156: Using AI to Predict & Prevent Health Issues – with Noosheen Hashemi

She’s applying artificial intelligence to healthcare in groundbreaking ways.

At the age of 22, Noosheen Hashemi launched her career at Oracle. Those days during the 1980s were exciting times. Oracle the company experienced exponential growth – Noosheen was one of the power brokers who helped Oracle double its revenues for five straight years. 

Noosheen moved from Oracle in the mid-90s to a fintech company that was instrumental in bringing financial, educational content to companies like E-Trade and Charles Schwab during the dot com heyday. 

After this dot com was sold, Noosheen started a family and a couple of foundations who began investing in many companies, which involved Noosheen working closely with nonprofits and think tanks. 

During those think tank years, Noosheen “became very wonky.” Her interest in the government’s ability to solve problems (and create problems) took off. 

With a deep interest in creating lasting change for the betterment of humanity, and after careful, systematic research, Noosheen decided to “bet on herself” by starting her own tech company: January AI. 

There are reasons why Noosheen pursued the private sector to make a difference. She shares with Wade those reasons in this episode. Listen as she shares how her multiple careers prepared her to lead today’s brand new seed-stage precision health tech company that’s got people talking. 

Wait till you hear what January AI offers – user-friendly AI that helps prevent, predict, and postpone chronic disease. 

Diabetes is where Noosheen’s company is already making waves – did you know 80% of the population is prediabetic and doesn’t know it? 

Are you? 

Tune in and discover how AI can help you predict and prevent future illnesses. 

In this podcast, we cover: 

• The incredible technology Noosheen’s company is developing to stop diabetes
• Which is more effective at bettering society: business or philanthropy? 
• How to know if you qualify as someone who is pre-diabetic
• How technology can be used to help you eat better and feel better
• How January AI can predict your glycemic response 33 hours into the future
• Using personalized technology to find desserts that are a good fit for YOU while avoiding foods that spike YOUR blood sugar
• How to create “psychological leverage” to foster self-discipline in your food choices
• The two tech “wearables” January AI requires that take data from your body to provide digital glucose management solutions
• Changes in U.S. healthcare Noosheen sees coming in ten to twenty years
• What does January AI do (and NOT do) with your health data
• China’s role in the future of AI and genome data harvesting
• Will “singularity” become our reality? 

Do you have diabetes? 

January AI started with a focus on diabetes for a good reason – far too many people end up with one type of diabetes or another at some point in life. 

In her conversation with Wade, Noosheen says we should think about diabetes as a spectrum. We all are on a metabolic health spectrum, some more healthy than others. The healthier side of the spectrum is where a person has better metabolic fitness. They can go from fasting to feeding quickly as their body makes speedy adjustments. This person has enough insulin to process glucose. 

According to Noosheem, 34 million Americans have diabetes, and 88 million have prediabetes – many of them don’t know this. 

Why is this possible? Because with no symptoms and no testing, how else would someone be able to know they are prediabetic? 

While Noosheen goes into further detail on this situation, she points out a test you can pick up at a local store that provides a quick and easy way to tell if you are prediabetic or not. 

Here is a glimpse of AI helping people live healthier lives:

Here is Nooshen describing how January AI works with the average user:

“We look at what you have been doing and eating. We create a behavioral model and a biological model of your body. This is the core data that tells us what you’re going to do next.”

This provides a “prediction ability” that the AI service can use for your benefit. Noosheen explains, “For biohackers, instead of putting things through your beautiful body that you fine-tuned so much, why don’t you instead put this info through the AI, and let the AI tell you how you’re going to respond. Why eat this? After only four days of training, you can take off the CGM, and the AI will continue to predict for you.” 

“The AI tells you which pizza you should eat, this pancake vs. that pancake, this grocery item vs. that grocery time. You can compare graphs to decide what you should do. You can compare any two grocery items or recipes. We have 2 million recipes in our database. How will you respond to eating this or that? Our AI will tell you.” 

“It will tell you how many minutes you have to walk to get back into a healthy blood sugar range after eating. So, if you eat a huge meal, you need to walk an hour and a half, for example. If it’s Saturday and you don’t have an hour and a half, it tells you the price of walking in minutes. To get your blood sugar back in the healthy range, it guides you. The AI can tell if you have been fasting for 15 hours. It makes recommendations as you go, like ‘maybe you should drop that particular yogurt because it has a high glycemic index. Instead, why don’t you shift to this yogurt instead?”

“We train people’s pallets over a period of time to move to lower glycemic foods without making it so extreme.”  Wade’s questions took a deep dive into some topics surrounding AI and the future of healthcare. As a Silicon Valley veteran of almost four decades – Noosheen provides many glimpses into what awaits us as AI technology marries healthcare. Episode 156 is one fascinating interview you don’t want to miss. 

Noosheen says “singularity” is inevitable – possibly as soon as 2030. 

Are you ready for the “brave new world” of futuristic healthcare technology? Find out by listening! 

Episode Resources: 

Check out more about Noosheen Hashemi & January AI
Noosheen Hashemi on LinkedIn
January AI on Facebook
January AI on Twitter
January AI on Instagram
Noosheen Hashemi on YouTube

Read The Episode Transcript:

Wade Lightheart: Good morning, afternoon and good evening. It's Wade T. Lightheart from BiOptimizers with another edition of the Awesome health podcast. And today we're going to talk about a really interesting and important subject. I don't know if you know this, but over 75 million people in the U S have pre diabetes and nearly 80% of those people don't even know it. And we're going to talk today about how artificial intelligence can help these people predict and prevent illness. And of course, this is a big issue. Diabetes is one of the biggest killers that compromises people's lives. And I think a lot of people think that insulin is a cure. No insulin is a treatment, but guess what? Through technology, we are going to be able to curb this and let other people live a healthier life. And today's guest is an expert in this very industry. Noosheen Hashemi is a tech industry veteran entrepreneur in philanthropist. She is the founder and CEO of January AI, a seed stage precision health tech company that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to prevent, predict, and postpone chronic disease. She also guides a family office that includes diverse investments in over a hundred companies and venture capital funds. She is the founder of the hand foundation focused on supporting scholars and organizations that promote socioeconomic growth among the disenfranchised. And she lives in the disenfranchise city of San Francisco. So welcome.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Hello. It's a pleasure to be with you. I

 Wade Lightheart: Had to throw in that piece. My goodness. I'm terrible. I know all the tech people are leaving San Francisco for Austin for some reason. So it seems to be the new everybody's going to Texas now some Florida. Yeah, Texas and Florida. So it's a, it's a very interesting transition in time that we're in there's a lot of breakthroughs that are happening. And what's interesting. We had a little bit of chance to connect before the podcast. You're kind of like one of these unique individuals that I was told about. We were all going to live like when I was in school. So when I was in school in high school, they told us that people were going to have not one career in life. They were going to have 3, 4, 5, 6 careers in one line, one life because of the exponential growth of technology. And you are literally that person that you've been able to achieve excellence in a variety of different areas. And you've combined them in a unique way to kind of, to, to, to make a big impact in the world. Can you talk to us a little bit about your background, but you started to before, and I was like, this is so good. We got to hear this because this really qualifies you for what we're going to talk today about how do we prevent people from getting diabetes?

 Noosheen Hashemi: Of course. Yeah, so I was I started around, I was 22 when I started at Oracle corporation. It was really exciting times, mid eighties and company had already been in business for seven years, but it was just beginning, this it's exponential growth. And the following five years, we doubled our revenues every year from 25 million to a billion. And that was just phenomenal. And I had a, I had a big role in that. I was I dunno if you ask people that worked at Oracle between 1985 and 1995, they would say, if you ask them who was the hardest working person, they would say there were a bunch of really, really, really, really hardworking people. I was probably one of the hardest working if not the hardest working person. I'm very proud of that because I was, we built something really amazing and that lasts to this day and is doing and it's doing great work in the world.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So from Oracle I had you know, I went to the.com world. And I it was early days of.com. So I was involved in bringing personal finance essentially to the world prior to the company I was with, people were going to brokers to actually execute transactions like buying and selling stock. And we brought this to everyday people, so they could, they could transact themselves. And we also brought financial content and other things. So we ended up becoming this sort of interesting feeder of of information to people like E-Trade and Charles Schwab and things like that. And that.com we sold that.com. And I went on to have a couple of kids and then started a family office. So started a couple of foundations. We started investing in a lot of companies, and this is when I began working very closely with a lot of nonprofits and a lot of think tanks that was participating in.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And I was on the board of new America foundation for almost eight years. I was part of the Atlantic council, many, many things tanks in DC. That's where I really became very wonky. And I was very, very interested in the role of government in, in everything because government really out, it really outweighs everything else. I spend time with philanthropy, but philanthropy at a time, you know, you were talking about $300 billion in philanthropy, but you're talking about trillions of dollars of government spending, which affects everything from, from what we eat in school lunches to subsidies, to, to foods and, and

