55 – United and Elevance Earnings, PE Risk Index, Healthcare LLM Rankings, Atlas Robot

Marcus: [00:00:00] Made it to the show. I’m so excited to be here.

Vic: Yeah. There’s a lot to talk about. Another, another, uh, Exciting day in the markets.

Marcus: Yes. Another exciting day in the markets. Um, got some good feedback from the last show, uh, that we did not talk about any of the guest shows, just, uh, the last show on the silver tsunami, um, had some people sort of reach out and, you know, commiserate some, some innovators who are actually working in the space saying, yes, this is exactly why I’m working on these solutions.

Marcus: So, um, yeah, You know, look, it’s a healthcare show, and, uh, I think, you know, Vic has talked about, uh, his passion around heart care things, and, you know, I know that’s personal to you, and you’re rolling out a whole series on the show about that stuff, and, uh, I, I probably will look at doing something around Asian care now, uh, [00:01:00] because

Vic: All of a sudden, it’s, it’s, uh,

Marcus: top of mind.

Marcus: Dude, this is It’s brutal. It’s brutal. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s really just the, the learning curve on it is, uh, you know, you kind of go from being complete idiot to, uh, being much, much smarter and also nowhere near smart enough to actually save yourself from, you know, from the, the, the pain and the trauma of the, um, of the experience.

Marcus: And so, you know, I’m, I’m, uh, I’m. In awe of just how complicated it is, you know, and how embedded and enmeshed all the different, um, dynamics and emotions and, uh, yeah, just the whole thing.

Vic: Well, and if you think about how much support and books and guidance there is when you have a child.

Marcus: Yeah,

Vic: [00:02:00] right. And then the lack of that.

Vic: When you have to take care of your parents, which is not that dissimilar. I mean, it’s it’s a significant undertaking that’s really important and personal. And I think that there just hasn’t been a vehicle to really share like you’re learning a ton about it right now. But then you won’t need it again.

Vic: Yeah. And so like it’s a one time, it’s kind of like having your first child or going to college or something. Like there’s a lot, there’s tons that changes because of that. The institutions or society puts in place support and we don’t really, we don’t have that so much. It used to be that family members kind of lived right nearby and then they passed away fairly early.

Vic: Yep. And that’s all changing, which is great, but Um, we haven’t updated the support systems.

Marcus: No, no. So anyway, uh, you once again have, uh, save the day, pull together a good show. And, [00:03:00] uh, I’m excited to talk about it. So let’s dig in.

Marcus: All right. So yes, as we talked about last week, pal now coming out and dialing back expectations on rate cuts because the numbers are just not trending very well. You know, I mean, I mean, it doesn’t feel like we’re in, you know, I mean, in danger of a resurgence of, of inflation. Um, but at the same time, it’s not continuing to go down.

Marcus: It’s being, it’s being pretty stubborn and sticky in this three ish range, you know, even testing, you know, maybe I’ll go back to four and you just, you can’t talk about rate cuts when that’s happening. So, you know, uh, I, I don’t know. I mean, we’re, we’re seeing, we, we saw obviously crypto markets totally bottom.

Marcus: I wouldn’t say bottomed out, but definitely have come back down to earth. Mm-Hmm. Um, and that’s usually a pretty good sign of liquidity and where general trends are, are, are going in [00:04:00] terms of risk, on risk off. Yeah. That’s classic risk on Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Vic: I think biotech’s been down, which is, which is another long dated another, uh, thing.

Vic: Yep. But I, I think. It’s not surprising that inflation hasn’t come down to 2%. I don’t think either one of us thought it was destined to come down to that quickly. No. And so, I think the, the Fed is You know, maybe was overly optimistic of how fast it would come down and now they’re sort of, you know, reacting to the data they’re seeing and not going to cut rates.

Vic: People are frustrated on Wall Street, but the stock market’s been down the last few days, but it’s, it’s at, you know, close to all time high. That’s right. So, I don’t think the stock market really needs a rate cut and the economy seems like it’s doing okay. We talked about the K shaped recovery. Previously, so we don’t need to beat it again.

Vic: But, you know, it really helps if you own stocks and bonds in a house. And if you don’t, you know, I think it’s pretty clear. We’re going to [00:05:00] have higher inflation and higher rates for longer than. Yeah.

Marcus: And I think that, that, that relates to the next story, uh, in the Wall Street Journal here, rents are still rising and pumping up inflation.

Marcus: So, uh, inside of that consumer price index, CPI, um, there’s a, uh, an entire category called shelter. And, um, you know, rents are a big portion of that, that shelter component and, uh, rents are while the, while the, the growth of year over year, uh, rent rates is coming down. It is the rate of it coming down is slowing, right?

Marcus: Um, and they still are year over year going up. And so. You know, um, that I think is, is, uh, that’s a big factor in inflation being sticky. Right?

Vic: Yeah. Yeah. There’s no question. We have a, we have a graph about it in it, but the, uh, I mean, your rental, your lease payments [00:06:00] for the place you live is going to go up at 5 percent this year compared to 10, 11 percent last year, the year before, which is moderately better, but it’s still over the feds, 2 percent inflation target.

