27 – First Health System Adopts AI for Patient Care | Digital Clones Arrive | Explosion AI Stories | Healthcare News Roundup

Vic: [00:00:00] Here we go.

Marcus: I know how you’re doing. We just had a board meeting, so we’ve been together for a lot of the day. We’ve

Vic: been spending the whole day together. We did a fire drill

Marcus: today. Walked

Vic: down 19 flight steps. Yes, we got our steps in there. We are safe now if there’s a fire.

Marcus: I got to say, like, as I was walking down those stairs, I was like, man, if there’s a real fire, I think we’re totally screwed.

Yes. That was not that exciting.

Vic: No, I mean, it’s not. Um, I mean, there’s like not the ability to get this number of people out quickly enough. And in real bad situations, we have seen people jumping out of windows and trying to run through the fire and all kinds of bad stuff. It’s just not, this building is not designed for an actual fire.

Marcus: Yeah. I was not thinking about that at any point before that. And now every day I come to work, I’ll be thinking about that. So,

Vic: um, that’s one of those things you can’t control, you know, if there’s a fire or a tornado, we’re just [00:01:00] dead.

Marcus: You also can’t unsee it. Once you’ve seen it, like you will see buildings totally differently.

My, my buddy, Adam, uh, who’s, uh, the, the fire chief of Philadelphia. I mean, you know, the number of things that he sees and he’s looking at something and he just sees all of the issues, the potential issues and like he lives it. It’s literally, it’s his life. If you

Vic: look at a healthcare startup and you see all of this stuff, he looks at a building and he’s like, that’s, there’s, that’s not right.

That’s not right. That’s dangerous. He’s like, where’s the

Marcus: fire extinguisher? What is wrong with these people? You know? And he’s right. He’s right. Yeah. Um, anyway, we got a great show to cover and that is not going on this week, a lot going on. So, uh, let’s jump in.

We’re

Vic: going to say it was election day yesterday.

Marcus: It was, it was historic, uh, election day, um, because the state of Ohio, I mean, you know, it was, it was one of those. Interesting, uh, pre [00:02:00] presidential election day years. And, um,

Vic: yeah, there weren’t that many things going on, but it’s an indicator that a lot of attention.

Yeah,

Marcus: it’s an indicator. It’s a, it kind of sets the stage for some things. We had the Kentucky governor’s race, which I think was interesting. Probably mostly because of Mitch McConnell, right? You know, and, uh, Yeah.

Vic: Well, I think Kentucky is a pretty good bellwether. Like the governorship has been indicative of presidential races for many years.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. So that was interesting. It ended up going to the Democrats. Um, but this Ohio, uh, uh, referendum, uh, adding, uh, abortion rights to the state constitution, I mean, that in a red state that is historic.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, I think the. The Supreme Court pushed this issue to the states to deal with, and I take it as a healthy sign that it went to a vote, and the citizens of Ohio voted, and they want the [00:03:00] right to choose whether each woman can choose to have an abortion or not in the state constitution.

That, that was the whole point of the Supreme Court ruling, that this wasn’t mandated from the feds. And so, I mean, I happen to be pro choice myself, so maybe I’d feel differently if I was really seriously pro life, but, but I think it, the result is what, what was called for in the Supreme Court. Took a long time.

Now, the other thing it sent, it signals to me is that a lot of the, the classic, Democratic messages, abortion being the one we’re talking about right now, have a lot of support, like in a red state like Ohio, they won by a decent amount, wasn’t that super close, and yet Biden doesn’t have much [00:04:00] support. And so you have this dynamic where the, the themes of the Democratic Party are, have, I think, decent support, but the head of the party does not have a lot of support.

And yet the party will not allow for really, there’s been a couple challenges, but no real significant challenges, which I think, I think is a mistake. I don’t know why that makes sense if you were sort of, you know, Thinking about the democratic party on a, in a 10, 20 year trajectory, but, but they’re apparently not,

Marcus: I don’t even pretend to be a political strategist.

So, uh, I, I, I will refrain from offering too much theory here.

Vic: Yeah. And that analysis may not be correct. I mean, I don’t know. You I’m not an expert at all.

Marcus: You may be correct. Um, it’s just I can’t make sense of it. I mean what I what I can say is this [00:05:00] one issue of abortion is bucking trends, uh, in terms of it really being sticky and really, uh, resulting in some historic state level votes in, in ways that I think the Republican party didn’t fully anticipate.

Um, you know, this, this being A response to the SCOTUS, um, decision. So it will, it will be interesting. And obviously it is a healthcare issue, right? Um, you know, and so I think we will see what happens for the health systems in those particular States, what happens for the providers in those particular States.

Um, but it’s a healthcare issue. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a ability to perform a procedure or not. And the threat of, uh, criminal punishment, if you do perform that That procedure, and we haven’t seen enough evidence that it will make certain states more provider [00:06:00] friendly, um, or that certain health systems will, you know, thrive more, but It’s something to at least watch.

It’s something to, to at least watch because, um, as the country becomes more of this patchwork quilt of some states to, and you can’t even really split it by, by red trifecta, blue trifecta anymore, right? I mean, it’s, it, because Ohio

Vic: broke the correct.

Marcus: Yeah. So, so, which probably is

Vic: healthy, really, but there’s going to be a patchwork of different laws, different constitutions in different states.

Yeah. And, you know, long term view, that’s probably a good way to get to a reasonable answer, but it’s going to be really painful, like, getting there. There’s going to be states where The rules are very different than 30 miles away.

Marcus: And again, making it hard for organizations like HHS or for multi state, large regional, super [00:07:00] regional health systems to have sort of standard practices.

It’s, it’s um, you know, you have to operate very differently from state to state. They already have to, but I mean, on a matter like abortion, I mean, that’s a, that’s a big one. That’s a big one. So something to continue to watch, uh, interesting election day, uh, following along on the banking story, signature bank, which has long failed.

Vic: Yeah, one of, it’s one of the three or four that failed. The initial three. Yeah, right. The

Marcus: initial three that failed, that’s right. Um, they are finally getting ready to sell their, uh, their commercial real estate. Portfolio and it’s gonna be sold at a pretty massive discount 15 to 40 percent lower than the original face value and vick you found this story and brought up the point that this really does begin the beginning of the markdowns and Particularly in an important market like new york.

Vic: Yeah, I think they have Significant number of assets in new york city both commercial real estate office buildings and multi family rental properties Um, and it’s gonna set a set a new market price like [00:08:00] it’s enough You Volume of buildings that will trade that it’s going to set a new, a new bar that then every other owner of buildings is going to have to reconcile as they value their property and either try to argue how their building is somehow different.

Or write their value down to that, or somewhere in the middle, and that is going to be pretty painful for all the holders that own, you know, the owners of these assets, but also the banks that loaned money to them, because I think in many instances, banks will often loan two thirds of the value, and then one third needs to be in equity.

And so if you just say, you know, the, the value goes down by 40%, the equity, there is no equity. And so that’s going to be really painful for both the banks and the, the equity [00:09:00] holders. And I think this, this, these set of transactions are going to close because Signature Bank is winding down and they just want to exit it.

