaine and alcohol was really to numb myself from the death of my mother when I was an eight year old child. And those are things that you think about every day. And it certainly wasn't something that I thought about. And so what we talked about is another term called ego dissolution, which we find, we just did a phase one study in Switzerland, with our collaboration with University Hospital Basel, that really looked at what is the ideal dose of LSD, to actually achieve something called ego dissolution? Which is, allows you really to self reflect and think outside of, your day to day ego.

Anthony Scaramucci: (20:50)
And I'm going to stop you JR if you are okay. So when you say ego dissolution, means that we have this ego, which is this fortified layer, it's a husk around our brains, personality that protects us from the outside world, they know it's our self talk, it's our self confidence, it's our layer of protection. When you create ego dissolution now, you're able to observe yourself in your most natural state, in terms of the way you came in to the world through nature, as opposed to these environmental behavioral protections that you've developed. Is that fair to say?

JR Rahn: (21:30)
Yeah, I think it helps break down that Kevlar. I mean, I think what I realized my experiences, was that we're just all children wrapped in Kevlar, we get more and more expensive Kevlar as life goes on. But really what that experience is doing is exactly what you say breaking down that husk and I think that's something that people rarely ever do the self reflection.

Anthony Scaramucci: (21:53)
I mean, that was one of the more scary revelations for me that when you become an adult, you're just an overgrown child. Okay. And so then you think, Oh, God! Some of these overgrown children have the nuclear codes and then you start really well.

JR Rahn: (22:06)
So you started it not me.

Anthony Scaramucci: (22:08)
But Sa'ad, have you ever done LSD?

Sa'ad Shah: (22:11)
I have. Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci: (22:13)
So what was your experience with it?

Sa'ad Shah: (22:16)
Was very much as JR suggested it was, a melting into the entire cosmos or with the entire cosmos and an overwhelming feeling of oneness. So, my journey Anthony started in college, but not in the way that you think. I did my undergrad in economics and finance and political science, but I spent all my life studying esoteric philosophy. So I was passionate about the Kabbalah as it pertained to Judaism, and Sufism, and pertain to Islam and Gnosticism and Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, Good Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, so on. And then that somehow led me to want to learn the whole science behind energy, frequency and vibration. So I studied quantum physics. And what I found particularly interesting in quantum physics, is that you need to have an observer consciousness present, in order to determine whether the electron is going to behave as a particle or a wave, or both. So my question was, what if you altered that state of consciousness? And that's exactly what psychedelics do. They alter the state of consciousness. But if you alter the state of consciousness, theoretically, should your entire reality change? And according to the math, there's a strong case for that, of course, that reality actually changes. So-

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:32)
Well does it always change for the better? Or could your reality change?

Sa'ad Shah: (23:36)
No, I think what psychedelics do really, is that they amplify the unconscious. That's what really happens, right? You, it shuts off the default mode network, right? In our brain. So that's where ego is, that's where memories are. That's where our sense of who we are and our role.

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:58)
But Sa'ad, does meditation also do that. Is meditation a way to get there as well?

Sa'ad Shah: (24:01)
Yes. Think of it like a pyramid. So meditation can get you there, you can start anywhere at the bottom of the pyramid. But when you get to the top, you're all getting to the same point. So meditation can do that. Beating getting beaten almost to death can do that. Some major, massive stress can do that, spending 40 days and 40 nights in the desert can do that, right? You see where I'm going with this. So there's, a lot of other factors that can play that can get you into an altered state of consciousness. Psychedelics do that as well. But the key thing with psychedelics is that they really amplify the unconscious. I'm going to go back to something that JR mentioned earlier on, which is this whole notion that psychedelics are not dependency, they're not the, it's not the Holy Grail. They are simply a catalyst.

Sa'ad Shah: (24:49)
They are the key that opened the door, but you still got to open the door and walk through it. But if you're walking through the door, and you're in a room with an 800 pound gorilla, that's pretty scary. So what psychedelics do is that they reduce the size of that problem down to a bite size, which is much more manageable. And it allows you to deal with that issue, whatever that issue may be your own personal traumas, it could be ancestral trauma, it could be whatever. And now you're in a position to deal with it. And that's what has been profound. And that's where the research has really come in to show that.

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:23)
When was the last time you did cocaine JR?

JR Rahn: (25:27)
Last time I did cocaine would have been two years ago, after I really embarked on being going through a few different psychedelic experiences, and realizing that I had a beautiful daughter, had a great life. And there's absolutely no reason to put this stuff up my nose.

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:47)
And so the psychedelic experience of, so you, said, "Okay, I've got to get off of cocaine, this is ruining my life." And so the psychedelic experience, I'm going to tie both of you in here in a second. So what Sa'ad is saying is this ego dissolution, you're in that state where your subconscious is, raised up, and you're starting to recognize all the great things that you have in your life. And so is that enough to overcome the biochemical or the mental addiction to the cocaine?

JR Rahn: (26:21)
Well, I think there's two, I think you're dealing with two things, right? I think there's a need for an experiential therapy like, LSD, which gets you to the point or a few that gets to the point of understanding what is the underlying cause of my addiction? For me, it was the death of my mother, right? I need to go through that experience. Now, there is a lot of science, if you look at Nora Volkow's work at the National Institute on Drug Abuse that looks at dopamine, and how dopamine is a huge driver of addiction. And so another thing that we're working on is called 18-MC. It's derived from a psychedelic called Ibogaine. And what we're trying to do is create the antibiotic of addiction. As an addict, when you do a line of cocaine, you get that great sense of euphoria, that's actually a spike in dopamine in your brain. And over time, if you do that too many times, you're depleting the amount of overall available dopamine in your brain. And so your baseline dopamine level that makes you feel good and normal, actually goes down. And so as an addict, you are no longer doing a line of cocaine in my case, to get high. I could do an eight ball of cocaine and feel just normal. I wasn't I didn't feel high. And-

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:42)
So for people on here, that eight ball is eight grams of cocaine, that's a very large amount of cocaine. And, somebody new to cocaine wouldn't be able to do that right away, they wouldn't have enough resistance to your point, their dopamine levels wouldn't be lower enough even right?

JR Rahn: (28:00)
Correct. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't doing that in one sitting. But I think it makes a point that you're really depleting that dopamine in your brain. And somehow we need to bring that level back up and an addict. And eventually, we want to get a person to a point where, they can have a glass of wine, maybe one glass of wine, if you are an addict and still have a normal life. I think that's-

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:27)
Right, because that one glass of wine can trigger you. So the Alcoholic Anonymous people talk about abstinence, because they're afraid you're going to get triggered the glass of wine lowers your inhibition, you're like, okay, let me go to the code.

JR Rahn: (28:40)
Yeah, but there's no solution right now for cocaine on the market zero. For opioids, you have methadone, which is just a little bit less harmful narcotic. We're not moving the needle, no pun intended there. To get people better, you're just putting them on something that is a little bit less addictive, or sorry, more addictive, but less harmful to their bodies. And so I think this is a, huge issue we got to deal with as a country as well, the opioid crisis is going to cost this country two and a half trillion dollars over the next four years. I mean, these are not small problems.

Sa'ad Shah: (29:17)
If I can just add to that, Anthony, obviously, the opioid crisis and mental health is the real epidemic here. And that's the biggest problem and it's getting worse and worse. There are 300 people in the US dying a day now of just drug overdose. And it's never been this bad ever. Suicide rates among men between the age of 45 and 55 is going up. Teenage suicide rates are going up and everything that's out there in the market that we just talked about SSRIs, SNRIs. They're all trying to treat the symptoms but nothing out there is going after the root cause there's been very little innovation in any of these, other SSRIs SNRIs since it came out In the 80s, with Prozac. So no innovation, these drugs are off their patent cliff, there's not much of an interest from Big Pharma as a result to take a look at these, they're focused more on oncology.

Sa'ad Shah: (30:11)
And that's why there's this vacuum created. But quite frankly, because of the political initiatives that underwent in the 70s, that really derailed this process, we're finally coming back with a hell of a lot of information, and a lot of actual cases of individuals that have overcome their addiction. Gabor Mate was a doctor up in Vancouver, who has been helping heroin addicts his entire career. Talks about, he says, "What does it really mean, for a heroin addict to be on heroin?" And as the first time ever heard, something that really put it in perspective, he said, "For heroin addicts, it's like, when the heroin, when they're on heroin," sorry, "Their mother's given them a warm blanket. And, really nurturing them, giving them a hot bowl of chicken corn soup, or chicken noodle soup, and just, being there with them." That's what they feel.

Sa'ad Shah: (31:10)
So what's happening in the brain is if you can substitute heroin, for something that makes you feel just as satiated, and just as nurtured and loved, that the promise there has been what psychedelics and particular plant medicine have been able to offer.

Anthony Scaramucci: (31:26)
So-

Sa'ad Shah: (31:27)
What? Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Anthony Scaramucci: (31:29)
No, I mean, I was going to thread both of you together. I'm going to turn it over to John in a second, because I know he has a series of questions from our audience. But what you're basically saying is we have in front of us something that could help our addiction disorders? It got derailed due to politics and the sociology around psychedelics in the 60s. But had we just progressed, the scientific research, we could have gotten to the point where we are now where this could be a therapeutic, that could solve a lot of these problems abate some of the two and a half trillion dollars that you're suggesting, on the opioid crisis and things like that.

Anthony Scaramucci: (32:13)
And there's a market opportunity for this side, right? Fair enough this would be a very profitable line of pharmacology, if you will, because it's obviously solving great societal problems. And you guys are at the forefront of this. Okay, so with that, I'm going to turn it over to John, because we got to get ratings. Okay, so for some reason, the two of you are all fogies, apparently now, I'm an old fogy, which, I find revolting, and he's a millennial, okay? So for some reason, he gets ratings and so forth. So we have to bring them into the conversation at this point. Otherwise, we probably won't get the ratings that we want. So go ahead, Darcy. You I know you have questions for these guys.

John Darsie: (32:52)
Yes, Sa'ad. I want to build on what Anthony was just talking about in terms of the social stigma attached to psychedelics today. And we had a long conversation when we were first planning out this SALT Talks about your personal experiences with psychedelics and how it transformed your state of consciousness. But in general, in terms of how society looks at psychedelics, you made it very clear and JR made it very clear that you're not looking to be cannabis 2.0. This is not a movement about legalizing LSD or other psychedelics for recreational use. This is specifically about the medical use and supervised use of clinical psychedelic treatments. Can you talk about where we are in the regulatory and social acceptance of psychedelics, and how you strive to be different from the cannabis movement?

Sa'ad Shah: (33:40)
Sure, so first and foremost, when folks talk about cannabis and psychedelics, I quite frankly, don't really get it. And, they're completely two different paradigms altogether. Cannabis is all about a recreation play. It's been a movement that's been going on for a while. There, it's linked to so many other political issues, recidivism, the incarceration rates, and so on. But, it's a recreational play, right? That's where the real revenue is. What's happening in psychedelics is a form of play. This is about biotechnology, it's about creating an entirely new ecosystem, as well around it, because it's not just a take this pill and it will solve your problem.

Sa'ad Shah: (34:28)
It's about creating the therapy around it. It's about the set and the setting the intentions, and it's about post session, integrative science, which is what now I've had my psychedelic experience, how do I make sense of everything that I've just, experienced, and I've seen and I've just sensed and, how do I now take that and live my day to day life with, this, issue that I'm carrying and, they need help with that. So, that's what wonderful about this about what's happening in this Renaissance movement.

Sa'ad Shah: (35:03)
Because it's there's a whole infrastructure that's going to be born out of it. There's a therapist, there's a supply chain, there's the upstream, the midstream and the downstream side of the equation is the whole supply chain endeavor. So that's, this is going to be a multi-billion dollar industry, which is going to go into trillions of dollars, I have no doubt about it in due course, over the next, 7-10 years, for sure. Now, the one we-

John Darsie: (35:31)
[inaudible 00:35:31] experience Sa'ad, before we go any further, what really, resonated with me when we began when we were planning this, SALT Talk about your personal experience we heard from JR, about how in his personal life, how psychedelics have been able to heal some of these issues that were latent in his consciousness, but tell us about your experience with Ayahuasca.

Sa'ad Shah: (35:51)
Right, so my first experience with psychedelics is at the age of 38. I was one of those just nerdy, geeky guys, I was reading a whole lot about altered states of consciousness, because that's where that, esoteric strength studies and quantum physics led me to. And I read one of the authors, his name is Graham Hancock, who wrote a profound book called Supernatural and all he was trying to do was trying to explain why is it that cave art, which is 50,000 years old, found in South America, found in Australia and in Europe, vast distances from each other, resemble and have the same features? And his conclusion was, through great research was that these were done by individuals that had had some form of a psychedelic experience. And then they drew this.

Sa'ad Shah: (36:35)
And so there were distinct patterns that were recognizable throughout, regardless of your ethnic background, your upbringing, ethnicity, so that was fascinating. I contacted Graham, and we became good friends. And he invited me down to Brazil. So I went down to Brazil in 2009. Like I said, I was 38 years of age, never had any psychedelics before. And spend two weeks down there trying to understand the Shipibo traditions and their ways. And there were a bunch of other professors and anthropologists there, and a few individuals that were suffering from stage four cancer, stage three cancer and other mental health issues. What I saw there was profound not only in terms of the journey that I went through, and what I saw on, through Ayahuasca, but in particular, the stage four cancer, ovarian cancer patient is still living, the stage three cancer, pancreatic cancer patient is still in remission. And, there was a suicidal ideation case there, that individual is still living.

Sa'ad Shah: (37:32)
So I knew that there was something to do here. But I didn't know as an investment management professional, what the hell I could do, there wasn't an industry, then there was not much to do in terms of investing in this space. Until we saw what happened in 2017 2018. With what, Compass and MindMed. MindMed, just for the record was our first ever investment we've made 19 investments in this space, seen over 250 different opportunities been very selective. And, now, this is an industry that you've got, well over 30 publicly traded companies in this space. There are 400 private companies that are in this space working on various molecules or aspects of this industry. So it's, now become an industry that can invite a lot of capital. And that's what we've seen. So that's the personal journey that got me to the point where I just didn't know what to do about that experience. But I knew that it was profound at so many different levels. For me, personally, I can just say, and obviously, this is very subjective.

Sa'ad Shah: (38:43)
My tolerance levels went up, I became a better father, I became a better husband, I became a better son, a better co-worker, my fears went away. My fear of death, my whole relationship with death and understanding of death went away, a lot of my inhibitions went away. So it made me a lot more grounded. It made me a lot more in touch with everything, and just a healthier individual, what I call a, much wealthier individuals. So that's my personal journey there.

John Darsie: (39:17)
Thanks for sharing that Sa'ad. JR I want to move to you. Sa'ad talked about the size of this psychedelics movement. And, MindMed is not the only player in the space, you're one of the larger players, but could you talk about just the growth of the psychedelics market institutions that have started to come on board and exciting growth prospects that you're seeing within the psychedelics industry?

JR Rahn: (39:40)
Well, look, I think, really 2020 was the start of, the publicly listed component of the space and you saw, both ourselves and Compass go public that the in 2020. All both achieving unicorn status in terms of evaluation along with a tie. So there's really a clear pack in front when it comes to ourselves and, other more upstarts in the space. But what I think, when we talk about psychedelic medicines as a new asset class in biotech. It's also in many ways a new paradigm for how we're treating mental health. And we're doing a really bad job of treating mental health in America.

JR Rahn: (40:31)
It's the bastard child of the American healthcare system. 60% of US counties don't have a psychiatrist. 80% of our SSRI or anti depression medications that are prescribed, which aren't really, helping people in many instances are prescribed by doctors, just normal GPs, that or your family doctor, they have no specialization in psychiatry. And so what I think the overall Blue Sky opportunity here in psychedelics is not just the drug trials that are undergoing here, I think it is that they will be catalysts for building out further infrastructure to retool how we treat mental health in America. And, I think we, spend just under $300 billion a year on behavioral health in America, we're going to need far more than that spending wise, to treat some of the issues that are coming out of here.

JR Rahn: (41:31)
40% of Americans, have some form of a mental health issue or an addiction during COVID. These problems aren't going away. If you look just even at Rat Park models, which are, where they took two sets of rats, and they put one set in isolation the other to lay around to run around in a little city, the consumption of addictive substances went up 18 fold we just had the largest Rat Park model in human history just happened to us with all these lockdowns. The lingering effects of COVID-19 on our mental health, as a society and globally. To me, the pandemic is going to turn into a mental health epidemic. And it's good that companies like us exist, and that we're rethinking how we treat mental health in this country and globally.

John Darsie: (42:25)
So Sa'ad building on what JR just said, why did you go out and start Noetic to tackle these issues that you're seeing in society as well?

Sa'ad Shah: (42:34)
Thanks, John. Sure. So Noetic was a very organic endeavor, really, it was three partners coming together. Realizing that this is a space that we wanted to get involved in, we saw what was happening with Compass, with ATI Live, SAGE Therapeutics, Perception, Life Sciences, and we wanted to invest. So we pooled our own capital together. Of course, investment, as I mentioned, was MindMed. And we just started to grow the portfolio. And slowly we started to attract family members and friends. And they said, "Well, what are you doing?" And we're like, "Well, we're very excited about this space, but not for everybody. But, but we think it's going to be huge." And, that just, it really just grew from there.

Sa'ad Shah: (43:16)
We've got a fund now that has assets under management about 40 million, we've made 19 investments, we've had a few realizations as well as generated 189% return profile. So it's an exciting area for sure, but it's really moving at breakneck speed. There are five companies in our portfolio that are public, we only invest in private, right? That have gone public there about four or five more that are slated to go public. So this market is moving fast. Obviously, the public markets are responding very favorably to psychedelics as well, because it's actually getting to the root cause of the issues and solving the problem, as opposed to just treating the symptoms. And everybody following up on the science.

Sa'ad Shah: (43:58)
Now, what's particularly pertinent, is that when you get CNN, 60 Minutes, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg all start to report on psychedelics in a very favorable light, that this is beyond just a fad or a trend or movement. This has really, taken off and so, ours was an organic endeavor, which, we've closed our first fund, we're going to be launching a second fund, which is more for institutional investors. And that's why I feel that platforms such as this are very, important. We need to this industry needs to get the institutional investors involved here. And they are taking note, there's a first ETF that just went up horizons ETF on psychedelics, they're going to be more that are going to follow. So certainly institutions are working up to this, but institutions really need to pay attention to what's going on, pay attention to the science and play a meaningful role going forward. And that's what we want to try and help and support.

John Darsie: (45:01)
JR we have a couple minutes left. I want to finish with you talking about the regulatory side. So where are we? Are you more optimistic now with a new administration coming in that might be a little more open mind to these treatments and in specific states? What type of measures and progress have we seen adopted, that gives you hope about the future regulatory environment for psychedelic treatments?

JR Rahn: (45:23)
Well, I think, with the incoming Biden administration, and, let's see how that goes. But, the Blue Wave that, could be undergoing here, I think, is positive for the psychedelic space. I think there's going to be more spending on behavioral health and mental health. I think the opioid crisis was attacked by the Trump administration right? They came out and they declared war on it. We have more opioid deaths this year than we did when the outgoing administration started. So still very big problems to solve. But what I think is interesting is that the space is becoming far more institutional. When I first started fundraising for MindMed, nobody really took me seriously in Silicon Valley, they just didn't think that this space was going to be possible. There were early folks like Sa'ad's Noetic Fund and, others that took some big bets on us and were rewarded handsomely as we went public this year. We're starting to see, lots of the Hedge Fund Community from New York come into this space in a very, big way.

JR Rahn: (46:39)
Their characters that are in the in billions, the series that are, going on Ayahuasca sessions, all the real life, folks that, are the basis for those characters are investing in companies like ourselves. And, I think that's just an overall destigmatization, but also a wake up from Wall Street, that mental health and addiction can be a very big industry. And unfortunately, it's probably going to be a boom industry because of what's transpired here in lockdown and COVID. But coming back to your question around on the regulatory framework that we work under and what's ongoing in the United States, currently, everything that we do needs to be federally compliant, our institutional investors require it. We have taken investments from some very big institutions that manage academic institutions money. And so, anything that we do needs to be federally compliant as a promise I made to one of our first seed investors, Kevin O'Leary, he had no involvement in the cannabis space, because they weren't going and approaching their space in a federally compliant manner. So everything we do is at the through an FDA pathway.

JR Rahn: (47:54)
Or if we do a drug trial overseas, it's through a nationally registered health regulator. But there is movements, there are movements. For example, in Oregon, you saw Measure 109 pass, I think the reason that this Measure pass and just to clarify what that is, and it basically, we got, legalized the use of psilocybin therapy in the state of Oregon, it has a two year hiatus before it can come into effect. We think there's a positive step in the right direction. But our ambition as a company is to make medicines for all Americans that are scalable, and institutional grade business. And so we need everything to be federally compliant. And we find that the FDA pathway is going to be the most efficient pathway to achieve that for both our shareholders and our patients. We don't want a scenario where it's legal in one state, but it's not legal, in the other.

JR Rahn: (48:55)
And, that doesn't really build a big business or help a lot of people. Our objective is to heal people. So I think those are positive movements. But I think what people and investors should really be looking at are not the political process that are behind psychedelics, they should be looking at the data and the science, the safety and the efficacy, because that's what the FDA cares about. And we think that's the most efficient pathway and the FDA is very receptive to what we are working on here. And they should be because these are, very large problems in society that we need to solve over the next few years. After, this pandemic closes up.

John Darsie: (49:36)
And another piece that resonated with me when we were talking before we did this session was SSRIs, which are a common prescription for people that are suffering from a variety of different ailments, whether it be addiction, anxiety, depression, the efficacy rates of those drugs are, very low, I think somewhere between 10 and 30%. So this provides another alternative that really gets to the root causes, as opposed to the type of experimentation you see with SSRIs?

JR Rahn: (50:03)
Yeah, thanks so much.

John Darsie: (50:04)
Yeah. Go ahead, JR. Just comment on that briefly.

JR Rahn: (50:07)
Yeah, SSRIs are also highly addictive. They're not easy things to get off of. And so it's something to consider, these are the substances that we're working on if you look at the toxicity, and we still have a lot of preclinical work that we need to do across different psychedelic molecules, but these are relatively non-toxic substances that we're dealing with, and relatively easy to get drug trials up and running in the phase one and phase two.

Sa'ad Shah: (50:40)
Yeah. And just too important note without any physiologically addictive properties. That's a very important feature. Right, that-

John Darsie: (50:49)
Right.

Sa'ad Shah: (50:49)
So...

John Darsie: (50:51)
Well, JR Rahn, and Sa'ad Shah, thank you so much for joining us today on SALT Talks. These are type of topics we'd love to dive into. It's an emerging asset class from an investment perspective. And it's something with huge potential returns not just on investment capital, but of human capital and the ability for us to finally start addressing this epidemic as JR referred to mental health issues that has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. So thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to reprising this conversation, either in the future on SALT Talks, or like you mentioned Sa'ad earlier one of our in person conferences, potentially later this year. So looking forward to that, and thank you so much for joining us.

Sa'ad Shah: (51:27)
Thank you, John. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, JR.

Anthony Scaramucci: (51:31)
Nice.

John Darsie: (51:32)
Thank you, everybody who tuned in to today's SALT Talk on psychedelics. It's definitely an interesting topic that we're looking forward to exposing more people on. If you missed any of this episode, you can always access our archive of SALT Talks on our YouTube channel, or on our website@salt.org\talks\archive. And you can also sign up for all of our future talks@salt.org\talks. Please tell your friends about SALT Talks. We love growing our community. If you found this conversation interesting. Please refer people to our website salt.org where they can participate both in our conferences and in the SALT Talks. And please follow us on social media. We're on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. On behalf of the entire SALT team. This is John Darcy signing off for today. We'll see you back here again tomorrow on SALT Talks.

