Most people know better how to operate their phone or their car than they know how to operate their body. Nine out of 10 people don't know how to navigate their own health information, and even most doctors probably don't. And so we have this moment in history where we're in right now is going to allow us to really unlock this.
Fidji Simo is CEO of Applications at OpenAI, where she leads products like ChatGPT and oversees the company's global operations. Big job. She's a veteran tech leader and a former CEO of Instacart, and she brings deep experience building and scaling some of the world's most influential consumer platforms.
I was hospitalized. I developed an infection, and the nurse arrives and she's like, 'I need to administer an antibiotic.' I put the name of the antibiotic in GPT, and so it immediately told me, 'Hey, this antibiotic is standard, but in your case, it might reactivate a really serious infection that I had had a couple years prior.' So I said that to the resident, and the resident was actually totally relieved because she told me, 'I have 5 minutes to make the rounds. I cannot look at someone else's records 5 years from ago.' And I'm really glad that she picked that up. One of the most important decisions of my life would have been kind of messed up if it wasn't for AI helping connect the dots. I had seen 20 doctors, but not a single one of them had looked at the whole picture and was able to analyze all of these data and give me patterns that you can only detect when you see that full picture. That confronted me to the health care system in a big way and realize all of the shortcomings of being able to treat chronic illness.
There's a specialty for every part of your body, and there's literally a doctor for every inch of you. And I think what most doctors miss is the body's one network, and networks are hard to understand. And now with AI and with Chat Health and with Function Health, we're able to start to gather our own data in ways we never could before.
Hey, it's Dr. Hyman. I'm so excited to share this episode with you today. But before we dive in, I want to get your help. Please take a minute to hit that subscribe button, whether you're watching here on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform. It truly means the world to me, and it helps my team and I bring you this podcast every single week. Plus, I don't want you to miss a thing. So, thanks so much for being part of this community, and I'm glad you're here. Welcome, Fidji, to the podcast. It's so good to have you.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Well, everybody who's listening is probably wondering why I'm having you on the podcast about health. But as it turns out, you've just taken on the role of CEO of Applications at OpenAI, otherwise known as ChatGPT for most people. And you are launching as your first initiative the health focus of ChatGPT, which is ChatGPT Health. To me, that's so exciting because you could have done a million things, but you're focusing on this really revolutionary approach to helping people understand their own health. You know, most people know better how to operate their phone or iPhone or their Android phone or their car than they know how to operate their body. And, you know, we were just chitchatting a little before. We said nine out of 10 people don't know how to navigate their own health information, and even most doctors probably don't. You know, honestly, it's hard when you're sick to figure everything out. And so we have this moment in history where we're in right now is going to allow us to really unlock this, and your efforts are really accelerating this. And before we get into kind of what the potential is for AI and health and what the potential is for people to understand their health better to end suffering that we now have the answers to but they're not getting, I want to kind of talk a little bit about your suffering and my suffering, because we both kind of have a similar history of having a condition that's poorly understood, that's poorly diagnosed, that's poorly treated, that causes a lot of pain and suffering, that's not in our head, but is a real phenomena that happens that we haven't been able to help. You know, maybe you could start out by sharing a little bit about your health journey and how you got into all this and why this is so important to you, because you've not just, you know, not just leading this from within AI, but you also have another company that's helping to sort of unlock the mysteries of chronic illness, which I got so excited about when I saw.
Absolutely. So, yeah, to share a little bit about my own health journey, I was very healthy until I got pregnant in 2015. I had a pretty rough pregnancy, and then after the pregnancy, I started having all kinds of weird symptoms. I started fainting a lot, being very shaky, exceptionally tired. And as you can imagine, doctors at the time told me, 'You're just a tired mom. You're deconditioned. It's okay.' Like, you know, nothing wrong with you. And I kind of miraculously recovered, you know, nine months later, but after the pregnancy, a couple years later, I had the surgery for endometriosis. And after that surgery, the same symptoms recurred. I started fainting a lot, started being very dizzy. My heart would go like super high as soon as I would stand. A constellation of like mystery symptoms. And that's when I was diagnosed with a neuroimmune condition called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is a mouthful, that then evolved into chronic fatigue syndrome. And it's pretty debilitating. Like, you know, I am still dealing with the symptom, and that means that, you know, I can't stand for long periods of time without fainting. I end up, you know, having fatigue much faster than normal people. And so, you know, that confronted me to the health care system in a big way and realize all of the shortcomings of being able to treat chronic illness.