And so I think it, it might be the beginning of the, Sort of the reconciling of all these other assets.

Marcus: Yeah. So, I mean, again, I think this is probably something to watch. I mean, we didn’t have 30 bank failures. We had three in one cluster. We had a small one in I think North Dakota or South Dakota that just failed over the last week, a very, very small, very, very small bank.

Just, just, just, uh, just failed. Um, but we didn’t, we didn’t have a total capitulation of the space. And so it’s, it’s going to be interesting to see whether or not this is isolated to this one market, or if. In some way, shape or form triggers other commercial real estate devaluation, right? That, that, that impacts the banking sector.

We’ve been talking about the potential of this happening. Yeah. It’s not a secret. Everyone knows

Vic: that the commercial banking sector has loaned to commercial real estate. Yep. And those loans are [00:10:00] probably underwater. There’s certainly the asset values are too high. We don’t know when it will change. Right.

And I think this could be, An aspect that triggers that I don’t, I don’t know that it will be. It kind of depends on the size and what the prices are.

Marcus: Right. So again, another, another story to watch. Uh, our third story to watch is that the FTC is continuing to go after healthcare companies as they promised.

They would, uh, this story is specifically around the pharma space and, uh, around something called the orange book.

Vic: Yeah, so, um, there’s a lot of pressure on pharma now, and you’re right about the FTC approaching healthcare in general, to get prices down. People are tired of really high prices for whatever reason pharma is in the crosshairs of the, I think, the entire federal government to reduce pricing.

And the orange book is where you, so you, you patent a new drug or anything, And if it’s, if it’s healthcare related, the FDA then [00:11:00] manages the length of time you have the right to monetize that patent and it’s 20 years. But then if you make a modification to that, they want to encourage ongoing innovation and continuous improvement.

So if you make a modification, you can apply to be inserted into this thing called the orange book, which gives you another 30 months of exclusivity in the market. And I think for a lot of pharma companies, and honestly, a lot of my portfolio, a lot of every company that has patents, there’s a strategy to get the 20 years, but then continuously make improvements and modifications.

So you build this portfolio and you, you extend the life of your effective exclusivity. And the FTC is attacking pharma for doing that in a way that is a little bit. unclear, like, like they often do. They’re saying it’s immaterial changes [00:12:00] that do not relate to the core patent, but they don’t really define.

I couldn’t find, we’ll put the actual policy in the show notes. I couldn’t find where they define actually the core patent. What, what makes it material or not, but the example they give is the EpiPen. The EpiPen extended their life, uh, with a retractable, um, needle. Mhmm. And, I don’t know if that’s material or not, um, that was the example they gave that was, uh, That was not appropriate, and whether it is going to stand up in court or not, they’re, they’re again attacking pharma for keeping prices elevated through this, in their words, anti competitive tactic of extending patents through the orange book.

Marcus: Yep. So FTC making good on its promise to continue to go after healthcare companies. I mean, right. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Okay. Uh, and then, uh, Quickly, just to cover one more story, [00:13:00] yeah, and the GLP space, um, we’ve been talking a lot about Nova Nova Nordisk because they’ve been, uh, sort of leading the pack, but Eli Lilly had been rumored to have a drug that was pretty far along in the clinical trial process.

And, uh, Uh, they want approval, um, for their drug. It’s called debt bound. Uh, list price is going to be 1, 060. And, uh, it looks like they’re going to have a, a really, really strong drug out there on the market to compete with Wegovy and Ozempic, um, in the diabetes.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, it’s a, it’s another in the same class, which seems to be now taking over at least all the news about pharma and new innovations, but weight, weight gain and weight loss is.

You know, impactful to many parts of chronic disease. And so having another choice is probably good at the thousand dollar price. It seems pretty similar to, but more choices, I guess, better.

Marcus: Yeah. [00:14:00] More choices is going to equal competition. There’s going to be different, uh, you know, ways that people feel, uh, from the, the different side effects or different,

Vic: different subtle.

Changes to it.

Marcus: That’s right. Yeah. And we know that, you know, whatever they were approved for here, we’ve already seen the, um, we’ve already seen the pathway here on how you can expand your applications for these drugs. Uh, you know, I would imagine CKD is probably on the roadmap here, you know, somewhere soon.

So, uh, congratulations to Eli Lilly for, uh, being approved to be in the, in the competitive race.

Vic: Yeah. They’re in the game.

Marcus: Yeah. Um, so we’re going to stop there cause we’ve got a long, A series of stories on artificial intelligence that we want to cover. Um, but we just wanted to kind of touch on four stories that touch on things that we’ve been talking about over 26 episodes or so.

Um, but we’re going to take a break here. Let Doug share more about Jumpstart Foundry, come back and dig into an incredible week and a half in the AI space.

Thanks guys for the opportunity to [00:15:00] talk about our pre seed fund, Jumpstart Foundry. My name is Doug Edwards, CEO of Jumpstart Health Investors, the parent company of Jumpstart Foundry.

We’re so excited to be able to talk about, uh, early stage venture investing, certainly the need for us to change the crazy world of healthcare in the United States. We are spending 20 percent of our GDP, north of 4 healthcare with suboptimal outcomes. Jumpstart Foundry exists to help us find and identify and invest in innovative companies that are going to make a difference in healthcare in our country.

Every year, Jumpstart Foundry invests a fund, raises a fund, and deploys that across 30, 40, 50 assets every year, allowing ease of access for our limited partners to invest to help us make something better in healthcare. Some of the benefits of Jumpstart Foundry is there’s no management fees. We deploy all the capital that’s raised every year in the fund.

We find the best and brightest [00:16:00] typically around single digit percentage of companies that apply for funding from Jumpstart and we invest in the most incredible, robust, innovative solutions and founders in the United States. Over the last nine years, Jumpstart Foundry has invested in nearly 200 early stage, pre seed stage companies in the country.

Through those most innovative solutions that Jumpstart Foundry invests in, we also provide great returns and a great experience for our limited partners. We partner with AngelList. To administer the fund, making that ease of access, not only with low minimums, but the ease of investing in venture much better.

We all know that healthcare is broken. Everyone deserves better. Come alongside us with Jumpstart Foundry, invest in making the future of healthcare better and make something better in healthcare. Thank you guys. Now back to the show. All right. So,

Marcus: uh, I remember when chat GPT launched. And I went to YouTube to [00:17:00] start finding interviews with Sam Altman because I was like, this is, I’ve, I’ve seen this before.

I’ve seen this sort of, you know, dawn of a new technology that’s about to change everything. And one of the most important things is to actually pay attention to the person behind it, right? Yeah. Because the, the, the, you will be stuck with this person. I learned this with Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Uh, you know, you will be stuck with this person.

And so I went to go find. Some, some, uh, interviews. And I remember finding a Graycroft interview that Reed Hoffman was interviewing Sam. You remember that was interviewing Sam, Sam Altman. And one of the, first of all, It told you everything you need to know about what he was trying to do and where this was going.