The Future of Renewable Energy | SALT Talks #138

“Storage is the Holy Grail of the energy business… you figure out the storage problem, you win the trillion dollar prize.”

Louis Evans is the president and CEO of Commonwealth Energy Group. Ed Fortunato is the chief economist at Exelon Corporation.

For many years, renewable energy could be seen simply as a subsidized inferior product compared to fossil fuels. As the technology has improved, renewable energy is now not only independently viable, but superior in many ways. Energy storage represents the most important next step in the evolution of renewables. The proliferation of personal renewable energy like home solar panels can go a long way in avoiding that challenge because energy does not have to travel far or be stored as long. “About 60% of energy is used to transport energy from the power plant to your home.”

The growth of renewable energy will have major effects on the geo-political stage. By establishing energy independence through renewables, the United States will be less and less dependent on the Middle East and Russia for oil.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKERS

Lou Evans.jpeg

Louis Evans

President & Chief Executive Officer

Commonwealth Energy Group

Edward J. Fortunato.jpeg

Ed Fortunato

Chief Economist

Exelon Corporation

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we started in 2020 and look forward to continuing indefinitely because we've really enjoyed these conversations with a variety of different guests and we've loved the engagement from our community as well. But SALT Talks are a series of digital interviews with leading investors, creators, and thinkers, and what we're trying to do on these talks is the same thing we try to do at our conferences, which is provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Lou Evans and Ed Fortunato to SALT Talks.

John Darsie: (00:59)
Lou Evans is the president and CEO of Commonwealth Energy Group, a graduate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, Pennsylvania Apprenticeship and Training Council, Louis is a highly skilled and licensed master electrician. In 2008, Louis founded CEG in an effort to assist companies in lowering their operating costs by lowering their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Louis is also an active member of the United States Green Building Council, Green Business Certification, Inc., and the Lead Green Associate. Lou serves on the committee for a local U.S. Congressman's military candidate selection board as well.

John Darsie: (01:40)
Ed Fortunato is the chief economist of Exelon Corporation, where he tracks global and domestic economic forces, forecasts future economic trends, and analyzes how these patterns and events impact the company. Over the last 17 years at Exelon, Ed has managed the proprietary trading book and the short-term analytics group, led the implementation of trading strategies in both the proprietary and hedging books, and has run the fundamental analysis group as well. Prior to working at Exelon, Ed served as the vice-president of natural gas trading at Merrill Lynch Global Commodities, and was a senior energy trader at Edison Mission Energy. He also serves on the board of directors for Partners in Excellent Scholarship Program and Marian House, and is the chair of the Loyola University of Maryland's Data Science and Science Board of Directors.

John Darsie: (02:35)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT, and without further ado, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:50)
Okay, guys, I just want you to know, I'm going to start this interview with great disgust. Okay, I learned that John Darsie is getting fan mail for these SALT Talks. I haven't gotten one lick of fan mail yet, and it's just infuriating me, so I just wanted to mention that to you because you're both cheaper than my therapist, but let's get into the discussion about the two of you before we go into your business. And so Lou, Ed, tell us something about yourselves we couldn't find on the internet, Wikipedia. How did you get started? Why don't we start with you, Ed, and then we'll go to Lou.

Ed Fortunato: (03:23)
Well, it's funny. I was listening to your discussion with Andrew Cuomo a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed like you had a lot of similarities. You talking about wooden spoons, I couldn't stop laughing. I spent my life, my younger part of my life avoiding wooden spoons and laughing at my mom when she'd break them on us.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:41)
Okay, so for the non-Italians listening in to the SALT Talks, what Ed's referring to is the grandmother, the nona, would come at you with a wooden spoon. She was stirring a pot of sauce. She cleaned it off with a dish towel and she started whacking you with it. And I like to tell people, some people say they got one strike in their family. Yet other people say they got three strikes. I got no strikes. I mean, she was starting to whack it before the pitch was thrown. You couldn't call it a ball or strike.

Ed Fortunato: (04:09)
We got a little bit bigger and you know, we break the wooden spoon and she threatened our father when he got home. And it was a disaster, but more than that, it was the faith, the family, the discipline that you guys talked about. And it just kind of struck a bell to me. It was really interesting. I just think we have a lot of similarities as far as that background goes. We were a little bit more working-class. I grew up in a Trump apartment, so I have a natural anti-Trump bias from a young age. So no offense to anybody on that.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:37)
So that was in Jamaica? That was in Queens, Brooklyn?

Ed Fortunato: (04:41)
In Brooklyn.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:42)
In Brooklyn. Yeah.

Ed Fortunato: (04:43)
Yeah. In fact, I cut out of seventh grade to go watch some film, Saturday Night Fever. And you know, I went to studio 54 for my high school prom. I got a scholarship to Brew College. I figured I'd give that a shot. My father would always say, "Go to college, go push a pencil when you get older." And I took a lot of odd manual labor jobs to motivate me to go push a pencil. So I graduated, I started on Wall Street after college. I studied finance. I fell in love with commodities and trading and a few companies later and 18 years at Exelon, and here I am.

Anthony Scaramucci: (05:12)
Well, Louis, go ahead. It's an amazing story. And this is one of the things that always gives me hope for our amazing country. Each of us have had these sort of backgrounds and upbringings, and we've got to keep that going, Ed. We've got to keep it going. Lou, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lou Evans: (05:32)
I too have fell victim to the wooden spoon. I have a grandfather right off the boat from Perugia. So you know how my upbringing was. Graduated high school and I'm in the Northeastern Pennsylvania area. And in that summer, post high school, we had a terrible flood. And I got a part-time job which turned into a 60, 80 hour a week job.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:12)
So let me interrupt you. That's Northeast Pennsylvania, is that Wilksberry, Scranton? Where was it exactly?

Lou Evans: (06:16)
It is. Yes, Scranton area.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:18)
On the Susquehanna River, right?

Lou Evans: (06:18)
Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:19)
So my dad grew up in Plains, PA. And so his family immigrated there from Italy. They were obviously in those coal mines. Then as my grandfather got older, he started a small butcher shop. So I know the area very well, and you're referencing the Susquehanna river floods, which there were some very big ones in the mid seventies.

Lou Evans: (06:42)
'72, Agnes was worst on record up this way. I was 85 and it was interesting. My first paycheck was in the thousand plus dollar range. And I thought, at 18 years old, I fell in love.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:03)
Amen.

Lou Evans: (07:03)
So I pursued a career. I got into an apprenticeship, went to school at night. Worked all day. And I was voted the most likely to not pursue a career, and very much so go in business. And everyone would kind of joke with me and say, "You're here to learn the business. We all know that you're going to go in business." And quite frankly, that's what I did a few years later around 22, 23 years old. Started out small and have started my own company, back then. And we did some commercial industrial work. And then I became a senior VP of another company doing major commercial industrial work. And then prior to the real estate bust in '08, the commercial markets for construction, they had dried up long before the bust and we couldn't buy a job. We couldn't buy a project back then. And I kept getting these magazines into my office on my desk, and they all had green covers. And you know, it was basically despair. And I opened up one of the magazines one day and started reading about green life, whatever you want to call it, the sustainability.

Lou Evans: (08:52)
And I took a chance with it, Pennsylvania had just deregulated, which means that you could now buy your electricity, kind of like the old mob bell deregulation. You could buy your electricity on the open market. And there were so many lawsuits that there were a lot of grant programs in play.

Lou Evans: (09:16)
So I put together a grant program. Used one of my close friends who still today owns a major call center, used him as my first customer. Once his grant money came through, he at that point set up a meeting for me with 11 investors. It was the day before Thanksgiving, 15 years ago. And I had hoped that one of the guys would write a check and I walked out of that room with 11 checks.

Lou Evans: (09:51)
So over the past 15 years through buy sell agreements, about four years ago, I've been able to take the company over 100%. And sustainability is a very broad word. Energy efficiency is more what we do, and we do it on a commercial, industrial, and municipal scale. I don't know if I can get into talking about my business model at this point, or save it for later.

Anthony Scaramucci: (10:29)
No, we want to talk about the business model. Let's talk about the business model, where you see it today in COVID. Where you see it post COVID. Tell people that don't know about Commonwealth Energy Group, what you guys do.

Lou Evans: (10:44)
So back in '08, we were a startup, and we had a great run for a good three, four years there because the incentives coming back from the utilities because of the lawsuits that I spoke of, they were very, very lucrative. A typical office light above your head would have a rebate in the same dollar amount that we would charge to put it in. So there was certainly no such thing as free, but we were getting a $50 rebate to put in a $50 fixture, labor and material.

Lou Evans: (11:26)
And that was a great run for a good five years. And as the incentive programs dried up, we dried up as well. And we knew that we had to make a pivot because we could show amazing return on investments. We could get projects to a two year return or less, and back in '08-'09, people would say, that's a beautiful thing, but we're not going to stroke a check.

Lou Evans: (12:03)
So we came up with a self-funding model because it was our biggest obstacle. At that point, we started very small, and we started to fund people and finance people. And we've grown with that model. So as of today, every project that we do, whether it's a sustainability plan or a retrofit as beautifully our new administration is talking about retrofitting many, many buildings throughout the country. We actually fund that project ourselves. So we put up the capital, we do the work, and we also guarantee the savings. It's pretty well a win-win win. It would be very hard for you to say no with us, giving you the capital, putting a guarantee on it, and doing the work for you. So it's very much a good model.

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:13)
So how do you guys connect? How do you guys partner up, Ed?

Ed Fortunato: (13:19)
So we have a little bit of everything in our company. We have a big umbrella. We have five utilities that serve parts of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Maryland, the Eastern shore of Maryland, New Jersey, Atlantic City electric, Washington, DC. And then we have a generation company. We're biggest carbon-free generator in the country. And we have a big retail arm. It's the biggest in the country. We sell more electric, more natural gas that anyone in the country.

Ed Fortunato: (13:46)
And Lou's company really just kind of comes in, and it's just another aspect of our retail business. It's not just, but it's a big part of our retail business. So we can use that as a marketing tool to get in the door and say, "Hey, we can come save you money." We can kind of make it more efficient. We can make your business run better. And not only can we do that, we'll sell you gas and power. And it's worked really, really well. I think it's been very lucrative for both Lou's company and our company too. So we continue that.

Ed Fortunato: (14:15)
And just to quantify how efficient lighting has gotten, and just using the lighting as an example, there's a measurement of BTUs per lumen. Lumen is the amount of light out there. And if you're burning a candle, you're burning some wood, it's like 0.2 lumens per BTU. A conventional light bulbs about 15 lumens per BTU. An LED bulb is in the tens of thousands of lumens per BTU. So it's gotten so much more efficient.

Ed Fortunato: (14:41)
And when I started in this business, you were talking about lighting demand would be about 20% of total demand overall. And you're down to 10 now, or eight or 10% now, and it's heading lower. So a lot of the low-hanging fruits been extracted, but there's still way more to go as far as just lighting alone goes as far as efficiency.

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:01)
When you look at the new administration and obviously Louis knows this, Joe Biden is from that area, Scranton, PA. He's thinking about things like the green new deal. He's thinking about things like addressing fracking and potentially curbing fracking. The Paris Accords, the reintroduction of the Paris Accords. Tell us about the impact that this would have on your business, if any, and how are you prepared and set up for the future? Given these things that are out there.

Ed Fortunato: (15:37)
Lou, me? Who are we talking?

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:38)
It doesn't matter. It's a free flowing conversation.

Ed Fortunato: (15:42)
Okay, good. I just didn't want to cut anybody off. The future is bright for energy. And I think there's a lot of reasons for it. I think one of the things that I was reading about over the course of the holidays, which is kind of new energy and renewables. And for the longest time, I always viewed them where they always seemed to be kind of subsidized inferior products compared to the fossil fuel business we have. And you look at GE, which is a major corporation. They're having trouble now, but they're a major corporation. The major acts as the capital. They're developing wind turbines with 13 megawatts. The average wind turbine in this country is about two megawatts. So you can drastically increase the amount of electricity coming from the wind.

Ed Fortunato: (16:23)
We have 60,000 wind turbines in this country. And if you start retrofitting some of those things, it'd be a vast difference. Hydrogen has been the darling of this whole pandemic, as far as energy goes. They've done a lot of work on that. And they're using that for energy storage purposes. You can take the wind, use it as electricity in off-peak hours, which is when wind blows, nighttime and spring and fall. And save it for a more peak day. And you can use hydrogen as that vehicle. And it's starting to make sense as far as pricing and as far as technology goes.

Ed Fortunato: (16:55)
And then you get a company like Quantum Scape, which went public back in November. That had a $5 billion market cap, went up to 40 billion and is somewhere around 20 billion now. But that's dues and solid state batteries in automobile applications. And that can kind of really change the game and challenge the Tesla and give an opportunity to places like Volkswagen and GM, to really kind of mass produce electric vehicles. And if they charge as quickly as they state they can, and they give you a range as large as they can, that would really kind of challenge the energy business. And I think that's important going forward.

Ed Fortunato: (17:27)
As far as Biden's work, we have a very balanced Senate right now. We have a really tight House of Representatives, and it is going to be hard for some of his more aggressive plans to get through. A guy like Joe Mansion or a senator like Murowski in Alaska can really kind of have an impact. Just moving one to the other because the Senate is so tight. And so it's going to keep very aggressive ideas more neutralized.

Ed Fortunato: (17:54)
Fracking on public lands is probably the most vulnerable, it's only 8% of our total output. And there's tons and tons of natural gas out there. In private lanes too. So it's not going to be a problem. Guess is going to be a transition fuel to the future. And yeah, I'll stop there.

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:12)
No, listen, it's fascinating. It's the reason why I wanted to have you guys on. Let's talk about the next 20 years in your business with everything that you just said, and I'll turn this over to Louis. What is the backdrop? How are you adjusting? How are you adapting to the landscape and the macro factors that Ed is laying out?

Lou Evans: (18:40)
That's a very interesting question because where we sit in the energy sector, whether it be commercial, industrial, or municipal, we will always always be the second largest expense next to people in an organization. So hydrogen is definitely the key to the future. Long-term battery and inexpensive battery is definitely just as good. If you look at the demographics on who's driving electric vehicles, it's mid thirties, over a hundred thousand dollar income, and that demographic has never changed. So something has to change, and lower price batteries, and maybe cars with a lot less bells and whistles that people will be able to afford them.

Lou Evans: (19:46)
You can look at a saturation point, whether it be new air conditioning, LED lighting, whatever that may be, but there's always something more. We're running, looking in our marketing, we came up with a bit of a plan where through COVID, I would drive weekly through Philadelphia and I would very much see all of these buildings lit up a 100% at dusk or at nighttime, but yet I knew there was no one in there.

Lou Evans: (20:27)
So if you take an LED and you've saved 70%, there is nothing cheaper than off. So lighting control now becomes the next thing. Why do you want to have a light on, even if it is 70 per cent cheaper, why do you want to have a light on if no one's there?

Lou Evans: (20:48)
Conditioning air, it is going to be massive. It's going to come out of this administration just because of COVID. There is going to be a great run on HVAC equipment. Everybody wants their air conditioned to be able to take COVID out of the air. They want that warm and comfortable feeling. So what we do, until there becomes a replacement for electricity, lighting and gas, we just need to get more efficient every day.

Lou Evans: (21:27)
And when it comes to sustainability, we do not approach sustainability the same way that let's say a Greenpeace tree hugger would. We look at it for the actual definition. We're here to help you sustain your company. And if it's financial, we'll bring in a financial person for you. We can certainly help you get your energy bills down, but we want that company to sustain themselves for many, many years to come.

Lou Evans: (22:02)
So I believe that the energy sector is in a great position because it is changing every day. We've got Steve Wozniak playing in the energy efficiency game now. So that's a great punch in the arm, a shot in the arm for the energy efficiency game. And we're what's called an energy services company, and now Woz is calling out ESCOs as the great new companies of the future. Everybody needs to be using ESCOs. So I believe that energy savings will never go away because HR looking to slash their costs will never go away. So we're number two.

Anthony Scaramucci: (22:59)
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let me Ed, because you've done a lot of work on this over the years. The relationship with China that the US is going to have, and the energy draw that China has on the world in terms of its fossil fuel consumption, et cetera. Where do you think things are going to go in the Biden administration with that relationship? And [crosstalk 00:23:24].

Ed Fortunato: (23:25)
I'll give Trump credit for one thing, he's made our relationship with China a bipartisan issue. And he's brought it to the forefront and they seem to be a threat. And as long as that's the case, it's going to be fairly contentious and a little more than competitive. Before the tariffs were imposed, there was a lot of talk and a lot of work on LNG exports to China directly. And that's kind of gone by the wayside. That stopped right now.

Ed Fortunato: (23:51)
But even without us exporting gas to China, it's still an energy hungry world. And it's still a very energy hungry country. And energy globally is a logistics problem. So if China was going to buy LNG from us and they're not buying it from us, we'll sell it to Europe and Europe will ricochet it over to China. So there's still demand for it.

Ed Fortunato: (24:16)
I think the Biden administration is going to take some of the rhetoric out of the equation as far as China goes. It's going to be a little bit less in the headlines and possibly a little bit more kind of clandestine or behind the scenes. I think Biden's going to work hard with Europe and other allies to kind of formulate a strategy to kind of isolate China. Whether that's a reenactment of the transpacific partnership, whether that's an alliance for trade with Europe, whatever it is. I think that they're going to kind of try and counteract China's influence in the world that way.

Ed Fortunato: (24:54)
The Paris Accords, as you mentioned before, we're going to rejoin those. It's more of a ceremonial type of a pattern. The cheap gas that we have in this country has done more than hurt coal and carbon emissions than anything else. So the combination of things is going to hopefully our alliances, hopefully our growing LNG exports around the world will kind of offset China. And also Russia's kind of influence with China as far as gas sales with them go to.

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:22)
But it's interesting. And I think it dovetails from what Lewis is saying about energy conservation and timing of the lighting, timing of the energy, making it more efficient. It puts America in a power seat geopolitically, right? Because ultimately we're going to be able to have some level of energy independence going forward, which will help the countries footprint from a foreign policy perspective.

Ed Fortunato: (25:47)
It sure seems that way. For the last 10 years, everyone's expecting the US dollar to collapse as far as world currencies. And one of the biggest supports of that is we're not shipping a trillion or a trillion and a half dollars out every year to countries for oil anymore. It's a balance of trade and the energy is fairly flat now. And that combined with the rich resource now, has kind of taken us from going to countries who are basically our enemies on our knees to begging for energy to kind of be an independent.

Ed Fortunato: (26:15)
And it's really kind of changed the politics of the middle East. It's changed our relationship with Russia. And one of my fears initially was, with lithium ion, China controls most of the cobalt in the world, they control most of the lithium in the world. And as a result, we're kind of going from dealing with the Russians and Iranians for energy, to dealing with Chinese.

Ed Fortunato: (26:36)
And now if we do develop solid state batteries, they are much more just common materials like zinc and nickel and things like that, which China doesn't control. So we'll have more control of our independence energy-wise and go from there. I'll throw out a quick trivia stat for you. About 60% of the electricity produced in this country is produced to move the electricity from the power plant to your home. And just a change in that would just completely make things infinitely more efficient.

Ed Fortunato: (27:08)
And if we can get kind of scale on solar, scale on wind, where you can use it in your house or put it on your roof, that transportation fee goes away. And it makes the whole system, demand would plunge for that. So there's just a lot of opportunities out there. Financing, it has been there for about five or 10 years now, and we need to kind of push forward and kind of have these new developments kind of take hold, which is what we're starting to see.

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:34)
Well, I'm going to turn it over to the earth's wild millennial who's getting the fan mail, because this is the way we get our ratings up. Louis, what can I tell you? It's embarrassing to me, but go ahead, Darsie. I know you've got a ton of questions for these guys, so fire away.

John Darsie: (27:52)
I don't have a million Twitter followers like you showering praise on me every day. So I got to latch on to just the single piece of fan mail that I get to try to boost my ego and boost my confidence.

Anthony Scaramucci: (28:02)
Well, you didn't have to bring it up though. You didn't have to bring it up and hurt my feelings in front of my friends, but go ahead.

John Darsie: (28:09)
So I'm going to start with Lou on this one. So the vaccine is getting rolled out. We're starting to see travel pickup a little bit, and we're starting to see sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Dr. Fauci said that by April, he thinks at least within April, he thinks the majority of Americans who want the vaccine will be able to get the vaccine. So when in your view, are we going to see energy demand pick up back to normal levels? And what will be sort of the path to getting back to the normal levels?

Lou Evans: (28:41)
You say energy demand. I would say that you're talking about commercial industrial. I would say 12 to 18 months. It seems like a lot of large companies are going to stay with this work at home model for quite some time. So that is going to be, it's almost a real estate question at this point for a REIT. That seems to change every day. Are you going to work from home for the next two years? Are you going to get back in the office?

Lou Evans: (29:28)
I was actually, Ed hosted a call yesterday and the downfalls of not being in the office. So from our standpoint, it almost doesn't matter because we're poised to help whether you're in the building or not. So energy demand kicking back up in the commercial, industrial space. I would say gradually over the next 12 to 18 months.

John Darsie: (30:04)
What are the biggest drivers in commodities markets in general as we head sort of into 2021? And into a more normalized environment. Ed, you want to take that one?

Ed Fortunato: (30:14)
Yeah, let me just pile one for the energy demand question for a second. Lou did the commercial industrial, but you look at the transportation side and until air travel improves, jet fuel is going to be depressed. And you're going to have a lot of people driving around. You've seen gasoline demand rebound.

Ed Fortunato: (30:33)
We average about nine to 10 million barrels a day of demand. We went down to 3 million barrels in April, we're back to seven or eight now. That'll increase as things get better, but jet fuel is a couple million barrels a day. And we're a fraction of that. And so until we get back to that travel, and whether it's leisure or business, and business is going to take a while. Zoom calls are pretty efficient. You don't need to stay for two nights for a two hour meeting anymore.

John Darsie: (30:57)
Right.

Ed Fortunato: (30:57)
I think that's going to change a lot and take a while to rebound.

Ed Fortunato: (31:03)
But as far as commodity markets, liquidity in the markets and fed stimulus and things like that have had a big help. You can see money flowing into different commodities pretty aggressively. You take a look at gold. Gold's price has been very strong, as money's kind of flowed there.

Ed Fortunato: (31:21)
You've seen commodities like oil be depressed because of lack of demand, but lumber demand has been through the roof just based on all the building demand for people. People in the houses are tired of being in their small cramped house. They're going to expand it. They want to do a little bit of work in their house to improve it.

Ed Fortunato: (31:35)
Businesses have been very ingenious in kind of expanding outdoor restaurant space and seating. So you'll see an increase in demand for that.

Ed Fortunato: (31:48)
As far as commodity prices going forward, I think it's more lack of capital going to the market than anything else. If you look at oil, or capital spending in oil has been cut 30% in 2020 and 2021 also. And as a result, you just know, when this demand does come in '22 or '23, you won't have as many projects online to kind of have capacity. And without that capacity, you're going to see prices surge and that'll be the market signal to go out and kind of go drill for more.

John Darsie: (32:17)
Right. Who do you think will be the biggest winners and losers in the energy space this year? And Lou, we'll start with you on that one.

Lou Evans: (32:26)
In the energy space, as far as customer goes?

John Darsie: (32:31)
Yeah, broadly.