Vic: And they smooth this with the concept that people can’t move out of their apartment until a year. So they take like the last 12 months in some kind of combined thing. So it kind of, uh, maybe it smooths out how volatile the situation is. The pricing is, but it also embeds high rates for kind of a longer time.

Vic: So you can see if people are listening to this 3 sort of bell shaped ish, uh, lines on this chart. 1 is the CPI itself. Then there’s the CPI shelter component. And then the actual apartment inflation. And as you said, the yellow line inflation for apartments was really high [00:07:00] in 22, 20, early 23, it’s come down and the CPI shelter rate is of course a derivative of that.

Vic: So it’s coming down more slowly and, and less, less, less high and less slow, but it’s all above core CPI right now. So it’s still having the effect of pulling things up.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. So. I mean, I think this, this K shape economy is something I’m, uh, let’s, let’s put risk on an investor and all that kind of stuff to the side for a second.

Marcus: I, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re in an election year and, um, I, I know we’ve, we’ve seen data that says that people are doing much better than they think they’re doing right. Um, and at the same time, I, I do feel that when I talk. Talk to people in their twenties. Um, and I, I’m [00:08:00] fortunate. I’ve talked to more people in their twenties than probably the average 48 year old, because I do jujitsu.

Marcus: So, you know, I spent quite a bit of time with fighting with them rolling around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, and, and, uh, you know, we’re, we’re friends, even though, you know, outside of this, they would be sort of junior to me, but on the mats, we’re all sort of, you know, pretty, pretty equal. And so, um, You know, I just sort of look at what they are able to afford and their future prospects.

Marcus: And I don’t want to say that they, they don’t have, um, I don’t want to say that they don’t have any opportunity cause that would not be correct, but it does feel like it is a. It’s a real struggle to, um, to just kind of, I don’t know, get like, feel like you’re getting ahead, if that makes sense, you know, um, it, it does feel like it’s a real struggle, it does feel like your opportunity to live in [00:09:00] an environment you might want to live in is really, you know, sort of limited.

Marcus: And I, I’m trying to kind of think about this. Against what I came up in. And I, I didn’t live in the most luxurious houses or duplexes or apartments sort of, sort of coming up. Um, but it did feel like the path was relatively straightforward and clear for me, you know, like kind of every two years we’d kind of upgrade.

Marcus: Where, where we lived and it was a pretty meaningful upgrade and I, you know, it didn’t take long, uh, for me to be, you know, in the workforce before I was able to sort of get that, that first house. And remember what the price of that first house was and it was, it was sub 300 K, you know, imagine trying to get that in Nashville today.

Marcus: I

Vic: bought a house in

Marcus: Boston. It was 200, 000. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah. I mean, I think our first house was, was 225 or something like that. And it was nice. It was really nice, you know? Um, and so, it does really feel like, I think, I think the median, um, price of a [00:10:00] house in Nashville right now is probably somewhere in the, uh, 475 to 500k range, I would imagine.

Marcus: Um, and rents being high, just, you know, it just eats away.

Vic: Yeah, I mean, I think the, I guess the challenge is, it used to be the opportunity. To move up your stage of life, your status, you’re in your class, move up from middle class to upper middle class, or whatever. If you worked hard and if you got a good education and, and really were diligent about it, it was a pretty clear path.

Vic: I mean, a lot of people were not able to get into the school or get a job, but, but there were plenty of examples where People did and so it felt much more like a fair game. I think they’re sure it is a lot of work to study and go to school. And then, [00:11:00] you know, my early jobs were a lot of hours, a lot of grinding, but you could see around you.

Vic: Other people also sort of. having success. And I just don’t know if those opportunities are as clear now. I mean, there’s a lot of debate about whether colleges are worth it or not, which ones are worth it, and how much debt to take out. And some of that is media craziness. Some of it is true, though. I mean, the prices are really high.

Vic: And then there just aren’t as many role models, I don’t think, where someone who is 28, nothing lucky happened to them that they just like worked hard and they bought their first house and they But another house that was a little upgrade, it just, I don’t have hard data for it, but it feels like the, the opportunity to pull yourself up to from lower middle class to upper middle class, or from, you know, blue collar.

Vic: Your parents didn’t go to college to now middle class. [00:12:00] That’s a harder journey. Now, it doesn’t seem like it’s as easy to do.

Marcus: Yeah, I guess one of them. Feelings that I’ve been observing in myself is that I’ve felt less comfortable, um, celebrating any of my own successes and also, uh, being overly encouraging of like the entrepreneurial lifestyle, because I’m just kind of like, it’s really hard, you know, and I feel like to some degree I was the beneficiary of a window of time.

Marcus: That I, that I was able to sort of come up in, you know, I feel like, I feel like when you and I met a little bit of a golden era in the space and, you know, some of the things that I was able to achieve during that period of time, you know, are just due to the fact that I was, I got my first Twitter account in 2007, you know, um, but now things [00:13:00] are so saturated, you know, it’s so hard to stand out.