 Wade Lightheart: Policies that direct technology development or stifles that oftentimes, which is one of the big issues that so many people in tech. Right. Absolutely.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And so if you look at, for example, U S ID NIH, there's so little of those funding of that funding is going to prevention a lot of the money, as you know, in our system. You're quite aware of secure. I'm glad you call it the same. I call it really goes into acute acute disease and end of life disease as opposed to you know, as opposed to really helping people live healthier lives. So, so I had that, so I was living that. So I was kind of in the service of others for quite a few years. And then I went back to the dark side in 2013 and started operating in some of our portfolio companies that we had invested in we've invested in 130 companies, about a hundred of them are alive still. And so, so invested in a hardware company I was involved with.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And so, and then I decided after, after about three years decided I had to start my own company bet on myself. Very Larry Ellison of me to bed but on myself. And so I really you know, I took a very methodical approach to deciding what I wanted to do. Cause I could do a lot of things that I saw a lot of opportunities, you know, for a minute, I thought I should do a, a new LinkedIn because it needed more heart. It needed to really address like the G middle annual population. They want to know what kind of boss they're going to have. There's, there's a lot of sort of connection emotion they need. And I felt like LinkedIn was just too cold. Anyway, I looked at a bunch of different things and I landed at this conference societal impact of of, of, of machine learning.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And there was a health section and I was, that was it. I heard the possibilities and I was hooked. So yes, so I've had a career in tech. I've had a career in philanthropy and running a family office then coming back to tech and really you know, it's it's now about combining all those things, not just doing good, but doing well as well because it's the only time, you know, philanthropy is great, but it's not sustainable. If you want to make tremendous change, you must do it in the private sector. You must do it in a way that gets into millions of people. And it's hard to get into millions of people philanthropically. So that's how I've ended up with multiple careers. I've also raised amazing kids. So my kids are really, really, really interesting people and interested people. They're very interested in things they're very curious and very you know, living quite hollered like horrible heartedly. So yes, I've been lucky to be able to have multiple careers.

 Wade Lightheart: That's really cool. You brought up so many different areas that you could dive into technology, its impact both positively and negative in the planet political machinations and how that shapes and then whether you're in business or philanthropy for long-term change, based on all of that experience, you came back to the picture of creating essentially a business model, which you can bring technology life-changing transformation. Why do you that you've landed there through that career before we get into the, what you, what your company does? Like what, what, why do you feel that way or how have you come to that conclusion? Because it's not just a theory, this is applied experience of what you think, what would you say? What, what, what were the aha moments for you and maybe those pieces and why businesses so critical because right now businesses under attack in the world right now, it's, it's invoked to condemn companies that are creating massive value on the planet. And I think a lot of people are missing the boat and say, we need philanthropy. We need to take care of these, but isn't it business that does a more effective job than anything else? Absolutely.

 Noosheen Hashemi: It has to be sustainable. There are few in my career, I started philanthropy casually in 1999. I became a rigorous, I always do everything quite rigorously. I became a student of philanthropy and studying and researching it from 2003 on for, for you know, for at least 15 years. So I've looked at it very academically, not just like, not just experientially, but you know, the private sectors is really the only way to make things sustainable. Most, most philanthropic institutions. You know, they depend on of course, contributions, annual contributions. The large foundations that were, were started with large endowments. They don't need contributions obviously, but they have their areas of interest that they invest in. And philanthropy is great for trying out ideas. You need businesses to scale, then you need government to scale them. You really can't scale in philanthropy.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And so, yes. Have there been cases of scaling philanthropy? Absolutely. I serve on as an advisor to a group called care message and they have they are a philanthropic organization but they have a very large amount of earned revenue. So they really are really they are a business that, that got started through philanthropy, but they're very unique in their case. You look at care message there helping at-risk populations seek medical help when it's when it's a right time to do it, not too late. So like they encourage people for example, who are pregnant to get help early on. So they don't end up with very costly pregnancies and that sort of thing. They've served up, you know, tens of minutes of messages to people. And they're very effective. That's very rare. So philanthropy, lacks market mechanisms, it doesn't have, for example you don't see companies, you don't see nonprofits that don't do well.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Dive very often. Sometimes it just stay open like endlessly. You don't see M and a, of course in philanthropy because that's just not done very often. It was rare when Warren buffet gave a bunch of money to gates and said, you spend it for me, you do it better. That's more bare. Generally people don't do that. People don't get paid the same way in philanthropy. You know, it's, it's Sean, they Google can pay $5 million for an engineer. You'll never see that in philanthropy just doesn't any sense to be able to do that. And also think about the IRS they give, they, they give basically they approve most people's applications. I think 95% of the people that apply for 5 0 1 C3 get approved. I mean, that would just wouldn't happen if you had 95% of the startups live, it just makes no sense.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So why should you start another nonprofit for the same thing that 2 2500 other people in the country are doing again and not gain those efficiencies and things like that. So it really isn't it lacks the market mechanisms to sustain itself over time and scale itself to really large large populations. But it's fantastic for experimentation. It's fantastic for trying out. It's fantastic for for doing things. I'll give you an example. And one of the things that gives us an edge has historically given us an edge, I would not say in the future historically has given us an edge over some of the Asian countries is our love for the arts and, and, and this interesting educational system in the U S where we had really, we had the sort of academic curriculum, but we had sports and we had arts and, and this allowed Americans to be a lot more innovative and a lot more creative in the world.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And, you know, as budgets go down, a lot of these programs, our programs get slashed. That's a good place for philanthropy to come in and say, you know what? We want our population to stay on the edge of creativity. We want them to think freely and not be told, you know, study by road, do this and that. So why don't we give them these other programs and support museums and, and different kinds of things to keep our population in the U S creative. And, and so there's a lot of places where philanthropy is uniquely able to play a unique role. But I would say when it comes to massive solutions to healthcare, to to you know, the biggest problems we have in the country, I think that business has to solve a lot of those things because business can it's subject to business rules, it market rules, it will die. If it doesn't do a good job, it can, you know, attract talent in a way that, that philanthropy and government can't of course you can go to Singapore and government does attract the best and the brightest, but not so in most countries in the world. So I think there's a role for philanthropy. There's a role for business. There's a role for government, but we shouldn't mix them all up.

 Wade Lightheart: Oh, beautifully said, and well, articulated let's get into what your company is doing. Because last week I had a lady on who was talking about genetic engineering and how they can prevent certain illnesses. We have an artificial intelligence, genetic expert on our team who is helping us cultivate and develop things for our, which is really cool. And your, on the bleeding edge of this industry, particularly around diabetes, can you talk about the, well, first off the, what diabetes prevention could be where it's not right now, because now it's, we're, we're kind of like, after you've got the diagnosis care, what do you see happening with your company and what it's able to provide to the world at large to kind of deal with this super debilitating condition?

 Noosheen Hashemi: Absolutely. Yeah. So pre-diabetes is a stage pre you know, before diabetes, obviously, and this is your, basically we think of diabetes as a spectrum. So all of us are on some metabolic health spectrum, some more healthy. So they have they experienced better metabolic fitness. They can, they can go from fast to fed pretty quickly. Their bodies can adjust very quickly. They have just enough insulin, just enough glucose to meet up. And but 422 million Americans. So 84 or 34 million people with diabetes and 88 million people with pre-diabetes today. They do, they're not so lucky to have that metabolic fitness, unfortunately, as you said a very large number, 84% of the people that have pre-diabetes don't even know it. They don't know that they have pre-diabetes. And so how's that possible? Well, until symptoms show up, they're not getting tested and screened today in America. So generally

 Wade Lightheart: I would say just as an interjection there, can you clarify what qualifies as pre-diabetic, how someone would find out what they would do to find that out themselves,

 Noosheen Hashemi: If they, if their doctor gave him an A1C test hemoglobin A1C tests where they can go to Walmart and pick up each one, you know, A1C test for 30 bucks if their glucose, if their blood sugar basically is if sorry, apologies if their A1C is 5.7 or higher, they have pre-diabetes, if it's 6.5 or higher, they have diabetes according to sort of medical standards, we think these numbers are more go up and down. Honestly, we don't think that you're, we think, you know, if people have been shown to go to the hospital for acute disease and all of a sudden show, very, very high high blood sugar, and people worry that they have diabetes, but they're under excessive stress, which is why their glucose is going through the roof. But but then they come out and they're fine. So we think of it a as a spectrum B why aren't people getting screened because today our entire medical system is based on when you complain about a problem. If you don't complain about a problem, no, one's bothering, right. You're fine. Worse than, yeah. You're, you're, you're, you're diagnosed

 Wade Lightheart: Is healthy just because it's the, you don't have the appearance of a disease at this point, even though that you're pre disease state