Lou Evans: (32:34)
I'm seeing a very big jump in data centers. Data centers are expanding hand over foot. And they are huge energy users, which obviously comes with our time, right? We're in Zoom, we're in Netflix. We need more cloud storage. So data centers are expanding. They will definitely be winners.

Lou Evans: (33:02)
I think the at homes will definitely be winners. And I think strong REITs will be winners. They're adjusting and they're being proactive and they're taking this COVID time, with half empty or empty buildings to make the modifications to make everyone comfortable. So that when the day comes, people will feel comfortable coming back.

John Darsie: (33:37)
Ed, what do you think?

Ed Fortunato: (33:38)
You know, as far as winners, we've seen hydrogen be the biggest winner. Any equity that's invested in hydrogen or is doing research in hydrogen, has kind of jumped up. We've seen some realizations on hydrogen limitations. We've seen some progress on it. We've seen a big progress, renewables. Like I mentioned with the wind turbines. We've seen solar panels improve, we've seen storage technology just really kind of improve at different levels. Whether that's batteries or that's wheels, things like that.

Ed Fortunato: (34:09)
I'll just diverge for a second. Storage is the holy grail of the energy business. And whether that's a battery to kind of threaten Exxon Mobil or the house of Saud on the gasoline side, or flatten out prices on power. You figure out the storage problem, you win the trillion dollar prize.

Ed Fortunato: (34:30)
And there's a lot of work being done on that. There's been some progress and I think there's going to continue to be more progress going forward. And that's going to be the most exciting part of the whole business. And we've seen trends accelerate, and this is all really kind of come to the forefront over the last year or so. And like I said, you can almost imagine a world now with renewables. Where a year ago, you just weren't seeing it.

John Darsie: (34:51)
Right. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you so much, Ed and Lou for joining us on SALT talks today. We have a lot of members of our community who are investors in the energy space. Obviously it was a challenging year in 2020 with the pandemic and other factors that help drive energy costs, energy prices down. So it'll be a fascinating thing to watch. And hopefully we'll have you back either back on SALT talks later in the year or at one of our in-person conferences. We're bringing the SALT conference back in 2021. We'll have an announcement on that in the next couple of weeks, but we look forward to keeping up with you guys and hopefully talking to you soon.

John Darsie: (35:27)
Anthony, do you have any final words before we let Lou and Ed go?

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:31)
Well Dorsey, you may be getting fan mail, but now that I know where Lou is from, him and I, we know where the best pizza is in the world. It happens to be in that area. Am I wrong Lou?

John Darsie: (35:42)
Brooklyn.

Lou Evans: (35:43)
Old Forge, Pennsylvania, pizza capital of the world.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:46)
[inaudible 00:35:46] talking about Brooklyn, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Ed Fortunato: (35:47)
We can take you guys for a pizza tour [inaudible 00:35:50].

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:50)
You remember Brutacos in Old Forge, Louis?

Lou Evans: (35:53)
Absolutely.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:54)
See these guys don't know.

Lou Evans: (35:56)
Best [inaudible 00:35:56] in the world, Anthony.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:57)
These guys don't know white pizza, Louis. They don't know white pizza again. They don't even know what they're missing. Look at how naive and uneducated they are on where the best pizza is.

Ed Fortunato: (36:05)
You need [inaudible 00:36:05] gardens in your life. We'll get you there after this pandemic.

Anthony Scaramucci: (36:10)
All right.

Lou Evans: (36:11)
Anthony, tripe and safrita.

Anthony Scaramucci: (36:13)
Amen. Amen, Lou. All right, well guys, thank you for coming on. And we'd love to get you at one of our live events and we'll see you guys soon right after the pandemic.

Ed Fortunato: (36:24)
Okay, happy new year.

Lou Evans: (36:25)
Thanks very much.

John Darsie: (36:26)
Thank you to everybody who tuned into today's SALT talk with Ed Fortunato and Lou Evans to discuss the energy markets and the future of the energy space heading into 2021. Just a reminder, you can access all of our talks on demand on our website at salt.org/talks/archive, and you can sign up for all of our future talks at salt.org/talks.

John Darsie: (36:49)
Please follow us on social media. SALT is on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. And please tell your friends about SALT talks and about SALT. We love growing our community. We grew it tremendously in 2020 using these digital tools that we were sort of forced to use, with doing SALT talks rather than doing our conference series, but it turned out to be a blessing. And we're very excited to have all these new members of our community who are aware of SALT and everything that we're trying to do here. So very gratified by that. And please spread the word about SALT. This is John Darsie, on behalf of everyone at SALT, signing off for today. We'll see you back here again tomorrow on SALT talks.

Lawrence Rocks: The Green Revolution & Robotics | SALT Talks #63

“The Green Revolution will not happen without robotics.“

Dr. Lawrence Rocks received his Master of Science in Chemistry from Purdue University, and his Doctor of Science from Technische Hochschule Vienna, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in German in the field of analytical chemistry. He authored two books, The Energy Crisis (1972) and Developing Your Chemistry Fundamentals and Fuels for Tomorrow, with the former proving influential in creating the United States Department of Energy.

In the immediate future, our dependency on oil will remain constant. Technology needs to advance around extraction and storage before we can look at dialing down our consumption. However, oil and natural gas will likely never fully go away. Instead, we’ll learn how to use both more efficiently and only for industries that truly require the resource.

As for solar and wind power, these two potential resources are being approached the wrong way. Wind farms need large areas to operate, as well as a reliable source of energy. A collaborative between the United States, Canada and Mexico to install turbines offshore along the length of our collective boarders could solve for unpredictable winds and high real estate costs.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Dr. Lawrence Rocks.jpg

Lawrence Rocks

President

Lawrence Rocks Associates

MODERATOR

anthony_scaramucci.jpeg

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks is a digital interview series that we started during this work from home period, with the world's leading and the foremost investors, creators and thinkers and what we're trying to do with these SALT Talks is replicate the experience that we provide at our global SALT conference series, which is to empower big important ideas that are shaping the future, as well as provide our audience a window into the mind of subject matter experts and we're very excited today to welcome a legend in the field of chemistry to SALT Talks and that is Dr. Lawrence Rocks and conducting today's interview is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, as well as the chairman of SALT and with that, I'll turn it over to you, Anthony, for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (00:57)
John, thank you. Dr. Rocks, I'm beaming in today from beautiful Venice Beach, California, so I'm trying to dress like a millennial. I'm competing with John Darsie for likes so, hope you'll forgive me for my attire. You look great by the way. Let's get into your background sir. Why did you decide to become a chemist? Where did you grow up and what motivated you to take this arc to your career?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (01:24)
I grew up in New York City and at the age of 12, our class in elementary school had a science project, so I elected to try to make a telescope from available lenses, a long focal plane lens and a very small microscope piece and I put together a telescope that actually could see a moon of Jupiter, so I was very excited to see Jupiter as a disk and a little tiny spot, which was a moon and I couldn't wait to tell the class about it, which I don't know how it went over, but I enjoyed it very much and that sort of started me on a path of interest in astronomy and science and chemistry. They come together, especially my interest in latter years with health and the environment. The environment is a tremendous area, encompassing so many different things that you can go a million different directions in it, chemical, astronomy, climate and so forth. So, I'm focused on matters dealing with health and the environment.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:36)
Oh. You published in 1973, a paper called The Energy Crisis and it influenced the creation of The Department of Energy under the Carter Administration. What was the book about, sir? Why did you feel it was so important at that time to have a unified national energy policy?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (02:56)
Well, at that time there was a looming shortage of gasoline and oil, exacerbated by an embargo on this country and I thought that energy would be a very critical issue. It was very difficult to get the book published. The publisher sent the manuscript to various universities and professors in a variety of very big named schools said, "Energy will never be a story. Don't bother with it." But I persisted with my partner, Richard Runyon, he's now deceased and we did manage to get it published at Crown and sure enough, energy became quite a story and is still a story. It's just lingering. It pops up here and there with wind power, solar, nuclear and so forth, but that was my basic motivation that this is a story that's good for a lifetime or more.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:00)
You think that oil, sir, is still a national security issue for our reliance on it?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (04:07)
Yes, I do. I think that oil of course, the technology of drilling hasn't improved, so that the old method of measuring reserves, oil recovered before the drilling is slightly old-fashioned, but it's still an important measure, but we've got wean ourselves a little bit off oil, which brings up a very tricky question. Many people are saying, "We've got to end the fossil fuel era." Which I don't think is at all practical or meaningful, but we've got to simply reduce and use oil more wisely and our natural gas. So, I have thought of strategies over the last almost 50 years now since the book. I can't believe it's that long, but the strategies that seem to be most appealing are so encompassed in so called green revolution, but how to harness the wind and sunshine, that's the problem and I think they're being harnessed all wrong now.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (05:21)
What we need to harness the wind is a North American Offshore Wind Alliance with Canada and Mexico. Why, because the stretch offshore Canada through America through Mexico, the wind is always strong somewhere. So, you wouldn't need much backup, East Coast, West Coast. It's a regional issue. If you pick one area, the wind is erratic. The wind is erratic all over the world, but when you add them all up, a stretcher like that of six, 7,000 miles, the wind is reliable because it's always blowing strongly somewhere and another reason is that wind on land, the real estate is against you. I mean, T. Boone Pickens had a company called Mesa Energy, building windmills up the central part of the US and the company went bankrupt. The wind power for a 1,000 megawatts of wind, which is typical power plant, that's installed capacity.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (06:25)
It's stacked up and the wind doesn't blow, but for a 1,000 megawatts installed capacity, you might need 20 or 30 square miles and 500 windmills. The real estate is against you, but offshore the real estate is not against you, but to compensate for that big area you need, I think robotics. So, one of my themes I believe in passionately is that the green revolution will not happen without robotic assistance to monitor the security and minor repair thousands of windmills stretching from Alaska, all the way to Southern Mexico. The potential wind power would give us all the electric energy we need, but then that's a power grid problem between nations and we need cooperation I think.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:22)
So, let's talk about that for a second. So you're saying, at least for the immediate future, we're going to always have some reliance on oil and you'd like to bring it down. So, let me ask you about the green new deal, which has been proposed by some people on the left. What's your opinion of the green new deal.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (07:48)
I'm not familiar with the details, but if we're to say oil and natural gas, we've got to also harness sunshine, but I believe it's being harnessed the wrong way. Solar electricity has not worked in 40 years and I don't think it's going to work in the next 40 years except on an extremely local basis, highly subsidized and my reasons are that the solar panels convert sunlight into electricity in a PN junction, which wears out with time, because of atomic migration. So, the solar cell is not eternal. It may lose 50% of its power in 20 or 30 years. It's got to be replaced. You need a large area. So, how to harness sunshine, solar architecture. If homes and buildings were designed to absorb sunlight in the winter and shield them from sunlight in the summer, the energy saved would be very important, by oil, gas and electric power. We've got a harness sunshine first as solar architecture, second as electricity if possible.

Anthony Scaramucci: (09:03)
What is your view of what's going on now with the climate? Are you a believer in climate change sir, based on the science or what's your view?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (09:15)
Oh yes. So, I think climate change is way beyond theoretical idea. Global warming and with [crosstalk 00:09:24].

Anthony Scaramucci: (09:25)
It's manmade, man and woman made. It's being created by the emission of all the CO2?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (09:31)
Well, it does. That is a very complicated story. Nature has its own cycle. Drilling into Arctic ice and measuring the isotopes of oxygen 16 to 18 shows that in the last 400,000 years we've had about five ice ages. The way the earth has behaved, apparently from oxygen isotope per measurements, 50,000 or 60,000 years of very cold weather compared to what we know and then, 10 or 20,000 years of a warm spell, which we're in now. So, we've had five such cycles long before people were here, long before industrial revolution, but some unknown reasons there was that pattern revealed by isotopic chemistry in the polar caps.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (10:27)
Now, where are we now? According to that rhythm, we're about 1,000 years overdue for an ice age. However, right now there's a problem of global warming, because we're in a relatively one period may be coming out of it. Where does mankind come in? Well, we're contributing to carbon dioxide and methane, but there is a very big disconnect here, which is why I propose Weather Station Moon and here is the disconnect, in the last 50 years, carbon dioxide has risen in the atmosphere at least 50%, but temperature on the Kelvin scale has not. It's gone up maybe 1%. We are experiencing more carbon dioxide and more methane in the atmosphere and more unstable weather, stronger wind and stronger hurricanes, very unstable weather patterns and yet the global temperature doesn't seem to have risen. Maybe it's hard to measure.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (11:36)
So, my concept is weather Station Moon, an unmanned telescopic station on the moon to take a look at the earth in the infrared to get its true overall temperature and you could also pinpoint areas telescopically. So you could get pinpoint temperature and global temperature and secondly, to look at the cloud cover not just visibly, to see if it's increasing or not, but in the ultra violent to see if there's more silicates up there. The silicates would reflect sunlight and cause the earth to get cloudier and colder, the so-called albedo effect. So, a cloudy earth would be a colder earth. How do we measure it? Well, Albany satellites gets some idea, but we need a total global picture of the earth and the only way to get it, I think is from the moon.

Anthony Scaramucci: (12:39)
So are we doomed at our current projection? Some people are saying that they were in an average retrievable position or do you think it is retrievable?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (12:52)
Well, I think it's very erratic. It's almost like the stock market up and down. There was a little miniature ice age in Northern Europe, 1590 to 1640, well-documented in literature and paintings known as the Little Ice Age. So, that could be a forerunner of the fact that we're on a slope toward another ice age, but that might be a 100 or a 1,000 years from now. The isotopic record indicates we're overdue for an ice age for whatever the reasons are, but for the moment it looks like global warming, it looks like polar caps are melting, seas may be rising and people will be moving inland and Northward in the Northern hemisphere, inland and Southward in the Southern hemisphere, but who knows at what rate? Now, along comes the COVID virus and that's accelerating everything.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (13:53)
So, there's a gradual trend, hard to detect inward and northward in the Northern hemisphere, but COVID has now accelerated everything. We can see satellite cities, more telecommunications. I think the trend is not going to end. It's just going to be erratic and it may extend way past our lifetime, children, grandchildren and so forth, but I think the future is this inland and upward Northward movement. More satellite states, more telecommunications as we're doing right now and more short trip airline travel and I also think that if we do the North America wind lines properly and have sufficient electricity, more electric vehicles, I think the electric vehicle future is very, very bright with the movement going on now, if we take care of the power grid, which we're not doing.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (14:59)
The electric power grid in this country is not being properly monitored, it's got to be expanded for remote sources and it's got to be monitored. For example, in California, had we had in place drones take a careful look at the power grid, we'd see that in certain places there was tree overgrowth. Now, that's not anyone administration's fault, that's just a fact of nature. So, with robotic surveillance of drones, we would see that and maybe be able to correct some of it, but the high temperatures in California are quite a mystery.

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:46)
But you would say that the wildfires and the hurricanes are coming from the climate change and the global warming, or you think there's just a natural phenomenon? How would you assess that?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (15:57)
There is global warming and it's triggering off something that's very unstable. For example, a few weeks ago, we had a dust storm from the Sahara desert traveling all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Now, with a weather station moon, you could monitor that very clearly and it would really look like something on a nightly TV and it's happened before and right now, the fire is in California, the dust has reach Europe. You can detect it, you can almost see it. During the dust bowl of the 1930s in this country, dust was picked up in New York city from the far West. Now, had we had a weather station moon way back then you could really follow that. So, what I'm saying is that the immediate trend is global warming and maybe in the future, I don't know, a 100 years, a 1,000 years from now a freezing trend, because we've had these cycles for the last 400,000 years.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (17:08)
Well, we've got to monitor the situation now in terms of the total earth and parts of the earth, see from the moon you can get from infrared light, the total temperature of the earth. If you try to piecemeal it together, it's very hot and it leads to a lot of controversy and we can get the total cloud cover, the percent, the reflectivity of the earth. So, we need the earth's total temperature as well as pinpoint area temperature, total cloud cover, as well as pinpoint cloud cover, wind speed and it relates to weather forecasting and the famous problem of North hemisphere, Southern hemisphere air exchange, which now has come to light with the COVID virus. The experts are saying well, in South America when they're having their winter, the virus seems to spread and when we get all winter we're probably in for a spread of the virus up here. So, predicting weather pattern, sees the weather patterns would help. I don't know how much, but I think it would help in predicting virus outbreak.

Anthony Scaramucci: (18:26)
Doc, John Darsie, we're getting a lot of questions piling up from the audience so, I'm going to let John Darsie cut in here and ask you a few questions from people that are thinking about these big issues.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (18:39)
Sure.

John Darsie: (18:40)
So, I'm going to start on a more lighthearted issue and then we'll get back into the deeper issues, but you're a renowned chemist and you've applied your knowledge and chemistry across a variety of different subject matters, starting with energy in the 70s, as we talked about, including public health, but you've also done work in sports and I think it's really interesting, the work you've done with St. Louis Cardinals Shortstop, Paul DeJong, regarding different experiments about optimizing bat speed and launch angles and thing in baseball. Talk about the research you've done in the baseball world. You were honored by Topps and given your own baseball card, which was a first for a chemist, but talk a little bit about the work you've done and what you've learned about how to optimize performance in baseball.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (19:25)
Well, what Paul and I did was, we hit a baseball and looked at its bounce and cooled it and looked at its bounce and sort of studied the elasticity of the surface of a baseball with respect to temperature. Elastic materials tend to get brittle at low temperature. They lose their bounce and at very high temperature, they tend to get so off. They lose their bounce. So, if a typical elastane and this is in optimal temperature of a day of elasticity, like an automobile tyre, it's got its own range, a baseball has its own range, seems to be most flexible around 70 degrees. Different materials will have their own ideal flexibility temperature range and that was done in a hope of encouraging school children to do their own experiments and that's what the program with Topps is all about, helping school children realize that you can do experiments. You don't need sophisticated scientific equipment, economic status is not that big a hindrance, that children can play around and do something of a scientific nature.

John Darsie: (20:44)
So, we have another question again, switching gears back to the solar energy piece, and we have a couple of questions that I'm going to combine into one and that's about, what are the best storage systems that we need to meet peak energy demand as we transition to more erratic sources of energy and do we have the infrastructure in place to build a better smart grid on top of existing infrastructure? Or do we need to completely overhaul our energy grid to prepare ourselves for the future?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (21:15)
I think energy storage is a tremendous problem and there isn't any simple answer to it. So, what I'm taking is that what we need, is to somehow harness the internal source of power, sunshine and wind and then have a backup, but battery backup has never proved economic on a bare scale for nation's power grid. So, for my concept of North American Offshore Wind Alliance, I envision a small nuclear backup, small nuclear power plants. The old nuclear power plants, 1000 megawatts, they have too many problems, heat loss, it's been going on for years, but the smaller power plants as you'd find on a submarine or an aircraft carrier, don't have the heat loss problems because they're smaller. So, we need small nuclear power as a backup and for decades I've been saying, "Go small, go, small."

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (22:18)
Utilities have been saying, "Not economical, not economical." The Gates foundation has funded research in what's called a Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor. If fuel rods are moved about so that the plant doesn't have to be refueled more than once every 20 years, they think, theoretically speaking, it's being built right now in China. Why is something funded by the Gates Foundation being built in China? Because of the red tape in this country. Maybe red tape is a bad expression. People are leery of nuclear power and rightly so, because the power plants are too big. They're melting down. They're not cooling off. I mean, if you boil a potato in water and take it out of the water, it stays hot a long time, but a piece of potato cools right off. So, my answer to nuclear power is go small and the nuclear waste has to be buried in nickel steel containers, offshore in the ocean by robotic submarine. People are aghast at that.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (23:31)
Burying nuclear waste on land is never going to work, because the radioactivity dies off, it takes at least a thousand years. You can't have multi-generations of people adhering to safety protocols for a 1,000 years. That's not going to happen. There's no societal mechanism for that. It's almost as if in the days of Julius Caesar, there were rules about burying nuclear waste and we're adhering to them today. The waste material has to be buried in a place where it's inaccessible and perfectly harmless and that's nickel steel containers, they don't rust in salty water, buried deep in the ocean floor by robotic submarines, there will be no problem.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (24:23)
Now, we can opt not to have nuclear backup and the question is, what is the backup, since the wind will always be somewhat erratic? And the only answer I can think of is extend the wind system. In other words, they're filled with some way to tap the entire earth. It's always windy somewhere, but then we'd have to be sharing electricity around the world. So I foresee regionalism. Where we are, the region would be Canada and the United States and Mexico go offshore and you don't have a real estate problem, hook up all the windmills in one giant power grid, three nations are involved and work out the rules of sharing power, that they see as the only way to avoid the fact that people are leery of nuclear power and secondly, battery systems don't work.

John Darsie: (25:24)
In terms of burying nuclear waste at sea, would that have any adverse effect on the marine ecosystem?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (25:30)
None. None whatsoever. The nickel steel propellers of the Titanic in all these years haven't rusted. The steel cylinders won't rust at the ocean floor, they're inaccessible even if anyone were to try and dig them up, there's nothing you could do with them. The radioactivity will decay significantly in 1,000 years, completely in 2000. If you put it on land, there'll always be a problem with security of that land site, always and for example, the Yucca mountain project failed. Why, because there could be an earthquake and the canisters could fracture and material could make its way through the fractured earth, but in the deep ocean basin who's in the ocean floor, that's impossible.

John Darsie: (26:27)
So I'm going to call you after the SALT Talk about starting a business to create these robot submarines that we can bury the nuclear waste with Dr. Rocks. So, just look out on your phone. I'm going to give you a call. Another question we have people following up about wind energy. So, a couple of the common criticisms of wind energy are, the effect they have on birds and animals in those ecosystems, as well as disposing of the wind turbine blades. So, the blades are massive in size, obviously after they complete their useful life. They're buried in landfills, but they're so large that they obviously create a ton of waste. Are those concerns that you think make wind energy less attractive, or do you think those are just hurdles that we have to overcome?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (27:15)
I think those concerns are real, but I think they're small compared to the real estate problem. A typical power plant, whether it be nuclear, gas, or oil or coal is about 1,000 megawatts. 1,000 megawatts on land, you need about 20 to 30 square miles and maybe 500 windmills. That's a lot of land area. Think of the real estate. Just think of how impossible that would be in New York City. That would be ridiculous. One power plant replaced by 30 square miles of windmills? It's a real estate problem as what happened with the T. Boone Pickens and his company Mesa Energy. It didn't work. It's not an engineering problem, it's real estate, it's economic. The best place for wind is the offshore. Now we need a big area, so, we'll have to go to a big area. So, I think the biggest stumbling block to harnessing wind is almost political. Canada, the United States and Mexico must cooperate.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (28:32)
Now, years ago when I was doing work on the book, The Energy Crisis, I had an idea that the gas being flared off in the Gulf of Mexico flagged as being wasted, could be harnessed and piped, that the United States and Mexico should join up and tap that natural gas and pipe it and it was an idea. It never saw the light of day. The economics, the politics involved, what happened was the countries at the Middle East, ExxonMobil, lowered the price of oil. That killed that project. You see, there's a lot of competitiveness going on. One industry will lower prices to put another one out of business. I know that the windmills, they have a hypnotic effect. It's an interesting phenomenon, 60 cycles a second seems to induce ecolepsy in a very small percentage of people. So, that's a problem. Bird migration, that's another problem.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (29:49)
I don't want to trivialize them. I just think that they're way behind the biggest problem, which is economic, the land area. It's just too large to put on land, got to get it offshore. Down now that way you've harnessed wind, by harnessing sunshine, all the projects being funded are solar electricity. That's the hardest way to go. The easiest, the best is solar architecture, because the solar architecture will last forever. I mean, as long as the home of the building, whereas solar panels will definitely wear out. Atomic migration happens at the PN junction. It's a natural phenomenon like water evaporating. So, whatever solar cell you invent, atomic migration will blur it and make it useless in whatever 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, it will go down in efficiency. Solar electricity is economically disadvantaged. It sounds beautiful, I love it, but it's economically disadvantaged. Solar architecture is the way to go.