Marcus: Capital is not readily available. And so if you don’t, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you don’t know somebody, um, or if you’re not one of the lucky people to get a check from a jumpstart foundry or a jumpstart capital or jumpstart Nova, or, you know, take a, take a pick, take a pick of the VC firm. Um, man, getting, getting that first gust of, uh, wind under your, you know, under your wings is not, it’s just not, I don’t know.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, I guess my, the hope is that. AI and Web3 blockchain stuff will open up new opportunities for people that want to learn and want to really work. We had our, um, portfolio kind of peer, uh, AI collaboration thing this morning. And, um, today was like show and tell. What, what have you built? What have you done?

Vic: Like, learn from each other. And one of, one of our portfolio companies, who’s [00:14:00] not a developer, he attended a hackathon. And it was a one day thing and so he built, uh, an AI based, uh, tool in two hours using, uh, open AI, you know, so it’s like 20 bucks a month, right? And prototyped a tool that was like sort of an add on to his existing startup that he has.

Vic: He has a behavioral health. Uh, company and he created an adjunct kind of piece to that in two hours and now it’s working, but it’s not HIPAA compliant. It’s not, you know, ready. Sure. So he’s paying a developer to, you know, kind of put it on his own server and get it where he can actually use it in health care.

Vic: Nice. But that’s, he’s gonna charge 50 bucks a month, and I don’t know if that will work, that one example, but he was able to do that just with his effort and, and reading and trying to figure it out. I’m sure there were several tries in that one day. But he, you know, he spent the Saturday [00:15:00] and through his kind of hard work, he now has a second product.

Vic: So I think it is possible, but, but there are fewer opportunities. You can’t just sort of show up. Like I kind of just showed up to college and then found a startup in 1993, you know, as Windows were. Just being adopted, and I think those easier opportunities are not as much around.

Marcus: Yeah, so you’re making a good point, which is the one thing that is, uh, easier now is the ability to be very prolific.

Marcus: Um, it’s theoretically. Easier to be very prolific. It is not actually easier. Maybe from a mental health perspective, maybe from an energy perspective, maybe from an inspiration perspective, maybe from a, how do I tune out all the noise and stop consuming all the time and actually like just focus on being a creative, you know, person as opposed to a consuming person, right?

Marcus: That’s a, that’s a big shift and there’s just so much energy. Uh, that, that goes into society [00:16:00] telling us to all consume all the time instead of create all the time. Um, but. You know, if you can get yourself oriented around creating, uh, the ability to just be hyper prolific right now is unparalleled. We’ve never been able to put as many shots on goal, high quality shots on goal as you can today.

Marcus: So I guess that, that is, that’s, that’s kind of the answer, right? I mean, that’s the

Vic: answer to our, uh, upward mobility challenges. Right. It’s also the answer to our national debt, because it, because we have to find productivity and grow our economy without the government just subsidizing everything, because that’s a sort of a never ending cycle.

Vic: Yep. So that, that’s the hope that AI is going to be the savior. I don’t know if it’s going to be enough to offset some of the challenges, but it’s a, it’s a bright spot or a silver lining.

Marcus: So, UnitedHealthcare, [00:17:00] um, they announced earnings, and I saw a, uh, notification on my phone this week that said, because I watched the stock, uh, that said, you know, UNH is up, uh, 5%, and, uh, I just sort of chuckled when I saw it, right?

Marcus: Because, I mean, of course, they, they really just don’t miss. And, and, and in the midst of probably one of the toughest quarters for them. Yes. In the history of the company. History of the company. And, and certainly we can say the last decade, right? Yeah. Easily one of the hardest quarters for them in the last decade.

Marcus: They are up more than 5%. Now they were down over the course of the quarter because of, healthcare, but to still come out and beat EPS and rally and get a 5 percent bump post earnings is remarkable. It’s remarkable. And I think it demonstrates some of what You know, you and I were [00:18:00] talking about as the whole thing was going on because we have intimate knowledge of the company change health care prior to the acquisition of, you know, by United Health Group, which is there aren’t a lot of organizations that could have absorbed this, you know, um, so look, uh, kudos to the team at, at, at United Health.

Marcus: Um, this is, that’s, you know, they have to be feeling incredible that they were able to, you know, come into investor. We come into earnings week and deliver an EPS bump in a 5%, uh, you know, bump in price for their shareholders after a really, really tough quarter.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, every company has. Um, tactics and little things they can do to try to make their earnings come out with the way the street expected them.

Vic: United has a lot of those, but it’s, it’s significant that they were able to hit that and they had to turn off all the utilization management stuff. Because it was, [00:19:00] the change healthcare outage was causing so much challenge to the providers cash flow wise. They said they. You know, optionally decided to turn off all their, um, you know, like, pre approval thing, pre off, pre off stuff, they turned all that off.