 Noosheen Hashemi: Or pre disease stages and insulin resistance can start, you know, in childhood it can actually start in utero. So so if you, you know, if you're under nutrition under nourished in utero, or, you know, low birth weight can, can start that there's I mean, there's no such a thing as that. It is definitely true that, that we spike more in our later years. So when we're in our forties, a lot of people spike and then with most of the things they were always eating and then they get into their fifties. A lot of people are spikers. So that's true. It is related to age for sure. But that disease starts pretty much from the beginning. It's like, you start aging when you're born, basically. It's, it's that, it's that idea. So, yeah, so basically people are not screened.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So some people are more, you know, think more preventatively because maybe they had gestational diabetes when they were pregnant or they had a family member. So if you have a sibling or a parent that has diabetes, your chances of diabetes go up two to four times, not two to 4% of two to four times. So I think those people have a little bit more awareness about that, but, but in general we have 122 million people on the diabetes spectrum today that have pre-diabetes or diabetes, by the way, keep in mind 22% of the people who have diabetes are not, are not diagnosed either. And so COVID COVID was like a real big wake up call because we all, we understood that, wow, if I have a precondition and I don't know it it could be definitely, it could be really costly. So we now look at things quite differently.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So what can technology do? And I can talk more about, I can talk for weeks on diabetes and pre-diabetes, and kind of the spectrum and, and what we know and what we don't know, but in terms of what technology can do technology can show essentially CGMs, well, let me start with heart rate monitors, cause they've done great things for us, right? Heart rate monitors have done phenomenally. What they've done in the last 15 years has just been transformational. I think I think this idea that you should move has entered the American site Geist more so than ever since the TV was, was invented, right? Where everybody just started sitting before that people were moving until the 1950s and then people just sat and then they drive to, you know, now we're in front of zoom. So the idea of movement has, has, has really clicked in the idea of sleep has clicked in the idea of mindfulness is clicking in with Headspace and calm and a lot of other things.

 Noosheen Hashemi: But this idea that we should manage our blood sugar is newer to the, to the world. And it is being made possible by this novel technology, which is actually not novel. It's been around for over 20 years or more. It, as the continuous glucose monitor, this continuous glucose monitor is really magical. It helps you see inside your body because you can see what's happening with your blood sugar. It's not an exact exact measure of your blood sugar, because it's just, it's reading interstitial fluid, which is correlated with glucose in your blood sugar. So it's not exactly like the low blood sugar, but it's good enough. As far as you're concerned, it's a, you're able to see what's happening to in your body. So you're able to see your reaction to various things. So if you go on a two hour by Cron, you can see what's happening to your glucose. If you do that if you eat a certain thing, your favorite food or, or anything, you can see the reaction to that food. And over time, you can, your possibilities for biohacking are really infinite because you can experiment to death. You can see, like I go on a five mile run and then I ate pancakes. What happens versus if I eat the pancakes, then go for a bike run. There's some fascinating

 Wade Lightheart: Periods that we've done it by optimized. It's amazing, Matt, my business partner is a split tester and I think he's done, I don't know, getting close to 20,000 different split tests just in the marketing level and almost as many on the physical level. Right. And it's, this is what I think, what is what's called bio-hacking now I believe will be called preventative health. Absolutely.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Yeah, no, no question. And, and we need everyone engaged because there's no way governments will have enough money to spend on, on actually solving our medical problems. I mean, you know that right? Well,

 Speaker 3: They don't really solve that many problems. They just add more

 Wade Lightheart: People and they get more research because no one wants to get concluded and they have to get refunded for the university. And there's no accountability built into the system. Cause can you deliver this on an economically viable model to the public and with increasing taxes and increasing or lack of oversight or accountability within governments? You know, the marketplace is the ultimate accountability. Absolutely.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So government does have a little bit of a good record in research. Like, you know, DARPA has done some great work for example. But by and large, look at, look at how NIH is money spent. It's, it's all on disease. There's very little on prevention, right? Dr.

 Wade Lightheart: Fowchee, I think has allocated $3 trillion in funding over his career. And the, in that kind of power, for example, I mean, basically we're beholden to what he thinks is valuable and what's not. And look at the mess that we're in now, which he's backtracking from and whether people want to like that or not. The reality is this is the current crisis that we're in was directly related to the lack of oversight for decades in institutions that were spending taxpayer money for things they should have been spending. Well, if

 Noosheen Hashemi: You get me started talking about trillions, first of all, when did we get to trillions? We used to be in billions and now like, like, we're not like a trillion here, a trillion there, three trillions, how about some trillions? And so, so yeah, don't get me started because I made four before I came to medicine. My love was economics and I've been I've been in love with economics for, you know, I have a degree in economics and I, and I'm part of a lot of groups I support economic is totally scholarships. I serve on the board of Stanford Institute for economic policy research, very, very interested in, in economics. And you know, I, we used to care about budgets. Now we used to care about government debt and things like that. We used to care about it, inflammation, inflammation. I almost said, inflammation, you see my two loves, they're getting it.

 Wade Lightheart: Well, inflammation and inflammation I think are correlated. One is systemic to an institutional and one that subjects to damage to the system. And the other one is, is biological, but they're, they're actually similar conditions.

 Noosheen Hashemi: All right. So, so yeah. So, so going back to sort of, yeah, so we could talk about how government money's allocated and it's not allocated to serve, serve the country. For example, USDA, it has two bosses. It has the American farmer and the American plate. And you know, so it's not really clear who's, you know, who we're serving and, and so, so I think there's, there's definitely an outsize role that government can play, but in terms of diabetes prevention, so the diabetes prevention program was created in 2002, where there was a study called the diabetes prevention program 2002. And this program basically showed that if you have pre-diabetes and you do not intervene, that may main interventions, weight loss, there's a 58% of the people who don't get an intervention who don't lose weight will end up with diabetes, but this was, this is almost 20 years old.

 Noosheen Hashemi: This is before smart phones before smart watches, before Abbott Libra, before Dexcom, Dexcom at all, any decks I think when it came out I think Medtronic just had had FDA approval on one CGM. So it is quite outdated in terms of its entire model and where we don't have anything new to take its place. And so private sector, you know, we're not waiting, we're running to take advantage of technology. So what we are doing is CGMs, like I mentioned, is one very powerful tool to add to prior powerful tools like heart rate monitors, to try to make sense out of our body. But in January we realized, well, sensors tell us everything. So let's just put on a CGM and a heart rate monitor, what can it tell us? And we quickly realized that first of all, we had a machine learning interest. So we weren't just interested in what can the data tell us, but what can the data predict for us? And so, because of our interest prediction, we said, is it enough to predict from just CGMs and and, and heart rate, can we predict a lot of things? And you can, yes, you can. However, to have more robust predictions, it's important to include food. What are people eating? And I think that's been an unsolved problem, which we tackled boldly and audaciously. So I can

 Wade Lightheart: Talk about what we did. Yeah. Can you expand on that particular? Cause you know, I'll give you a little insight, but for when I was a personal training coach, I would get people. The first job they would have to do is to write down everything they ate for a week. Now, prior to that conversation, I would tell them, I'd like, well, what's your diet? Like? I'm like, oh, I eat pretty good. That would be 99% of the people said, I eat pretty good. Well, you get them to write down for a week in a pen and paper and a journal and they'd come back kind of slinking and, and, and they'd come over and we'd meet. And I was like, so what's the journal I can. They're like, well, I don't think I eat as well as I thought I did. And this is kind of going to the next level because now they're not even coming down to, Hey, I'm not, I'm not in alignment with what I say. You're actually looking at well, based on what you're currently doing, your likelihood to get diabetes. Is that, that, that, that is that what you're doing.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Well, we don't give, so we don't, I, you know, I should give the medical disclaimer, we don't, we got to get those legal disclaimers and we do not treat or diagnose, we don't diagnose or treat or manage, but we do help people understand their bodies deeply and understand if they may be at risk and they should go discuss it with their doctor. But

 Wade Lightheart: Like, when are we going to get out of this program, by the way, I don't know, man, this legal jargon, mumbo jumbo to prevent a lawsuit with people. It's like, you know what?