John Darsie: (31:04)
And we have another question about nuclear energy and nuclear fusion is sort of the holy grail of nuclear energy and there's been people that have tried over the years to create a nuclear fusion reaction for the sake of producing energy. Do you think we'll ever get to the point of creating a fusion reaction to create energy, because if we do, obviously it would solve a lot of problems if you can do it safely, but what are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (31:30)
It would. Theoretically it would solve a lot of problems. The Russians pioneered a design called Tokamak. It's a tunnel, a magnetic tunnel to confine plasma and in this country, we've pioneered Laser fusion. Pallets of deuterium, little glass pallets are hit by laser light from all directions. The problem with thermonuclear energy is that once you get ignition, it's so hot, it is just tried temperature. It seems to destroy the very container it's in. So, I don't know about thermonuclear fusion, I think it's very theoretical at the moment. It's way off in the distance, I don't see any thermonuclear electric power plants in my lifetime, or I don't know how it's ever going to be done if at all.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (32:32)
I think the way to go is standard nuclear, the way the Navy did it. Small nuclear power plants. Now, the utilities will say, "Well, that's not very economical." And my answer is, "You're right." It's less economical than one big plant, but what if one big plant melts down, how economical is that? Like three mile Island or [GMA 00:32:56] in Japan or the Russian power plant, that's not economical at all. That's what stopped nuclear power, the danger of a large plant overheating. If you have a small plant, it won't overheat.

John Darsie: (33:11)
What about geothermal energy? We have a question from our audience. They mentioned Yellowstone as somewhere that's somewhat central that could be potentially used as a source of clean energy. Do you think geothermal energy has a larger future in the United States and around the world?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (33:28)
I'm not sure about it. The power plants that I read about seem to admit to sulfur deposits, wherever there's geothermal energy. It seems to be gases off gases from the hot lava down below and they're usually associated with the air pollution, a lot of off gases and there also could be a problem with earthquake production and I just think it's too limited.

John Darsie: (33:58)
Well, Dr. Rocks, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to kick it back to Anthony if he has a final word for you, but we appreciate you coming on in and you're a legend.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (34:06)
Oh. Thank you. I appreciate. Thank you.

Anthony Scaramucci: (34:07)
Before we leave, I want to talk about your legendary baseball status Doc. The shortstop on the St. Louis Cardinals, Paul DeJong, attributes a lot of your insights to his prowess on the field. Tell us a little bit about that. You said to me something a few months ago about ligaments, which I've never forgotten. I'd like you to share that with our audience and tell us how you ended up getting your own baseball card.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (34:38)
Well, the story is muscle versus ligament. Muscles produce energy, ligaments produce power. Power is energy per unit time. It's the snap. It's like a bow and arrow. That you just stretch the wood and release it and release the string and it snaps back. So, the muscles are providing energy to the tendons, the tendons stretch then they snap back and as we age, tendons get more crystalline, less amorphous. They get more brittle, they could get strong.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:14)
Are you listening to that Darsie? Your time's going to come. Okay? Are you listening to that?

John Darsie: (35:18)
It's already come and[crosstalk 00:35:19].

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:19)
Dr. Rocks and I are already dealing with that Darsie. Pay attention.

John Darsie: (35:22)
I already had a knee replacement.

Anthony Scaramucci: (35:24)
So go back to the crystalline. Go ahead. What happens Doc?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (35:27)
The best gymnasts are teenagers and then in your twenties, you'll lose that and certainly in your thirties, but it's a well-known phenomenon with tendons and ligaments, that as we age they become more crystalline and less amorphous, almost like the automobile tyre industry has this problem, that the rubber has got to be amorphous enough to be flexible and crystalline enough to be strong. So, the weightlifter is developing strong tendons, more crystalline nature in the proteins, less amorphous, less flexibility, so they're strong, but they're less flexible. So, the discussions I had with Paul is that there's got to be a balance and I have no idea what it is for any one individual, it's an aging process, but there is a balance between being very strong and not being flexible enough to hit a baseball or being very flexible and not being very strong. So, it's got to be a balance. So, I think the way the athletes tell it to me, too much weightlifting is not good. You get strong lifting weights but you don't get better at hitting a ball.

John Darsie: (36:50)
I mean that's Tom Brady. You're preaching Tom Brady's philosophy there. At his age and he's the oldest quarterback in the NFL and one of the oldest that has ever played at a high level in the NFL and he talks a lot about flexibility and pliability versus trying to get stronger and it's helped him extend his career.

Anthony Scaramucci: (37:07)
He uses a lot of band work, right? He doesn't really use weights, right? He just uses bands mostly. Right?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (37:14)
That's one of the things that Paul and I have discussed and the other thing I've discussed is, what level of air pollution. This COVID virus, they're cleaning facilities, right? You can over-clean. I mean, you can have so much cleaning around that it affects the lungs and some of the chemicals interact with each other, which is a subject that goes, I think unnoticed. For example, cleaning fluids that have fluoride and cleaning fluids that have acetic acid, if you mix them, you get trace amounts of fluoroacetic acid, which can cause scarring of lung tissue. So, one of the phenomena I'd like to study, like to get into it more deeply is low level air pollution.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (38:04)
How it can take the edge off an athlete, a little bit of carbon monoxide, or a little bit of cleaning fluid, or a little bit of ozone. Let us say that it's reducing oxygen transfer in the lungs by 2% hypothetically speaking. So, you've got 2% less energy, hypothetically speaking. So you hit a baseball 400 feet. What's 2% of 400 feet, eight feet. That could be the difference between a home run or a ball court and the running track. See for a non-athlete like me, you wouldn't even see the difference, but for an athlete where the edge counts, I think one or 2% loss of power, loss of breathing, loss of oxygen transfer makes a big difference.

Anthony Scaramucci: (38:57)
So Doc, what would you recommend instead of the cleaners? Get these air filtration systems?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:04)
Yes. Filtration and also air it out.

Anthony Scaramucci: (39:07)
Like open the window?

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:09)
Right. Ventilation.

Anthony Scaramucci: (39:10)
Right.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:12)
The cleaning fluids do their job in minutes, but the excess can linger for hours.

Anthony Scaramucci: (39:18)
Right. So open-

John Darsie: (39:19)
If I'm in the car with Anthony I'll make sure to follow that advice.

Anthony Scaramucci: (39:23)
I would never let him in the car Doc given his habits, his hygiene habits, that's fake news. He's never been in the car with me. Okay? God only knows what he does in his own house. There's a reason why the bookshelves are green behind him, Doc, just so you know. Okay? All right, before we let you go, tell us about the Topps baseball card. We all want to hear about this.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (39:47)
Well, I feel very honored that Topps made a baseball card for me and for Paul, for our work with the projects that might interest children in science. I think it should work to interest children to do things of a scientific nature. It's quite an honor. I hope I can live up to it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:18)
All right. You look great in the card. I love it. Well, we appreciate having you on and I want to turn it back to John, where he's going to talk about some upcoming SALT conferences and hopefully we get you back soon after the election and talk about the direction of the environment, the economy, and all things related to chemistry, but thank you so much for coming on today, Doc.

Dr. Lawrence Rocks: (40:39)
Anthony, I can't thank you enough. Just for me, this is a great opportunity. I appreciate it so much.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:44)
Well, I want your message out there. I just think it's super important. Let's turn it back to John. I think we got the best of him, particularly when I said that the bookcase was green for a reason, Doc. I think we really nailed him. Go ahead Darsie.

John Darsie: (40:57)
Anthony's jokes always hit hard, but thanks everybody for joining us today on the SALT talks with Dr. Rocks.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: The Crisis of Loneliness | SALT Talks #61

“One of the greatest gifts that you can give your children is the confidence that they can show up as who they are.“

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States from December 2014 to April 2017. As America’s Doctor, he called the nation’s attention to critical public health issues including the opioid epidemic, e-cigaretes and emotional health and wellbeing. Prior to serving in government, he conducted research on vaccine development and clinical trial participation and founded several organizations focused on HIV/AIDS education, rural health, physician advocacy and clinical trial optimization.

He is the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. After being sworn in, Dr. Murthy embarked on a listening tour to see what was affecting communities across the United States. He found that, regardless of occupation, location or economic status, there was an crisis of loneliness that was not being formally addressed. Anywhere from 22-50% of people suffer from loneliness, far more than the number of people currently living with diabetes.

Loneliness is more than just a “bad feeling.” It affects performance and puts people at higher risk for heart disease, depression and anxiety. It affects our ability to have healthy dialogue with one another. If you take this sense of inadequacy to your interactions with other people, the feeling compounds, as you’re preventing real, honest interaction.

On top of this, society isn’t set up to prevent disease. Proper nutrition, good rest, physical activity and social connection are the deciding factors in good long-term health, but our current system addresses problems after the fact.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Dr. Vivek Murthy.jpg

Dr. Vivek Murthy

19th Surgeon General of the United States

MODERATOR

anthony_scaramucci.jpeg

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Joe Eletto: (00:07)
Hello everyone, welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is Joe Eletto and I'm the production manager of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and networking platform encompassing finance, technology, and politics. SALT Talks is a series of digital interviews with the world's foremost investors, creators and thinkers. Just as we do at our global SALT events, we aim to both empower big, important, ideas and provide our audience a window into the minds of subject matter experts. We are excited today to welcome Dr. Vivek Murthy to SALT Talks.

Joe Eletto: (00:39)
Dr. Murthy served as the 19th surgeon general of the United States from December 2014 to April 2017. As America's doctor, he called the nation's attention to critical public health issues including the opioid epidemic, e-cigarettes and emotional health and wellbeing. As the vice admiral of the United States' Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he oversaw a uniformed service of 6600 offices dedicated to safeguarding the health of the nation. Prior to serving in government, he conducted research on vaccine development and clinical trial participation and founded several organizations focused on HIV/AIDS education, rural health, physician advocacy and clinical trial optimization.

Joe Eletto: (01:27)
He received his bachelors degree from Harvard and his MDE and MBA degrees from Yale. He completed his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he later joined the faculty. If you have any questions for Dr. Murthy during today's talk, please enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and now I'll turn it over to Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, as well as the chairman of SALT, to conduct today's interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (01:57)
Doctor, it's great to have you on, it's a big honor for us. I sort of start these interviews the same way, my traditional question, there's something about you that we cannot learn on Wikipedia or from your professional service, public service, et cetera, so tell us something about yourself that led you to where you are today that we cannot learn on Wikipedia.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (02:24)
Well, there are a couple of things I'd mention. The first and foremost thing that led me here that isn't on my resume in any way, shape, or form, are my parents and my sister. I was brought up in an immigrant family, my parents traveled to the United States from India many years ago, and I was raised in Miami, Florida. We didn't have a whole lot in the way of resources or connections when we came here. There were a long time, things were pretty tight, had to be careful how much we spent in the grocery store, had to be mindful of how we lived our life. And I tell you, as a kid it was scary at times, I'll tell you that, but what I gained from my parents over those years were a core set of values that really have stuck with me throughout my life.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (03:10)
A value for hard work, a value for people and community and investing in others, and a value for service, giving back to those who have helped you and even those who haven't, recognizing you could be in tough circumstances one day yourself. My parents did that not by giving me a book and telling me, "Memorize these three lessons and live by them", but they taught those lessons to me by living their life that way, and so they are the most important reason that I'm here today, and that's what I want to share with you today.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:42)
Well, that's an amazing tribute to your parents doctor, are they still alive?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (03:46)
Yeah, I'm grateful they're still with me. In fact, they're probably about 20 feet away from me right now, because during this quarantine my wife and my two small kids and I have been in Miami, which is where I grew up and my parents still are, so we've been living the extended family life and it's been chaotic but wonderful.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:03)
Good for you. All right, so make sure you tell your mom that I live two miles from my mom and I've been doing her grocery shopping for the last six months, okay, I just want to make sure your mom knows that, I want to win some points with her before we continue the interview.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (04:19)
She'll say you're a good son.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:21)
Well, I hope so, I'm trying. I haven't been perfect but I've certainly tried. Earlier in the summer I purchased a book titled Together: The Healing Power of the Human Condition in a Sometimes Lonely World, and I got to tell you it's an amazing book. Very, very thoughtful book and I think you are making the connection which all of us need to make about the body and the mind, and how we handle stress and connect with each other, and how it helps us physiologically as well as our mental health. And so kudos to you, and obviously the book was very well timed, given the fact that all of us are in some level of home confinement. And I'm just wondering about, when you decided to write that book, why you decided to pick that genre, which I think is a fascinating genre, and what could we tell somebody here on this SALT Talk if that could tease them to get them go out and buy the book? Which I'm strongly recommending that they do.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (05:27)
Well, thank you, Anthony. This is anything the book I thought I would write, to be honest with you. It's not the topic I thought I would focus on before I was surgeon general, but what happened to me, Anthony, is I began my time as surgeon general on a listening tour, traveling around the country asking people how I could help, and trying to understand a bit about what was going on in their lives. And what I heard were some stories that wouldn't surprise you.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (05:51)
Stories of opioid addiction, of alcohol use disorders, I heard stories about violence in communities, about parents who were worried about their kids being depressed and anxious. I heard a lot of stories like that, but I also heard these stories I didn't expect, which were throughout so many of these tales of chronic disease, were these threads of loneliness where people would often say to me, not, "Hi, I'm Vivek, I'm lonely" or, "Hi, I'm Anthony, I'm lonely". They would say things like this, they would say, "I feel like I have to deal with all these difficulties and burdens on my own" or, "I feel if I disappear tomorrow, nobody would even care" or, "I feel invisible".

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (06:30)
And hearing that again and again, anything just from people who were old or living alone, but also from college students on college campuses, from members of congress, from CDOs, from people across the country, I realized there was something deeper happening here. And as I delved more into the subject, I realized that there was a lot of research on loneliness that told us it was more than just a bad feeling, but that it increased our risk for heart disease, for premature death, as well as for depression and anxiety. But it also affects our performance in school and in the workplace, and our ability to dialogue with each other.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (07:05)
So if you're looking at the world today, if you pick up a newspaper, or if you go online to any news site and you scan through the topics that are being reported on, I guarantee you that you will find subjects that ultimately are driven in some way by loneliness and disconnection, whether that's political polarization, or challenges that our kids facing in school, or the litany of chronic illnesses that we're struggling with. So I know it's not a typical subject for a surgeon general to talk about, it's not tobacco, it's not physical activity, it's not the opioid crisis, all of which I've worked on, but it is, I think, a root cause issue that we have to address if we want to build stronger, healthier lives and a stronger, healthier society.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:49)
So in addition doc, to the loneliness factor, what are some of the other things that you're worried about in terms of the public health. We'll get to the pandemic in a second, I'm more talking about the ethereal aspects of our health and our mental wellbeing, and what did you learn on that listening tour that you went on?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (08:10)
Well, what I learned is that a lot of people are worried about their health and they're worried about the health of their families, and it's coming from a few different perspectives. One is, people are worried that if they get sick, they won't be able to get good care, either because they can't afford it, because they don't have insurance, or because the health care system itself is not built for them. And I would hear this particularly from minority groups who felt like we had real trust issues with the system, but I also heard from many people who were worried that the fundamental building blocks of health itself were often missing.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (08:44)
When I think now about what is it that contributes to so much of the illness that I saw as a doctor over those years, it's a few fundamental building blocks. It's the food we eat, it's whether or not we get good rest, it's physical activity, do we get it or not? And it's social connection in our life as well. And if you think about it, as a doctor who went to medical school and residency and then worked for many years, I didn't learn a whole lot at all about how to optimize those building blocks in people's lives. I learned how to treat illness once it came about, but I think there are many people in this country who recognize that they'd much rather prevent a case of diabetes than get it and then deal with it.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (09:24)
The challenge is, society doesn't seem to be set up to really do that for us, so if we want to truly build, Anthony, a healthier, stronger society, what we've got to do is focus on these four building blocks and ask ourselves, "How do we not only inform people about how to live a healthy life, but how do we actually enable them to do that? How do we make healthy food actually cheaper and more accessible? How do we make physical activity more part of our lives at work and school and in our neighborhoods? And how do we facilitate and strengthen social connection at a time where work and other priorities have overtaken our relationships?" And even though we all value people, we often find that our relationships and those we love are pushed increasingly to the side as second, third, and fourth order priorities.

Anthony Scaramucci: (10:10)
You mentioned something that you call the social recession. Tell us what that means, the social recession.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (10:19)
Well, I was thinking about that in the context of what's happening right now, because in the context of... even before COVID 19 arrived on the scene, we were struggling with very high levels of loneliness. If you look at the United States and data from 2018, this is actually the more conservative data, I don't mean that politically, I mean that methodologically; those numbers put loneliness at about 22% of adults in the population who are struggling with loneliness. The real numbers are undoubtedly higher, but there are many surveys that have actually put that number closer to 50%, and some surveys, including a survey from Cigna, which have shown that the numbers are actually trending the wrong way, that they're increasing. To just put this in context, even if you take the lower number, 22% of adults struggle with loneliness, that's more than the number of adults who have diabetes, it's more than the number of adults who smoke.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (11:09)
So we were struggling with a lot of loneliness before, and then comes COVID 19, and all of a sudden, at a time of extraordinary stress and uncertainty, a time by the way, when we typically reach out to people to help them deal with that stress, we find ourselves having to physically separate from one another and we can't connect the way we were used to. And that I think, for many people, has deepened their loneliness, so when I think about a social recession, I think about a period of time marked by deepening disconnection and loneliness. And if you understand the health, economic and political consequences of loneliness and you recognize the consequences of social recession, the price that we will pay, is just as important and comparable, I believe, to the economic headwinds that we're facing as a result of this pandemic.

Anthony Scaramucci: (11:55)
One last question before we get into the pandemic, because I think we would both agree to this, that loneliness, people are afraid to admit that they're lonely. They have a self-consciousness about it, makes them feel like it's something that reflects poorly on them if they're not surrounded by people, and we also get that from social media, there's pressure on us from social media, we see people... trust me, my kids are always taking the picture stuff with the best lighting and they're trying to frame it out. In the immortal words of my daughter Amelia, "It's either real life or social media, I choose social media". Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of truth in that. So what ends up happening is, if we feel lonely, we can't admit to it, and so therefore there's a bit of a stigma. So how do we break that down? What do you suggest people do?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (12:49)
Well, that stigma's real, and I'll tell you that. Not only did I hear that in the people's stories around the country, but I've felt it myself, because I am someone who's also struggled with loneliness a lot over my life, particularly when I was a child in elementary school where the scariest part of the day for me was lunchtime, going into that cafeteria wondering if I was going to be alone. And at that time, I thought I was the only one who was experiencing that, and that's the real challenge with loneliness, is we look around us and we think, "I'm the only one who's struggling here, everyone else seems to have wonderful lives, especially if you look at their social media feeds". But the reality is actually quite different, we know now, based on real data, that people are in fact, all around us, struggling with loneliness.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (13:29)
But there's another reason actually that we don't admit it, because in our society, we tend to live in an extroverted society where engaging and socializing, especially in large gatherings, has a premium to it. It says that we're popular, we're desirable, we're attractive, we're interesting. So I think the real challenge here, is how to admit to being alone in a society that always values being surrounded by others. And so when I think about what's driving loneliness today, whether it's for young people like Amelia, or whether it's for people of our generation or people older than us, I think there are a few key factors you have to recognize. One is, we're more mobile than we ever used to be, which is great, but it often means that we move away from communities that we've grown up with and come to know.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (14:17)
The second factor is our technology. Technology I think is an extraordinary tool, I say that as somebody who built a technology company, who is a big fan of what tech can do for us, but I think how we use it is what makes the difference between whether we deepen our connections or dilute our connections. And I think the way in which we use social media now is predominantly geared toward ultimately hurting our social connection, because we spend so much time in front of screens we crowd out our time with people in person, and we also bring technology into our interactions, such that it distracts us when we're talking to other people.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (14:52)
But for young people in particular, and I think about my kids a lot in this context and worry about their future, I think that social media also undermines their self esteem, because it's constantly telling them that they're not enough. You're looking at other people's perfect lives thinking you're not good enough, you're not popular enough, you're not thin enough, you're not buff enough, you're not whatever it is. And so when you constantly feel like you're not enough, you approach...

Anthony Scaramucci: (15:17)
Just so you know doc, Joe Eletto met every one of those criteria, he's thin enough, he's buff enough. I just want to make sure, there's three of us on this call, but Joe has made the criteria. But keep going document, I just wanted to make sure you knew that.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (15:32)
Well sadly, not all of us can be Joe, but as we continue to work toward that, I think many people in society now, young people in particular, just walk around feeling like they're inadequate. And if you take that sense of inadequacy to your interactions with other people, what you find yourself doing instead of focusing on being yourself and just truly being present and listening to them, you're constantly thinking about how you're coming across, you're constantly trying to orchestrate and work the conversation and say the rights things so the other person thinks of you in a positive way, and when we're not ourself, we don't connect as deeply and as strongly.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (16:07)
So if we think about all this together, we realize that loneliness didn't come about yesterday, it didn't start with this pandemic, it's been brewing for a long time. And if we want to address it, we've got to start with recognizing that all of us at some point in our lives have struggled with it and there's nothing to be ashamed of. And this is the last point I'll make about this thing, Anthony, in terms of why people shouldn't be ashamed of it, because let me ask you this; are you ashamed of being hungry, or thirsty? None of us are, we know that everybody feels hungry or thirsty at some point. We should think about loneliness as the same type of thing. It's a signal that our body sends us when we're lacking something we need for survival. It's something we've evolved to do, because when we were hunter gatherers thousands of years ago, our survival depended on being in trusted relationships, and when we were separated from our tribe it increased our vigilance, it pushed our focus inward because we were worried about safety, and it increased our overall stress level.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (17:02)
If you transport that to 2020, Anthony, to the modern day, what you find is that our circumstances are different but our nervous systems are the same. And so we can think about loneliness not only as a signal that tells us we need more connection, but also as a source of stress, which in the short term can be beneficial, it can motivate us to pick up the phone or call a friend or get in the car and go and visit a relative, but in the long term, that stress has powerful and negative effects on our body, leading to physical and mental illness.

Anthony Scaramucci: (17:32)
Well I think it's very well said and I think we have to continue to have this conversation, because a lot of our illnesses of the mind are just that, they're illnesses. If I told you I had clogged arteries, god forbid, you'd put me on some medicine or exercise or whatever. Something wrong with my knee, we would take care of it. But when we have issues related to our mind, we are trapped somehow, we feel like there's a social stigma there which really doesn't need to be, so I really do appreciate all you're doing to make a difference in that area, because hopefully it'll lead people just to relax a little and be themselves and enjoy the authenticity of who they are. There were some in the White House, when I was there doc, that wanted me to care a little more about what other people thought of me, but what can I say? We did our time training at the Scaramucci house, just let me to be who I am. What can I tell you?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (18:28)
Well listen, I'll just say, last thing on that, you said something really important there, which is being ourselves is not always easy in the modern world. And one of the greatest gifts that you can give your children, is to give them the confidence that they can show up as who they are, and that what matters most is not the approval of other people, but it's whether or not they're living up to their highest version of who they can be. Are they living up to their values? Look, I wrote this book, not because I wanted people to be depressed about how common loneliness was, but I wanted two things to happen; one is for people to recognize that they weren't alone, if they were lonely. But the second thing is, I wanted them to recognize that our social connections, our relationships with one another, are one of the most powerful resources we have for healing, for strengthening ourselves, for enhancing how we show up in the world, whether it's at school or work.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (19:18)
And if I told you, Anthony, that I had a pill that could dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease and mental illness and that could boost your performance and could even enable you to dialogue better with people on the other side of the aisle and everything, I'd do really well if I sold that drug. People would be snapping it right up. The truth is, we have that power within us in the form of relationships, and what I want, and my fervent hope for not just the United States but for the entire world, is that we can recognize once again, that if we put people at the center of our lives, if we truly prioritize people in terms of where we spend our time, attention and energy, if we design our curricula in schools and our workplaces in ways that strengthen human connection, then we can not only come out healthier and stronger, but we can help people and or children will be much more fulfilled and happy than many of them are right now.