Vic: And they still weren’t able to hit an LR of, you know, roughly 85%. It’s

Marcus: ridiculous. Yeah,

Vic: it’s

Marcus: ridiculous. Yeah. And, and they, they were transparent that this is going to cost them over a billion dollars. Yeah. Still got the, still got the stock bump, right? You know, you just, you take your medicine, you price it in, uh, you know, I have, Uh, you know, firsthand knowledge from portfolio companies that, you know, Optum was offering loans.

Marcus: Um, and I don’t think they were spending a whole lot of time underwriting those loans, right? So I think it would, it probably felt not dissimilar to everything that happened during the pandemic and kind of like stimulus money flying out the door. So somehow they were able to manage. Sort of, uh, you know, at least for their little universe, [00:20:00] a pandemic like stimulus effort, turning off prior off and still nailing the number, beating the number.

Vic: Yeah, I mean,

Marcus: and the reason why I want to make a big deal out of this is like, how many companies do you know that could do that?

Vic: Very few, three or four. I mean, like,

Marcus: That could take a billion dollar unexpected hit. Have to give out loans to a whole bunch of their partners, customers, you know, vendors, providers, et cetera, and still beat earnings.

Marcus: Yeah, they are just a machine. Stupid man. It’s just ridiculous. You know, and if you don’t understand that, then you’ve never like tried to run anything. But, you know, sorry, that is, that is just. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. Um, okay. So along the lines of the whole cyber attack stuff, this one kind of flew under the radar over the course of this last week.

Marcus: Obviously, we’ve, you know, the big headline in the world is the whole Israel Iran situation, right? So, um, a lot of things were not going to, you know, [00:21:00] crest above that. But, um, Microsoft got hacked. Um, and it’s a, it’s a pretty serious hack, uh, because it was like their cyber security team’s emails were hacked.

Marcus: Um, and so the Russian hackers are back at it again, uh, And

Vic: Microsoft works for the federal government, so that’s what they were really attacking. Yeah,

Marcus: yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, look, this is the same thing as the change healthcare thing, right? The, the Russian hackers are attacking the private companies as proxies to get at the United States nation state.

Vic: Right.

Marcus: That’s the, that’s what’s going on here. So,

Vic: they’re going

Marcus: to keep doing that.

Vic: They are a vulnerability point.

Marcus: That’s right. Yeah. Our government does a lot of business with our private market, private sector. Right. And, um, that creates a, you know, a vector of vulnerability. Right. Just attack the companies that our government depends on, um, like United Healthcare, like [00:22:00] Microsoft.

Marcus: Um, and so this, this is pretty bad. Um, and CISA, which is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, uh, published an emergency directive, um, requiring all these different effective agencies to study their different stolen emails and look for leaked, logged in information. But this is probably the beginning of, you know, a much larger investigation that.

Marcus: Happened in pretty much flew under the radar. I think most people didn’t even see this happen.

Vic: Yeah, that’s right And then I heard a podcast or talking about I couldn’t find that the news story but T Mobile and Verizon Reported. I think it was 5, 000. A lot of their employees were getting text messages and offers 300, 400, 500 if they’d do a SIM swap over Signal.

Vic: Over Signal? Yeah. Well, so the, like, it was a message saying, if you’re interested, hit us at the Signal place. Um, and [00:23:00] the podcaster was saying it’s, um, you know, if you, you guys, I mean, back to the K shaped economy, You ask 5, 000 low level employees, they have access to the, I mean, they’re in the Verizon store, in the T Mobile store.

Vic: And how many do you need? You need one, one or two. That’s right. Swapping a SIM number means, like, my phone breaks, and someone in Russia is now managing my account with all my, all my stored passwords, all my stuff I’ve saved in, I’m on Android, but whether you’re Android or Apple. And so that’s a really just it’s just another example of where you take a vulnerability and it can just expand out.

Vic: Hold on.

Marcus: And, um, I know this is at least true with AT& T. They’ve moved away from physical SIM cards. Yeah. It’s all eSIM now. Right. So it’s like, it’s like signal based. It’s not. Yeah. So you can

Vic: swap it out from the, from the store. Yeah. From the store. And the user has no. Like you, you open your phone and now you don’t have a account anymore.

Marcus: [00:24:00] So like, I don’t, I feel like people who never programmed have never actually thought about. All the vectors for attack, and so like, as you know, as all these things get easier, they don’t understand the trade on security when you do these things, and I’m just like, yeah, I used to program, I’m just like, Oh my God, dude, this is like, it’s more and more fragile.

Vic: Yeah, it’s impossible in my mind to. Expect us to keep all these bad actors out. They’re not gonna be kept out. We’re going to be continuously hacked. Just cause there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of vectors they can come at and there’s a lot of people trying to do it.

Marcus: Alright, uh, So that was a little departure on the cybersecurity thing, just because we were talking about United. So moving on back to the payer side of things, Elevance, um, they also, uh, beat earnings. And so their stock was up nearly 5%, [00:25:00] um, uh, after, uh, after releasing their, uh, their results. Um, and you know, Elevance is kind of trailing UHG, but.