 Speaker 3: Let's help people, right? Yes. So basically

 Noosheen Hashemi: What this is. Yeah, yeah. With the CGM can tell you is how you're spiking, but what January can help you do is to say, okay, first of all, you can't keep all your spikes in your head. You know what, when you ate last week on Tuesday, you're not sure what that was. Or if you want to share it with someone, let's say somebody wants to share it with their personal trainer or they want to share it with a nutritionist or, or someone else. Who's, who's part of their care team. So then what we do is essentially we've created a database. So this is, this is kind of, this was our journey. So we sort of looked at heart rate data and CGM data. And we said, you know, what's missing is food data, how can we turn food into an asset? How can we heard it, turn it into data that could be used in prediction.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So we said, okay, let's build a food database. So we aggregated all the food databases, curated food databases that there are in the U S from USA ID and other private sources. And then we, we saw that, of course, most of the food in America is not labeled. So the only food that's labeled in America is this, there's another role for government. If you wanted to give an art role to government, you know, labeled the food sorry, that was rude. But grocery grocery items are labeled and chain restaurants are required by law to be labeled, but nothing else is labeled. So you could have a milkshake that's 1200 calories and you, you wouldn't know it. So here, I must say that, you know, the food lobby has been very powerful in, in, you know, not allowing us to be more informed about what we're eating. Can I,

 Wade Lightheart: Can I expand on this a little bit, because what is it about human psyche that chooses to ignore important information? That's impacting them, whether that's their credit score, whether it's how many calories they're eating, whether it's the risks associated with their weight gain, or like,

 Speaker 3: Wait, you really want to go

 Noosheen Hashemi: To the cognitive cognitive revolution because if we are the only species that can imagine things like we actually have these, these thoughts around like for an animal, for a frog frog, doesn't have like, if it eats sad, I don't think the frog eats a bug and goes, I'm so sad. I can't believe I ate this frog. I feel guilty. The other frog didn't get enough bugs. You know, we had, you know, it just doesn't, it there's no, there's no socialist. How did we get to this place? There is. So I think this is, this is our evolution as, as homo-sapiens, this is what happened. So it's not, we're not being mischievous. This is, this is just what happened to us. We ended up with this cognitive revolution and we are now as part of our evolution. Now we are these people who imagine things. And then, you know, we are terrible at, at, at studying data and looking at data and especially, especially about ourselves, we just cannot look at data about ourselves. You know, very fast

 Wade Lightheart: Brain issue is that like our, our brain versus our cognitive brain, like, what is, what is the interruption point? There were any

 Speaker 3: Insights. No, I mean, I, we should get, we should get

 Noosheen Hashemi: We should get evolutionary biologists to comment on this, but my, my 21 year old son is, is one. Okay. So

 Wade Lightheart: These integrations. Yes.

 Noosheen Hashemi: But, but in terms of just where we are you know, I think if we, if we want to look at, so, so basically we thought, okay, about food, you were talking about journaling. So we said, okay, this is, let's build this database. And then let's look at labels. And then, so our first machine learning project was to label foods. We said, let's let let's label the foods. And people's local restaurants because a lot of people don't necessarily go to chain restaurants. A lot of people do, but but of course there are lots of pop them up, you know, mom and pop shops. Let's let's those. Then we, we, we noticed that your glycemic response or your blood sugar response to foods is more associated with glycemic index of foods. You eat versus carbs that you eat because not carbs are created equal.

 Noosheen Hashemi: You're not just eating carbs. You're also eating foods that are complex that have other things. They have fiber, they have fats, they have water. So we thought let's try to understand foods better. So our second machine learning project was to come up with glycemic index and glycemic load for the 16 million foods in our database. Then we ran a an observational trial to associate people's glycemic response or blood sugar response to the glycemic index of foods. They were eating. We then took that and made it into a prediction model. So our study took from August of 2018 to March of 2020. And we studied 1,022 people. We put out word and got 23,000 people interested in this study. So we just took 1,022 people 250 of them with type two diabetes, the rest pre diabetes, and healthy again, because we insist on learning the spectrum.

 Noosheen Hashemi: We don't want to live in one band of the spectrum. We want to understand how people move from one side to the other back and forth. So, so that ability to predict, and that's really the crown jewels, our ability to predict glycemic response for people in type two. So people have predicted glycine response for type ones or people who are insulin intense users. And those people usually that's the calculation between carbon insulin, insulin car. It's pretty simple, but we took this and look that for type two. And the poster we put out at the American diabetes association in 2020 was about our prediction model, which was, which basically can accurately predict your glycemic response, 33 hours into the future, not two hours, 33 hours in the future, 33 hours based on just four days of training. So yeah, that's crazy.

 Wade Lightheart: So the machine is able to tell you, yeah, Bob, you're likely to hit Starbucks at 9:00 AM tomorrow. You're likely to hit like the fast food lunch, hard this time, and have a reasonable dinner in the evening,

 Speaker 3: Looking at your behavior. And

 Noosheen Hashemi: We're looking at where you have been doing, and we can. So we're now creating a behavioral model and then we have a biological model. So we have a biological model of your body. We have a behavioral model, and it's the core of the two that tell us essentially what you're about to do next. So, so then, so then what can we do with this prediction ability? Well especially for biohackers, instead of putting things through your beautiful body that you find tune so much, why don't you put it through the AI, let the AI, you did let the, I tell you how you're going to respond to it. Why are you going to eat it? So after four days of training, you can take the CGM off or after, since you have runs out, you can take it off. And the AI can still continue to predict for you.

 Noosheen Hashemi: I can tell you, you eat this pizza versus that pizza, these pancakes, versus those pancakes, this grocery item versus that grocery item. This is how you might do, and you can compare and you can, the graphs, you can see what you should do. So it helps you figure out, compare any two groceries, any two menu items, any two recipes, because we have 2 million recipes in our database. How are you going to respond to it? It will tell you how many minutes you have to walk to get back into a healthy sugar range. So if you eat a huge meal, if that's gonna, if you're gonna have to walk out an hour and a half, maybe you don't have an hour and a half lead that for Saturday. Maybe you shouldn't have that during your Workday because you just don't have time to walk an hour and a half.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So it tells you your, you know, basically the price in minutes of walking. So to get your blood sugar back in healthy range, and that's not all, that's not all, it also tells you how long you've been fasting and eating. So intermittent fast that people who are intermittent fasting practicing and humans with fasting can see, oh, I'm getting close to 15 hours. I'm getting close to 16 hours, but not because they set an alarm for themselves in one of the popular apps, but because we know from their body, that's what's happening because where they're wearing these wearables. So we can also make recommendations to people say, Hey, you're eating this yogurt with blueberries. It's pretty high GL. How about we move you to a lower GL yogurt with blueberries later? How about if we move you to, let's say a vanilla yogurt with real blueberries, how about later, we move you to playing yogurt and blueberries.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So we would be able to, you know, train people's pallets over a period of time to move to lower GL foods without making it so extreme. Like today, everything you were doing yesterday, stop that's what happens when people go to the doctor and they get diagnosed with diet with pre-diabetes or diabetes, the doctor, she hands them a sheet and says, everything you've been doing until yesterday is wrong. And, and so it, January, we believe like those things just don't work. People are just are staring at a blank wall. They don't really know what to do. Nobody can just drop 25 pounds. It takes an enormous self-efficacy and willpower to do things like that. So we think we need to give technology to people to figure out what they can eat. They can eat a little bit more of the things that can eat it a little bit less of the things that spike them and, you know, look for alternatives and have this database to, to sort of scour. We can go, we can take this many directions.

 Wade Lightheart: Well, there's so first off, that's amazing. Congratulations on creating something so robust using technology that it can predict. What, what different types of foods, how many foods do you have in this database, that 16 million foods that you sew. So you can eat a diet, your regular diet that you'd normally follow on any given week and after four days, this machine will be able to tell you what happens if you walk into Chucky cheese and have a pizza, definitely a chain restaurant,

 Noosheen Hashemi: For sure. If you're in an airport, you're going through an airport. You're like, should I eat this? Or should I not? We can, if you can at least look at our predictions of, of the nutrients for that thing and our predictions of your glycemic response. And that's why we spend three years in research.

 Wade Lightheart: So, so based on this, why isn't every single diabetic organization in the world, providing this for people and saying, listen, here is your on, and you can explain how the technology is delivered, but basically you now have someone that gives you instant feedback before you make the inflammatory move, which is which, I mean from a behavior modification program, you know, I'll, I'll I'll give an example for our listeners. I I've been very capable and have demonstrated ultra high levels of successful dieting using no tech observation internal representation monitoring in a rigidity of diet. It's and it's not, it's not technology that people get, but what's interesting where the concordance is, is how do I deal with going off the program if you will. And that is yes, I create a psychological leverage point that is so painful in my mind, I use my imaginative component to get leverage on myself.

 Wade Lightheart: And I learned this in bodybuilding. There was a guy by the name of rich [inaudible], who was a successful Mr. Olympia competitor, back in the eighties and early nineties. And he asked himself one question before he ate food, is this helping me get to my goal or not? And recently I'm doing this 50 weeks to 50, and I'm like, I had a successful body, boom growth went away from it. Wasn't trying to stay in shape. And, you know, I was in, you know, elite level of physical conditioning for much of my life. And then as my business grew, I said, I don't, I don't have to follow that as, as much, but now that I'm coming back to 50, I was like, well, can I get back to that level again? And in order to do this, I had to activate this leverage point now, before it was related to my career, my athletic career, what that meant to me.

 Wade Lightheart: And I was like, those things, aren't that really important to me anymore. So I'm like, how do I get leverage on myself? But we're launching a book next year on, on dietary philosophies. Yeah. And it's and it, I said to myself, okay, well, I need to show up a certain way for that diet book. I need demonstrated proof. And so one of the leverage points is I use this like, well, I love potato chips. For example, I love potato chips. You give me a potato chip. My friends know that don't hand weigh the bag of potato chips or the bowl of chips. I will eat all of them and not offer anything. I go, I love them. I don't know what it is. It's like my pet peeve and my demon and my, and my love at all at the same time. But now I look at that potato chip and I says, well, if I eat this, that bag of potato chips could cost me $142,000 now because of loss, potential revenue for the company, because I'm just a fat guy talking about a diet book.