Very transparent. But also, I remember there were like 30, 000 views on it or something. You know, like nobody was watching it, right? And so this week, uh, two days ago, OpenAI had their Dev Day. This is their first Dev Day in San Francisco. So they’re, you know, kind of the version of the Apple developer, um, you know, WWDC.

Vic: Yeah. Yeah. [00:18:00] And I just want to note, I got a lot of great feedback from our show last week about our Maybe healthy debate about regulation in AI. Oh, yeah. And so this is not a follow up to that, but there’s been a ton of news, and so we need to talk about all the changes. I think, you know, certainly the U. S.

government’s going to keep trying to figure out how to regulate it. They’ll either do that well or won’t do it well. But we’ll keep covering the news because it’s going to It’s going to keep moving incredibly fast and we need to keep everyone, keep ourselves up to date and keep building up to date on it.

So the regulation really is a separate issue that we debated. Of course, I’m right and you were almost right, but we need to cover this news told

Marcus: me, but, but, but I mean, but, but one thing that is important to bring up, though, is the timing of that executive order relative to dev day happening.

Vic: That’s right.

Marcus: Uh, uh, I don’t think those are coincidences. I’m just going to go out on a limb and say, I don’t think the timing [00:19:00] of the White House getting out in front of OpenAI Dev Day is a coincidence.

Vic: No, and I think Sam was involved in helping the administration understand it. There’s no question. He’s been on record of going to D.

C. and talking about it. And then a bunch of this news came out this week. Just like, um, other Apple developer day or other big developer days. There tends to be like other news that comes out right around that because it’s a huge attention around the space. And so everyone tries to get in just in front or consecutive with the big show, which is the open AI show.

So anyway, so,

Marcus: so two days later, uh, we’ve, we’ve got the YouTube Page up here and the video has a million views. I still would say relative to like super Trending videos on YouTube. It’s literally it’s trending 45 Okay, so to me the input the impact and the importance of what is [00:20:00] in this less than 50 minute video 45 trending is not actually appropriate.

It’s it’s too low. Well, the reason we need to talk is I think a lot of

Vic: health care Uh, experts, a lot of our audience that is really focused on caring for patients or maybe they’re in leadership in a payer or they’re an investor. They maybe weren’t focused on this. They may not have seen it. They should watch this 45 minute show and we’ll talk about some of the changes, but, but it is a significant quantum step up in, in the capabilities and the reach for open AI.

Marcus: It’s the first, it’s the first link. At least this year that I’ve shared with every single friend group, you know, every WhatsApp group, every slack group, every, every, you know, group, me group, every group I’m in, I, I felt compelled to share this link with, because if you’ve been tracking, AI and chat [00:21:00] GPT at all, at all.

And you watched it from its launch a year ago to the launch of GPT four, give it, you know, that was six months later or whatever, or so to this, the progress level is unreal. That’s happening here. This thing is moving so fast. The capabilities that we were just theory theorizing about agents and And all these other kinds of things, where it is now, the implications are just absolutely mind blowing.

And I think the fact that they are empowering developers, and also empowering individuals through very basic user interfaces, to do incredibly powerful things with the GPT model and with DALI. Um, there’s no [00:22:00] way in 2024 we don’t see real impact as a result of this. There’s just, there’s no way. No question.

There’s no way. We’re going to start seeing some economic impact. We’re going to start to see some real job shifting, let’s just say. Uh, it’s so powerful already, already.

Vic: So let’s just give some people, they should, they should watch it, first of all. But at a high level, Improved power and capabilities. Yep.

So, so upgraded,

Marcus: upgraded the, the model from GPT four to GPT turbo, right. Advanced the knowledge set from 2021 to April of 2023. Right. Um, take in.

Vic: 300 pages of text. Yeah,

Marcus: so, so literally my book, My entire book. The Create and Orchestrate is 255 pages. I can copy and paste the Word doc, drop it in to my user account, which is supposed to be sort of isolated, right?

So it’s not supposed to train its model based on what we as users give it. [00:23:00] It can, it should be able to learn my entire book and then basically interact with me In real time. In real time. Yeah. And then GPTs, which are custom GPTs. So I should be able to then take that and create a Marcus Whitney, create an orchestrate GPT.

Yes. Where if you wanted to ask me anything in the context of how I wrote the book around entrepreneurship, you know, the markets, venture capital, I could do that right now. Yes. Right now. And we were talking, why that’s mind blowing is we were talking about that two weeks ago, and we’re assuming we were going to need all sorts of code, and this, that, and the third to do it, and now it’s literally point click.

Vic: Yeah, so I did it, I did it last night. So I, I created a GPT myself. And it, it takes a bunch of my sort of discussions with founders that are recorded because we have this online educational thing called insight that records a bunch of stuff. [00:24:00] And I uploaded it up there and then you can ask that you like the.

The bot powered Vicado. And it answers from the context of this 10 hours of stuff that I put in. And so anyway, so the capabilities are incredibly more, they cut the price.

Marcus: Three, three X, three X for some tokens, two X for other tokens. So the

Vic: price is dramatically cut. Yes. And then as we’re talking about, they did these things called GPTs that are tools for individuals.

Yep. I did it, I’m not a developer at all, and I, it took me an hour, and most of that time was finding your stuff, my stuff. It didn’t take much time to set it up. I had to find my own stuff because I don’t have it organized well. So that’s individuals, and they’re claiming they’re going to have a, uh, a store.

Kind of like the app store for these GPTs so that people [00:25:00] can navigate to find a GPT that would help them and the network power of that is going to be incredible, but they didn’t stop there. Then they opened up an API for people that can actually develop and build entire systems. And. That’s going to allow people to stitch things together that are much more powerful than I could do just on the fly.

Along with the outside world. With the outside world. And third party applications.

Marcus: Yes.

Vic: That also have APIs. And they, they gave the example of Zapier, so that they’re already connected in with Zapier, which is another API tool. That just for people that don’t know already has connects into every, every, every application, every SAS tool is connected via Zapier.

Yes. So as of two days ago, they announced all these things.

Marcus: Yeah. I mean, you can basically code an application that ties together Google [00:26:00] Maps and Uber Eats and like all these different things by yourself by writing English. Yes. Yes.

Vic: And it is super fast and cheap. So I, there’s like a little sandbox where you can test your, your GPT.

Right. So I tested it. I gave it like two or three questions just to see what it would say. And you have to pay for that. And so I’m like, Oh shit, it’s going to cost me a lot of money. But I put in a hundred dollars and figured, well, you know, at least I’ll learn a little bit. And what do you think it costs me to ask three questions?

Three cents. One penny. Yeah. Yeah. I think, cause they just don’t charge less than a penny. Yeah. I mean, I asked three questions. It charged me a penny. Yeah. That’s why I have 99 and 99 cents left. And so all of a sudden I’m like, Oh gosh, like I, I can do a lot more with this. I don’t have to be so cautious.

That’s right. The power combined with the really low cost. [00:27:00] And

Marcus: they have an actual subscription model or a penny model. It’s not advertising driven. Yeah. Like they’re generating real revenue.