Marcus: Make making a lot of moves. Uh, and I think they just also announced the partnership with CDNR, uh, and their very whole health unit around doing primary care. Um, so more and more partnerships.

Vic: Yeah. Elevance is, um, they have the Carillon platform, which we’ve talked about before. It’s very similar to Optum.

Marcus: Yeah, it’s, it’s modeled after Optum. They name things the same as Optum and they’re moving very, very quickly to acquire things to make sure they have feature parity with Optum.

Vic: Right. Yeah. And so partnering with this private equity firm, CDNR, that we know is going to help them sort of not catch up to United, but get some more scale.

Vic: And they, um, they can be really effective, I think, at sort of doing a, maybe a smaller version of what United and Optum are doing.

Marcus: Yeah. So, so CDNR had a company called Veri, Veri Whole Health, and then they also bought [00:26:00] Caslight and then they put those together. Um, they got the guy who used to be the president at, uh, Cerner.

Marcus: I think Don Trigg is his name. And now he runs that company. It’s called a pre health. Okay. And so it’s, it’s got advanced primary care, but then it’s also got all the cast light stuff, which is all the transparency stuff, but also, but also like the, the, the digital health hub. So like all the different apps are sort of built into the infrastructure and it’s all vetted and like the different partnership deals, et cetera.

Marcus: So it’s a, it’s a total package for employers is kind of the model. So I think Elevance just said. We’re never going to be able to build that. We’re trying to have feature parody as quickly as we can with UHG. And so we’ll just partner with CDNR CDNR already through a pre health had a partnership with, um, JP Morgan.

Marcus: Um, and their whole Morgan Health initiative that happened after the whole, uh, May, May Haven Haven

Vic: Haven. Yeah,

Marcus: when Haven imploded, um, you know, JPMorgan continued to do Morgan Health, but they were like, we’re not going to do it internally. And they partnered with, um, a pre health to kind of roll out everything they’re [00:27:00] doing there.

Marcus: So, um, uh, pre health is getting some pretty big, uh, partnerships, you know, Morgan Health and now Elevance Health. These are, this pretty major.

Vic: Yeah. And then, um, cdl. Put another thing, millennium, which I didn’t know. It’s another portfolio company of theirs.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah. So, um, millennial, uh, millennium is a, um, it’s a, I think it’s a value-based care physician group.

Marcus: Um, okay. It, and I think they were based in Florida. Um, but yes, uh, yeah,

Vic: maybe it’s, uh. It looks like it’s an orthopedic group. They’re talking about joint primary care. Yeah.

Marcus: Yeah. Okay. That, that, that, that makes sense. So, so yeah, I mean, you know, this, it’s, it’s a pretty big deal and I think it also just shows where forward look, CDNR is a very, um, Forward thinking private equity firm.

Marcus: They’re not kind of like your old school financial engineers, you know, they, they, um, they incubated and created Agilent as an example. So, you know, they’re more on the like creative, how do we like create new value, create

Vic: value, grow it. [00:28:00] You know, maybe bring in a stronger team, hold it longer, take it public,

Marcus: as opposed to like, just, you know, sell it off.

Marcus: Um, and so, yeah, like partnering with Elevance, I think that’s, that’s pretty interesting because we think a lot about PE generally just in terms of like health systems. And we’re going to talk about that in a little bit here, but, you know, the idea that some of these, um, you know, payviders who are behind in terms of building out their stack might just partner with some of these private equity firms.

Marcus: You know, Welsh Carson’s another one that comes to mind that might, you know, have some assets that would be good for, um, some of these groups to partner with. So yeah, it’s just, just kind of an interesting dynamic that I don’t know, hadn’t really thought about before, but could be a way for the, the, uh, the other payviders on the scene to like advance what they’re doing.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, again, the payviders have already been ahead of the health systems. And they seem to be moving

Marcus: very quickly. Yep. Uh, and then unfortunately, uh, Walgreens had their fourth round of cuts. So Walgreens is [00:29:00] still kind of, I think, rebooting, um, uh, had a leadership change last year and, uh, they’re continuing to try to figure out who they, who they are.

Marcus: I think, you know, um, this, this round of the layoffs was largely corporate workers. So, um, you know, Top of the food chain probably means that there’s a lot of different business lines that they are just going to get rid of. And so, you know, probably don’t need, you know, as VPs and VPs of business lines, you’re not going to continue to run.

Marcus: Um, so, uh, over the last year they’ve laid off 900 corporate employees. So that’s, that’s some pretty big shedding. Um, and they’ve got a billion dollar cost cutting plan that they’re, they’re currently, um, working through. You know, I mean, look, sometimes you got to do that to. For the long time, long term viability of a business, you know, we certainly understand

Vic: CVS certainly started this transition several years ago, and so there have been a little bit ahead.

Vic: Walgreens has started to make that transition from. The corner [00:30:00] store that also you can pick up your drugs at to more of a health care company, but it takes a while to sort of move to that to that basis. Yep.

Marcus: Uh, all right. So let’s stop there. Uh, cause we have a pretty interesting run of stories. I think, um, after we, we come back from breaks.