Anthony Scaramucci: (20:12)
Well, I think it's very well said, I'm glad that you took another moment to re-emphasize that for everybody. We get a lot of young people on this call, doc, and so I hope you guys are listening out there. Let me switch gears and talk a little about the pandemic, and then I'm going to turn it over to Joe because we've got a ton of questions piling up in the queue. I want to talk specifically about the disease for a second, about COVID 19. There's a lot of misconceptions about this disease; we were treating it differently in March and April than we're treating it today, so tell our listeners a little about that if you don't mind, and then tell us a little about these long haulers. What's your opinion there? And what is the long term prospects for them, frankly, in terms of their quality of life?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (21:03)
It's a great question Anthony, this has been such a journey of discovery, a painful journey of discovery as we learn more about COVID 19 and have understood not just how it's affecting us here in the US, but have seen what's happening in other countries, and my hope is that we continue to learn from what's happening outside of our borders. But where we are right now is that we have, unfortunately in the United States, reached a very difficult point where we've lost over 200,000 lives, we have nearly 7 million people who are infected with COVID 19, and those are almost certainly dramatic underestimates in terms of the real numbers. We know what hurst the most though, Anthony, is that it didn't have to be this way, is that we had opportunities and still do have opportunities to curb the spread of COVID 19. Is there a scenario where we could have prevented anyone from getting sick or dying? I don't think so. I think this was inevitably going to effect some people's lives. But what has happened is it has spread on such a scale that I think it has caused so much more damage and fear and anxiety, and has led to economic pain in terms of prolonged shutdowns, and educational, terrible impacts in terms of school closures that didn't necessarily have to be as prolonged as they were. It is not too late though, to change that.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (22:23)
I do think we know enough about how this virus spreads to put in place measures that can reduce spread, for example, we know now that masks are actually quite effective. Unfortunately, there's a lot of misinformation out there about masks, unfortunately we're not hearing consistent messages from our leaders in the country as well, which is unfortunate. But we do know that masks work, we know that distancing works, and the fact that we still have a lot of COVID does not mean that we can never resume our way of life. We can. There are safe ways for us to educate our kids and to resume certain types of work, we just have to have that coordination and the courage to have a clear plan and actually implement it. So all this to say that COVID is still an unfolding story, and my hope, despite the challenges we've had, is that we will muster a more science driven and effective approach, and that we'll communicate honestly and openly with people along the way.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (23:20)
One of the things we have learned though, about COVID, which is really interesting and unfortunate, is that there are some people who have symptoms for a prolonged period of time. These are colloquially sometimes referred to as long haulers, so people whose symptoms don't go away in the first couple of weeks, but actually may last for many, many months. And those could be symptoms of fatigue, they could be general aches and pains, it could be a mental fog that some of them have described that they experience. We don't know enough to really know how commonly this occurs, or if it ultimately will peter out at some point, or if it will be something that will be with people for years. It's still something we have to understand.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (23:59)
And that's why as we go through pandemics like this, investing in science and discovery and collaboration is so important. If we had learned from what was happening in Europe and Asia and actually implemented those lessons when COVID got to the US, we actually would have been much better off in terms of protecting our schools, in terms of protecting workplaces and ultimately, protecting people's lives.

Anthony Scaramucci: (24:23)
So you mentioned this brain fog, I just want to take one more question on this, there was an article this week, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, talking about the blood vessels and the heart, and that there's some issues there. Is that permanent damage do you think, doc? Or is it something that we don't know.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (24:44)
Unfortunately, we don't know, and there are two cardiovascular complications I think, that we have seen. One is myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle itself. Interestingly, and somewhat disturbingly, that's something we've seen in young people as well, including in young athletes. There was an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Cardiology recently, which it was a small study looking at a population of student athletes and found that both symptomatic and asymptomatic people who didn't have any symptoms, people who had COVID 19, that they both seemed to have evidence of inflammation of their heart. Now, is this consequential? Is it going to cause long term problems? We don't exactly know.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (25:26)
But the other challenge that we found on a cardiovascular level is that many people with COVID 19 seem to develop blood clots in the hospital. These are people who tend to be severely ill, those clots have been noticed even when they've been on blood thinners. So what is it about COVID 19, the inflammation it creates, it seems to generate what's called a prothrombotic state, a state where we're prone to developing clots, again, is also unclear. But one thing is clear, the more we learn about COVID, the more we learn about how many organ systems are actually affected.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (25:58)
In the beginning, we thought this was just about the lungs and then we realized that actually it can hit the nervous system, it can hit the cardiovascular system and it can affect your kidneys. And one by one, we started to realize, this virus is a lot more complicated. That's why it's important to be cautious, it's why we don't want to just say, "Okay, let's just let this virus run like wildfire through the population". Because not only will we lose many lives, and we've already seen that, but we will have many people who survive the virus but may have complications that they may live with for months and possibly for years.

Anthony Scaramucci: (26:32)
Well, I think it's a brilliant exposition of what is going on. We've got a ton of questions and we'd like to keep this thing tight, so I've got to turn it over to the very buff and in shape Joe Eletto. Go ahead Joseph.

Joe Eletto: (26:45)
Only because the gyms opened three weeks ago, but I had my mask on the entire time, I promise.

Anthony Scaramucci: (26:50)
By the way Joe, as an aside, I have to start complementing John Darsie otherwise we could have a [crosstalk 00:26:58]. Yeah I got to tell you, I got to boost, after what... this is our other co-host doc, after what you said about loneliness and stuff like that, I got to go pick this guy up. When I leave this call I'm going to FaceTime him and send him love, but go ahead Joe.

Joe Eletto: (27:13)
Good for you.

Anthony Scaramucci: (27:14)
Yeah, I got to do that now. I feel guilty about all my tweaking of him.

Joe Eletto: (27:20)
So turning back to social media just briefly, I want to ask; social media companies are under intense scrutiny for misinformation, and I went back through your tweets and you wrote out, "If social media companies can't police misinformation, they should shut down their platforms". I thought that's fantastic and I wanted you to elaborate on that, and considering the amount of people who makes important decisions based on what they read, potentially in an echo chamber, on their social media feeds, why aren't we approaching social media regulation as a public health issue?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (27:59)
Yeah, well Joe, the reason that I believe this is so important is because so much of that misinformation people are getting is coming through social media, and it has real consequences. This is not a laughing matter, this is the kind of thing that makes people decide not to take vaccines that could save their lives and protect their children. This is the kind of misinformation that sends people to take medications that are unproven and they actually cause harm, but they're misled to think somehow they would be helpful, and we've seen that with COVID 19. And so the real question is, whose responsibility is it? And what I think is problematic is when social media companies say, "My job is just to create the platform, it's up to people to use it the way they do". That sounds good and fine, and that might even be in accordance with the letter of the law, but there's a higher responsibility that we all have to each other to create and build products and services that ultimately advance humanity and don't cause harm.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (29:01)
And I think that in the vein of taking responsibility, I think that social media technology companies have a responsibility to police themselves, and if they can't police the harmful effects and mitigate the harmful effects that they are having on the population at large, then we have to seriously ask, "Is it okay for them to continue to function in the way that they're functioning?" We wouldn't do this, you wouldn't, for example, put a drug out onto the market and say, "It seems to help people, it's killing a whole lot of people, but it seems to help a few people so maybe we should just keep it up there and it's up to everyone to make up their own minds about whether they want to use it or not, and figure out whether the data's real or not". We wouldn't do that, because that doesn't make sense. Because we know it's actually exceedingly difficult to figure out whether a medication is safe or effective on their own. They need trusted sources to look at the data, to parse the science et cetera.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (29:55)
Similarly, it's very hard these days for people to figure out on social media what's true and what's not. Things are so often not labeled, if they are labeled as false it's well after the fact, and the bar that many of these organizations have for taking action is often way, way too high. So that's where my concern comes from, I'm not thinking about anything other than, first and foremost, what is going to help protect the health and wellbeing of people around the country? And right now, social media has not made a good case that it's on the side of helping reduce pain, suffering and improve health.

Joe Eletto: (30:29)
Yeah, and continuing on from there, I mean talking about the forthcoming vaccine which hopefully we'll have some information on the efficacy of it by the end of the year, maybe next year, and do widespread distribution by the summer at best, is what Dr. Fauci is advising us. But relating to social media so we don't have to dive into any rhetoric coming from the White House, what are people going to do? We're reading things online that vaccines aren't safe, or maybe COVID will be not as rigorous, the vaccine for COVID won't be as rigorous. Governor Cuomo just came out today saying that New York state is going to have its own review process for a vaccine, so all of these conflicting messages don't really instill confidence in someone who might even be looking at a vaccine for the first time in their life. So I'm curious to see what your take is on how you would solve for that.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (31:23)
It's the right question Joe, because it's on everyone's minds and especially as these clinical trials for the vaccines advance I think we're all hoping that we'll get a good vaccine trial result soon, and one that can hopefully deliver a safe and effective vaccine into our hands so we can start saving lives. That's the hope and everyone should be in favor of that. The challenge, and this is a bit of an unprecedented challenge that we're dealing with, Joe, is not that there are some people who don't believe in vaccines, that's been true for many years, but it's always been a very small percentage of the population. It seems a lot bigger than it is, but it's actually quite small.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (31:59)
The part of the challenge that's unprecedented is, we've never been in a situation where there was so much distrust of what was coming out of the FDA and the administration, because in Republican and Democratic administrations in the past, when we had major outbreaks or pandemics, both Republican and Democratic presidents often came together around the science and they spoke with one voice, in terms of scientists and political leaders all speaking to what people needed to do, and they had a process that had integrity when it came to evaluating a vaccine. And that's really essential and I think they did that because they knew what was at stake. It wasn't just a current vaccine and illness, but they knew that if you compromised faith in a vaccine, that it would impact you for years to come, for future vaccines as well.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (32:45)
And what we've unfortunately run into is a situation where because of, I think, a division, if you will, between what scientists are saying and what political leadership is saying, on a variety of things, not just vaccines but on masks, on hydroxychloroquine, on a range of other issues related to COVID, people are starting to wonder who's really telling the truth. And if the administration says the scientists are telling us that we should trust this vaccine, is that actually what the scientists are saying? I think that unfortunately for all those reasons you see what the Kaiser Family Foundation demonstrated a few weeks ago in its full, which is that 54% of Americans say that if a vaccine was available today for COVID 19, they would not take it. I mean, that is staggering, if you think about it. Because this is a pandemic that's turned all our lives upside down, we should all want a vaccine, but that speaks to how deep the mistrust is.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (33:35)
So if we want to correct that, if we want to instill faith, we've got to do a couple of things; number one, the FDA has to lay out clear standards for what constitutes effectiveness and safety, and the second thing they have to do is ensure that we will hear from independent scientists on the advisory board as well as from the staff scientists at FDA, hear directly from them about what their take on the data is. And third, they've got to make the data actually available to the public so that scientists and the community can look at it, can assess it, can opine on it. Without those bars being met, it's going to be very hard for people to trust an administration that has repeatedly, unfortunately, shown a callous disregard for science.

Joe Eletto: (34:18)
And I want to, just as we're winding down, talk about the next three months going into 2021, what a potential post COVID world is going to look like. We've just hit a staggering milestone of 200,000 people who have passed as a result of COVID 19 and complications thereof, there are some projections that will take us now up to 400,000; what does the rest of the year look like? What does the [inaudible 00:34:45] start of the new year look like? And what sort of mitigation efforts would a Biden presidency bring in to restore faith in the FDA, restore faith in the NIH, the CDC, and how do we reeducate the American population about what the facts are behind COVID 19 and the science below it?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (35:07)
This is a difficult time and the projections show that unless we take a different tack here to get this virus under control, we may lose up to another 178,000 lives by January 1st. This is according to the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Those are staggering numbers, but I do think that we can do things differently, and overall, as sobering as the numbers are, I actually am optimistic that we can overcome COVID 19, because we actually know what to do. We have extraordinary scientists. We have learned a tremendous amount. We have amazing civil servants who are standing at the ready. What we just need is coordinated, clear leadership to help execute and to make the plans that are necessary. So I think what a Biden administration would hopefully do is, to number one recognize that you've got to step in here with strong leadership. And what does strong leadership do? Well, strong leaders lead by example. Ultimately they step up and fill gaps, they take a responsibility and they deliver results, and that's going to be more important now than ever.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (36:13)
I think the second thing that a new administration would have to do is to rebuild trust, and the way that you rebuild trust is to ensure that you are letting science guide your decisions, but that you're also communicating openly and honestly with the public about where we are, where we need to go, and how we're going to get there. Part of that is allowing scientists to speak directly to the public, and you don't avoid letting scientists talk to the public unless you're worried about what they're going to say or not planning to follow their guidance. But again, we've got to speak with one voice.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (36:46)
And I'd say the third thing that a new administration would need to do, which I know vice president Biden has spoken extensively about, is to lay out clear plans on our priority issues. Those being; how do we distribute a vaccine fairly and quickly? How do we ensure that we close the gap on testing where we still have shortages? How do we put forward, not just a plan, but the resources to open our schools? How do we provide the economic support for people who are hurting so they won't have to find ways to go back to work while putting themselves at risk, and they can in fact prioritize their health? And ultimately, how do we put forward clear guidance for families, for workplaces, for states and for schools, so people know what to do to keep themselves and their community safe?

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (37:28)
All of this is going to require good, strong partnerships. It's going to require federal government that's willing to step up and work closely with states and communities and organizations. It doesn't mean the federal government has to do everything, but what it means is that the federal government needs to have the courage to lead and not step back and allow others to take responsibility when things fall through. Because that is the definition of a leader, you step up to fill the gaps. Look, ultimately I think we can do this. The reason I think we can do this is because we have overcome great challenges in the past, we have dealt with major outbreaks, we have distributed vaccines to millions and millions in the population, we have done extraordinary things in public health. Have we done something at this scale and addressed a situation that was this urgent in the last century? No. So this will take actually America coming together in an extraordinary way.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (38:19)
I lastly want to say this, which is as important as everything I've mentioned is, in terms of what government should do and what states should do; there is no way that we will overcome COVID 19 if as individuals we also don't step up to not only do the right thing in terms of safety, but to support one another. One thing that's giving me heart and hope during this time has been to see how many people have been stepping up in communities to support their neighbors, to look out for their family and friends and loved ones, to support strangers; I walk around my neighborhood in Miami and I see these signs that neighbors have put out thanking nurses and doctors and grocery store workers for putting themselves on the line so that others can be safe and taken care of.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (39:01)
And there's something deep within each of us, a spirit of common concern and decency and compassion that I saw when I was surgeon general, as I had the privilege to visit communities across the country. That is ultimately what will sustain us during these difficult times, and I want us to recognize that, because it can be easy to feel like you're powerless during a time like this because you can't create a vaccine, you can't make the medicine, but I want us to know that the compassion, kindness and love that we wield, that we have inside of us as part of our birthright, that that is one of the most powerful medicines we have. I say that as somebody who has written many prescriptions for medicines over the years, but there's nothing more powerful than what love and compassion can do to help us heal and to make us strong during difficult times.

Joe Eletto: (39:47)
That's fantastic. It almost feels like the problem that we're living through, however terrible, could actually be a solution to the discord we're having between political parties, between people now, and coming out of this, we could see something of a coming together and a solving of that. But I want to thank you so much for coming on SALT Talks, Anthony, do you have any final words?

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:08)
Oh, doc, I appreciate it. I brought my mask for everybody, you see that, so I'm wearing it in your honor sir, okay. And I just hope that people will listen because this will save people's lives, and if you love your parents and they have comorbidities, you want to wear the mask. Now of course, you guys can't hear me through the mask, but I'm making the point visually, so let's keep it together and I really appreciate your time today...

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (40:35)
Of course, great to be with you Anthony.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:37)
And hope to see you live at one of our events once when we can get back up and running.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (40:42)
Thanks Anthony.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:43)
Thank you.

Dr. Vivek Murthy: (40:43)
It's good to be with you and Joe, great to be with you and the team as well.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: The Global Response to COVID-19 & Lessons Learned | SALT Talks #48

“Science, of course, does not give you the instant satisfaction answers the public wants.“

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC, an American nonprofit global policy think tank with the stated intent of using science and scientific analysis to attempt to make the world more secure. In January 2020, he was recognized in the media as one of the first to alert the public on the pandemic risk of COVID-19.

“Holy mother of God, the new coronavirus is a 3.8!” Not only did the United States fail to act aggressively to combat the spread of COVID-19, it failed to act at all. With the last global pandemic a century ago, the public had no institutional memory of what to expect. People needed to see the consequences to believe it, but panic scares the market.

On mitigation, “It’s not about how much you test. It’s about how early you test and how well you contact trace.” COVID-19 carries an infection fatality rate (not case fatality rate) 10-20 times higher than that of the seasonal flu. Plus, most people have some degree of immunity to the flu, whereas very few have active immunity to the novel coronavirus.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding.jpg

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding

Senior Fellow

Federation of American Scientists

MODERATOR

anthony_scaramucci.jpeg

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the Managing Director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. At SALK Talks, are a series of digital interviews we've been hosting with leading investors, creators and thinkers.

John Darsie: (00:25)
What we're really trying to do with the SALT Talk series, is replicate the type of experience that we provide at our SALT conference series, where we try to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as to provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.

John Darsie: (00:39)
We're very excited today, to bring a very topical and relevant SALT Talk to you with Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding. Dr. Feigl-Ding is an Epidemiologist, who was one of the earliest forecasters of trends that we saw explode relating to COVID-19.

John Darsie: (00:53)
He's also a Health Economist and a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, DC, and is the Chief Health Economist for Microclinic International. In January of 2020, Dr. Feigl-Ding was recognized in the media, as one of the first to alert the public on the pandemic risk of COVID-19.

John Darsie: (01:12)
He's part of a FAS' work to stop COVID misinformation and communication, lead communication with the lay public regarding the virus. He was previously a faculty member and a Researcher at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School, between 2004 and 2020.

John Darsie: (01:31)
Dr. Feigl-Ding's work focuses on the intersection of public health and public policy. He also currently works on behavioral interventions for prevention, medicare costs, quality improvements, drug safety, diabetes, and obesity prevention and public health programs in the United States.

John Darsie: (01:47)
He has further expertise in designing and conducting randomized trials, systematic reviews, public health programs, public policy implementation and leveraging big data for improving health systems.

John Darsie: (01:59)
He was noted in his role as a whistleblower, and a leader of a key two-year long investigation into the controversial drug safety and risk data of Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra, that drew FDA and national attention.

John Darsie: (02:12)
Highlighted and expressed, published in JAMA, as corresponding joint first author, he was also recognized for his role in the New York Times and in the book, Poison Pills, The Untold Story of the Vioxx Drug Scandal.

John Darsie: (02:25)
A reminder, if you have any talks or any questions for Dr. Feigl-Ding during today's SALT Talk, you can enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen. I imagine today will be one where people have a lot of questions about what the future holds for COVID-19, as well as sort of an examination on the original outbreak.

John Darsie: (02:42)
Hosting today's interview, is going to be Anthony Scaramucci, who is the Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the Chairman of SALT. With that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:55)
See doc, we have so much respect for you, that we dressed up like billionaires. See, I'm wearing my Mark Zuckerberg hoodie, but it's a source of frustration for me. My only suit out here, my wife has it in the dry cleaner, so I apologize for the way I'm dressed.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (03:13)
No worries.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:13)
Thank you for coming on. I think it's always an important and central question, particularly for the younger people that are listening to our SALT Talks. How did you go in this direction with your career? What was the driving factor? Was it an Asian tiger mom who was like, "My son is his own internal tiger mom."

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (03:34)
Thanks.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:34)
"He just graduated from Stanford Business School. He's like a self-cleaning tiger mom?"

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (03:38)
Yes.

Anthony Scaramucci: (03:38)
What was it about you and your family that turned you into this illustrious direction?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (03:43)
Well, I was a normal video game playing kid, who in high school, played way too much video games until I was 18. I had this big tumor when I was 17, the size of a tennis ball, baseball. They said, "You have a five-year diagnosis with this kind of tumor right here." I thought I was going to die.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (04:10)
They luckily took out the tumor, and it wasn't that kind of cancer. It kind of woke me up, jolted me up. Life is short, it's about what you do in life, not the number of video games you can master on Legendary. That kind of took me off the-

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:28)
Hold on, I got to get my six-year-old kid in here. Who's was playing Fortnite right now, somewhere in the house. I got to get him down here to hear that. See, this is why I love asking this question. You had a traumatic event, a health scare. How old were you, 18?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (04:44)
I was 17. They took out the tumor when I was 17, yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: (04:47)
Okay, and how long did it take you to heal from all of that?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (04:50)
Well, it was like an open chest... they cut your rib cage apart kind of thing. It took a while, but I could still run. I started running a month after the surgery. My mom was like scared pretty, living [inaudible 00:05:05] that I was going to fall and crack my rib cage apart again.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (05:10)
No, it was good. I recovered, but couldn't be an astronaut or anything like that, that I wanted to originally be. Then it sent me in a different direction. I was really keen on risk and prevention of things, and that took me to Hopkins.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (05:29)
I wanted to be a doctor, but then I realized... I think epidemiology, predicting risk... because I became obsessed with it, when I went to college after my health scare. From there on, epidemiology was where fell in love with. I went to medical school too, but then I dropped out.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (05:47)
I did a doctorate in epidemiology and another doctorate in nutrition. I like, "You know what? Life's about what you need to do, not collecting a third doctorate or something behind your name or anything like that." That's why I became an epidemiologist.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:02)
Okay, so I love the philosophy. I'm going to take you back to January 20th, 2020, which feels like it's 7 to 10 years ago now. You posted a thread on Twitter, which I think got a lot of fanfare.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:18)
At that time, people still really didn't know what was going on, myself included. It was a pre-publication of a paper on the novel coronavirus, where you said, "Holy mother of God, the new coronavirus is a 3.8." What did that mean? Was that the [crosstalk 00:06:36]?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (06:36)
Yeah, that was the R-naught.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:37)
R-naught.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (06:37)
That was the R-naught.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:38)
The R-naught, okay.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (06:40)
At first, [crosstalk 00:06:40].

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:40)
Let's tell people what the R-naught is. Some of our viewers may not know.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (06:44)
Yeah, the R-naught is basically the R-naught, that means the raw part. Means for every infected person, that person infects 3.8 additional people in an exponential manner.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:56)
Per day.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (06:58)
Per transmission.