That's very frustrating as someone who's got access to anything, anybody anywhere on the planet and feel not to be able to get answers because we're looking at things through the wrong lens. And you know, I think, you know, in reading some of the work you've done, I encourage everybody to read your Substack article on ChatGPT Health, which really lays this whole problem out. And you talk about how you went to different doctors for different symptoms, but you're one body and everything is connected and there are root causes and there are fundamental biological systems. And I also, when I was younger, first got into all this because I ended up having chronic fatigue syndrome. I went from riding my bike 100 miles a day and, you know, being able to remember 30 patients' charts without taking any notes all day to not being able to walk up the stairs or know where I was at the end of a sentence. It turned out I had mercury poisoning from living in China. And that's a whole long story. But my whole system just collapsed from one day to the next. I went to doctor after doctor. I went to Columbia. I went to Harvard. I'm sure as you did. And no answers, you know. 'Oh, you're stressed. Oh, take some Xanax. Oh, take some Prozac.' You know, like, you know, and I knew I wasn't crazy. And I was a highly motivated, highly engaged person. And all of a sudden, I could barely function. And it took me a long time to dig out of that. And I think, you know, what I discovered was that the body is this incredibly complex network. As an individual doctor, it's very hard to understand that massive complexity that's a human body. We've got 40 trillion cells. We've got, you know, billions of trillions of chemical reactions happening every second in the cell in the body. There's so much scientific literature, and no one person can put that all together. There is an operating system that we call network medicine or systems medicine that's preventive, proactive, predictive, participatory, you know, as you've written about, and it's so good at helping people understand these complex chronic illnesses. But traditional medicine is just so slow to change. You know, as a doctor, I know that, you know, it took 50 years from the time Semmelweis discovered we should wash our hands before surgery till doctors believed that we should wash our hands before surgery, right? So, it's kind of like that. And now with AI and with ChatGPT Health and with Function Health, we're able to start to gather our own data. We're starting to make sense of our own data in ways we never could before. So, it's super exciting. And I think you've struggled even as a person who, you know, who's had access to figure this out. And I feel bad because that's really what I get up every day for, because I want to have people be empowered to end needless suffering and to get help whatever they can from the world's, you know, incredible scientific knowledge that most of us don't have the ability to sort through, understand, and make sense of. But now we're starting to be able to do that with AI and health, which is pretty exciting.
And I'll tell you, I mean, what you're saying resonates so much. I saw 20 specialists, everyone looking at just like one particular symptom. And if you look at my disease, it's a mix of immune dysregulation, nervous system dysregulation. So that impacts the entire body. But meanwhile, you have the GI doctor that's just focused on your GI symptoms. And so a cardiologist who's just thinking that your heart rate is fast, but not really connecting that with the fact that it's a neurological symptom. When I got diagnosed, it was interesting because I had this very naive idea that there were, you know, plenty of doctors behind the scenes who are all working to make sure that this condition would get cured. And I realized, oh, actually, there isn't that much happening that can actually advance scientific discovery. So, I ended up hiring a teaching assistant at Stanford to teach me genetics and like basically the whole body system. But I'm like, that's crazy. Like who has the resources and the time to do that? And that's what made me so passionate about making sure that everyone can understand their own health, level the playing field with doctors because ultimately it's your life. And really desilo the healthcare system which is not working as is. And especially when you look at like the burden of chronic illness in the country right now, about like 85% of healthcare cost is coming from like these complex chronic disorders. All of these multi-system, they are not focused on one organ. So you have a health system that's very organ focused and meanwhile sick people who are falling apart from head to toe are stuck with figuring out how to get out of that. So, you know, I'm really thinking about how AI can help but also how we can like reform the healthcare system to adapt to what people are going to need in the future.