 Wade Lightheart: Right. So I can't do that. I can't let down that. And it's not about letting myself down. It's like, I can't let down the people on my team. I can't let down the business. I can't let down all of our clients that we're treating like, so this is monumental cascading of effect of like I'm and that's the leverage point, but what you're essentially doing is you have a machine here that is able to say to that person in that moment and get leverage on it. The consequence of you making this choice right now is

 Noosheen Hashemi: Totally, yes. It closes the human behavior, though. It's a little bit like you brought up the credit store credit score. So today people have a foundational understanding of their credit score and what it would do for them, if they ruin it or how they improve it or how it goes bad et cetera. And we don't really have that about our body. We don't really, we just think, yeah, it's when we're young, we think we're invincible and like nothing is going to go wrong. And then forties hit a whole bunch of things. Either we get sick, our kids get sick or parents get sick and we start understanding our vulnerabilities and sort of you know, it starts hitting us. And then we don't really know. We have, we have 40 years of learned habits and the foods we've grown up with and everything else and our busy lives to deal with.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And, and I think one of the reasons are we've named the company January. My, my son named it when he was, when he was 16. Cause it's, you know Greek, God, Janice is a two faced God that has basically Dennis is the God of new beginnings and resolutions. And that's why January is the first month, but there's two faces. We look at them as the face, looking back as your, basically your genetics and the, and the food you grew up with and the habits you grew up with over, which you have no, no control. And then the face forward, which is you know, you as a person, a reason weight, and you're expressing that reason in your diet book and your creed and the way you live you as a person of breeze and deciding how to live the rest of your life. And, but changing those things that you were dealt with is hard. So we don't think that most people, 99.9, 9% of the population can do these blankets. The one at 9% of the population doesn't have your self efficacy and, and discipline. That's not because we're lazy or terrible because of a lot of factors that I mentioned just now the cards we were dealt the foods we've grown up with so many other things, but also

 Speaker 3: Physiology or experience, or people have three jobs and

 Wade Lightheart: Three kids. And they're, they're not, they're not

 Noosheen Hashemi: Able exactly. They're not able to really, you know and if you were born in certain zip codes, you just, you know, it's, it's really hard to overcome. So, so I think we're trying to give people tools where wherever they are meet them, where they are trying to move forward. That's it.

 Wade Lightheart: So, so how does the tech work? What is it like? So are you strapping a computer to your face

 Noosheen Hashemi: For wearing, you have to wear a heart rate monitor, so you have to wear a right now, a Fitbit or an apple watch. And then you wear a continuous glucose monitor. I'm wearing one right now. You can't see it, but it's on my arm right here. And and then you do have to log your food and the reason it's important to log your food is because again, we want to know what you're putting in and you can do that. You know, for like, if you use season of me, our program, we really want you to log your food for at least four days. So we can grade our model together, but we want you to do it for about two weeks, because we want to know kind of what you were doing. And we want to show you because we run through experiments, we have canned experiments for people, so they can learn experientially what happens to their body if they eat their favorite meal.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And if they eat their favorite meal and walk, comparing those two, or we give them we give them you know, we have them eat their normal breakfast for four days. And then we give them a sugar shot, kind of this you know, oral glucose, glucose tolerance test and GTT, a CGM or GTT. So they're basically down 75 grams of sugar. And then they kind of see what happens to their body when they have, but, you know, Coke has 49 grams of sugar, you know, Coke has four. Yeah. So this is under factor. Exactly. So you can have two to two Coke is way more than what we give you, but we want you to know what that's like. And then we give you a very low glycemic index breakfast the next day. And we compare these three. So how close is your breakfast to pure sugar versus a very low GL, think of it as a Quito type of breakfast, which one are you closer to?

 Noosheen Hashemi: And how did your body process these four things? So we compare these. So basically it involves wearing two sensors, food logging, and then getting these insights and these insights out around the calorie management calorie restriction, because calorie restriction and intermittent fasting together have been shown has shown benefit for improving insulin sensitivity. So we're not just interested in lowering your blood sugar today. We're interested in really improving your underlying physiology. So we want to improve your insulin sensitivity and to do that, we encourage you to do intermittent fasting, to restrict your calories. We add fiber dramatically to your, to your to your diet. So we report back to you how much fiber you are getting. We encourage you to get more fiber. It's really important if we encourage you to move, but after meals and before meals. And we also encourage you to you know, drink water, keep your, keep your time and range, you know, keep your blood sugar in a tight range. So those are some of the things that we do

 Wade Lightheart: Very impressive. Now, as far behavior modification, how successful has been behavior modification with the people that are, have you run it through trials? Is it now going to the general population? And is there a feedback loop where you're getting data supporting that like over above say controls who aren't

 Noosheen Hashemi: Totally. So our first first trial was an observational trial, so it wasn't a randomized clinical trial. It was observational. So mostly we did it to collect data, to develop our models in that study or the sugar challenge study based, based on which we published two papers. We did improve time and range for everyone, both healthy pre-diabetes and diabetes for almost everyone. And so that was, but we just did it over 10 days. And then our season of MI, which is our commercial product, you can buy that's 90 days and we are seeing great people are dropping weight. A lot of it is anecdotal. We are just running. Right now we're studying that data. We have been studying it, we're continuing to study it. So there's a lot of reportings of fasting of weight loss.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Mainly because people don't believe that they can go without eating in the morning. So one of the biggest levers in terms of fasting and they, a lot of people think they don't eat breakfast, you know, ended the end of the world. And then they kind of, or, you know, some people eat essentially. We will allow you to eat whenever, whenever you, you know, have your eating period, be whenever, whenever you want it to be. But but intermittent fasting is very effective in getting people to reduce their overall calories occasionally, or those people who do intermittent fasting. And then they overeat when it's time to eat, you know, they'll fast and then eat two pizzas. That's really rare. I think over time, your stomach kind of shrinks and you just don't feel good, eating more than a certain amount. So over time we kind of nudge you.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So there's a lot of nudges. There's not just around spiking foods. So this is what your spiking foods look like. By the way, if you ate this other thing, it wouldn't spike you as much, but it tastes about the same. And then there's not just around activity. This is what you ate, but had you walked, this would have been your, your curve. And if you had walked more, this would've been your curve. Yeah. So those are what we call activity. Counterfactuals we'd have to better come up with better consumer names for them. So we're a very geeky bunch, if you haven't noticed so far from looking at our, so I guess I would say

 Wade Lightheart: Your sugar optimization strategy. So what is your, you know, w what is the SOS, okay, I'm my blood sugars here. Can I walk, can I do this? Like, what's, what's the, what's the net like, you know, and I would put some sort of, I would put some sort of interruption device, like, and your blood sugar isn't diabetic level. And then, and then, and then like, you know, some kind of reward mechanism where there's a auditory, visual, or vibratory mechanism, that's anchoring to the nervous system on positive changes, so that you're anchoring positive and you're creating aversions to negative mean. You can just look it up to a car, battery, electric, cute people, and they screw up. I think

 Noosheen Hashemi: The smartest, the smartest things that everybody can do load up on fiber. If you're gonna, if you're going, you're headed to a bachelor party or going to a birthday party, you're going to eat a bunch of things. It, a lot of fiber ahead of time you can have fiber in a powder form. You can have fiber in the way of fruits and vegetables. You can have, you know, see if you can eat a plate of broccoli. It will, you can't, it'll just be, you'll eat so much. And then you'll have to kind of stop because it's, you know, it's volume that you're, you're, you're eating. And so fiber in your stomach, this is empirically shown. When you have fiber in your body, 24 hours before your curves come down, your blood sugar comes down and compared to this, eating the same food without fiber in your stomach.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So easy things to do fiber up and other things start walking after you eat this stuff, you're in a birthday party. You just had a big piece of cake. Don't sit down, start moving, start dancing. Yeah, just get everybody else up. And we joked, we joked in our office when we started studying in 2018, we call the Prancercise thing. We literally would, would, would eat things. And then, you know, with CGMs on, we started walking in the office. And even that made a difference, like whether you sat or walk in the office, it made me the difference. So we brought this knowledge to the world. This wasn't known before we did our studies, instead of talking about this stuff, that it makes that much of a difference. And now of course, everybody thinks, duh. But but yeah, we had to, we proved these things to ourselves and it was really interesting. So we said, even if your prints are size, it will make a difference. So eat at the party, get up and start moving, go around the houses.