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:59)
Per transmission.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (07:00)
Not per day, per transmission. That person gives-

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:02)
Okay.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (07:02)
... another 3.8, gives another 3.8. You can see how this thing just cascades out of control exponentially. Whether it's two-

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:09)
Something like the Ebola virus, what was the R-naught on the Ebola virus?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (07:13)
Ebola, it's slightly lower. The thing is, it's not just the R-Naught. It's also for example, Ebola fizzles out. Ebola's R-naught is a little lower and it fizzles out, because it kills 50%, case mortality. A virus that grows... you have to spread fast, but not kill everyone along the way too quickly.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (07:35)
If you do that, then it fizzles out. This is why this coronavirus or COVID-19 is such a weird in between. It kills those who are susceptible, especially if you're obese and a heart disease, or underlying factors with very high rate, what hospitalizes them.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (07:55)
Then for some young people, it just passes asymptomatically. They don't even know they're sick, but they're making everyone around them sick. This is why it's so pernicious. It's like a double-edged... really light and spreads really fast.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (08:11)
Contagious silently, but then it kills and maims those elderly and have risk factors. It's spread, and attends to super spread. It either spreads... oftentimes just one or two people, and then other times 60 people at a wedding for example.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (08:30)
We know this kind of stuff happens. In January, when I saw it, with the R-naught, I knew this was bad, because it wasn't just the paper. I have relatives in China who've been sharing info with me.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (08:43)
They basically piece up together like, "This is bad." Most scientists... I don't work in academia anymore. Most scientists are too shy, too gun-shy to say, "Call it out in a manner that everyone can hear." I had nothing to lose. I was leaving Harvard anyways.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (09:05)
I just said, "You know what? I'm going to go all out and say, "It's thermonuclear level bad. It's going to be really, really bad." Back then, you might as well tell people about aliens, to be honest. People don't know what the hell it is.

Anthony Scaramucci: (09:21)
Well, you called it out. Some people listened. A lot of people, frankly, they didn't listen. As an example, the next day, South Korea got its first infection.

Anthony Scaramucci: (09:33)
It seemed like they listened, had the right culture to respond to the virus. The United States got its first infection on the same day, January 21st. What do you think went wrong in the United States?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (09:48)
Yeah, there's a whole boatload of things. Someday we're going to have a reckoning of everything, but I think it's a culmination of-

Anthony Scaramucci: (09:52)
Okay, almost like a 9/11 Commission, a Coronavirus-

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (09:58)
Yeah, I think there will be. There definitely will be.

Anthony Scaramucci: (10:00)
Yeah, sure. I believe that.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (10:02)
Not under the Trump administration, but someday.

Anthony Scaramucci: (10:03)
A responsible officer of government will need to do that at some point, so that we can learn from it and figure out what-

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (10:11)
Yeah. I think what went wrong is a series of... we didn't react. There's like, people have this tendency to, "Oh, don't overreact. Don't be alarmist." There is a pro-alarmism and anti-alarmism. This climate change, people have been sounding alarm for a long time, but people don't see it.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (10:29)
People need to see it to believe it. I think people don't want to cause panic, because again, they scare the markets. At the same time, people have a limit of imagination. We haven't seen a pandemic like this in over 100 years, and we don't have a good memory of history.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (10:49)
Again, people can't believe something that they haven't seen themselves. They don't take it seriously. When it comes to taking precautions, people basically, "No, we don't have to go that extreme. No, we don't have to. That's too much." It's just that gut reaction. That's just the first line kind of thing.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (11:10)
Also, obviously testing. We should have tested aggressively. It's not just about how much you test, but how early and you do it. You contact trace. America is just... we have some lab testing issues, but we also didn't contact trace.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (11:27)
We didn't do lockdowns fast enough. We didn't do mask wearing early enough. There're so many things that we went wrong at. At the very minimum, we did not soak in the reality fast enough.

Anthony Scaramucci: (11:44)
Actually, they seem to have done that in Europe. They seem to have done that in parts of Asia, and their economies seem to be more open than our economy. Is that fair to say?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (11:54)
They are now, but their lockdowns were a lot harsher. Italy lockdowns, you weren't even allowed to go the park or go outside. In China, Wuhan, the lockdowns were so harsh. You were not even allowed to go outside, to go grocery shopping.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (12:08)
They would bring the food to your neighborhood, little community cluster. They were like, tie the food to a pulley to pull it up to your third, fourth, sixth floor apartment. It was just that intense and no one was allowed out.

Anthony Scaramucci: (12:24)
[crosstalk 00:12:24].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (12:24)
They scanned their cell phone SIM cards, to make sure you weren't in the hotspot-

Anthony Scaramucci: (12:29)
Sure.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (12:29)
... because, "We don't believe if you haven't been to Wuhan. You show us your SIM card, has it touched a Wuhan SIM card tower?" We can't do that here. There is a degree of individuality and freedom. It's really difficult. Listening to big government, half the country is anti-big government.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (12:49)
This is what government's for. In times of crisis, coordinating all these kind of things. I think our society was just not prepared. We're just way too [inaudible 00:13:02]. If you actually look at some of your lockdown rules, it's half pages lockdowns, three pages of exemptions.

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:08)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (13:10)
It's completely different, what we did.

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:13)
Let's talk about the disease for a second, because we got a lot of information on this disease, some disinformation. I have friends of mine like Chris Cuomo that are long haulers.

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:24)
They're having a hard time coming back from the disease 100%. What is the disease actually doing to the body? Is it a respiratory virus, or is it attacking other organs in the body? Contemporaneous to the respiratory area of our body.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (13:39)
Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: (13:39)
Tell us about the disease and your observation, and what we're learning from the epidemiologists and from the autopsies frankly?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (13:47)
Yeah, I think it's already showing that it's clearly more than just respiratory. It has neurological effects. Actually for example, the classic symptom of you losing your smell, it's actually not because your sensors are dulled. It's actually neurological.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:09)
It's because of affecting your nervous system. That's actually why you lose your sense of smell. Not because your receptors are malfunctioning. Similarly, you have brain fog. There's a lot of people with brain fog, long-term. The most-

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:25)
What is brain fog? These words are-

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:31)
Brain fog is just cognitive memory problems. Not [crosstalk 00:14:31].

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:31)
Hard time doing math.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:32)
Short term recall-

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:35)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:35)
These kind of verbal [crosstalk 00:14:37].

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:36)
I can't remember the name or the place that I was at or something like that.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:40)
Yeah, exactly.

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:41)
Yeah.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:41)
Exactly. It's just that memory fog, which people generically call it but-

Anthony Scaramucci: (14:44)
Is this stuff reversible, doc?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (14:48)
I don't know, this is the stuff that we're finding out. We're in a fog of war, literally. Here's the other thing, the frustration is, normally science is behind the walls. We figured out, "Oh shit, okay. This is true. This is not true. Okay, here's the story. All right, now let's go tell the public."

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (15:06)
Now people were so hungry, that we don't know... there's a lot of conflicting stuff. There's a lot crazy people peddling dangerous theories too at hydroxychloroquine. Being one of them, this other bleach thing and I can go on.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (15:27)
I think reversibility, we'll figure it out. I think there's other things like heart... we already know heart disease, myocarditis and other inflammations, also clearly well known.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (15:41)
There's actually some new evidence. I hate to tell it, but it actually affects sperm quality for a short period of time at least. In fact, if anything, if you actually want to tell people to wear masks and obey social distancing.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (15:59)
Tell the fragile, ego sensitive men who don't want to wear a mask, they will actually hurt their sperm quality. Honestly, that would actually get people to wear masks and social distance, way more than telling them, "Oh, you'll help other people. Protect them."

John Darsie: (16:19)
I thought college football would be the motivator for people in the South, but that didn't work either. Now a lot of places in the country have no college football.

Anthony Scaramucci: (16:26)
Well, and just to let you know, doc, that worked for me. I'm masked up for the rest of the [crosstalk 00:16:31].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (16:30)
Masking up right now.

Anthony Scaramucci: (16:31)
Okay, even though I don't have anybody near me, I just don't want anything to happen to my sperm.

John Darsie: (16:36)
You're still going, Anthony, huh? You still want more.

Anthony Scaramucci: (16:39)
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:16:39].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (16:40)
Want more kids [crosstalk 00:16:41].

John Darsie: (16:41)
[crosstalk 00:16:41].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (16:41)
That's good. I only have-

Anthony Scaramucci: (16:42)
Yeah, I got a lot of kids. I may have a lot of kids coming. We'll just stick with the mask, I think until the end of this interview. Let's go to another question related to misinformation. The virus is just going to disappear. The virus is just like the flu.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (17:02)
Yeah.

Anthony Scaramucci: (17:03)
I am going to take the mask off.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (17:04)
Yeah, that is-

Anthony Scaramucci: (17:05)
I thought that was very dramatic. I thought I was having a dramatic moment there.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (17:08)
No, dramatic is necessary to get people... I tell people, literally, you have to shout in a way people can understand and emotionally connect with. If you're just using scientific talk-

Anthony Scaramucci: (17:20)
You got me with the sperm.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (17:20)
I know.

Anthony Scaramucci: (17:21)
I'll be wearing a hazmat suit next time I'm in the local supermarket. Let's go to this information, the flu and the disappearing. I mean-

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (17:32)
First of all, the flu is... people don't get the flu test normally. We impute it from some statistical algorithm. For this, there's also, people are confused. There's two statistics. One, there's case fatality rate, with death among those diagnosed. Then there's infection fatality rate.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (17:55)
Infection fatality rate, is anywhere from 10 to 20 times the mortality of the flu, if you actually compare it. It is so much higher. Some people say it's five times, but even if it's five times more than the flu, it's a serious problem. The other thing is, many of us have some background immunity to the flu.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (18:24)
Very few people have any background immunity to this. There is some argument that if you have the other common cold coronavirus, you have some small immunity, but that is nothing close to herd community.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (18:37)
I think the herd immunity misinformation right now, is one of the largest. They say, "Oh, we don't need to infect 50%, 60%. We just need to infect 20%." Still, 20% is... other than Manhattan, downtown Manhattan, most other places aren't even close to 20%. They're not even close to 10%.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (19:01)
Actually, the number of people being harmed and maimed is so dangerous. I think that is part of this... right now, Scott Atlas keeps saying "Herd immunity, herd immunity." It is so dangerous. Fauci is calling it out.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (19:15)
Sweden, that tried herd immunity, all their leading scientists basically say, "Don't do what we did. Doing herd is an example of how not to fight a deadly infectious disease." That misinformation... but it's being misused by those who want to reopen businesses and pretend everything is normal.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (19:38)
Look, we've had flares. If you look at Israel, Israel had a big peak and then smashed it down. They thought everything's okay. They reopen everything, and then everything went out of control. There was no herd immunity there, and it is just so, so dangerous. I think there's misinformation.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (19:57)
People just want to grasp anything. Now, you remind me of the movie, The American President, in which, Michael J. Fox says to President Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas, "People are so thirsty for leadership, that they will crawl to a Mirage. When they discover it's not there, they'll drink the sand."

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (20:21)
Michael Douglas, President Shepard replies, "No, people don't drink the sand, because they're thirsty. They drink the sand, because they don't know the difference." Right now, in the middle of the fog of war, there's so much information. People want to drink something, to know that they're going to be okay.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (20:44)
Oftentimes, there's quacks and snake oil salesmen just trying to peddle things that's a mirage, that's like sand. Science of course, doesn't give you the instant satisfaction answers. Long story short, people are just misled so easily, so easily right now about this coronavirus.

Anthony Scaramucci: (21:10)
You have a family. I have a family. John has a family. Kids are going back to school, Eric. What do you do there? Be our guru, be our therapist, be our epidemiologist, be our scientist.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (21:24)
Yeah. First of all, WHO says, "You should not reopen anything, schools included, until you have less than 5% positivity in your area for 14 consecutive days, consecutive days." I think that's even very kind of like generous. To be honest, we sure need to go for zero COVID.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (21:47)
In absence of that being a reality, I think A, there definitely should be a mandatory mask wearing. Yeah, the indoor distancing does not... it's not that important I think, in the grand scheme. We know there's aerosol transmission. Aerosol transmission, compared to droplets.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (22:09)
There's three kinds of transmission. There's fomite, which means surface contact, touch a dirty doorknob, touch your face. There is droplets, as in when you spit, the ballistic droplet falls down by gravity within six feet. That's where the six feet rule comes from.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (22:26)
Aerosols float in the air. They float literally throughout the whole room, however big the room is. There's evidence in Netherlands, it's gone through some air conditioning ducts that recycle the air. It can be there for 20 minutes or four hours. I think ventilation is so key, masking, ventilation.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (22:48)
If you can't ventilate, at least six exchanges per hour, which is once every 10 minutes. Not many places have that kind of ventilation. Then you need to use filtration. If you can't use filtration, you should also add UV and the HVAC system too. To kill the germs whenever you recycle the air.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (23:11)
A lot of our schools are outdated. They can't open the windows. Actually they can't open their windows and doors, because just schools' anti-shooting security system prevents it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:23)
Sure.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (23:24)
Which is a very double sad, with all the gun violence. Some classrooms are interspersed. The thing is, most schools are poorly ventilated. It's one of those things where you have to demand as a PTA, buy HEPA and MERV 13 air filters, if you can't ventilate your classrooms.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (23:50)
Kids should definitely wear masks and maybe face shields too, to be extra conservative. It's all about your degree of risk acceptance. What's not acceptable, is just sending your kid without a mask. It's really frustrating. It's all depending on how much is the community spread?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (24:10)
Are the schools taking safeguards? Are they ventilating? If you don't ventilate, are you filtering the air or just sanitizing it in some way? To be honest, not many schools have that. Or funding from parents groups, who can fund all this kind of stuff.

Anthony Scaramucci: (24:28)
Are the planes safe? A little bit smaller than a school.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (24:31)
Planes have good air turnover. They do. I will say that. They have exchanges once every six minutes, eight minutes. The problem is you're super packed in there. You're like elbow to elbow. I'm like six foot. I've really wide shoulders. You're [crosstalk 00:24:50].

Anthony Scaramucci: (24:50)
Don't rub it in, Eric [inaudible 00:24:53].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (24:54)
All right. Sorry. Anyways, I [crosstalk 00:24:56].

Anthony Scaramucci: (24:58)
We're all the same height when we're sitting down. Everybody take it easy. [inaudible 00:25:01].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (25:01)
Yeah. Hey, Fauci is-

Anthony Scaramucci: (25:06)
Fauci is my man.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (25:07)
He's the man. He's not tall. Height is not the ultimate measure in this day and age. I'm just saying like, if you're packed in there, the... and people eat and drink. To Ted Cruz who has taken off his mask... many people do take off their masks, to eat and drink on airplanes.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (25:27)
There's actually an airplane... a documented case in a medical journal. Someone was wearing a mask, but he took his mask off to eat and got infected during that time, by people around him who were positive. He wasn't positive and didn't travel to any other places, but he took his mask off next to them. Boom, he got infected.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (25:51)
I think the airplanes... certain airlines actually blocked the middle seat. I really respect Southwest, and Delta and JetBlue, who actually blocked their middle seats. Or Southwest is selling only two thirds of total seats, which is the same. United American, they're not blocking the middle seat.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (26:10)
When you're jammed in there and you're snacking, you're going to spread. This virus, it spreads more if you shout. This virus will spread when you even breathe. That's the honest, scary thing. Just the act of breathing, gives out aerosols. Again, the mask, cloth masks are good for catching yours.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (26:34)
If other people are breathing out while eating, then you're going to get it, even if you're wearing a cloth mask. That's why you should also wear a premium mask. This is why also airplanes are... it's why the airlines are not booking the middle seats.

Anthony Scaramucci: (26:48)
All right, this has been terrific. I'm going to ask you one more question, and I'm going to turn it over to John for outside questions or audience participation. Let's talk about the vaccine for a second. The stories about a vaccine coming in the fall, is that realistic or is that hype?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (27:10)
The vaccine, so we will get trial results of some phase threes that are finishing. What I'm worried is that, they're going to get an interim peak at the trial, halfway through, before they finish. You have to enroll enough people and follow them enough, in enough amount of time. They're going to get an interim peak, I bet.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (27:35)
My fear is they're going to emergency use authorize it way too early. If you want to truly know whether it's safe and effective, you need to have enough people studied, for long enough follow-up time.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (27:51)
My worry is that before the election, they're going to do this interim peak. Then they're going to approve it, based on some early data. You have to first of all, just aside from the safety efficacy, it needs to be at least 50% effective. You have to be sure enough, because every stat has a confidence interval.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (28:16)
You have to be 95% sure enough that it's not unaffected, and not like 30%, which is crap for a vaccine. You have to be sure enough, but I bet there's going to be a push to approve it. Just like hydroxychloroquine was approved. Convalescent plasma was approved.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (28:35)
Remdesivir was approved for wide use, even though their trial wasn't for a world wide-use. They're going to push it through. I think that's careless and callous. If anything, vaccines, you want to convince people to take it.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (28:51)
If you push it through it, you're going to actually scare more people and scare them off of using it, even when eventually you have all the data to say it's good. Communication's really important. If you do something too early, people get too scared. Even when you do it properly later, they don't trust you anymore.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (29:15)
That is my worry. We will get a vaccine, I'm sure. Hopefully in due time, after the phase three trials are done. My worry is, we're going to get it pre-approved, emergency approved before it's over and it's going to create a shit show.

Anthony Scaramucci: (29:31)
All right. Well, we really appreciate the clarity and the factual basis of all the information, Eric. Doctor, thank you. Let me it over to John Darsie.

John Darsie: (29:43)
I got a bunch of questions here, from emails and people posting in the chat. I think we'll pack our last 15 minutes here. Dr. Feigl-Ding, thanks again for joining us.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (29:52)
Sure.

John Darsie: (29:52)
This is very timely and our audience is enjoying it a lot. The first question is about the World Health Organization. Obviously, Donald Trump is not the first person to criticize the WHO.

John Darsie: (30:06)
Well, they got a few things wrong in the early part of the pandemic. There is a lot of people that have criticized their early response to the pandemic, but is pulling out of the WHO the answer.

John Darsie: (30:16)
In a post-WHO world, let's say Donald Trump wins again and serves another four years. Or we're trying to rebuild another super national organization, to help us combat global pandemics and other public health issues.

John Darsie: (30:31)
Were they right to question the WHO and pull out of the WHO? I think I know the answer to that question. What can we do globally to sort of create a cohesive plan for preventing this type of calamity again, that's had so much economic and social negative impact?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (30:45)
Yeah. First of all, I feel WHO is an organization that is completely built around trying to help global health. What people forget is, these viruses, they come from... Ebola comes from Africa, MERS came from the middle East. There's many viruses that could emerge from anywhere.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (31:09)
It's WHO that makes sure that they extinguish it, in the far nether reaches of where often times these outbreaks start. 9 to 10 times, you haven't heard of Guinea worms or many or polio... and they crop up every once in a while. WHO keeps them in check.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (31:33)
If they didn't keep it in check, they would be on your neighborhood door honestly. People don't see that. It's kind of like, if you build a crosswalk at this dangerous intersection and instead of 10 people dying a year, of being run over, no one dies. No one's grateful for the crosswalk being there. WHO is like that.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (31:55)
Of course, when they make them blunder, it's very visible. The 99% of time in which they actually make sure that Ebola doesn't reach your shores, and TB is not... you're not coughing up TB, is because they kept it in check, in the far nether reaches of Africa or India or South America.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (32:16)
That's why we don't have Zika brain damaged babies here in the US, when we could have easily had it a few years ago. I think WHO serves a great purpose. Their comms can definitely be improved. There is a working group to actually reform WHO. There's definitely going to be a reckoning.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (32:33)
Pulling out from it is so dumb, because if you want to change it... and this is a UN organization that is definitely staying around, it's not going to die out. You need a seat at the table.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (32:44)
This is why I'm saying, oftentimes even with people you disagree with, if you want to change them, you need to engage with them and have a seat at that table, with someone you disagree with. I think you US pulling out is stupid. Also, just yesterday, they pull out from WHO's COVAX, vaccine consortium.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (33:04)
WHO's working on a whole slew of another dozen or two vaccines. While the US is only committed to a couple, like half a dozen in Warp Speed. It's kind of like an insurance project. If you don't want to join the vaccine group organized by WHO, you're putting all our eggs on a limited number of vaccines.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (33:26)
It's a risk. During a pandemic, you want to actually get insurance. I think A, pulling out of WHO. B, refusing to join the WHO vaccine consortium, to share other resources of working vaccines is just stupid in the long run.

John Darsie: (33:43)
You alluded to this earlier, when you were talking about using the sperm example as a way to clearly communicate something visceral to an audience, that might not take the virus as seriously, as they would otherwise, if they heard an example like it reduces your sperm count or the quality of your sperm.

John Darsie: (33:58)
There seems to be a rise in misinformation, and anti-vax movements and things like that. I think there was a poll that I saw a couple of months ago, that nearly 30% of the population is at least vaccine skeptical, if not, anti-vax.

John Darsie: (34:13)
Why do you think that is creeping up as part of sort of American culture, where we're rejecting science at? How do we come up with an information campaign, to combat the misinformation that's causing public health issues frankly? You're seeing increase in diseases that were dormant for many years, because of anti-vax movements.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (34:32)
Yeah, the anti-vax movement is very tricky. It's a confluence of different things, like a study over the years. It's partly a distrust to big pharma, because pharma has jacked up the price of insulin.

John Darsie: (34:46)
You're familiar with that, of course. It's [crosstalk 00:34:48].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (34:48)
Yeah, of peddling dangerous drugs. Opioid epidemic, jacking up the price of EpiPens for kids with allergies. That either feeds into all this. They're all tied, because it's this distrust of big pharma. Secondly, the anti-vaxxer movement, it also feeds on this globalists, anti-globalist conspiracy.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (35:13)
AQ [inaudible 00:35:13] for example, there is a poll that came out, only 13% of Republicans don't believe in AQ [inaudible 00:35:20]. That's crazy. The fact that there's... 87% of Republicans believe in the AQ [inaudible 00:35:26] conspiracies, is just mind blowing.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (35:29)
It's just part of that same distrust of the machine, whatever they... even though science does not care. The virus does not care about your political beliefs or religious beliefs, but there is this movement to be anti-science, because for some reason, science is part of the establishment. I think that's very hurtful.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (35:52)
I think this vaccine will actually show us, if we do not get vaccination... because herd immunity does work if you vaccinate. Vaccine is the only safe way to get to herd immunity. Say the vaccine is only 60% or 70% effective, and then only two thirds of people take it, then you're going to drop below 50% potentially.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (36:17)
That's going to be really bad, because if many people don't take it, then this epidemic will just keep raging onwards and we're going to pay a way, way higher price. We need to extinguish it, before we can actually truly get back to normal.

John Darsie: (36:32)
What would you deaths in the United States have looked like, if we said, "You know what? We're going to take a full herd immunity approach. We're going to actively infect members of the population, so that we can reopen the economy." What would the death count have looked like in your estimation?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (36:44)
It would potentially be in the millions, honestly. In the millions, because here's the thing, elderly is a risk factor. I think another major risk factor is obesity. Especially among the severe morbidly obese. There's almost no one who gets hospitalized with morbidly obesity, and doesn't go on a ventilator.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (37:06)
That's just that scary. Tons of diabetes is a risk factor, a heart disease is a risk factor. Many kidney diseases are also risk factors, in addition to being immunocompromised. Then that's just deaths and hospitalization.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (37:26)
Then there's people, there's long COVID... or being maimed with long-term mental... the brain fog, mental scarring, as well as other diseases. It's not just mortality, but also long-term morbidity that's actually causing... that herd immunity, would be a extremely, extremely dangerous act.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (37:50)
This is why when Joni Ernst yesterday, she peddled two conspiracy theories in a row. One, about herd and then the 6% thing. The other thing about, doctors are over-billing just to make money from it. It's insane. By the way, the 6% thing is basically saying, "Only 6% of people who died, did not have any risk factors."