Well, I think that's exactly right. I mean, you know, it is two-pronged really. One is helping individuals understand their own health in a way that was never possible before from their lab data. Function allows people to do that from imaging, and Function allows you to do that through wearables which integrate now into Function, through any lab that you've ever had done. You can upload into Health Vault and get all that information. And also you can access all the scientific literature in the world and all the knowledge, expert training, and all the genetics and your microbiome and your metabolism and toxin levels and measuring things that we never could measure before, and now we're doing it at radically deflationary prices and at great scale. No individual doctor can make sense of that, but it's going to tell a story about what's going on with you that you might otherwise think about. And the narrative you said was really important. There's a specialty for every part of your body and there's literally a doctor for every inch of you. I mean, it's so subspecialized now. And I think what most doctors miss is the body's one network and networks are hard to understand. They're complex. I mean, you've got biology, you've got chemistry, you've got physics, you've got all of it together in the body. And it's just impossible to be reductionist about it. And that's what medicine's been. But now with our ability to sort of source the whole world's knowledge, sort of like a gigantic Library of Alexandria in a way, we can suddenly actually have insights about things and learn things. So not just for individuals, but we can also accelerate science and change the paradigm. And I think that's what's exciting to me. So I think medicine is going to be shifted from the outside, you know, just like many other industries were shifted by, you know, like phones were disrupted by Apple or music by iTunes, you know, Spotify. These didn't come from within the industry. And I think this is what's so exciting to me because, you know, like you said, doctors try their best, the healthcare system does its best, but it's sort of stuck in this antiquated model. I really want to hear how you use AI for yourself because you've tried to figure this out as an individual, like what's wrong with me, why do I feel like this, what are the causes, what do I do, like what is my doctor not telling me. How have you used it for yourself?
The main thing is exactly what you said. It's connecting all of the data about me in one place so that it can be analyzed. And like the first time it happened, I connected my health records, my Apple Health data, all of my, you know, past labs, my medical history all in one place in ChatGPT and just asked ChatGPT like, 'Hey, are there patterns that you're detecting that would be interesting?' I also uploaded my whole genome in there. I was blown away because there had been, you know, again, I had seen 20 doctors, but not a single one of them had looked at the whole picture and was able to analyze all of these data and give me patterns that you can only detect when you see that full picture. So that has been really helpful in like finding new avenues to explore, getting new ideas, not having to read all of the, you know, studies coming out because like who has the time? Like I get a summary every morning on like new studies on my condition. I get a summary from like new treatments that people on Reddit are trying out because we spend so much time when we're sick on forums trying to figure it out. And ChatGPT does that for me. So that has simplified my life in a very big way. And in an even more concrete way, to give you a real story, last year I was having a kidney stone. I was having surgery and I was hospitalized. I developed an infection, and the nurse arrives and she's like, 'Hey, I need to administer an antibiotic for your urine test came back, you know, with an infection.' And I was like, 'Hey, like I'm totally fine with that, but can you wait a minute? I just want to check something.' And I put the name of the antibiotic in ChatGPT, and it already had all of my health records, right? And so it immediately told me, 'Hey, this antibiotic is standard for a UTI, but in your case, it might reactivate a really serious infection that I had had a couple years prior, C. diff.' And it like straight said like, 'You really shouldn't use that one. There's a better one to use that will do the job, but without risking, you know, messing up with your microbiome.' And so I said that to the resident, and I was expecting pushback, and in fact, the resident was actually totally relieved because she told me, she's like, 'I have five minutes to make the rounds. I cannot look at like someone else's health records five years ago, and I'm really glad that you picked that up because that could have been really bad. So I'm glad that I can now give you the right antibiotic.' And that made me realize, wow, like again, one of the most important decisions of my life would have been kind of messed up if it wasn't for AI helping connect the dots fundamentally.
That's such an important story. And you're right, doctors are relieved. It's like you got five minutes, you got 40 patients, you're running around like crazy. You don't have time to research everything. You know, even with AI, it's still hard. What did you learn, Fidji, about your health that was novel or new that helped you when you started to put all your records into ChatGPT?
My whole genome was really interesting because it's not that I had like genes that were like very clearly pathological, but because of certain combinations, ChatGPT started telling me some potential drugs that doctors hadn't thought about that because of my genome could be interesting, and they ended up really helping. So that was really helpful. It also detected that, you know, I needed like B vitamins that were methylated and like things that doctors hadn't dug into. And, you know, that was really interesting because years ago there was this promise of genetics like changing the whole medical world, and the reality is that it doesn't happen, right? It does happen in cancer, but like for your day-to-day care for a regular chronic illness, your doctor is not analyzing your whole genome and telling you to change your nutrition based on your genome, right? But all of this data is available and actionable and could help patients really improve. And so to me, like that combination really helped. And then combining that with Apple Health and really being able to see like, oh, actually your HRV is way better when you go to bed a little bit earlier and like you have a better symptom day after you do that. Just correlating all of these data sources was really magical, and that's what we're hoping to do with, you know, ChatGPT Health and making sure that you can have all of the right input so that your personalized health agent gets to know you better than anyone else and can really do true personalized advice, which was the promise of personalized medicine, but again, we didn't get there.