Marcus: We’ll let Doug share a little bit about Jumpstart Foundry and we’ll be right back.

Doug Edwards: Thanks guys for the opportunity to 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.

Doug Edwards: 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 [00:31:00] 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.

Doug Edwards: 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, typically around single digit percentage of companies that apply for funding from Dumpstart. And we invest in the most incredible, robust, Innovative solutions and founders in the United States.

Doug Edwards: 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 invest 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 [00:32:00] better.

Doug Edwards: 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.

Marcus: Okay. This is another one of those interesting storylines. I love when you find these, um, Vic, I love when you find like, hey, there’s just a bunch of stories coming out about this one topic.

Marcus: Like what’s going on? To

Vic: be honest, a subscriber, uh, emailed me, check out this story. And it was this Becker story. And so I, I looked into it, and so Becker’s has a story out, it came out, uh, last week, which is why I guess, uh, I heard from the subscriber. Okay. Um, and I had missed it, honestly, and it, it’s talking about this, uh, this thing called a private equity state risk index, and how ten states are really at risk.

Vic: Um, [00:33:00] their healthcare infrastructure is sort of at risk because of private equity. That’s the Becker story. And so that’s interesting. Becker’s always this kind of like short, quick hits. And so I looked into sort of the story. And then, um, Fierce, Fierce Healthcare had another story that came out today, or maybe it was yesterday, um, talking about bankruptcies, uh, in healthcare, uh, have spiked that are private equity backed.

Vic: And, um, it, it sort of summarized a bunch of stories that we already have covered and are not new, um, but they published it. And so,

Marcus: And they cite the same,

Vic: Yeah, the same, Index. The same index. Yeah. Right. And so, there, this is the second time there was, there was a, uh, drug pricing thing that we saw. It was a PBM thing.

Vic: Yes. Yeah. So, there is a, there’s a group, I can’t figure out who is behind it, but it’s a lobbying or public relations, [00:34:00] effort. Well, it’s a non profit. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a non profit. I don’t know. I mean, well, I mean, all lobbying things, non profit,

Marcus: maybe not. No, no, no, no, they’re not. But this one, this one is a non profit.

Marcus: This one is a non profit

Vic: and it’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s impossible to tell. It’s hard for me to tell who is supplying the money or what, what it is. Um, but it’s called the private equity state risk index. And they are publishing information about public, private equity, creating risk for housing, healthcare, jobs, and pensions, sort of infrastructure that is important to all of us, uh, by state.

Vic: And, uh, if you go down, they have a cool map of like red, yellow, green. Tennessee is red. Uh, and this is how vulnerable or how much exposure to private equity [00:35:00] each state has. The scoring system is, um, difficult to unpack.

Marcus: Yeah. They have a whole methodology that you need to spend some time reading.

Vic: And I don’t know if a lot of private equity people would fully agree with their methodology, but, but it is getting attention and it’s, it’s a well done public relations kind of site.

Vic: So it’s going to keep getting more stories, I think.

Marcus: Yeah. Well, it just kind of shows you like how You can just create an index and you can create a methodology and you can add up some numbers and then you can rank some stuff and then all of a sudden like it gives a risk score is 83. Yeah, 83 out of 100 and and and Tennessee is a big risk of private equity, you know, ruining our health care system.

Vic: So the sound bites to reporters or politicians. Exactly.

Marcus: Going to be tempting. Exactly. Like that’s, that’s the thing, right? Create an index, create a [00:36:00] methodology, create a nice little interactive map. Um,

Vic: just rely on the PE firms to be unorganized and not do anything. And

Marcus: then create a nice little leaderboard here where I can sort.

Marcus: And now I have my top 10 cause that’s all, you know, look, I’m doing blogs. I got, I got three a day. I got a knockout. I need it. I need a top 10 list.

Vic: So you either need a top 10 list or you live in Florida. And you work for a report or a newspaper in Florida. And so you then you can go to the Florida one and figure out what, how should I spin it here?

Vic: Right. I mean, private equity certainly does plenty of things that are not good, but they also do a lot of things that are good. And we’re just sort of grouping everything together in a way that’s not that helpful.

Marcus: But it, it, it, it does, uh, illuminate the strategy of how you can, you know, how, if, if you want, A bunch [00:37:00] of, um, news outlets to cover your topic, you know, I feel like the old school thing used to be have relationships with the reporters, you know, hire a PR firm, et cetera, et cetera, but we’re seeing more more and more.

Marcus: It’s no create a nonprofit. Have that nonprofit do research and generate reports and this is really strong generate a risk index Right, right, you know and then make it easy for backers make it easy Yeah Now you just send this out and now everyone up I already love talking about how private equity is bad for health care now Now I get now I have data points to prove it.

Vic: Yeah, I can reference this other source that whether it’s credible and really well done or not doesn’t matter. I mean, who are these people? Yeah, I have no idea. You can’t figure it out.

Marcus: And by the way, I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m simply saying like, it’s a website. Right. Right. With a map, with some colors, with some numbers.