 Wade Lightheart: There's a comedian who I, we sponsor, I think, did a video on prance or sizing in the forest or something, which [inaudible], he's a really funny guy. And  I think he's also very fit minded. He's a, he's a very athletic person. He rose to fame and YouTube and Facebook and all that stuff with his funny videos.  where's this all going like? So what do you envision for the future of January? What would you like to see happen? Where are you and, and, and, and addressing the millions of people who are suffering in ignorance, and you can bring this opportunity to them to address issues that they think may not be within their country.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Right. Well you know, for starters, we'd like to get this in more and more people we'd like more and more people to be self-aware. And I think we know for a fact that, you know, wearables are going through a revolution, right? So apple watch is trying to solve a lot of things from your risks. I'm not sure if you can solve every health problem from your risks, but you can sell, you know, quite a few. So they're being very bold, you know, Samsung you've saw companies like aura and and who've got big funding, for example. So people optimizers, you're interested in more and more data about themselves. So wearables are going to explode. Cgms will explode. So there will be probably 47 different CGMs coming onto the market in the next five years. We will, we will see this will be pretty normal for people to throw on a CGM.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So wearables in general are going to grow. And then within wearables, we're going to see more interesting things like we're going to be able to see continuous lactate monitors. We're going to be able to see continuous ketone monitors. Eventually we'll see continuous cortisol monitors that tell us about, you know, stress. So wearables have a an infinite future. Of course, if the singularity takes over and it will some people will say, say as early as 2030, but maybe 2050. But but the sensors may start giving us false data because somebody is manipulating them. But let's say, I do believe sensors are going to massively grow and massively expand our understanding of what's what's happening in our body. So that's for absolute sure. I think telemedicine the whole way that we conduct medicine is going to change. So COVID really made accelerated telemedicine, I'd say by a decade it was happening, but now it's just that the rigor people are not going to go back to the old office and just sit there and wait to be called.

 Noosheen Hashemi: They will for, for specialty diseases. You know, if you, if you have acute disease, you will go see a liver expert or something like that. Before every day, every day care, I think it's going to become retail, right? We're going to, we're going to best buy. We're going to go to Walmart Kmart. We're going to go to target and CVS and you know, all the other places where we're shopping, that's where we're going. So that's going to dramatically change kind of where we get care. And then the force, there's an explosion of consumer testing, right? So you, you see Everly, well, you're going to see lots of other companies that are giving the tests. I think Rowe was giving people COVID tasks, but you'll see, I've invested personally in companies that will, that will be powering other companies to provide testing.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So you won't necessarily be relying on your doctor to write tests, prescriptions for tests for you. You will test yourself as much as you want as frequently as you want. And so, so what's going to happen is you will end up with more and more consumer health data. You have microbiome data, you have your genetics data with 30 million people. Who've done ancestry. And 23, me, that data is just sitting there. It's not really being used. So where are you going to end up doing it's going to happen is you're gonna have all this consumer health data now, apple health kit Google they are capturing this data, but they are keeping it in silos, right? So apple may be studying your data. It's not giving it back to you in a synthesized fashion right now. So there is apple health kit, but all that data is going in, but it's not synthesized. So is apple studying that? I bet you, of course, that's how they're determining which

 Wade Lightheart: Devices they're going to roll out next. Or there's a reason they're, they're a trillion dollar company. They keep all their info and they're not disseminating. Yes.

 Noosheen Hashemi: I love how all the innocence, you know you know so it was a whole other talk show. Let's come back to the innocence. The, the presumptive innocence of tech that's a whole different, different show, but yeah, no, let's dive into

 Speaker 3: There for a second. I want to go there for

 Wade Lightheart: A moment because on the outside. And so I'm, so Matt and I, my business partner, we have an interesting dynamic first off, he's a keto guy. I'm a plant-based guy. He is ultra data driven. I'm all tra observational, intuitive. He wants more tech, more data, more device. I want less tech, less data, more insight, a lot more you know, feel whatever you want to call it. And we go back and forth on this. And I, you know, I, I can remember reading. Google's, don't be evil tagline because the power of artificial intelligence, the power of technological information and how it's utilized used inside. I wrote a book a number of years ago called the wealthy backpacker in the rise of the digital Republic. And it came to me being a digital nomad, traveling around the world. I'm going to come around to where we're going with this for a second.

 Wade Lightheart: It became to me that I was living in Bali, Indonesia in a work workspace with there was two or 300 people from all around the world. And there's this kind of like this organic place from people around, which were producing things. And there was the exchange of information and ideas. And I saw when I asked Canadians that were there myself, I'd ask them about what they thought about the current government that was, there was an election. This was prior to Trudeau getting elected. I said, what's your current take on the political machinations of Canada? And most of these people were in their thirties, early thirties or late twenties. They had no idea about the political situation of the country they're from, but when I asked them about the latest algorithm on YouTube or what Amazon was doing in re in the release of technology and how they were paying people, they were very sophisticated and understanding the consequences of that. And what I realized is that there is now these digital republics, what I call Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Netflix, you go on down the list of these super tech companies, which are essentially tyrannical organizations, which have more influence and power than governments themselves.

 Wade Lightheart: So, and, and, and, and, and I realized this and I wrote about it, and I said, wait a minute. We know that the democratic Republic concept that emerged in the United States and its biggest experiment of history combined with you know, basically market dynamics, but you have a wealth of nations philosophy, okay, let's just call it that right. Produce more value than you consume and discern and scale that up. And you contributed to than it's worked very well. It has its limits, but now we're moving into a place where people are voluntarily giving up all of their information, turning it over to an institution who sold drive is to extract that information and increase more profitability to them that may not be inclusive to doing what's optimal for that person or for society at large. How do you address that issue as someone that's deeply embedded in that world? When you're talking to investors, when you're talking to your colleagues in the industry or cross pollination between different companies, is that conversation happening? What did people

 Noosheen Hashemi: We're adamant about not selling people's information adamant, which is why we have a subscription service. So, but four years ago when I started this, everything was for free. It was mostly ad tech. I mean, it's another conversation to talk to you about how hard it was for me to hire machine learning, people away from Fang, you know, away from these companies four years ago, nobody wants to go to hell into health. Now, every VC has a health practice. Now, everybody now, now health is a big thing, but four years ago, I had a lot of convincing to do to bring the health, you know, best and the brightest into, into health. So they were talking, you know, people, just a lot of machine learning, people told me, look, I just want to solve interesting problems. So so, so autonomous, autonomous vehicles robotics ad tech, FinTech people weren't really interested in health because health is just something people don't want to touch because they know it's so big and it's so messy.

 Noosheen Hashemi: And it's they kind of, you know, which is such a shame because, because until we get the best and the brightest to come into private sector health, we're not transforming the U S healthcare industry three, it carry it. We won't government won't fix it. You know, monopolies won't fix it. I think what will fix it is, is more innovation and more more you know, essentially smaller companies or just innovation in general. I think it's going to be really important. So so at the time we, this is going to be really hard to get people to pay for things because they're used to ad tech, you know, they're used to advertising has underwritten the online experience you know, since the mid, mid nineties. So so getting people to pay for a service sucks that their data doesn't get sold is critically important.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So we are adamant we will not sell people's information. Absolutely. And I think everyone who's carrying health data needs to really care about security as well. I think companies like, you know, I would say yeah, you know, the biggest offender of courses is Facebook because they did sell the data they did. They did. Actually they, they offended in so many levels. Apple tends to believe that they are, you know, they are that they are, are custodians of your data, that they will not sell your data there. They protect your data and they keep other people from selling your data. And hopefully, hopefully they're using our data in ways to serve us in terms of health and et cetera. But, but you're right. Is it possible that that something goes rogue and something happens? Yes, of course that's always, there's always downsides to technology.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Technology can always be used for good. It can always be used for bad. It just all depends you know, on, on that, but in general, I have a lot of faith in apple maybe because I knew Steve jobs personally. And not because he, he foresaw what was coming at this point, but there's just a creed about quality and magical user experiences. I really do believe you asked me earlier, why do you think private sector will do more for the, for the world than philanthropy alone? Philanthropy alone. Like I said, it has a place, but not enough. Why do it? I think that, because this, this phone, the phone did so much more for philanthropy then than nonprofits ever did. Why? Because people got connected people, you could go through a line somewhere in Africa and, and it cost. And if someone wants to get a bribe from you, some kind of customs, officer's going to say, Hey, you have something, give me a, give me some of this or give me cash to let you pass it through.

 Noosheen Hashemi: You can send a message to the people behind you and say you know, somebody is trying to extort here, just watch out for this person. Yeah. You couldn't do that before you can't, there's no non-profit, that can help you do that. It's just, it's just, it just can't. So I'm just adamant believe in the power of the private sector to solve these problems. And I think apple has done a phenomenal job creating magical experiences for people, but they completely innocent. I don't know, because if you self obsolete your product so frequently you know, not, you know, and they're trying to come up with ways to get people to pay for these, but you know, who thought that the average American was going to spend $1,100 on a phone? You know, and so, but they've done a phenomenal job. They've built a phenomenal brand and it's why, why are people, why do people love it?