I think you're right. You know, I think a couple important points here. One is, according to some recent data, 93% of your health outcomes, of longevity, are not determined by your genetics, are determined by what we call your exposome, what your genes are exposed to and how they get expressed depending on that. And you mentioned, you know, something quickly which involves you need a different form of B vitamins. We're not looking for mutations particularly in your genome, we're looking for variations in your genetics that affect how your body functions, and you need a particular form of B vitamin that bypasses a step that's kind of sluggish. It's not a pathology per se, but it's just a little bit of a quirk. And for example, one-third of our DNA codes for enzymes. Enzymes run all the chemical reactions in our body. Every enzyme needs a helper. Each helper is a vitamin or mineral. And so there's a huge variation in the nutrient needs in a population. Never is looked at by doctors. They don't even probably know about half of them, know about this. I mean, some of them might know about this gene MTHFR that I think you have. But, you know, it's not that hard. And now we went from a billion-dollar genome when it was first decoded to a $300 genome. So, it's really accessible for almost everybody and you only have to do it once in your life. And so, now you're right, you can say, 'Hey, what should I be thinking about that I didn't know and how could I be helped?' And I wonder if there were any other things that it suggested to you from a causal perspective or any kind of things that your doctors hadn't suggested besides like what vitamins to take or what drugs to take.
Yeah, I think it was mostly like the challenge with chronic illness, as you know, is that you rarely collect one diagnosis. When you have one, you start collecting a lot of problems, which also points to the fact that traditional medicine puts labels on conditions but doesn't understand biology. And so what was actually, ChatGPT told me like, 'Hey, yes, you have like, you know, five different diagnoses, but fundamentally it's only one thing. You have like this dysregulation of the nervous system, and these are even some lifestyle, you know, changes you can make, activating the vagus nerve and like things like that that could potentially calm your system down.' And so again, it's like finding patterns across like a variety, a constellation of symptoms and diagnostics, etc., trying to solve them one by one and trying to solve the underlying problem, which has been just really helpful.
Well, it's amazing. I mean, without being a doctor or a healthcare person, you're a tech person, you're a business person, you sort of stumbled upon what is the future of medicine, which is understanding the body as an entire ecosystem that's a network that has root causes, that there's fundamental systems that affect everything. And, you know, in my first book, you know, over 20 years ago, I had a chapter that was called 'If You Know the Name of Your Disease, You Don't Know What's Wrong With You,' right? It's just the name of the disease. It doesn't tell you the why, it tells you the what. And I think, you know, saying you have POTS is just a name of a syndrome, is just a fancy medical word for saying when you stand up you get dizzy and your heart rate goes up. That's what it means in English, but it's a fancy word, you know, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, blah, blah, blah. And I think, you know, we make all these fancy-sounding things when we don't know what we're doing. And the truth is there are root causes, there are reasons this is happening, there is a way to understand how to treat the system. And I think with the advent of AI applied to our personal health data set, which we've never really had the ability to do before, we're going to be able to really accelerate discovery in medicine, you know, accelerate people healing all kinds of chronic illnesses. You know, I was able to cure my chronic fatigue syndrome, which, you know, most people would say is incurable, just like people say POTS is incurable, but it's not. And I'll help you if you want figure it out. But so I'm wondering why OpenAI and you in particular, head of apps, decided to start with health. Was it because of your health condition or was it because of the fact that 230 million people a week ask ChatGPT about their health?
Definitely the leading cause was we saw that this behavior was already happening. Like, you know, some of the best stories that I hear about ChatGPT are about, you know, helping people with their health. It's 230 million weekly. It's 40 million people daily. It's billions of conversations a week. It's 5% of total conversation. So that gives you a sense like of the scale that this is already operating at. So when we saw that and we hadn't really done anything, you know, super specific for healthcare on the product side. We had done a lot on the model side to answer a question in the right, accurate, factual way. But on the product side, we realized actually there is a lot to do to build upon this use case. And if we could get people to connect to their health records in a much easier way, which right now is very hard, if we could get them to connect to Function Health and pull in their data from Apple Health, like now the models are powerful enough that they can extract insights out of these data in a way that no one else can. And so that was the impetus behind ChatGPT Health, and my own experience certainly influenced that because I was already really primed to think about how we remove silos and how like the defragmentation of information could lead to much better insights. The other thing that was interesting in my mind is like, you know, as you know better than anyone, healthcare is really sick care. It's like you go there when you're sick. Whereas really what we need is preventative health. But preventative health when doctors only have 15 minutes for you is not going to happen that way. Whereas with ChatGPT, you can have literally a health coach like in, you know, in relationship with you every day telling you like, 'Okay, this is how you slept yesterday based on the data on your wearable. Today you should do this kind of exercise. You should eat this kind of food, and then tomorrow we'll reassess again.' And like having that kind of assistant to really help you with your health every day, not just when you're sick, not just when you're seeing the doctor. That's really what gives me hope that we could get to the root of chronic illness because so much of it is lifestyle related.