Vic: Yeah. Now they’re spending a lot of money, but they’re making, they’re bringing in a lot of revenue. The business model is not ad driven.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. It’s usage. And there’s going to be There’s a huge network advantage, like them being out first with chat GPT last August 30th. So it’s less than a year ago, this whole thing started. And now less than a year later, they’re launching an app store. The first time I tried to run the sandbox, it wouldn’t run because there was too many people on it.

I remember that an hour later. Well, this was last night and then later last night, and then an hour later, it ran fine. There’s a lot of people doing their GPT things, just like me, playing around. Most of them will be terrible, but there’ll be some [00:28:00] great ones. That’s how the App Store works, right? And then you have the APIs coming in that will probably be maybe 30 days or so for Some developers to, to turn their attention here and build some stuff.

And it’s going to be fast. I mean, it’s going to, they’re going to gain a lot of market power more than they have right now. Quickly.

Marcus: Also, they had Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft as like a guest Appearance at their dev day. Like he was not the headliner at all. He got like three minutes and it was like, get off stage, Satya.

But he was on stage to tell you that Microsoft is building Azure to spec for open AI. So basically don’t worry about the scaling because Microsoft is going to throw everything that they can throw at it from a cloud perspective.

Vic: And why wouldn’t they? Their market cap has gone through the roof because of their association here.

That’s right. And so. It is really [00:29:00] impressive. I think there are a couple players that can compete, but we’ll see if they do. Like Google maybe can compete. Facebook has an open source approach, which is interesting.

Marcus: Google can compete. Google really has to get their act together. Yeah. Um, but they, they are truly probably the, the, the best.

The one organization that a has the capability to compete, just given, you know, the breadth of their Google cloud, the fact that they, you know, they’ve been building GPS for a long time last week. That’s right. You look at alpha fold, they have, they have the intellectual capability, they have the network power, they have the money and quite frankly, um, Chat GPT is a true threat to Google search in a way that nothing has been a threat to Google search in more than 15 years.

So I think they have to. So I think they have the motivation to do it. Um, so I’m, I’m envisioning a world of, of sort of Microsoft and Google going after each other [00:30:00] in this AI race, but that’s what I, that’s what I see. Yeah.

Vic: And then the open source, there’ll be an open source component to this competition.

Facebook has been leading that. But, um, we might transition to, um, Grok. So like, so Elon came out with his, uh, so Twitter now called X came out with their own version of an AI model and a chatbot on top of it. Called the chap what’s called a grok

Marcus: which is based on the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy right grok is a term from that Yeah, yeah, it means like understanding everything intuition and

Vic: empathy.

Yeah the topic.

Marcus: Yeah

Vic: And I don’t know. I think it’s gonna be Open source, but I don’t fully know that. Do you know if it’s gonna be open source or not?

Marcus: I didn’t read anything about that. Um, I know that he is going to be rolling it out to Twitter premium users first or X premium users first, whatever you want to call [00:31:00] them.

Um, and he’s

Vic: been throwing stones at. Open AI because they’re not open anymore. Well,

Marcus: also he’s a co founder of Open AI. So, I mean, he’s got a grudge around what’s happening there. Um, so yeah, I mean, and he’s also very focused on making X a super app. He’s been talking a lot about, uh, setting up X for, You know, streaming music and video, supposedly

Vic: call people on it now.

And I don’t know,

Marcus: he wants to talk about making it a finance app. So he’s just, you know, he’s looking at, at the platform as a distribution platform. And I think he’s just going to continue to layer in services, um, you know, nonstop. But look, I mean, at the end of the day, even though his handling of Twitter now X has been pretty laughable in a lot of ways, I just think you always have to take Elon seriously.

Um, You know, there are some things that even to this day, even with all of the value destruction he’s done on that platform, X is still the best platform for, um, I’ll

Vic: tell you, I mean, [00:32:00] it was election day this week and I was trying to watch the TV news. And it’s pretty painful to watch the news. Now I’m sort of a centrist, independent, and I have to bounce around because I can’t deal with the news.

I think that’s

Marcus: true for everybody. I think everybody, I don’t, I don’t even care if you’re on the right or on the left, I think cable news has managed to piss everybody off. So that’s, so

Vic: X is. I think the best chance for an independent source. It’s, it’s noisy and messy and there’s a lot of crazy stuff, but it’s independent.

It works for news. Yeah, it works for

Marcus: news. Yeah. Um, also, uh, it is a real time data source and I think his advantage he’s, he’s positioning

Vic: for the, for

Marcus: the AI is that you were going to be able to leverage the X data set in real time, in real time,

Vic: other AI sources from it, from using it. Yeah,

Marcus: which, which. Is part of the AI war, right?

It’s like, what, what is your training data? That’s right.

Vic: So I think that’s [00:33:00] going to be interesting competitor. Anthropic has raised so much money. They’re still going to be there. And then

Marcus: by the way, we just didn’t say Anthropic has raised a lot of money. I think Amazon is, is, is Amazon and Google are both in, in Anthropic.

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Vic: Um, and then. I think Facebook has an interesting strategy. They basically realized they were behind, in my opinion, and then decided, let’s open source what we have and let the crowd work on it. And that’s pretty interesting, right? The open source stuff is slow to gain strength, but the crowd of developers across the globe is pretty powerful.

So that might be competitive.

Marcus: I think truly. Yeah. Metta runs ad driven social media. They are the undisputed winner in that category. And so, I think they have a very specific application for AI. In terms of the [00:34:00] effectiveness of their ads and of serving up content. Their distribution platform is built.

That’s

Vic: right. That’s right. And position ads that I am more likely to click on.

Marcus: That’s right. I don’t think they have to fight with OpenAI and Google in the same way because the way that they’re going to apply AI is very specific to the mechanism that they have. And I think as long as they can keep up with TikTok, they’re fine.

They have to worry about TikTok and really almost nobody else. Right.

Vic: Yeah. But, but the tactic of open sourcing and like putting it on GitHub, it means that there will be a credible open source. That’s right. Uh, large language model, which is healthy probably.

Marcus: And also look, credit to Meta in terms of like open sourcing technology.

That’s, that’s not new to them. They’ve been doing that for a long time and they view it as a weight if it’s

Vic: not proprietary. If we open source it, it’ll get the cost down with ad servers or whatever other other infrastructure

Marcus: tools. That’s right. That’s right.

Vic: Yeah. All right. So then on that front

Marcus: of

Vic: [00:35:00] open sourcing, open sourcing, uh, it was announced two days ago, I think again, probably because the dev day was coming this company, uh, oh, one dot AI based in China led by hopefully I’m going to say this right.

Um, they, they released their open source model. They, they offer a large language model that has more parameters, it’s open source, more parameters than what Meta released, which is called Lama

Marcus: 2.

Vic: And it, it communicates with you in Chinese and English. And their startup, which began eight months ago, is worth a billion dollars now to the last fundraising round.