 Noosheen Hashemi: Cause it's, it is a magical user experience. It's beautiful. It's I, we, we all seek beauty and I think apple products are really an interesting brand, but, but I would, you know, on that spectrum, I would put I would put a Facebook at the bottom as an offender and I would put, I would definitely put Google and apple as, as people that are more interested in what's you know, of, of serving humanity more you know, Google is solving a lot of interesting. I don't know if you enjoy, I I'm enjoying AI. Like when, when, when apple tells me to stand up, thank you. Yes. Thank you. I need that nudge. You know, when I, when I'm interested in learning about my disease and I go on Google, it's index the hell out of all of the information, I literally do not need to go from, you know, and I read a lot of academic papers, so they are doing things like that are good for us, but do they have outsized power?

 Noosheen Hashemi: Absolutely. they do, but our approach is don't sell the data, get people to pay for it, keep it for them. But our approach is to synthesize that data. We are not keeping the data in silos. We are specifically saying come to January to make best use out of your data, give us your heart rate, give us your glucose, give us your food data in the future. Give us your microbiome, give us your genetics, give us your other Omex. And we will synthesize and make sense out of it. And we'll tell you, what's working for you. What time you should eat, what you should eat. We can at least assist you. We can at least nudge you and help you. That's our hope. That's our goal.

 Wade Lightheart: It's very cool. I guess so many we're getting into this really deep topics, which I love a couple of things that come to mind. I'd like to your commentary, since you have such a diverse background, so three things, the common health, the common

 Noosheen Hashemi: Cold, is that what you're going to ask about next? Okay. Yeah. I'm just kidding. Let's talk about

 Wade Lightheart: Biosecurity and the kind of bio digital convergence that's happening globally. And you see this coming out of, like, if I look on the Canadian by looking at Canada right now, which I'm a citizen of I'm, I'm a transplanted E two visa person here in the United States. And the role of governments interfering or working in a collusive way with these digital entities that have so much power on the political machine as well. You know, we're seeing how you know, here in the United States, the role that tech played in the, the last election we're seeing. And that started probably a big point with Obama originally using an E a very base root email campaign to, in, to activate a group of people who were not participating in the machine. And then now we literally the squelching and expansion of information. Now we have biosecurity issues with the hacking that has happened inside of which almost no one is talking about there's the solar flare issue, but there's a bigger issue.

 Wade Lightheart: That's not even being mentioned. It's so, so deep. And then we have the same government institutions talking about the need for the fusion between biometric financial and identification components, which are creating two tier societies. And those who are going along with the, the biomedical information that is being propagated through these dissemination components to control whether you fly, whether you get injected with something, or whether you don't get injected with something, do you, how do you see the future shaping up as these competing energies or these competing agendas are happening, where you have a collusion between the medical field business and governments?

 Noosheen Hashemi: I'm not sure if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, I mean, in terms of, I want to know what you mean by bio-security. Cause if you mean by biological agents coming to the U S like corrupting our water sources and things like that. So like, tell me more because other, if you, if you asked me about like the global concerns I have, I definitely have global concerns. I mean, in terms of our AI superiority I would say, you know, China's definitely has AI superiority and that has implications for us in terms of security has implications for us in health. Not because they're trying to keep us from becoming healthy because they will win in so many ways they will solve for health, which I think is phenomenal, phenomenal as a global citizen. I am thrilled. I couldn't be more thrilled. I just wish we were also hustling at the, at the rate that they are hustling to, to keep our edge.

 Wade Lightheart: That's what I'm talking about specifically. So let's say all of my genetic information, which is easily extracted through traveling now, because now I've got associated with my identity, with my genetic information, which is being extracted under the current COVID testing stuff. And that's going into some databases somewhere. And obviously this material is going to become more and more available either through private institutions or through government mandated regulatory stuff. And then we have this, the security of that data and how that could be leveraged through countries who do not share the same political philosophies that we do. And that's what we're seeing with, with China and the United States right now, as the, as the, as you know, maybe the descending power of the United States and the rising power of China and China being a, that never has had a date of democratic rule in its world, not a philosophy that's inside of it, actually it has, it has,

 Noosheen Hashemi: China is a very, very old country with no 5,000 year history. I mean, they were talker to these started in China, but, but that's a whole different conversation, but, but I think that China will use its data to solve for big societal problems like health. And they are, they are, they literally will. I mean, they they will solve, they have been looking at our genomics advances, our understanding of genetics. They have, they have, they're looking at basically every, every angle of health that we have been. We have been active in, they are mastering those things, not just like getting interested in them, but they are building labs. They're, they're recruiting the best and the brightest talent to the, to their country for studies. You know, there are plenty of plenty of intellectuals and, and academicians and scientists who have, you know, who ha who are in Canada or the U S or Europe who also have labs in China now.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So, and then we kind of know that whatever belongs to, you know, whatever goes into, you know, private sector in China, there's not a big line between, you know, it can and can end up in, in government as well. The problem is here, we're collecting all that data. It is subject to abuse, but we're not benefiting from it necessarily in a centralized way and centralized government. It does have its benefits. We didn't think, you know, end of history told us that, that wasn't the case that end of history told us that, that, you know, the developed nations that essentially that you know, economic prosperity was built on top of, of democratic societies. But of course, China prove that completely wrong, right? So they, they built they built, they use central planning to their economic advantage and they actually brought two or 300 million people out of poverty with central planning without having those democratic freedoms that, you know, that we see that we saw in the west.

 Noosheen Hashemi: So they did. And this round, they proved us definitely wrong that it wasn't a necessary, necessary requirement necessary condition. Our democracy wasn't a necessary condition for economic development. So they did show that. But I do think they are, they are ahead in terms of AI in their application of AI, specifically to health. And they are ahead in a lot of ways in the health. I really think health is one of our biggest, biggest problems in this country. And I think that in cost and suffering, honestly, and how much people have to suffer, why should they find out they're stage four of something? I think that's just insane. You should know when you're, when you're on your way to disease, you should be getting alarms. Now, if you ignore those alarms fine, but you should, at least you have the right to know your your data. You have the right to have your data and you have the right to give it to companies like us. We can synthesize it for you. We promise not to sell it. We will not sell or commercialize your data. Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. so I don't know if I really addressed your thoughts. I feel like we could talk for hours about kind of these different forces. And I'm not sure if I really answered, but, but I, I, but you know, I think we sh we share some of the same anxieties.

 Wade Lightheart: Yes. Beautiful. I've been concerning myself with this whole topic. So we kind of went off on a tangent bringing it back around to one of the things that you brought up was before we close up, because I think it's, this is the big question that myself and my business partner go back and forth. I want to interview both

 Noosheen Hashemi: Of you by the way. Cause these approaches are both very relevant, very relevant to what we do.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah. So for example, he, he's kind of in the Elon Musk can laugh where he's just like, Hey, singularities come in. I'm in boot me up. You know what I mean? Like plug me into the system and let's continue on. And I'm like, no, I want to be the last of, I want to be the last of the homo sapiens. Oh, you want to go out poetically? Maybe? Yes. Maybe, maybe, maybe I'm a gift shop. Yeah. Yeah. And because my belief and I'd like to know what yours is because it's fast and don't get me wrong. I think this dad is great. And we, we leveraged so much of it. It's like, it's, it's amazing. But I'm, I'm this old school curmudgeon from another generation and I go, well, okay. Do you first, let's walk through these first quick question. Do you believe the singularity is inevitable? Yes. Okay. When do you think that's going to happen?

 Noosheen Hashemi: I think it's going to happen obviously in the next 30 years. However, I don't think we will know when it's happened.

 Wade Lightheart: Okay. Because we will not be able to determine what's human and what's not, which I think we're well on the way to that. I think we're basically sideboards now, you know, we have a phone that we're kind of at time. Yeah. We're, we're, we're, we're semi sideboard for sure. You know, and now we're getting into the embedding of technology which, which has its benefits. Absolutely. There's, there's no denying the benefits of that. My question is I personally believe that that biological evolution is more robust and survivability than bio digital information. For example, I asked him this question, which he's like, wait, you can't compete with all this stuff and its current form. And I say, that's true, but has all this technology say accounted for a giant solar, a giant, slower solar flare knocks out all the technology in the world. And all these people that has been embedded into the system for 20 years suddenly lose 99% of their brain essentially.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Well, I was going to say what happens to solar flare? What happens to the people? Cause I think what, we're what we're saying. Well, the people will survive the solar flare, but the tech won't, the climate, the climate the climate based migration is going to be, I mean, a million people came from the middle east to Europe and they wrecked it. You know, they broke their, they're like breaking the European here. You're going to have millions of millions of climate you know, people on the run. And I don't, I don't know that what's, that what that's going to do to our society. I don't know. You know, if, I mean, we are we are just overtaxing the planet. So we do, I do think that there are some forces that are, that are not voting well for us. And singularity you know, the climate sort of migration climate based migration is going to be pretty horrendous.