Yeah. And I think you hit on something super important, is that most of medicine is focused on disease and on treating disease. And yes, there is prevention, which is, you know, mammograms and colonoscopies and checking your cholesterol and PSA and getting a bone density, and that's all important. That's all important. That's how we typically think of prevention in medicine. You know, take your statin, take your aspirin, and that's okay, but that's not true prevention. That may be early detection, and also it's not about creating health. And so what I think for the first time we're really beginning to understand is what is health. I mean, I never got a class in medical school that said, 'Here's how to create health, creating health 101 for doctors.' Like they didn't exist, you know, no clue. If you go to your doctor and say, 'Doc, you know, I'm okay, I don't have a disease, but I want to be like really healthy, like what do I do?' they go, 'Well, eat better, exercise, get enough sleep, don't be too stressed.' Like it's very platitudinous and not very specific and it's not personalized.
But now we're having, you know, precision health, precision nutrition, precision medicine in a way that we've never had before. And it really allows us through personalization, which can only be done through something like AI and through understanding the science of health, not just what is the science of disease, but what is the science of health? What is a healthy human? Even defining that, we've never defined that. It's crazy, you know, like you put your car into the computer at the auto shop and it reads a thousand different metrics and tells you what's a little bit off here. You know, I mean, if your HRV goes down by 10 points one night, it's not a disease, but it's giving you a clue that you're not exactly where you should be, right? So, that's what's so exciting to me is we're going to be able to help people understand not just to treat disease or prevent disease, but how do we actually create health? And that's where this becomes really, really exciting for me. I'm wondering like how you see ChatGPT Health working along partners like Function and collaborating, integrating with them.
Well, I think partners are absolutely critical because the whole point, as I was saying, was like having one place where all of these different parts of your health can be connected into so that we can see the full picture. And right now, you know, we rely on partners to be able to do that because everyone has kind of a different lens. Like you go to Apple Health and you're going to get a lot of the, you know, lifestyle data. You go to Function and you're going to get a lot of like the biomarkers. Health records are going to tell you different stories. So to me, it's really about like how can we partner with as many players as possible so that the end user has a full picture of their health across many different sensors, many different biomarkers, and that way we can do the best job possible at helping them personalize everything for, you know, their lifestyle. So that's super important for us. And then there's also a type of partner that's more about being able to take action. And, you know, we're in partnership with Instacart, and I was the CEO of Instacart before coming to OpenAI, and that's a good example of like, you know, nutrition is so much at the heart of health. You know, it's funny that I'm telling you that, you're the utmost expert at it, but it's really hard for people to take action on nutrition advice. Usually, even if you go to a nutritionist, which very few people have the resources to do, you end up with like a piece of paper, you put it in the drawer, you never look at it again. And what is like, can we make it actionable? So, with a partner like Instacart, you can go from, okay, this is what you should be eating to like in one tap, order that and it's at your door in an hour. And like that's a magical closing of the loop where you really start with, to your point, what is health and how do we help you get there, and then all the way to actions that you can take in like as easy a way as possible to be able to stick to this new routine.
I think that's so important, you know, like you're right. I mean, in getting people all the way down the pathway, not just understanding what's going on, but just having an assessment of what their disturbances are in their health or simple things they can do, but how do you take it into action and how do you kind of close the loop? And, you know, I know Instacart is working on medically tailored meals, for example, and, you know, food is medicine initiatives, which is amazing, right? But most people wouldn't know how to do that. I mean, we could tell through Function Health you have diabetes, but then it would say, you know, we want you to eat a diet that's low glycemic, higher good quality fats, lots of fiber, good quality protein, and then what? Like then they go turn that into a menu plan for a week and then go to Instacart and go shopping for me and deliver to my door and like show me the recipes on how to make them by video and like all that's coming really soon or if it's not already possible. The Instacart app in ChatGPT already allows you to do that. It's really magical. Like you can literally just say, 'I have a family of three. This is our health condition. Develop a menu plan for us,' and then buy all the ingredients in one tap. And to me, like that was always my dream of removing friction as much as possible so that being healthy isn't also overwhelming. It just feels easy. And I think when we finally have the tools to get there, yeah, it's pretty exciting. I'm like thrilled about it.