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (38:09)
That's kind of like saying, "Look, hey, there is a meteor that's going to drop on this town. 94% of this town has some sort of risk factors, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, et cetera." When the meteor crashes down, it wasn't the meteor that killed them. It was the risk factors. Only-

John Darsie: (38:31)
Right, only like 40% of Americans have two or more chronic diseases.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (38:34)
Oh, yeah.

John Darsie: (38:35)
Isn't that right?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (38:36)
Exactly, two thirds of Americans have major risk factors and that's excluding age. If you include age, you're getting close to 80, 90%. This is why it's so, so dangerous. Again, most cancer patients, 95% of cancer patients who are near death, have risk factors.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (38:59)
Does that mean that 95% of cancer deaths are fake, because they have other risk factors? No, it was the cancer. I think all the conspiracy theory is incredibly, incredibly dangerous. That we have sitting members of Congress like Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst peddling it, is just... it's ludicrous.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (39:16)
Iowa right now, by the way, is having one of the worst epidemics. Their mortality is soaring. Their cases per capita is one of the highest in the country. I think it's top three right now. This is why these conspiracy theories are dangerous, because it tells people to be complacent.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (39:35)
They're going to keep spreading it. Maybe a young person catches it at the beginning, or a kid at school. You know what? They're going to spread it to mommy and daddy, or grandparents. Again, 8 or 9 out of 10 people actually have risk factors. You can't quarantine a kid from the rest of the family. That just doesn't work.

John Darsie: (39:54)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (39:55)
That's why it's incredibly dangerous.

John Darsie: (39:57)
What about reinfection? It's still sort of a under dispute, about the idea of reinfection. There was a patient in Hong Kong, who showed asymptomatic reinfection. There was a Nevada who ended up in the hospital.

John Darsie: (40:11)
His first infection was far more mild. Are people getting reinfected? What's the early data on that? How does that impact what the long-term benefits of the vaccine will be?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (40:21)
Yeah, so these are good, two separate questions. First of all, about the reinfection, we've known about, it's possible for a while, but from anecdotal reports. To prove it, you needed to actually have this Hong Kong and Reno, Nevada example, in which they had a sample of the original virus and a sample of the new virus.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (40:40)
They compared the genome, the RNA of the virus. The viruses are completely different, so that we know that for example, that it's a different virus. As opposed to the virus just being [inaudible 00:40:52] in your body.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (40:54)
As you pointed out, in Hong Kong one was... the second infection was asymptomatic. This Reno one, the second time the guy got infected, he got hospitalized for quite a while. We don't know how common it is, because it's really hard to do this double virus, genome RNA test.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (41:15)
It's definitely possible, but I think it's probably not the case most of the time. Most of the time, most of the people do have some sort of immunity or crossover immunity. If you were previously infected by a common cold coronavirus type, you have partial immunity to this. It shows that it's not guaranteed.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (41:37)
I think for the vaccine though, it's not a likely worry, because the vaccine targets... there's different versions. This is why we need a pool of vaccines, because there's not just one single vaccine.

John Darsie: (41:52)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (41:52)
There's some that's attenuated or actually inactivated. Some, they put it into... the RNA, put it into another virus particle to carry it. Then basically, they want you to learn. It's a virus training program. That's what a vaccine is.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (42:11)
There's different training programs to train your body. I think this is why we need... even if one vaccine is less than perfect, say it's... the measles vaccine's great, 98%. Most vaccines oftentimes are less than 98%. Even if it's not perfect, we need to put our eggs in more baskets.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (42:31)
This reinfection thing just teaches us, this vaccine could be better short term. This vaccine could be better long term. This is why we... not WHO vaccine consortium, which has way more vaccines in their consortium than our Warp Speed program is kind of stupid.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (42:50)
We need to actually consider and try all the different vaccines, to see which one is the best long term. Hopefully, this virus is not a fast mutator. It's not like the flu.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (43:01)
The flu has this fast recombination system. This one has... it's a slow mutator. We're hopeful that it will have lasting effects, but we need to put our eggs in more baskets, as any investor would know.

John Darsie: (43:15)
I want to talk about Sweden for a minute, before we wrap up. We've had a few questions about that. There's been a lot of hand wringing over the Sweden approach, which is, to allow more free movement in the economy, keep the economy relatively open.

John Darsie: (43:28)
As you alluded to earlier, Sweden has suffered similar health problems, if not worse than neighboring countries and other countries around the world. They also have not been immune to the economic impacts of the virus, which sort of goes to show that the slump in the economy is not a matter of the economy being closed.

John Darsie: (43:45)
It's a matter of people not wanting to go out, and they could be potentially infected by a deadly disease. Could you talk more about the... exactly what the results are of that experiment... were in Sweden, and what we learned from that?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (43:58)
Yeah. Well, the Swedish experiment is not a scientific experiment. It's more like a social-

John Darsie: (44:03)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (44:03)
Hey, laissez-faire policy. Sweden, if you look at the curves, have enormous infection. Sweden used to be the same country as Norway, by the way, they split decades ago.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (44:16)
If you look at Swedish versus Finland to the East, Norway to the West, Denmark to the direct South on a bridge, all this Nordic Scandinavian neighbors did exponentially better, in terms of cases or mortality. Swedish mortality is finally going down a little bit.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (44:31)
It's been really, really bad and cumulative, much worse. Their economy is actually no better. Again, you're right, it's the demand. It's not the business closing per se, it's that people are scared. This is why the best analogy is Jurassic Park.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (44:52)
If you reopen Jurassic Park with the velociraptors still roaming around, people are not wanting to come back to Jurassic Park. Even if you say, "The park is open, we have tasers." No, just because you have tasers and we have distancing masks and shields, the people are not going to come to your park.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (45:11)
That's the underlying thing, until we get this under control, the demand is not going to come back. Demand is not just cash demand, in terms of cash on hand and the marginal propensity to consume on a macro scale.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (45:27)
It's the micro demand, because there's just... people are scared go out in here. In terms of Sweden, in terms of like herd immunity, I don't think it's truly reached herd immunity. You also can't compare Sweden to US. Sweden has universal healthcare.

John Darsie: (45:47)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (45:47)
You have any illness, you do not have to pay a cent basically. Yes, they have taxes, but in terms of on an everyday out-of-pocket cost, you pay almost nothing. They have perfect contact tracing, or they've a medical record system that's all linked. It's a complete [crosstalk 00:46:06].

John Darsie: (46:07)
Their ability to socialize the costs, the healthcare costs [crosstalk 00:46:11].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (46:11)
Here people are dying, because they can't afford a test. People-

John Darsie: (46:16)
It's been said that, Trump tries to say and others try to say that we're over counting the number of deaths from COVID. There is a lot of suggestion that we're actually severely under counting, because of home deaths. [crosstalk 00:46:28].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (46:27)
We're under counting by 10X.

John Darsie: (46:28)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (46:29)
All the studies show, the true infection is actually 10X higher than what our case count right now is. We just passed 6 million, just a couple of days ago. We're going to definitely pass 7 million this month.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (46:42)
We're definitely going to pass 8 million in October. By Election Day, we're going to have at least 8 million. I'm pretty sure about that. 8 million [crosstalk 00:46:49]

John Darsie: (46:49)
[crosstalk 00:46:49] US population.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (46:51)
Not just 8 million multiply by 10.

John Darsie: (46:53)
Yeah, if looking at the US population, you're thinking a quarter of the US population has probably been infected with the virus.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (47:03)
By end of the year, yes.

John Darsie: (47:04)
Yes.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (47:06)
Still, that's not quite herd immunity levels.

John Darsie: (47:11)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (47:12)
Again, it doesn't truly kick in, until you're way higher. Look, this there is no easy way out. People are trying to dream up danceable ways like Sweden, as a fancy of a way to get out of this. There is no magic bullet. It's the velociraptor Jurassic Park example.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (47:31)
Demand is not going to truly come back until all this is solved. Conferences, businesses are not going to hold these global in-person massive business conferences, where everyone's rubbing elbows and shaking hands, because the risk is too high.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (47:49)
That is what's the underlying problem. Until actually we feel the risk is low enough, all the normal businesses and exchanges, and business meetings are not going to happen. I think that is the ultimate lesson. This is why chasing zero COVID is the best way.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (48:09)
There's ways to do that without lockdowns now, by ventilation, mask wearing and premium mask. Cloth masks are good for catching your droplets, but the premium mask, like surgical, N95, KN95s are way better actually filtering out these.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (48:27)
Especially if a lot of people don't wear a mask. See, the less people wear masks, the more you need to wear premium masks. If you're surrounded by people who don't wear masks, because-

John Darsie: (48:35)
Put on your mask and things like that.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (48:37)
Yeah, only the premium mask protects you from them, if a lot of people around you don't wear a mask. We shouldn't have like a Defense Production Act for that months ago, but here we are, we don't.

John Darsie: (48:47)
Right. It just came out in the last, I think couple hours, that the CDC is asking states to speed approvals of their vaccine sites, so they're ready by November 1st. You think that's a politically driven decision, that it's not a coincidence that-?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (49:00)
It's not a coincidence.

John Darsie: (49:00)
.... it's two days before the election?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (49:02)
Look, we know the October surprise, is the least surprising of any Octobers. The surprise everyone talks about, is that basically Trump will force his FDA to emergency approve the... probably the [inaudible 00:49:22], or maybe one of the other ones.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (49:24)
They're going to force approve whichever one they have the most data for. They're going to hail its success, but no one's going to actually get an actual vaccine shot by then, because their productions on a ketchup.

John Darsie: (49:36)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (49:36)
They'll only go to healthcare workers at the beginning anyways. I don't think we're getting an actual vaccine, until spring of next year at the earliest. At the very beginning, there's going to be shortages.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (49:48)
This October surprise, it's coming and they're going to force the vaccine through. At's going to A, it's going to empower the anti-vaxxers, right?

John Darsie: (50:00)
Right, [crosstalk 00:50:00].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (50:00)
They're going to say, "Oh, we don't have all the data. We don't know if it's safe." The scientists will actually say, "We don't actually have all the data or that we need to fully evaluate it." It's going to empower anti-vaxxers. In the long run, we're actually going to hurt ourselves.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (50:17)
We're going to lose credibility. By we, I mean, as a country. CDC, FDA is going to lose credibility, whenever they ... or FDA emergency approves this. It's going to be a shit show.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (50:29)
This is what I'm really concerned, because this vaccine rollout, I guarantee you, we're not going to be talking about herd immunity or hydroxychloroquine when October, November comes. It's going to be this rushed vaccine. Again, it's only going to empower the conspiracy theorists.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (50:51)
I hate to say it, but unless we can stop it, we're... and can actually roll out the vaccine in a safe way, once all the data comes in... basically, until Fauci says, "It's okay," we're going to lose our credibility if we rush it ahead of Fauci.

John Darsie: (51:08)
What would Fauci do? I'm going to get the wristband printed up and sent out, or what would Dr. Feigl-Ding?

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (51:12)
What would Fauci do?

John Darsie: (51:14)
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:51:14].

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (51:15)
Yeah, we should have those shirts. Well, Fauci would wait for the phase three trial to run its course. Every trial's like posted on clinicaltrials.gov. Run its course, of however many people enroll. Do it for the entire amount of time that you're required, and make sure that we have enough confidence.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (51:34)
That the efficacy is high enough. That it's not just like, "Oh, we're 50%, but with 20 or 80% uncertainty." That were certain about the efficacy. We're certain that the safety signals clearly show that there's no increased risk. Then the Fauci would approve it. That data is not going to [inaudible 00:51:59] December or January.

John Darsie: (52:01)
Right.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding: (52:01)
The proper way, so that's-

John Darsie: (52:04)
All right. Well, fascinating stuff. Thanks for taking sort of an extra 10 minutes. We went over time, but we had a lot of important things to talk about. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you've been one of the leaders in combating the misinformation, it's been out there.

John Darsie: (52:17)
Your Twitter feed is an amazing resource in and of itself, for following the information on the pandemics. Thanks so much for everything you're doing. Anthony, do you have a final word for Dr. Feigl-Ding?

Anthony Scaramucci: (52:28)
No, just for our general population. In all seriousness, wear the mask, keep your family safe. Listen to the scientists and listen to the facts, and we'll all be safer and healthier.

Anthony Scaramucci: (52:40)
Doc, thanks so much. Hopefully, we can have you back at the end of the year, and talk a little more about where you think things are going to set up for 2021.

John Darsie: (52:50)
Sure, absolutely. Stay safe everyone

Anthony Scaramucci: (52:52)
Wish you all the best.

Alan Patricof: Longevity & the Future of Aging | SALT Talks #35

“You don't see many 60-year-olds walking in from financings into a venture capital firm. It just doesn't happen… I actually read three studies, which said that 60 year old entrepreneurs were twice as successful in starting up businesses as those who are 30.”

With a 50-plus year career in venture capital, Alan Patricof has been instrumental in growing the venture capital field from a base of high net-worth individuals to its position today with broad institutional backing, as well as playing a key role in the essential legislative initiatives that have guided its evolution. Alan founded Apax Partners, leading global private equity advisory firm, and co-founded Greycroft, venture capital firm focusing on investments in the internet and mobile markets.

When investing venture capital, there are often not a lot of numbers to go off of. This often requires evaluating the people running the business, their past work and the team they bring on as the surest indicator of a company’s success. With the responsibility of investing in companies with other people’s money, an emphasis on bottom line should be maintained instead of simply focus on revenue growth. “At some point a company has to have a bottom line, and a lot of companies have lost sight of that today.”

Having lived alongside a loved one in need of extensive at-home medical care and recognizing the massive need to address chronic diseases that older Americans face, Prime Time Partners was formed. Venture capital will be targeted towards entrepreneurs over 60 in order to support start-ups addressing the later-in-life costs, an age group and industry relatively neglected up to this point.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE

SPEAKER

Alan Patricof.jpeg

Alan Patricof

Co-Founder

Greycroft

MODERATOR

anthony_scaramucci.jpeg

Anthony Scaramucci

Founder & Managing Partner

SkyBridge

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

John Darsie: (00:08)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series we've been doing during the work from home period, to provide our audience a window into the minds of subject matter experts who are leading investors, creators, and thinkers. Our goal with these talks is also to provide a platform for what we think are big, exciting, world-changing ideas as well as great investment opportunities. And we're extremely excited today to welcome Alan Patricof to SALT Talks. With a 50 plus year career in venture capital, Alan Patricof has been instrumental in growing the venture capital field from a base of high net worth individuals to its position today, which has broad institutional backing, as well as playing a key role in the essential legislative initiatives that have guided its evolution.

John Darsie: (01:04)
Alan founded APAX Partners, a leading global private equity advisory firm, and then he co-founded Greycroft later on, which is a venture capital firm focusing on investments in the internet and mobile markets. His latest venture, as he's calling his third act, is a company called Primetime Partners, which is a seed and early stage venture capital fund, investing in companies transforming the underserved and trillion dollar global sector of the aging population. He's helped build and foster the growth of numerous major global companies, including among others American Online, we had Steve Case in an earlier SALT Talk, Office Depot, Cadence Systems, Cellular Communications Incorporated, Apple Computer, which you may have heard of, Four Systems, NTL, Interlinks, Audible, Axios, and Wondery. We're very excited to learn more about his next chapter with Primetime Partners, as we mentioned, in what Alan refers to as the silver tsunami.

John Darsie: (02:02)
A reminder to our audience today, if you have any questions for the great Alan Patricof, enter them in the Q and A box at the bottom of your video screen. Conducting today's interview will be Anthony Scaramucci, who is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT. With that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.

Anthony Scaramucci: (02:24)
Alan, it's great to have you on. We really appreciate the time you're taking today. People get mad at me, my son in particular, when I ask these background questions, but I actually don't care because I find them fascinating. What is something we could learn about your background that's not on Wikipedia, it's not something that's been written about you, maybe it's something about your parents, maybe it's something about the way you grew up, maybe it was the realization that you made that you were going to go into this story career of entrepreneurship?

Alan Patricof: (02:57)
What do people not know about me? I don't know. I guess from a very young age, I really was entrepreneurial in my own way. I mean, I was brought up in a middle class background on the West Side of New York. I'd say lower middle class. We didn't have servants, we traveled by bus and subway. I didn't know what a taxi was until I was out of college. Family trips were all by car, not by planes. I sold the Saturday Evening Post standing by the 103rd street subway stop, with one of those bags around my shoulder at age six or seven. And during the war I sold war bonds, I collected scrap and newspapers for the war effort. So I would say those were probably good indications that I was a hustler from very, very early on.

Alan Patricof: (03:54)
And when I went to school, I went to Ohio State, not because I really intended to go to Ohio State. I got there by accident. I almost went to Brandeis, but I panicked when Brandeis was in its second or third year. And I went to one of those preliminary college interviews. And when I walked in, everybody had black hats and long beards and long black coats. And I said this wasn't right for me. Of course, Brandeis is a totally different place today, but in those days, it was very, very ethnic. And I just came home, put a label on my trunk. In those days you had a trunk, you didn't have a suitcase. It was Railway Express, Railroad Express which became American Express. But in those days, it was the way you shipped everything around was not in the Amazon cartons, but in trunks.

Alan Patricof: (04:55)
And I sent my trunk out to Columbus, Ohio. Next day, got in the car and went out to Columbus. And even while I was at Columbus, I sold ties. I sold favors. I wrote for the Columbus Citizen. I did a market research for the Brown Shoe Company. So I guess you'd say I started at a very early age trying, like many of us, probably like you. You had to do something to supplement your family's income, which was limited. I'll finish with the background. When I tell you when I came to New York, I had no job. There was no recruitment effort at Ohio State. If there was one, it was at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, it certainly wasn't at Ohio State for undergraduate. So my alternatives were going to Caterpillar Tractor in Des Plains, Illinois, as I recall, or the National Bank of Detroit, or to go work for AID down in Brazil.

Alan Patricof: (06:01)
And at the last second I said, "I gotta go home." And I don't think I would have made it at Caterpillar. And I went to New York and the way I got a job was I walked Wall Street. Because I knew I wanted to be on Wall Street, and I walked the street literally. And those days you would get into the building, which you couldn't do today. It's a joke. And I would go into an elevator, to the top floor, go to the secretary, open the door and say, "Any jobs available?" That's honestly how I did it. And I'd go from the top floor down to the bottom floor. I started at 110 Wall Street, and fortunately I got a job on the 35th floor of 63 Wall Street with a great firm. So that's how it all started. From there, it's been one great success after another, I have to say,

Anthony Scaramucci: (06:56)
Well, it's an amazing story. I think it's one of the reasons why we like each other so much. I had a paper route, was making $35 a week at age 11. I was giving 20 to my mom and I was keeping 15 for myself. And my first job coming out of Tufts was at One Wall Street. So I had the same idea you did.

Alan Patricof: (07:15)
The other end of the street.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:17)
I went to the Irving Trust building. I rode up to the 28th floor and there was a law firm there called Hughes, Hubbard and Reed. It was named after Charles Evans Hughes. And I asked them for a job that summer, and they put me in the paralegal area. So we have a lot in common that way.

Alan Patricof: (07:33)
And what was my first salary, because believe it or not, people don't realize, you can go to Social Security and ask for a printout of every year and what you contributed to Social Security. So my first year was 1955. I made $55 a week. So that was $2,700 a year or whatever.

Anthony Scaramucci: (07:54)
Well I was more fancy pants than you. The guy offered me $8 an hour, Alan. Being who I am, I said, "Could you make it 10?" He goes, "What are you, crazy?" I said, "Yeah, please. I need the money."

Alan Patricof: (08:06)
That was good money.

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:06)
I had to pay off all that school debt. What's that? That was good money in 1986. You know, I worked on the Continental Airlines merger with People's Express. I spent the whole summer of 1986 in that office working on that merger. But I want to go to your-

Alan Patricof: (08:23)
Was Freddie Laker around then?

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:24)
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Alan Patricof: (08:27)
I remember meeting with Freddie Laker, going out to his hangar out in New Jersey, big cavernous hanger. For those who remember, Freddie Laker was like the guy who really started cheap travel.

Anthony Scaramucci: (08:38)
He really started the whole concept of mass transit in the air. And Frank Lorenzo, you may remember Frank, he's living up in Nantucket now, he was running Continental Airlines at the time, and he bought People's Express, which is the reason why United airlines has all those hubs over in Newark. [crosstalk 00:08:56]

Alan Patricof: (08:56)
So I remember my famous story with Freddie Laker, was I went to meet him at his corner office. And I said something, somehow we got into the idea of board meetings and he said, "Well, I have board meetings." He said, "I'll show you how I have a board meeting." He goes out into the hallway, a long... Remember it was a hangar. And he calls out whatever his partners one, and I won't do it, he screams out, "Hey, Hey, Jimmy," and Jimmy comes out the other end of the hall. He said, "Let's have a board meeting." I always remembered that. That was Laker airlines board meetings were in the hallway [crosstalk 00:09:33]

Anthony Scaramucci: (09:33)
There you go. The true symbol of entrepreneurship. Right? It's an amazing story. So you're one of the pioneers. I mean, you've had this amazing life and you've always been able to see around a corner. So take us back to the early part of your career, venture capital, private equity. What were you thinking in those early days about directionally where you were going in your career and that industry specific?

Alan Patricof: (09:59)
Well, my father had once said, when my father was a stockbroker in his later career, the only real guidance he gave me, he says, "Always be a buyer, not a seller of investments." In other words, not be a stock broker was really what he was saying. So my career has always pretty much been on the buy side. I mean, I worked for a development capital firm. I worked for an investment counseling firm, as they were called then, like Scutter Stevenson Clark or Fidelity is today much bigger than private management. And then I went and ran a family's money. And then I worked for a guy, Ben Hidaman and Mickey Newman. Mickey Newman was the son of Jerry Newman. Jerry Newman was the partner of Ray Newman, who was the great professor at Columbia who wrote the famous book that everybody in Wall Street, if they haven't read, should read. And I'm shocked at the number of people today who haven't read it. He worked for one of the firms I have which is called Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd, I think a first edition is worth, you have to pay $3,000 to $5,000 to get the first edition, but the firm was Graham Newman. And I was involved with that.

Alan Patricof: (11:16)
And I had a lot of experience with families and I saw that families manage their big portfolios of stocks. You know, we talked about the Whitney's and the Rockefeller's and the Phipps is, and many, many other families that you wouldn't have heard of, including the family I worked for, which was the Godeson family who made their fortune in the paper business. And they would do private investments, but they didn't know what they were doing. Someone, Andre Maeir, who was head of Lazard, or Gus Levy, who was head of Goldman Sachs, or John Lowe from Lowe Rhoads would call up and say, "I'm putting you in for $500,000 in this, or I'm putting you in for a million in this or 200 of that." It was an old boys kind of club, and family offices were putting up money for that. And we did our share and I was the one, because I loved that, that became the person who ran that file drawer with all these private investments.

Alan Patricof: (12:12)
And it was while I was there that we made an investment in New York Magazine and we made an investment in another company called Datascope Corporation. New York Magazine, I had the tender age of 30 something, became president arbiter from Low Rhoads was chairman. Clay Felker was the key guy who built the built New York Magazine. And we started a company and I got the taste of really what it was like to be on the frontline of running a business. And in the case of Datascope, it was a medical electronics company, which we started with $50,000 on a kitchen table, with a very clever technology for cardiac monitoring. And I said, "This is much more interesting than buying IBM and General Motors and The National Paper Stock." And having it go up or down two or three or five points in a day, and no one could really tell you except some psychological event that happened. Some extraneous events someplace in the world would affect that price. I also went that time into a firm called Lynn Broadcasting, on behalf of Central National. So I said, "There's really a business out there to manage high net worth families private investments who aren't like the Phipps, or the Whitneys, or the Rockefeller's who had their own private investment activities.