 Noosheen Hashemi: It's going to test our institutions pretty seriously and test our capacity just to incorporate people, you know, as a lot of people go into Europe and a lot of people. So I think migration is going to remain a problem. It's just going to, going to be exacerbated. You know, I think these, these things have, you know, certainly the rise of, you know, single man rule in the world you know, we didn't think that was going to come back. We saw that was behind us or at least we thought we had a pretty balanced system, but we don't, that's just rising in the world kind of in a lot of places not just in a few places, but in a lot of places. So I think what it, there's a tremendous amount of anxiety that, that brings to the next generation who are supposed to solve these problems.

 Noosheen Hashemi: You know, if they create that, you know, there's not going to be a fish in the water by 2050. And, you know, although that's not a very like enlightening, I mean, it's interesting in some ways the people that are doing space tourism, they're kind of trying to create this kind of new hope for the young generation. You know, it's like, don't worry, we'll leave here. We'll go someplace else. That's more happy habitable. But I think the speed at which we just haven't had enough time, you know, just look at agriculture, just how old agriculture is. Okay. And the fact that we have moved so far away from our ancestral diets, we used to 850 grams of fiber. And in a matter of 10,000 years, we're off to these like crazy where we're eating all these packaged foods and all this stuff is happening. And we are extremely inflamed.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Like we have, we have, we have, you know, seven and a half billion people that have low grade chronic inflammation based on what we're eating. Right. So what's going to happen. So these things are happening so rapidly. So I, I want to, I'm a little bit with your brother here. Not that I want to like hook myself up and all that, but I feel like the human being doesn't have enough time to adjust to these things that are happening. So we could take some of these things if we were given tens of years, hundreds of years. But if we're given, you know, a few years, I think we are going to have a hard time adjusting to these very quickly.

 Wade Lightheart: That's an interesting argument, very similar to the argument by Yuval Noah Harari in 21 lessons for the 21st century. So, so the, so the last question, I guess, we'll get before, because this has been so awesome. It's a wealth of knowledge who wins out homosapien, bio genetics, genetic callous, bio digitalis, or bio genetic digitalis. And what I mean by that is the genetic engineered, the digitally enhanced one, the combination of the two or the old school homosapien who just survives all of it by living off the grid in a mountain pass. And as we destroy everybody, and that's all the people that left, who, who wins that, who wins that. So it would be

 Noosheen Hashemi: Most poetic if it were the homosapiens because you know, all they need is 150 people in a community and they can just live on and they can regrow and remake everything and make their clothes from scratch. And they can do everything. They did it before they can do it again. But I don't know. I don't know the answer, honestly. I don't know if anyone does. But I don't because I think there's so many combinations and permutations of, of what could happen. I think what we, I think what we, we should, we should do everything in our power to empower the people who want to work on themselves, who want to make themselves healthy, who want to give themselves a better chance as human beings. If they want to know, let them know it don't have all these archaic rules. You know, one of the great things that that, that president Trump did was to enforce this sort of transparent price transparency, which I thought was really, really important. And Obama

 Wade Lightheart: Also publicity on that either. Right. But I

 Noosheen Hashemi: Thought it was great, but also Obama basically that, that administration passed rules about people's electronic health records that people had to make them available to people in, in with speed and at low costs. And so these kinds of efforts to bring more transparency, just break that allow people to have their own data, allow people, allow consumers to make choices, consume it. Everything else has consumerized in this world, except two things, the military and healthcare, why don't we allow, we can't consumerize the military, but we can consumerize healthcare. We must bring consumer private sector forces into healthcare. We must give people choices. We must give them freedom over their own data. We must give them freedom to choose, to provision their data the way they want to, if they want to give their data to their employer, fine. You want to give it to their doctor.

 Noosheen Hashemi: Okay. They want to give it to a coach. Fine. They don't want to give it to anyone. They just want to keep it for themselves. Fine too. That should be the right. So I think if we go back to some of the simple principles market principles and say, how can we bring market principles to healthcare? How can we break down the opacity? You know, the sort of the, the, the screwed up incentives, where you're just working at end of life, you're just working at acute disease. You're just working at solving these kind of problems that are too late to solve. And how can we put all of our efforts on the front end of this? I think your what you hope for is more possible. If, if a hundred, a hundred, 200 million people start taking care of them. So if we switch over to prevention on health, it's possible that we're going to survive more. And the path we're on right now, because obesity and diabetes is growing in every country in the world. And that's, that's not very good for our survival. That's not safety, but

 Wade Lightheart: You know, it's interesting, you know in the wealth of nations, the idea is that you actually consume, or you produced more than you consume. And what's interesting is that we're now consuming more information or more than we are actually producing. And so if we can have a way to aggregate and systematized the sheer volume of information and so that we can actually produce more output in a positive way from that, then perhaps the balance will be struck. You're absolutely right. We've become

 Noosheen Hashemi: Boyers right. People wake up and they're on tech talk and they're all these they're spending hours and hours and hours consuming and not making, not building, not producing in those ways. And that just can not be good for us.

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah. So I do think that we're in this Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biologist that runs dark horse podcast. Do I, I love listening to you cause he's, he's a great non politicized scientific thinker. And he, you know, he walks through the process as does his brother. Eric's a little bit further out on the limb. It's very struggling to deal with Eric, but Brett interprets his stuff very well, but he says it's a 50 50 deal from his calculations. Whether humans actually survive. My belief is homosapiens. Aren't going to survive in its format. I think we're in an evolutionary shift very much like we had Cro-Magnon and homo Florida's and all these different versions of, of homo erectus or apprised sapiens. And we're moving into this, which one wins out. I don't know. Well, we're here to kill

 Noosheen Hashemi: Everybody else. So the question is, can we kill our food source? Can we kill everything? And can we, are we doing ourselves in by, by killing, you know, the ecosystem basically that kept us alive and surviving. So that's not very smart, but we do, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. And anyways,

 Wade Lightheart: Yeah, yeah. I think homo Spiritus is the answer and that is defined a deeper connection with all that is. And by doing that, it, it shapes the choices in a better

 Noosheen Hashemi: Way. I, I agree with you and I wish that more people saw light. And but you know, I'm afraid, you know, our, our unit, our higher instance, higher education institutions are filled with people that are running to, you know, computer science classes so they could get an a, so they could become the next mark Zuckerberg. That's the problem. They're not trying to they're not trying to connect to this higher spirituality and necessarily, so so you know, that's another podcast we can talk about higher education and its role and its role in prepping and preparing our next generation to deal with with what's ahead of us.

 Wade Lightheart: Fascinating conversation. I wish we could go on longer. It's so great. We'll have to get you back your company. Can you talk a little where people can find it, where they can find you all the social media channels first and foremost, I want to thank you for being so open. Thank you. Wait, you got, you got me

 Noosheen Hashemi: To go all sorts of places that I normally don't on a day-to-day basis. I live, I live in microbiome. I lived in, I live in I live in, I live deeply in machine learning and, and, and, and you know, other places, but you, you really had me tap into some of my, some of my wonky are days. But no, I really enjoyed it. These are, it's always a pleasure when we're not just talking about just the personal science in our bodies, but we're thinking about the context and the bigger picture of health and mental health and, and, you know, access and everything else. So thank you. I really also very much enjoyed that. We [email protected] and I'm, Noosheen Hashemi, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. But mostly I, I was born you. I don't spend that much time on social media. I'm I make I'm a minority geek. So I I'm told, I need to be spending more time on that.

 Wade Lightheart: Everybody. I just got it. I just had a big fight with my group that met a fight, but I had a discussion about how often I'm posting and sharing the intimate aspects of my life. And I'm like, I, you know, can I do this just once a week and get back to real living? It's a, it's a it's

 Noosheen Hashemi: Right. And that, you know, from the world that I come from, they're kind of like, well, you know, share your life. I said, my life as an entrepreneur, I work 14 hours a day. Like I, I mean, what part of that do people, do people find inspiration,

 Speaker 3: Try to tackle like

 Noosheen Hashemi: Huge problems, which, which means getting talent and connecting all the pieces and pioneering and areas nobody's tackled and taking these huge bets. And, and so there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of anx for being, you know, doing things that have never been done before, but yes, we are. We are called called to call to share. But well, this

 Wade Lightheart: Has been such a great conversation. You've been such a great guest and enlightened me in a lot of ways. But the one thing I'm very clear about is that I believe that January, the technology you're producing can make a difference in a lot of people's lives to help them, you know, lifestyle correct, or change their behavior, or understand the consequences they're doing to make positive change. And I've been a positive change advocate since my teenage years, when I first got into this industry. And I think in a technologically driven world, this is how you're able to scale change. And so I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. And for those who want more information who liked this, please share it. Talk about it. I'd love to hear your comments on the God casts. Of course, that's it for this week. Wade T. Lightheart from BiOptimizers at the Awesome health podcast, who's going to win bio or homo geneticists, homo digitalis, almost Spiritus, good old homosapien tune in for the next few decades. And we will find out, but I'd love your opinions. Thanks so much for joining us. Take care and have a great day.