And I think that the food is medicine part is important. You know, you grew up in a little village in France. You said you need a passport to get to the next village because it was so remote and isolated. And it's this little fishing village in the south of France. And food is such a part of French culture. And, you know, the freshness of it, the realness of it, the deliciousness of it. It's not just a convenience. It's also centered around connection and family and friends and social connections. And, you know, it's all the things we've lost in America. And I just see, you know, all this shifting as people start to understand the relationships between their health and food. And, you know, I mean, you know, when you go to the doctor, they don't tell you to do anything about nutrition. You know, I've been, you know, trying to work on changing medical education by getting nutrition exams, questions that have a nutrition focus that's based on chronic disease. And yeah, so doctors are really challenged, and this makes it easy. Less than 20 hours of medical school spent on nutrition, which is crazy when you realize that like I think something like 80% of chronic illness has a diet component. It's just crazy.
So yeah, I totally agree. And yes, growing up in France, you know, food was sacred, like it was at the center of everything. And here I think it's more considered like sustenance, right? And I think reestablishing the relationship that people have with food is really important.
You know, at Function, we kind of help you sort through the mass amounts of data. I think the Function app within that's integrated into Chat will help people understand their data in a broad level and help guide them on action plans. I've been playing with it. It's pretty amazing. And integrating that with like all the tools to be able to kind of execute on the recommendations, whether it's what supplement to buy or what food to eat or what things are going to help you, what drug could help you. It's going to be pretty profound. It's a really important advance, and it hadn't existed before. And I'm really glad to see you started there because it is, like you said, something people are using every day. I mean, people are, I don't know, Google a billion searches on health every day, and now ChatGPT in some ways is replacing Google. I don't know the last time I used Google, honestly. So I hate to admit that because my friend is one of the founders of that, but it's a really exciting moment. I'm very curious to hear your vision of, if you had a crystal ball, where you see, you know, this movement between AI and health intersection going in like one year, three years, five years, because even in the couple years that we've had ChatGPT and AI that's accessible as a consumer-facing product, which I learned was not even meant to really succeed at all. It just took off, you know, as an accident. It was kind of like a side thing. Where do you see, you know, this going? Because it's just even in the
It's accelerated so fast. And I wonder from the perspective of healthcare, from individual self-care, from research, what are the areas you see us being able to really accelerate human evolution?
We've talked a lot about what's going to happen on the consumer side, and I think ultimately it's really about empowerment. We're going to empower people with health information. They're going to be able to make better decisions about their health and just have a lot more data to optimize their health. So I think this is going to be reflected directly into health outcomes. We haven't talked as much about the provider side but we're also really invested here. We just launched OpenAI for healthcare with a ton of great institutions like UCSF, Boston Children's, HCA, where these institutions are deploying ChatGPT Enterprise for their doctors to be able to assist them in clinical decision making, to be able to reduce administrative load. And so we're really thinking of it as equipping both sides so that doctors can be more informed, because to your point, they cannot read the thousands of studies that come out every week. They can be more informed, they can make better decisions because they can look at the full picture of the patient. And then when they meet with the patient, the patient is also better informed about their health and that creates a much better dialogue between a doctor and patient. So that's really the end state. And then beyond that, I think the thing that gets me very excited is that I think we're finally getting at a level of intelligence of our models that can really find novel insights and novel science. So when I look at all of the diseases that have not yet been cured, I hate calling them incurable because I believe that it's just a matter of time. I really think that the models are getting smart enough that the time frame from kind of identifying a condition all the way to having a drug ready for it, all of these steps are going to be reduced by AI. We're going to identify drug targets way faster. We're going to develop these drugs way faster. We're going to get them through regulatory approval, which as you know takes forever right now, much faster, by using AI at every level. And so that's why, you know, I think when a couple of years ago we were talking about curing all diseases in our lifetime, that sounded a little bit like science fiction. I actually think that we're closer than ever, as long as we can update all of our pretty outdated processes and regulatory framework to this new world that would allow us to massively accelerate the pace at which scientific discovery happens.