Marcus: Right. And a leaderboard. [00:38:00]

Vic: Yes.

Marcus: And some methodology.

Vic: And so, um, I expect we’re gonna see more and more private equity News stories about bad things and partially it’s deserved and partially it’s not deserved.

Marcus: Yeah. Well, the steward health thing, I think has got everybody up in arms. And so, uh, it, it does feel like as we are in an election year, you know, for some politicians, this is a stump story.

Marcus: And, uh, I don’t know this website, private equity risk. org is probably going to get a lot of hits over the course of the next seven months. I would imagine. Um, all right. So let’s see here. Oh, this was, this was a not so awesome story, and I hope it just stays kind of trivial, but it sounds like the World Health Organization is warning that there is a threat of bird flu spreading to humans, and that is because it’s been spreading, spreading pretty, pretty Aggressively amongst cows.

Marcus: And they [00:39:00] are saying that cows biology are similar enough to humans biology that even though so far, uh, bird flu has killed less than a thousand people, um, over the course of the last 20 years, uh, there is an increasing outbreak amongst cows. And so they’re just worried about the mutations getting to the point where it can be transmissible, um, across people.

Marcus: Is that basically what’s going on here?

Vic: Yeah. It’s been. There’s been 888 humans that have gotten it. Okay? So humans have can get it. There never has been a reported case of a human getting it from another human. Right. So that, that’s the mutation that, uh, WHO is worried about. That has not happened yet.

Marcus: Yeah. Hasn’t happened. And, and I, I misspoke. So it was 888 cases. 52 percent were fatal. So that’s a high fatality rate. Yeah, but it’s a very very low number of people who have actually gotten it, right? So that’s kind of your, that’s what you’re working with there. One in two people who get it die. So that’s pretty [00:40:00] serious.

Vic: That’s right. And it, I think you’re exactly right. Bird flu was not likely to be that dangerous to mammals, which we are, but now it has already progressed to cows and I think a couple other mammals. So that, I think, made WHO more nervous. But yeah, it’s a, it’s a warning, uh, of something that might be an issue in the next couple years.

Vic: But I think it’s, it, it could have, you know, It’s really deadly. So we want to watch it.

Marcus: Yeah. I mean, we’ve been, we’ve been free of any, you know, serious, uh, things since, since COVID and it’s been a couple of years, you know, and look, I mean, SARS, Ebola, I mean, you know, there’s all sorts of stuff that, that flies around out there.

Marcus: So, um, at some point I think it’s more of a, when, not if, uh, there will be the next, you know, viral, uh, disease. And, uh,

Vic: hopefully we’ll get a little while more.

Marcus: Well, hopefully it doesn’t have a one [00:41:00] and two. Fatality rate. Yeah, I mean that that is that’s no bueno. Um, all right, so This memorial herman story This this reminds me of the of the um, what was it?

Marcus: The the new york presbyterian story. Yeah. Yeah It’s similar to that one. Yeah, it’s kind of like inappropriate doc behavior

Vic: It’s not quite as evil as that one, but but it’s still pretty bad. It’s bad

Marcus: ethical.

Vic: Yeah Yeah, so a transplant physician in houston At uh, moira herman, I think he’s I think it’s right to say he’s been accused.

Vic: I don’t know where he is in the process, but they have stopped the transplant program. And the allegation is that he was changing the applications of transport, uh, transplant potential patients, because he knows what the algorithm is, like who gets The liver transplant who gets a kidney and who doesn’t and so he would change their, [00:42:00] their BMI, their age, et cetera, in order to help them, but then, of course, disadvantage, disadvantage others and you

Marcus: can’t, obviously,

Vic: that’s unethical.

Vic: You can’t, you can’t do that. So, um, They have stopped the program during investigation, but it’s just a it’s kind of a sad story. I wish we didn’t have these stories, but the health systems need to get their act together about trust and reliability, and they need to work on that.

Marcus: Yeah. And, and, and here’s the real bad thing.

Marcus: In the wake of the investigation.

Vic: Yeah. So they’re not doing any transplants. Exactly. Now, I think the organs will go to Vanderbilt or go to Mayo or go, go, the organs will go somewhere else, but not to those places. But they

Marcus: clog up another pipeline and it’s all going to be slower for a bunch of patient, patients who are waiting to, to get a transplant, right?

Marcus: Who are on the list. So it’s, it’s doubly bad. Like, you [00:43:00] know, so, The original sin is bad, right? Because you’re not supposed to advantage some to disadvantage others. But then the fact that the course of action in order to remediate this is to suspend the program entirely. I mean, can you imagine being a family, uh, you know, with a loved one or being the actual person on that list?

Marcus: And, and, you know, imagine being like two away or something like that, and now it’s like suspended.

Vic: Well, hopefully they will do the investigation and turn it back on in a month or two. But yes, any, any, any day is not good. Just

Marcus: the anxiety of every day knowing. You know, you did nothing wrong and now this program is suspended.