Alan Patricof: (13:44)
And so I started a business in 1970 called Alan Patricof Associates, which became APAX many years later, we changed the name to Alan Patricof Associates International, because we were in 12 countries at that point. And started managing investments for private families, of their non-public securities on a very modest basis. I forget, I think I was at a retainer at $25,000 a year and the carry was 10%, not 20. And that gradually grew and got bigger. And eventually we started taking institutions, and got bigger and bigger. Our first one was two and a half million. And when I left APAX, there's no exact date, because I was in APEX's office until about 2008 or '09 physically, but I decided around 2002 after the bubble, that we had become too much of a private equity firm, we'd gotten so big. Our last one had been, I think, 10 billion. From two and a half million to 10 billion. We weren't doing the same kind of investments. So I spent three years helping the World Bank pro bono and the IFC, and looking at small and medium sized enterprise development around the world, primarily in Africa.

Alan Patricof: (15:15)
So I probably traveled to a lot of countries. And around 2006, I said, "This is not satisfying enough for me." I was 71 or 72. I said, "I want to go back in the venture capital business, pure venture capital." And I started Grey Croft, which is a pure venture capital firm. We are not a private equity firm. So far. The temptation is enormous to get bigger and bigger, Grey Croft is now in it's... I started out with a small fund, 75 million, which was small. And our most recent fund, we really kept ourselves constricted. So it will be under 300 million, which may sound large, but it's really small for the way funds have grown. We could be a lot, lot, lot larger. We've had six funds and three growth funds, which takes the second phase after the early stage A and B rounds. But I've been consistent and sticking with private investing companies that were early stages in their development, whether they were startups or growth rounds. Been an exciting career, I have to say.

Anthony Scaramucci: (16:29)
Yeah. Amen. And I think your career is just getting started. We're going to go to the silver tsunami here in a second, but I want to ask this question before I go in that direction. You have this wonderful knack. It's one thing to read a PowerPoint presentation or a business idea, but it's another thing to understand that you have a management team that can intersect with that idea and execute the idea. So we have a lot of young people on this SALT Talk listening. What are some of those qualitative and quantitative factors and gut instinct that you bring to the table, to see that opportunity at such an early stage in the business process?

Alan Patricof: (17:10)
Well, in all fairness, in the venture, that pure venture are and the startup area, you really don't have a lot of numbers to go from. There's a little bit of this. I mean, you can't avoid it. So it has to be based less on numbers and more on the people. And we've learned consistently that people who start businesses, who have been in previous businesses that are similar and that have left them to do something similar, and more importantly, have attracted people from that previous activity to join them, is a very high indicator of success. Because those are the people, they know more about this leadership than we could possibly know. And they're betting with their careers, as we're investing with our money, which is fungible to a great extent, except for what we have invested in our own funds, is other people's money.

Alan Patricof: (18:11)
And while it hurts and we are fiduciaries, somehow that's a very high predictability of success. And the second is someone who really understands the economics of the business that they're going into, even though they can't prove it at that point, but they understand that they have to make a profit. At some point a company has to have a bottom line, and a lot of companies have lost sight of that today, but if you just start out with a theory that all you have to do is build revenues and they will come, I don't think that makes sense. I think people have to understand the factors that go into making a bottom line profit, and how long that will take, and how much capital that would take, I think is a critical aspect.

Alan Patricof: (19:04)
I think understanding the market they're going into, not what we call, they use the word Tam, the total address market, but they think of the total address market as being that big, instead of thinking of it as this big, which is the real market they're going after. I think someone who really understands the size of the market they're going into themselves. So if you take those combinations of people, product, market, and are you investing on a risk reward rate of relationship that justifies taking the risk? And I say all of this, because it's very important at the beginning, and the beginning, you don't have as many answers or proof points in that point that I brought up, but most critically, when you go to the follow-on rounds, this is where it really becomes important, I think it's very, very important to have the discipline to say, "Did the people develop as I expected? Did the product make progress at the timeframe that they said it was going to make? Is the market that I thought was there, is it really there? Or has it been taken away by someone else who beat us to the punch? And is the round we're going into, does it justify a potential reward based on comparables, the risk we're taking and making that financial investment?"

Alan Patricof: (20:49)
And I think, in my opinion, that unfortunately today we have too many companies out there, and I'm not going to name them, because everybody knows them, that have gone along through multiple, multiple rounds of financing, and are not yet near profitability. And yet can continue to generate ,raise new capital, that do not exercise that discipline of understanding that at some point, shareholder capital cannot totally finance a company forever. At some point it's where are the emperor's clothes?

Anthony Scaramucci: (21:32)
Right. Well, I think it's well said. I want to switch over to Prime Time Partners, which is your new venture capital firm. And obviously it's targeting older Americans, early stage startups. You're calling it the silver tsunami, which I guess no one's getting their hair dyed like me, obviously, because why would you call it the silver tsunami if you had hair dye involved. But what is the investment thesis of Prime Time? And why are you doing this now?

Alan Patricof: (22:03)
Don't tell me you normally have my color hair.

Anthony Scaramucci: (22:06)
My hair's whiter than your hair actually.

Alan Patricof: (22:08)
Oh my god.

Anthony Scaramucci: (22:09)
But it looks terrible on television. I told Sean... Look at Sean Hannity. Now he's got so much snow on the roof. I told him, "Come on." But I mean, you look very distinguished with that hair. I still have that baby face.

Alan Patricof: (22:21)
My barber once, about 15, 20 years ago, tried to talk me into lightening it. I said, "Once you start, you can't stop. I mean, it's impossible. It's only going to go one way." So I gave up.

Anthony Scaramucci: (22:33)
I'm going the way of Joan Rivers. Let's just put it that way, but I want to go back to silver tsunami.

Alan Patricof: (22:38)
I want to go more than you do. Let me say, I have never, in my 50 years in this business have been more excited about anything I have done. I came to this, honestly, because my wife has Alzheimer's and she's had it for 11 years. And the last three years have been pretty brutal in a sense of 24 hour caregivers. And she's lost all the functions that people have. She's still at home. She'll be at home until the end.

Anthony Scaramucci: (23:06)
I'm sorry about that.

Alan Patricof: (23:08)
Yeah. But during that process, I have gotten to know what problems are for people with chronic diseases. I've gotten to meet a lot of doctors, how to modalities and looked at a lot of technologies and looked at all the support structures you need from the standpoint of caregiving, the standpoint of feeding, standpoint of changing your house around, all those things.

Alan Patricof: (23:33)
And they're not just for people with chronic diseases, although God knows there are plenty of those around, not just with Alzheimer's, with all other kinds of diseases, whether it's hip replacements, having repair, or you see the people around with walkers and wheelchairs, they're not just Alzheimer's victims. But people in general getting older and what maybe some of your 211 people on this call don't realize it, the fastest growing segment of the population today are the people over 60. In this country, in China, in Japan and in Europe, not in the Middle East. And these people all need different things than they did when they were part of the millennial generation.

Alan Patricof: (24:23)
And there's been, ironically, while it's the fastest, and I think it's like 24% of the population, but they're the fastest growing part. I don't want to be [inaudible 00:24:36] but I believe less than 10% of the marketing dollars is spent against this segment of the population, which actually has the most money to spend on products and services and everything else you can think of. And they've been neglected honestly. By the same token, venture capitalists, we're all terrific people, but you don't see many 60 year olds walking in from financings into a venture capital firm. It just doesn't happen. As I looked at this market and I also read more than one study. I actually read three studies, which said that 60 year old entrepreneurs were twice as successful in starting up businesses as those who are 30. And that really shook me. These were not just statements. These were full academic studies, and you can refute it or not, but they exist and you can get ahold of them yourself.

Alan Patricof: (25:30)
And the reason was, someone at 60 has a lot bigger Rolodex. He has more battle scars, or she, has more battle scars. They know more about the industries, they have more contacts, and in my opinion, if they want to start a company that's in the similar business and they have the energy that I have, and they want to do it again, they are a darn good bet at putting money behind them, because they know where to find the people to work for them. They know where to find the customers. They have the relationship with the customers. The probability of their success... And it's logical, but people have not thought that way. They'd rather back, including me and Gray Croft and APAX. We'd rather back the 22 year old, who has no Rolodex, who has no experience of the business, but has lots of fire in their eyes and excitement and attracts a lot of other young people, and a lot of them are successful. But the fact is that older people are successful.

Alan Patricof: (26:34)
So I had been thinking about this, and my son came to me in November. And he said, "You know dad, Abby Levy," who was the founding president of Thrive Global, which was Arianna Huffington is her latest company after the Huffington post, which I was an investor in it. And I was an investor in Thrive Global. Abby was there for two years and she left. I was very, very disappointed. She went to Soul Cycle, and I didn't keep in touch with her except to see her. She stayed on the board and I see her at board meetings, but we never talked about anything. And my son came to me. He said, "You know Dad, Abby has been spending the last year focusing on this wellness and aging population. She's got all this, what you're doing, but she's going to do something about it."

Alan Patricof: (27:27)
So we got together two days later and together with a firm on the New York Stock Exchange called Welltower, which owns 1600 senior living facilities. They became the strategic partner, which all it meant was they would try out ideas that we might find, in one of their homes where, because they were looking for innovation and they became in effect our partner with no economics, just purely interested in what might come out of it for a fund like ours. And we said, "Let's go for it." And we were all ready to raise money in January and COVID hit. And we sat around and in May we said, "Let's go for it now, whether or not there's COVID." And in 45 days we raised, we filed with over 30 million.

Alan Patricof: (28:21)
And in the course of the last couple of weeks, we've had a bunch more investors who proactively have contacted us and we've tapped it out. It's going to be a small fund, but I will tell you, we have a pipeline now of 80 companies, we've invested in four, and people don't realize this. And I'm hoping to be more venture firms started up in this area, because there are a lot of people around who got lots of good ideas, whether it's a nutrition. Now we're not investing in pharmaceuticals or drugs or senior housing, but all the products and services, you just don't think of the things that change as people get older. And if Anthony is going to live, I'm going to live to 114. Anyone on this program who knows me, knows that I've been saying this for 10 years.

Anthony Scaramucci: (29:10)
I had that as the under for you Patricof.

Alan Patricof: (29:10)
People say 150? I said, "No, you made a mistake. It's 114. I'm not changing." It was based on a speech I'd heard it at Mount Sinai about 10 or 15 years ago, about the probability that age gets offset by all the things that happen during life. And I just heard recently that they are now saying that you could live to 120, but I'm not changing. 114. Well, if you're going to live to 114 or 100, read the obituaries every day, notice all the people who were over a hundred, who are living. Those people are going to need the lots. There are going to be lots more of them, who are going to need lots of different things. And they are going to need new companies to create, to service them. I mean, a company just got sold yesterday called Rebundo, which got sold for $17 billion to Teladoc or tele... One of the tele-medicine companies.

Alan Patricof: (30:13)
Which is in the food area of feeding older people. You see on television every day, A Place For Mom. I don't know how big it is, but it's big. There are all kinds of ideas happening and I am totally excited. Abby and I are having a great time. We're recruiting. If anyone has healthcare or venture experience, we're looking for someone right now with a principal or senior associate role. It's a wide open field. I mean, we have been able to find two or three other small venture firms. We want to be the leader in this field. And by doing the way we did it, announcing the fund on an embargoed basis on July, whatever it was, two weeks ago, we ended up with coverage in every media major stories.

Alan Patricof: (31:10)
We intended to do that. And I intended to do just what I'm doing now, to get on a soap box and say, I'm 85. If I could start my third business at 85, I started my second business at 72. There's no reason why other people can't. So we're hoping we're going to invest in product services, technology. And in parallel, if we can find some older entrepreneurs, older, meaning they want to start a second career, 55, 60, 65. We'd like to find a few of those that don't have to be servicing the older community, but they want to do the same thing again. And they have the energy and brains to do it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (31:54)
Well, we know it's going to be successful. We wish you a great success. I want to turn it over to my colleague, John Darsie. We've got a ton of questions that are populating. And so go ahead, John. Let's take some questions from the audience.

John Darsie: (32:08)
Thank you, Anthony. And maybe you have a business idea, Anthony. I know you're in the senior citizen category, so maybe you have a couple of new business ideas you might want to launch.

Anthony Scaramucci: (32:16)
Well, mine are all going to be in beauty and Botox, John, okay? Go ahead.

Alan Patricof: (32:21)
Well, it can be done, Anthony. Don't think those aren't categories.

Anthony Scaramucci: (32:25)
Trust me. I'm a big consumer, Mr. Patricof. I'm a big consumer.

John Darsie: (32:31)
Well, Alan. Thanks again for joining us. We had a couple of questions about, you've had some commentary recently regarding the big tech giants and how they're sort of utilities that are in need of some form of regulation. There's a great book out recently by David Day, and who's actually speaking on SALT talks next week, called Monopolize that covers this exact subject. Can you talk further about these recent congressional hearings that we've seen and also your views on big tech and how we allow them to grow and innovate, but we don't allow them to be destructive in a way that some monopolies have been throughout the course of American history?

Alan Patricof: (33:04)
Well, I'm glad I have this opportunity. I have spoken out the past year on this subject and I'm sure you've read the book Zucked, which was by someone venture business who had been at Facebook and invested in Facebook and profited from it, but told the reality. Let's face the reality, the four companies under attack if you will, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple is thrown in there, have accumulated an enormous amount of data. And every time they make an acquisition, they get more data. And that data is very, very valuable. It knows that all of us are right now on the SALT conference light on Zoom. It knows when you're going to be buying something, when you're selling something, what you're reading, what sites you're going up to. And they have been able to use that in a, I hate the word use the word monopolistic, but in a fashion that has given them a substantial advantage over anyone who wants to compete with them.

Alan Patricof: (34:25)
And we've all heard the argument from particularly Google, but Facebook as well of saying... And Amazon where you can put your product, they're handling third party sellers, but the fact is they've come out with their own products that compete with these sellers. They have the ability to give priority listing to it. They have the ability to control the ad market now. I mean, I don't know. Those on this line have had companies where overnight Google will change the algorithm. And all of a sudden your traffic go down by 10 or 20%.

Alan Patricof: (35:05)
When I grew up, I grew up with a basis that if someone had control over something, where you could not avoid it, that's called a utility. I mean, that's why utilities are regulated. That's why the railroads are regulated. That's why the phone companies were regulated. That's why we had monopoly laws in the late 1800's and the early 1900's. And I'm not antiquated, but those laws applied to people who are combining oils, steel frames to raise prices. And they monopolized industries. Today, we have a different kind of monopoly, it's data. And there has to be found a way to make this data available on a ubiquitous basis, in my opinion, so that everybody has access to it. And if it's accumulated by someone, they're entitled to make money from that data but making it available and create a more level playing field. If not their data accumulation builds up by the nanosecond.

Alan Patricof: (36:15)
And it's inevitable that these companies have to get stronger and stronger and stronger as they stay alive. And they can use every argument in the book. I think that, I'm encouraged by the congressional hearings now that, I never can pronounce his name Seciligo who's a Congressman I think from Rhode Island, who has led the fight, and done very well at it, by the way. He had the four Kings in a couple of weeks ago for a hearing. I mean, it's ridiculous to have a five-hour hearing for this subject, but that's what was allocated. There's a lot of work that's been done in the background. There are committees that have informed their non-profits, the Open Market Institute which was originally run by Sarah Miller and now has spun off into another activity, and her successor is doing a great job of preparing position papers.

Alan Patricof: (37:22)
I think it is appropriate that the government is looking into this. There's no other way we're going to come out with answers. I am not speaking out in favor of breaking off the companies. I honestly, I think it's a very tough job at this point. But every day, you know, we saw yesterday Fitbit's being bought, more data. I saw Facebook bought a company called Brainwaves, now they're going to have control of the brain. We don't have enough elements of our eyes and touch and everything else. So I want to make one disclaimer, I do not think that any of these people that we're referring to, so [inaudible 00:38:13] or Mark Zuckerberg, or certainly not Steve Jobs when he was there had any thought about being monopolous, about controlling, power. It's an inexorable growth where they're allowed to buy 50, 60 companies and combine the benefits of some of these companies. And it all gets down to data.

Alan Patricof: (38:39)
Take away the data from them, put it in a data repository and let everybody bid on it. And it'll be a different business, I think. And it's hard to make this argument, because everybody likes to get faster, cheaper. And you know, when you have an Amazon package in front of your door every day, who doesn't like to get it that way. And if we have a discussion here before we got on the phone, Anthony asked me about someone, whether he was alive or dead and I couldn't quite get to it. But what do I do? I go to Google. I mean, that's where it is. I mean, they've got 92% of the search traffic. So when you have that dependence on one thing, that is, in my opinion, a utility, and if you're a utility, you should be regulated.

Anthony Scaramucci: (39:28)
So I want to follow up on that comment you made about Amazon, and we've had a couple of our tech speakers, Steve Case, Chamath Palihapitiya talk about how technology is improving the world, but it's also creating a deflationary supercycle, whereby goods and services are cheaper, but it's also cannibalizing jobs for low and middle income Americans. Could you talk about that a little bit? Do you agree with them and what do you think the long term impact is?

Alan Patricof: (39:52)
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, why do you think all these retail stores are going out of business? I mean, they can't compete. It's impossible, they can't compete with the pricing, and as Amazon proved, they didn't have to make money for a long time because shareholders kept beating them with money, and they fed them to the point where they were able to put a lot of other people out of business with their low prices. And prices are not quite as low as they used to be, and they've got their formulas of knowing how to price merchandise. Those are tough people to compete against, both for selling hands and selling merchandise, and for delivery.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:36)
We have a few questions about what-

Alan Patricof: (40:38)
Like for Apple, it's a tollbooth for an app.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:41)
Yep.

Alan Patricof: (40:42)
You want to go through the tollbooth, that's it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (40:45)
An increasing percentage of their profits are coming from their services sector and they're trying to keep people captive in that ecosystem.

Alan Patricof: (40:52)
Right, and of course Amazon was able to start AWS. I mean, just another nail in the coffin.

Anthony Scaramucci: (41:02)
So we have several questions from members of our Asian audience about whether you look at that market at all, silver e-shoppers, especially in the Asian markets are very strong. And are you seeing commerce solutions that are tailored to that market? And part of that question that I'm combining into one, is Japan has an older population, China has things like a mandated retirement ages, where very successful executives who are then going to have extra time and money on their hands. Are you looking at the Asian markets at all? Or is this more of a US based play?

Alan Patricof: (41:34)
We're the new guy on the block, we're trying to build a position for ourselves in the industry. I will say that one of the companies we looked at, which was early on, has been in the sensing area, which is a key area, remote sensing for conditions that exist in senior living facilities or at home. And this particular company was a US company, but was selling in Japan because the healthcare reimbursement for this type of activity was so much greater, because the demands were so much greater in Japan than here. We would be certainly open to any other country investment that fit our criteria, although we are both in New York, both in our homes on Zoom. We're more likely to have a portfolio that has a preponderance of US companies. But I definitely would not leave out the possibility of having a European investment or a Japanese investment. Even possibly a Chinese investment. But we would certainly only do that with a partner, we would not do that on our own.

Anthony Scaramucci: (42:49)
Alan, we're going to leave you with one last question. It is a political one if you don't mind. I know you've been very active in the Democratic party. What are your thoughts on a Biden presidency? Again, I don't want to make it overly political, but I'm just curious. Because of your wisdom and your life experience, a Biden president, is he good for the market? Is he good for venture capital?

Alan Patricof: (43:16)
You know Anthony, you and I have had a very nice relationship since we met at the Florida convention, I don't know, 20 years ago now, I can't even count the years. And I have been a strong Democratic supporter. I have got to believe that Joe Biden is going to be good for the economy. I've got to believe he's going to be good for the country. I believe, I can't avoid being political, I believe that things that have been done to our Democratic system in these last several years have been so devastating. We're at an accelerated pace, I am deathly concerned with the November to January period this year of what further damage can be done. I believe that Joe Biden is solid. I know him. I've known him for a long time.

Anthony Scaramucci: (44:21)
You think Joe Biden will win this?

Alan Patricof: (44:25)
You're not allowed to be overly confident, but I'm convinced that the country in general, based on everything I read and see, is getting to the position that I am, that we can't continue with a Trump presidency for another four years or we're going to decimate all the institutions we've got. Let me give you an example. When a new administration takes over, you have normally 4,000 positions to fill that are political positions, from cabinet level down to Schedule C employees. People don't realize that. I don't know the facts, but my sense is that no more than half or two thirds of those positions had ever been filled.

Anthony Scaramucci: (45:18)
It's about two thirds, yep.

Alan Patricof: (45:20)
By the Trump... [inaudible 00:45:22] is not wrong. And of those two third, how many of them have been changed multiple times due to resignations or firings? A new administration coming in has an enormous challenge to, in effect, fill those positions, and fill them with adequate people and for those who haven't been in government before, to get trained with a [inaudible 00:45:49] who really perhaps is in a position to train other people. It's going to be an amazing challenge, but I want to finish this political thing with one thing.

Alan Patricof: (46:01)
The market doesn't like surprises. I have been shocked by the market we've had in the last three or four years under Donald Trump, because it has been a good market, good stock market, in the face of daily surprises, and that confounds me. Because investors like to plan, they like to be able to project, they want consistency. I believe in a Biden presidency, we're not going to have an irascible person who you just don't know what's going to happen when you open up the papers or listen to the [inaudible 00:46:43] overnight, and I think that stability of he and the kind of people he'll have around him. I know the big concern on Wall Street is tax rates. I read the op-ed this past week about the specific, concern about the income rate going up to the levels that they're talking about. I believe that's why we have a Congress, I think everything will be moderated, I think the people who have made extraordinary amounts of money recognize that they probably have got tax benefits that were excessive in view of the world where it's at today, and income inequality and all the other issues in the world.

Alan Patricof: (47:33)
Most people I know who have been successful financially have a sense of responsibility, are not totally selfish and believe there's got to be fairness in the system. If fairness also brings a more equanimity to the populace, if we have people who feel that things are fair, there's an equal playing field, I think that will permeate itself down to every level. And I think there will be more concern for care giving. One of the things about Joe's program is his Cares Act, which he wants people having to care for their elderly parents, having to care for their children, all the issues that are really front and center, and I don't mean to bring it back to Primetime, but certainly going to, I'd hope, benefit Primetime in a way. It has nothing to do with it, but I think it [inaudible 00:48:35] well for people being concerned about their parents. I mean you're concerned about your parents today, everybody on this line is. The ones who are older are concerned about themselves.

Anthony Scaramucci: (48:47)
Amen. Listen, we got to look after each other. Alan you had an amazing career, you're a great friend, you're a great American, we didn't get a chance to go into all of your charitable giving, which has also been amazing, and it's a great honor for me to have you in my life and thank you for sharing your time. You have to accept my invitation to come back, because I understand that you have written a book which is about, somewhat of a memoir, but also somewhat of an emotion about what you see in the country and our lives today, and so you have to promise me you'll come back so we can talk about that book when it's done.

Alan Patricof: (49:25)
As soon as the publisher agrees to publishes it.

Anthony Scaramucci: (49:27)
Agreed. All right. Well, amen. Okay, well that's a deal, and stay safe and healthy, and I look forward to watching your third [inaudible 00:49:36] success unfold.

Alan Patricof: (49:37)
And meeting up in person at your favorite club.

Anthony Scaramucci: (49:40)
Yeah, amen. Exactly. Got to get back into the city you and me.