I think you're so right about that. I think it's going to accelerate the development of drugs and of discovery in so many ways. But I also think it's going to do something else, and I don't know if you've thought about this, but I'm hoping you have, because your company Chronicle Bio, which is really to help people solve these quote incurable diseases like chronic fatigue and POTS syndrome and many other conditions that are chronic and often intractable. I think what's going to happen is going to be acceleration of medical understanding not just about how to develop better drugs but about root causes, about mechanisms, about novel therapeutics that involve food as medicine, that involve other therapies that are kind of outside traditional medicine that could accelerate healing, that are being applied across different things like novel therapies for example like plasmapheresis that's being used for autoimmunity, that's being used for long COVID, that is still sort of on the margins, it's part of traditional medicine but hasn't been used for that. So there's a lot of things that I think are going to happen that are both accelerating the way we do medicine already faster and better, which is important, but also to kind of emerge a new paradigm of medicine where we can actually understand the body as a network, where even if you get better at each specialty, the body still isn't organized like a bunch of parts, it's a system. And that's what's so exciting to me about the use of this technology and AI to help understand these massive data sets, look at patterns, discover things they never were seen before, understand this. And I know this doing this for 30 years, like I collect massive data sets on people compared to the average doctor. I mean, I look at everything you possibly think of looking at. And I sort that through my own little brain here, which can only hold so much. But I know I've seen patterns in the data that nobody has ever described before. For example, I know when someone comes in, they have a heavy metal toxicity. First of all, most doctors don't look for it, but when they do, I see they have methylation problems. They have low glutathione. They have low zinc. They have lots of oxidative stress. They have low amino acids. They have a whole series of patterns that I've never seen written up in a book or a paper before. And I'm like, 'Oh, this is interesting.' And I see this with autistic kids, too. There's all these genetic variables and all these different metabolic changes, and they're not being described widely because doctors aren't looking for them. And there's a joke I often tell when I'm giving lectures about this guy who drops his keys on the street and his friend comes by and he sees him looking under this lamp post and he's like, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I'm looking for my keys.' He said, 'Well, where did you lose them?' He said, 'Well, I lost them down the street.' He said, 'Why are you looking over here?' He says, 'Well, the light's better over here.' So we tend to look where we can find things easily, but not where the problem is. And I think the root cause approach to medicine, the systems approach, people like Leroy Hood who was doing the phenome health project, they're thinking like this. They're thinking about this new paradigm. And I think that's where there's going to be a whole acceleration because yes, we want to do all things to get better drugs and better discovery and so forth. But I think the biggest flip is going to be really changing the actual medicine we're doing and helping people create health and dealing with these chronic conditions that are in quote incurable. In fact, it's funny you said that because I'm launching a new feature on my podcast called The Incurables. And it's for people like you who've been through the healthcare system, who've tried everything, who've done everything, and who were told there's nothing to do except take this drug, maybe it'll help your symptoms, but you're going to have to live with it forever. And the truth is you don't. If you understand how to solve the puzzle, you can actually help people get better. And that's the beauty of this. I think the problem we have right now is that because we don't have the data we are not able to subsegment the people with these conditions so that we can find the exact thing that works for them. You mentioned my company Chronicle Bio, like that was the impetus behind it. We realize we're not going to find cures for long COVID overall because long COVID is probably 20 biological processes under that. So what we decided to do was actually create a company that partners with clinics to get biological data from patients and analyze everything on those samples, genetics, multiomics, proteome, metabolome, etc., so that we can actually subsegment those populations. And I think that's really the promise of big data plus AI that's going to allow us to find those subsegments of population and be able to do better by them. I'll tell you a story. At some point throughout my journey of trying to fix the problem, I opened up a clinic for these conditions and we were running clinical trials. And we were running a particular drug for long COVID and we had people that went from completely bedridden to completely functional. But the clinical trial failed in absolute. And the reason is there wasn't enough segmentation of the patients to realize, okay, on those it's going to be miraculous and on all of those it's not going to work. And so they killed the program. And now we had patients in tears saying like this drug would save my life and it's not available. And to me that's the greater strategy. So if we can have the right data so we identify the right population of patients, the right treatments for them, and then that can accelerate clinical trial approvals for these subconditions, I think that's the holy grail and that's where AI is going to really shine.