And so. It’s interesting, one, coming out of China, they stockpiled the Nvidia chips that are needed, and so they have the, the power that they need. China now has a, at least seems like a credible [00:36:00] play in this space, and they chose to open source it, which, which is interesting. Um, so, anyway, that, that is also gonna contribute to this, Chaos to this to this huge attention to this huge growth.

Marcus: Yeah, for sure. And uh, of course it’s worth a billion because they can kind of, I mean, first of all, it’s a privately held company, so they can manipulate the value to be whatever they want it to be. Um, I think what is interesting is that two things, one, China went through a, uh, they, they, they basically reversed strategy on their whole capitalism approach.

They they hid Jack Ma away for a while and and the whole world was kind of like what’s going on with Ant Group What’s you know, what is what is going on with doing business over there the VC landscape pretty much split So now like we have there’s there’s a sequoia in China, but it’s not tied to the sequoia in America anymore [00:37:00] So the even the VC stuff is very fragmented now in terms of America and China Whereas I don’t know how

Vic: easy it is to get capital in and out.

Marcus: I don’t think it is very easy anymore and so You know, legitimately we have, um, we have this, this AI company that is a competitor to open AI. It is open sourcing it’s, it’s technology, and it really is truly, uh, not connected to the U S in any discernible way.

Vic: Right.

Marcus: So that’s, that’s, I mean, that just shows you why we in America cannot.

Not be in the AI game that I guess that’s kind of the ultimate point. We have to be in the game because the world, the world is not going to do it. That’s right. The world is going to do it.

Vic: Yeah, that’s right. And then I think she and is going to IPO in the next couple of months, which is a Chinese company that they’ve turned back on their IPO

Marcus: markets.

Vic: Yeah.

Marcus: Yes. Okay So this was insane, uh this story about the AI [00:38:00] influencer with the digital. Yeah.

Vic: Yeah So, uh, I think because of the AI startup, uh news the guardian came out with this story Influencers, which are people that are on social media and make their living by gathering You know people that follow them and then marketing products.

It’s a it’s a thing. I don’t Spend a lot of time on it, but in the U. S. it’s a thing, but in China, it’s, I think, a pretty big business. Influencers have cloned themselves, and then they use that clone to do kind of crazy acts on social media that, that the human wouldn’t be able to do. The example the Guardian gave is Chen Yuru, uh, in Taiwan, live stream footage of himself, but it’s his clone, eating chicken feet for 15 hours in a row.

And I went and watched it, and it’s in Chinese, so it’s hard to tell exactly what he’s doing, but [00:39:00] he’s eating something that looks like french fries, but I guess it’s fried chicken feet. But it’s not him. It is a deepfake video of him, uh, for 15 hours doing what looks like eating chicken feet, but it’s, it’s a fake.

And so, that is new to me. I mean, the quality of this and the 15 hours, I had not seen before. Although it, I’ve been sort of expecting it to come, it came much faster than I thought. Um, and so I just got interested in, you know, what is this cloning thing? And what

Marcus: does that mean? People who heard the debate would not be surprised by that.

You’re all in. You’re just leaning right in.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, if someone’s going to be cloned, I mean, I’d like to have a second me. [00:40:00] I could be now answering emails while I’m talking to you.

Marcus: Right.

Vic: And so I went and looked and there’s a company. In the U. S. called Delphi. D E L P H I dot A I. That will create a clone of you.

And they have done a couple so far. They did Steve Jobs. They did, uh, Robert Oppenheimer. They have done a couple. No, but

Marcus: they, but they’ve done live

Vic: people. And they’ve done live people. So that they have. Um, they have several, uh, people that have been cloned and I now have an interview with them tomorrow to learn what it means to clone myself.

I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. Or I’m not comfortable or I love it or I’m nervous about it, but I’m going to learn about it tomorrow.

Marcus: So literally when you go to the website, it, it’s tagline [00:41:00] is clone yourself. Okay. And then the, in, in the bottom, in the lower right, right fold, uh, creators, coaches, and experts use Delphi to create a digital copy of themselves to talk with their fans 24, seven, three 65 on any platform, interact with their audience one on one at scale.

I mean, sounds cool. And honestly,

Vic: it’s not that different than the GPT I just made up last night. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, the video is different. The video is different. And the ability to be a fake, like in China, where they’re not saying, my chat on GPT says Vic Gatto bought. It’s not pretending to be. The real me, and I won’t have my clone pretend to be the real me, but people could do all kinds of stuff.

And I don’t know what that means, but it, but it’s, it’s going to be a change.

Marcus: So this company Delphi, [00:42:00] um, in order to prove the capabilities of their, of their AI, uh, they have this app or on a website called chat2024. com and it is basically all the candidates who are running for. Uh, president in the 2024 election, you can set up a debate, your own debate with them.

You can

Vic: chat directly with them, or you can have two of them debate each other on whatever topic you want.

Marcus: Yep. So you just go to ask the candidates on the website, um, and you can just say, you know, what is your plan for the economy? And then you have. A list of different candidates. And let’s just click on Robert F.

Kennedy, just to

Vic: see, yeah.

Marcus: And, and here it is. He’s telling us about his multifaceted and, and, uh, he prioritizing sustainability, equity, and innovation. We need to reevaluate our foreign policy. That’s definitely RFK, um, strategy in the, in the Middle East has collapsed. So [00:43:00] anyway, you can, you can ask all these different candidates.

And

Vic: it’s, it sounds like them, right? He uses the language and the. Uh, mannerisms that they use,

Marcus: which, which if you pay attention to any of these folks, you don’t even realize you’re used to it, but you are used to it. Uh, and right away you can click debate, click on Joe Biden, click on Donald Trump, confirm those candidates, uh, and then ask a question like, you know, what is your plan to address climate change?

And they’ve got stock questions. So you don’t have to think of anyone. You can just like click it.

Vic: Yeah. I had them debate. What would you do to improve us healthcare for, uh, us citizens? And they, they debate it.

Marcus: Yeah. So, so anyway, you can just go to chat, 2024. com and experience this for yourself. This, this is sort of an example of the cloning capabilities that Delphi is offering from a GPT perspective.

Um, but you can see where, you know, you, you overlay that with, with what happened with the Taiwanese influencer. Uh, and, and we’re starting to [00:44:00] get into some very, very interesting, interesting spaces.

Vic: Yeah, and so this is, one, it’s a great illustration of the power of their technology. Two, I think it’s a pretty reasonable social good.

Like, you can easily compare and contrast candidates here and learn. Uh, so it’s a, it’s a good, it’s a good demo because it, it has value, but it also shows how, how strong they are.

Marcus: Assuming it’s not hallucinating.

Vic: Well, I mean, this is a way to see, does it hallucinate? And they have these things that claim to be Source material.

Source material. I was not able to click through to them. But supposedly there’s some way, maybe you have to log in or something, but the, the, the references kind of like footnotes are there. Um, so anyway, um, that is cloning. I’ll know more next week because I will have my interview. I don’t know if I’ll, maybe I won’t pass, [00:45:00] we’ll see.

Marcus: So, so all of this Leads us to well, okay. What does this mean for healthcare? What are the implications for healthcare? Right? And of course in AI week It has to be a healthcare story about this too So virtua health, which is an academic medical center.

Vic: Yeah, I think in new jersey or somewhere in the east east coast

Marcus: uh modern healthcare, uh wrote a story about how Their chief digital transformation officer, along with the health system, is rolling out AI therapists.

And so they are rolling out the Wobot app because they’ve got a shortage of providers.

Vic: Yeah, of course they do. Every health system has a shortage of providers. Specifically,

Marcus: uh, yeah, that’s right. Specifically therapists.

Vic: But, um, but I don’t know that it’s the right choice to roll out a chatbot. Although we could debate that.

Like, it’s It’s risky.

Marcus: I think I was when I saw [00:46:00] this story, especially in the context of like I saw the story after I saw the chat GPT, you know, demo day, right? The opening I demo day and I was shocked because I’ve had conversations with multiple people who have talked about. One thing to do this, right?

Wanting to launch an app, you know, because of the shortage of therapists and how some people will feel more comfortable with an A. I than they would with the person in terms of what they might disclose. And all all these things are certainly reasonable from a hypothesis perspective. But we are talking about the clinical theater and we are talking about people’s actual well being.

And we’re talking about very, very experimental technology at this point, right? I mean, you know, I don’t think Sam Altman’s going to go in front of Congress and say, yes, GPT is ready, uh, to be a therapist to people, right? So the

Vic: Wobot app existed before this. This was just the first health system. I know.

Marcus: So there are, there are several. Listen, I’m not faulting the Wobot app. The health system is the one with the patient panel.

Vic: Yes, that’s [00:47:00] right. And the responsibility to You know, the Hippocratic Oath.

Marcus: Totally. So, so this, this app is, uh, called WoeBot, W O E B O T. Uh, you can go to WoeBotHealth. com and you can see how it works and how they have everything structured.

Um, it, to me, it sounds totally crazy. I, I immediately reached out to. Um, someone who I trust very, very much in the behavioral health space. Um, they are a provider and, and they’ve been at it for a long time and shared this with them. And obviously it’s a, it’s a change coming into the space. And so, you know, change should be looked at skeptically and maybe, you know, the disrupted doesn’t feel that comfortable.

Being disrupted. In this case, I think this person was pretty disruption friendly and would be open to expanding access to care to people. And they were like, Yeah, this we’re not ready for this. You know, we’re not ready for this yet. Not yet. [00:48:00]

Vic: I mean, I’ve been in in therapy. I think you’ve been in therapy with, there is a ton of benefit and people need assistance and there’s not enough therapists.

So like, I agree with that, but a lot of it is, um, learning to like, to have empathy and understand your own feelings and sort of the human to human interaction, I think is, is hard to get out of a chat bot. I would be comfortable, I mean, as I showed last week, and maybe I’m showing by cloning myself, I’m interested in leaning in and learning about this stuff.

But I think jumping into virtual health, just having a thousand patients that have mental health issues, by definition, use this, is not the first step. I think there should be like a, I don’t know, like a, a process [00:49:00] where the therapist is, I mean, like self driving cars. We have a human in there. As the AI is driving, so there’s some safety.

We should have it be kind of a, a more slow rollout so that we can see the effect. And learn because I worry that we don’t know what the effects going to be

Marcus: and look, I mean, there’s different tiers of acuity when it comes to behavioral health. And so, you know, it’s, I’m almost certain that someone who’s dealing with psychosis, for example, is not a psychotherapist.

eligible for Wobot, right? So it could be that they’re saying, listen, we have really, really high acuity patients and then we have some low acuity patients who like, you know, maybe we will get to them with the provider, but for the in between times, we’re just, we’re deploying Wobot, uh, you know, kind of in the same way that you have chronic care management in between you know, um, specialist visits or something like that.

Vic: Yeah,

Marcus: and I’ve

Vic: invested in tools that fit in between in person visits. Yeah, right. So that it’s an augment or an [00:50:00] addition to the existing care. Maybe it even allows the therapist to treat more patients. Yeah. You could extend, maybe instead of once a week, every two weeks.

Marcus: And capture some interesting data as well, right?

Vic: so the therapist now has more actionable insights to work with. It empowers them. Yep. That I think makes sense. Just kind of jumping into the deep end of the pool with a thousand people’s lives, even though I’m, I’m interested in AI makes me nervous.

Marcus: And as a reminder, in June, we talked about the NIDA story, the National Eating Disorder Association story.

Part of the

Vic: reason I’m nervous is, in June, we had this story.

Marcus: Yeah, back to the Wall Street Journal story, it was called, How a Chatbot Went Rogue. And basically, the chatbot misinterpreted what the person’s issue was. The person was dealing with an eating disorder, but You know, it was more of the flavor of anorexia and, uh, the chatbot was trying to give them dieting things for how to get more fit or whatever.

[00:51:00] I mean, you know, like you’re messing around. No.

Vic: And a human understands sort of the emotional state has empathy, understands the context in a way that it’s, chatbot to do at scale without any mistakes.

Marcus: And that’s, that’s actually something that’s probably worth talking about because, um, It’s something I’ve learned as I’m trying to really figure out how to leverage chat GPT and other GPT based tools simply to get my work done right?

Like that’s that’s my current, uh, you know, working canvas is I got a lot of work. I’m trying to get done. I have aspirations for 2024. I have things I’m trying to do. Can this thing actually help me get more work done? Okay. Like that’s, that’s my, you know, not replace an existing human. I

Vic: need to write an eight page brief in the next two days.

Can it help with that?

Marcus: Not something I’m going to publish to the world, right. Or anything like that. It’s an internal document that I’m going to use to work with you and other leaders in the company on stuff, you know, [00:52:00] can it help me with those things? And the thing that. I have learned and we’ll, we’ll see how much this changes with this, uh, with the, uh, GBT for turbo.

It’s so important to feed a ton of context into the GPT. Yes. Right. Like a ton of context. Um, and one thing I’ve, I’ve learned about chat GPT, I didn’t really understand just because. It’s not that intuitive in terms of understanding how it works, but it will answer questions about how it works is your, your user profile across different chats maintains a state or, or it maintains awareness about what you have told it about yourself.

So, so, and I learned this because like, I told it in a chat, like three chats back that I was a healthcare investor. And then I asked him like last night, this question and it brought up, it said as a healthcare. Venture capitalists. And I was like, Oh, do you remember that? I told you that in like three chats ago.

And it was like, yes. When you tell me something about you, I save it as part of [00:53:00] your user profile. And then I was like, that’s interesting. Do you train that to the global open AI model? And it says, no, anything that you tell me inside of the user profile is just local to your user profile. So anyway, I say all that to say, when someone goes into engage with a therapy chat bot, I don’t know that they know how to.

Necessarily articulate the level of context and depth to get the right answer. I mean, I feel like so much of what my therapy experiences have been, have been, first of all, the person seeing me and not just listening to me, but seeing me and picking up on body language cues, right. That where I may be saying something with my body language, that my words are not necessarily expressing, um, and then their ability to.

intelligently pull out of me the thing that allows us to go into the space to actually start doing the real work. I’m not [00:54:00] certain based on my current level of experience with chat GPT, which I think is one of the most advanced GPTs out there that these tools are there to really replicate that kind of therapeutic experience.

Vic: I don’t think they’re there. And furthermore, I’m, I mean, as of proven, I’m interested in testing these things. And I’m risk tolerant, and I’m not comfortable giving OpenAI my personal mental health situation, even if they claim they’re not going to share it. I don’t know that I believe that. And listen, they’re a for profit company whose goal, whose responsibility is to the shareholders.

I have learned from social media. As I interact with social media, it serves me [00:55:00] ads that are, that are attractive to me. And whether that is a benefit or a problem kind of depends on my state of mind. Mm

Marcus: hmm.

Vic: But, but, uh, All of them are very good at understanding how to get me to click on an ad and buy a thing that I didn’t know I needed 15 minutes ago.

And the power that we will grant OpenAI, or anyone, if we start letting them have our entire behavioral health, I’m not comfortable with. I don’t think they have the ability to collect that information or understand the empathy and the, as you’re saying, the body language and the tone of voice. They don’t, they don’t collect a lot of information now.

I’m not sure that if they do, that will be good. I [00:56:00] don’t, I think that’s too far. And then furthermore, I’m really worried that I can’t unplug my, all my personal data. Yeah. I want to be able to pull that out and plug it into Google. Or plug it into some Chinese open source thing that’s global or whatever.

And I’ll be kind of locked in eventually because they have all this data they’ve accumulated. And the switching costs are just really high to go train Google bar to a whole new thing. That’s tiring. That’s

Marcus: right.

Vic: And I worry about that, but, but to answer your question, I don’t think that you can be an effective counselor as a chat bot because they won’t have the context that a human would have.

Now they’re better at other things. So, as an adjunct, it could be really helpful at three in the morning, maybe my therapist is not available for me to call them right now, to also have a chatbot, and then my therapist could look over that and we could talk [00:57:00] about what I was discussing in the chat at the next in person.

Like, that could be great. Mm hmm. But just going all in makes me super nervous. I don’t know how it makes sense for a virtual to do it.

Marcus: So in summary,

Vic: wrap, wrap up all this. How do you stitch that all together?

Marcus: Well, I, I think in summary, let’s, let’s track these last two weeks as, um, You know, two of the most important weeks in, uh, technology history, I think, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement.

I think from the executive order to all of these AI announcements, AI as a paradigm is, it’s on par with the iPhone as a paradigm shift. iPhone and the browser. That’s right. From a technology perspective, it’s a, it’s a once every 15 or 20 year kind of shift. You know, breakthrough in, in technology, and we already see it making its way into, into, um, into the clinical theater.

Like [00:58:00] that, I think that’s the, that’s the part for me is in the same week that we had all of these unbelievable technology announcements, a health system announced that it’s rolling it out.

Vic: Yeah.

Marcus: So, so anyone who thinks like this is not going to affect

Vic: me, you’re wrong. Yeah.

Marcus: You’re wrong. I’m sorry. You’re wrong.

Uh,

Vic: like watch the Dev Day thing. Yes. Tonight, get onto ChatGPT, set up an account. It’s gonna cost you a penny. And learn about it. And that doesn’t mean you should bring it into your practice or your day to day work today, but you should figure out where it can help you and where it is too much.

Marcus: And I, I remember saying this when we had, uh, this was, this was many episodes back, but we were talking about AI and, uh, I was, I was, uh, uh, an Aspen, I remember, I remember, and I’m kind of ending this the same way I ended that episode, which is to say.

While I was watching [00:59:00] the dev day and I’m watching all this stuff part of what was going on in my head was God, it’s gonna be so much effort to change my like my habits literally my working habits to work with this thing Yeah, is it’s just not natural. I mean part of what I think is going to get people left behind Is just, there’s a, there’s a emotional aversion to changing the way you work.

And I’m just going to tell you, you have to intentionally overcome that. Sit down and start banging away on this stuff. Like you got to open up a, I don’t care if you got to make it the, the browser tab that comes up whenever you open your browser or like.

Vic: Spend 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day. Download

Marcus: the app and put it on your home screen.

You know, set up reminders or whatever. Folks, you gotta play with this stuff. You have to get the visceral understanding of how transformational this is going to be. This is not a [01:00:00] fire drill.

Vic: We’ve named two technologies, browsers and iPhone, okay? And depending on your age, you had a parent or a grandparent.

That didn’t understand the internet or didn’t understand the iPhone and the, the line of delineation between old and doesn’t get it and young and going to use this to my advantage in my career is not age based. It’s based on, have you played with it? Do you understand the questions to ask? And do you feel confident that you can listen to a podcast or ask a friend or talk to someone at your lunch hour and feel like you’re at least up to speed enough to ask the right questions?

And if you’re not that, your decision is either decide to be old and let it pass you by. I’m not willing to do that [01:01:00] or start playing with it. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s a whole new paradigm. It’s not easy to understand and to me, that’s the point because the Teenagers and 20 year olds they don’t have all of this uh, aversion to new stuff.

Because they don’t have, I’m 53, they don’t have 53 years of using email a certain way. And it reminds me of when the browser came out, I was like a year out of college. And to me it was fun and great. And to the people I was working with it was a lot of work and confusing and why do I want that? You weren’t working, you were playing.

I was playing, I thought it was fun. And that’s the delineation. I don’t think it matters how old you are. It just is having a curiosity or being willing to make mistakes and play around. I mean, it costs a penny. So like if you put a hundred dollars and you will not [01:02:00] spend a hundred dollars for the whole time of your experimentation,

Marcus: money is not the barrier.

And, and, and time is almost, well, time is almost not even the barrier. I, I think there is an emotional barrier that you have to break through, get over, um, where you have to sort of face the fact that a lot of the value you’ve built and a lot of your habits are about to go away. Yeah, yeah, they’re about, yeah, they’re, they’re about to be deprecated.

Like, and that, look, that’s for me. I mean, I told you I’m, I’m dusting off my, my coder hat and that’s going to be hard. It’s going to be hard. I haven’t done this a long time. Yeah. But I am digging back into being a coder because I’m sorry. Like, I can’t not understand what is happening with this. I feel like I can’t be a real venture capitalist and not actually understand how this stuff works at the code level.

Yeah. I like, I have to start understanding how it works at the code level.

Vic: I don’t think you can [01:03:00] be a professional in almost any industry. And not, not at the code level. You have to understand at the user level.

Marcus: Bare minimum at the user level. So like I’m, I’m not,

Vic: right now I, I have tried to set up a dev environment on Amazon, on Google, and I’ve failed both times and I’ve spent a lot more than a penny and not had any success because I just can’t get it to work.

I am now excited about. As a user understanding how these tools can work and if I can clone myself, I’ll learn from that and whether I actually use the clone or not, there’s going to be clones all over the place because it’s Easy to do, and why wouldn’t you want to have two, three, four clones? And so, I think, I think people have to understand that in order to make a decision if they want to do it or not.

Marcus: I, I think the most important thing, you know, we’re talking about deep [01:04:00] fakes and, and fifteen hours of eating chicken feet and all this other kind of stuff. But, but I think the main thing is, you have to understand, Where we actually are with the technology now, right?

Vic: And how fast it’s changing.

Marcus: Yes, if you don’t, if you don’t understand those things, it’s going to be very hard for you to map where things might go from here.

And I don’t think you can understand the tech if you don’t play with it. So unfortunately, I just feel that people have to lean in and, and, and figure this stuff out. And, and specifically, I mean, I, I played with the first version of chat chat GPT, and I was like, okay, it’s a fun little toy, blah, blah, blah.

But the speed with which this thing is improving, getting more powerful. I’ve, I’ve seen this rate of change before and I know where this is going, you know, I know where it’s going.

Vic: I mean, Netscape and iPhone are the only two examples of this [01:05:00] size and they, they’re both slower than it. Yeah. And everyone listening, I think has a letter or an internal memo or a blog post they did or something that they’re proud of that they think sort of talks about a topic.

Well, learn how to upload that. And create, uh, it’s called a GPT assistant, create that. Cause then you will understand one, how easy it is and two, how powerful it is now to have this assistant that’s answering in your own voice now, how you use it after that, I agree with Marcus completely. That’s about like where the technology is going and where your career is today and how it would be best to incorporate.

That is each person, what aside, but you have to understand like where it is now and how it’s changing in order to have any chance to map it to your future. And it’s, it’s going to change all these, everyone’s job.

Marcus: So, so with that, including our job, including [01:06:00] our job,

Vic: that, yes, that’s why we’re doing this podcast to force ourselves to read this news.

And have a discussion about it because otherwise I get lazy and I would have gone home today We had a board meeting and I wouldn’t necessarily spent an hour talking through this And it’s good to do that. And then hopefully There’s some audience members that will sign up and learn and they might give us feedback and they’ll come along for the ride

Marcus: So two episodes ago, we we worked on three themes I think I don’t think we’re gonna wait another 23 episodes to add a fourth one Yeah, AI being you know, the transformational force of this decade at a minimum We need to add it and we need to be tracking this every show now I mean we we talked about the Fed For 25 straight shows, we got it.

We got to add an AI component to it because now all bets are [01:07:00] off. I mean, this last two weeks has been

Vic: unbelievable. And to just end on a more optimistic note, the. The U. S. has printed so many dollars and the Fed has so much, uh, responsibility to get inflation down and they’re going to hold rates high and bring a lot of challenges to the marketplace.

And when the, I think we’re going to go into a, at least a slight recession, maybe worse than slight, then maybe they’ll reduce rates and create more dollars and print more. We have a lot of debt. We have to figure out a way to grow our economy. Not at three percent, two percent, four percent a year, but in in big chunks, and so I think AI is I mean, like the iPhone, can drive huge efficiency gains across the economy.

Well, look, when

Marcus: you have a health system segment that is [01:08:00] completely beleaguered by every angle that you look at it. Yeah. Um, you know, we talk about the best of the best being HCA from the for profit perspective, and, you know, they got walloped with the, you know, the baggage of the Envision JV and having to carry that 50 million dollars every quarter there, you know, they’re dragging on earnings with that.

I mean, and that’s the best of the best with the best payer mix and the best markets and blah, blah, blah. Like if you think AI is not going to be on the table as a potential solution to help health systems figure out how to become profitable again. Well, why, why and and why wouldn’t it be

Vic: we need

Marcus: it. Why wouldn’t it be

Vic: we, we have, I mean, we don’t have enough.

We don’t have enough therapists. We don’t have enough nurses. We don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough people to treat our patients. We have to empower them, not replace them. That’s why I disagree with virtual. We have to integrate technology tools, [01:09:00] whether AI or the ones so that we can. Empower the people to do more and have a more rewarding job.

Take away all the monotony and, you know, hard things with technology and let them really care for people with empathy, which is what humans are good at.

Marcus: And I guess the final thing is, um, because I can’t leave on a great note. And now, um, look, I think, I think it’s also really important. Most people at this point probably have gotten really good at picking out phishing emails and, and, uh, you know, you get those, those wacky text messages that, you know, ask you things, right?

You know, and, and we’re all, we’re all kind of, we were all smartened up to those things. Look, AI is going to take this to another level, folks. It’s things are going to get really hard to work through once, once you start adding AI to cyber security, um, attacks. Okay. Like, like, like, seriously scary, hard to figure out.

Vic: Your [01:10:00] loved one, say a parent, calls you and says, I need help, I’m in jail, I can’t get out, I need bail money. There’s no way to know if that is real or a clone. At the moment. I, I thought this was crazy a week ago, okay? But, uh, I listen to a ton of podcasts, this guy on a podcast said, AI, um, fraudulent AI, phishing things, you should have a safe word with your loved ones, that if it’s really them, they say french fries, or whatever it is, talk about that verbally in person with them, and then, If that voice doesn’t say that word, it’s a fake, because there’s no other way to tell.

And then the other thing that you and I have already been thinking about, but it’s scary is, when we wire money right now, we have like a, [01:11:00] You know, two factor authentication, and it’s, it’s best in class security, and I don’t know that it’s good enough if we have these deepfakes. It’s just not good enough.

And so, anyway, maybe that’s a good, depressing place to end.

Marcus: No, but look, I mean, we’re just trying to help land the plane for people on this. Yeah, yeah. If you have a safe

Vic: word, it’s super easy. Right, like, if Rachel calls you and she says, Whatever the word is, elephant, french fry, anything just like non sequitur that you wouldn’t necessarily think of, you know it’s her.

And if the person doesn’t say that, it’s gonna sound just like her, and it’s not her. And, it There’s no other way to tell unfortunately, which is crazy, but

Marcus: go watch the demo day Go watch the dev day video, and we’re not we’re not trying to be fear mongers folks, but this is it’s coming It’s [01:12:00] coming here.

It’s actually here. Yep, and we will be tracking it every week including next week So thank you for checking in like subscribe share it with a friend. We we we are Really trying to start growing the, the listenership. Um, I think we’re gonna, we’re gonna really focus on growth a lot more next year. This year, we’ve mostly just been focusing on, uh, trying to get good at being on the mic and talking to each other for an hour every, every single week.

Um, but next year is going to be a growth year for us and really trying to get the word out about the podcast. We hope that you’re enjoying it. If you’re listening to it, you know, on even a semi regular basis. But if you

Vic: listen

Marcus: to it every week, like, you know, and, and I know some of you do, Um, share it with somebody, you know, send them all, especially this episode.

Uh, cause I think this episode has a lot of utility in the show notes. We’re putting all the links to everything we talked about here. So this should be a really valuable episode to share with people so that they can understand what is happening in AI and tell your healthcare friends. Because the virtue of health story, I don’t know that that’s getting to everybody [01:13:00] and, uh, it’s being deployed in a clinical setting right now.

So, uh, with that, I will see y’all next week.