Marcus: I mean, yeah, it’s terrible. It’s just, it’s just, I think it just. illustrates the, like how high the stakes are in this industry and, um, how things that would not be that big a deal at all in other [00:44:00] industries are so huge in this industry. You know, this, this is, this is a hard industry that really tests us as, as humans.

Marcus: Um, you know, tests our, our, our, It tests our, um, it tests our morals, it tests our, our ethics, and, um, the costs are high when we fail. The costs are really high when we fail.

Vic: Yeah, my, my first boss, you know, a hundred years ago, you know, he was talking about, On the first week about our values and ethics of the company.

Vic: And so we went through them and of course we had like things on a piece of paper of values, but he ended it by saying, this is all great. And we’ve, we’ve created this list, but what I want you to think about is, you know, if your mom is driving home and she saw what you’re doing, put on a billboard. You know, would you be proud of that?

Vic: And I think that’s, that’s, I’ve carried that with me. It’s something that, you know, like, even if [00:45:00] the letter of the rule or the law allows you to do it, there’s some things that just you shouldn’t do. Like, you shouldn’t give a patient that you happen to know or like an organ and take that organ away from someone else who by the algorithm that, you know, these algorithms, doctors and surgeons fight over them.

Vic: In detail, like the BMI and they’ve quit smoking and how far away they live, all the different details and you should just live with that.

Marcus: Yeah.

Vic: Anyway, so hopefully they’ll come back online soon.

Marcus: All right. And now our weekly AI rundown. So. First and foremost, we’ve got a identifying new potential treatments for Parkinson’s disease.

Marcus: Obviously, great news, but I think what underlies this is not so much that A. I. is figuring this out, but it’s how A. I. is accelerating the ability to figure this out. It’s really a drug discovery story more than it is a specific [00:46:00] Parkinson’s story. Right. Cause you could swap out Parkinson’s for, you know, a myriad of other diseases.

Vic: Yeah. The way it caught my attention is they. They reported in Nature that they were able to, uh, search a thousand times faster than they would have been able to before AI. They were basically looking at small molecules and what could be effective against Parkinson’s. Right. Um, which is great and a good use case for AI.

Vic: It’s gonna really help the The R and D process, which we need because there’s less, uh, from federal agencies as far as like, you know, basic science is less dollars being invested every year and the biotech in it, we still want new drugs to come out. So we need to do more with the slightly less, fewer, uh, federal dollars coming in

Marcus: back to our discussion about AI making us a more prolific, um, productive society.

Marcus: Uh, if you sort of just tease this out and [00:47:00] scale it out. Let’s say AI not only speeds it up, but also in some way, shape or form lowers the cost right of drug discovery. Yeah Then you can imagine a world where not only does it, you know, go a thousand times faster But it increases the number of submissions to the FDA For approval by 10x.

Vic: Yeah

Marcus: by 100x, right? And so the FDA is going to have to meet this Um, this increased prolific inbound, uh, with their own systems, they’re going to have to deploy AI as well to

Vic: get efficient too.

Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. They, they can’t become the bottleneck that stops diseases from being cured. Right. That’s not, I mean, and I, and I know people are going to be like, what are you talking about?

Marcus: They already are the bottleneck. Like, I mean, I mean, I get that, but like, this is going to be a. [00:48:00] This is one of the true highlights and great applications of AI. There’s so many things about AI that are really scary, but Increasing and improving drug discovery, you know, with a chance to eliminate diseases, especially when you combine AI with gene and cell therapies.

Marcus: This is like one of the great uses of AI, right, for humanity. And the FDA can’t, like, just continue to operate business as usual once we start having a multiplier on the number of, you know, submissions for approval. That’s just, that’s not going to work.

Vic: Yeah, I, I think, uh, I think the FDA will, will react to, you know, politicians pushing them.

Vic: They, they have already gotten much better than they were 10 years ago. Now, they have, they don’t focus on how effective the drug is as much anymore. They’ve, they’ve skewed much more towards, say, [00:49:00] this is safe, and so we’re gonna, you know, put an approval with a bunch of caveats in it. Mm hmm. That has been complicating the reimbursement side.

Vic: But I think the FDA will react and more, you know, more candidates getting clinical trials and getting evidence and learning more is a good thing. So hopefully the FDA will respond.

Marcus: All right. Boston Dynamics released some footage of their new humanoid robot Atlas. Yeah. Um, I think this thing is so cool.

Marcus: It’s double jointed. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like, of course. Yeah. If you could design humans differently from day one, like what is one of the things you would do?

Vic: Yeah, I would love to be able to spin all the way around and

Marcus: it’s just, it’s so cool to watch this thing, like get up from laying down on the ground and [00:50:00] you’re just like, man, I wish I could get up like that.

Marcus: Right? You know, it’s, uh, so I think that’s, that’s like an, an interesting thing is to think about not just robots, um, you know, mimicking our current human design, but Finding the limitations and sort of just bypassing those limitations and and what does that do to physical labor when you bypass just built in limitations of the human, you know, body?

Vic: Yeah, there’s a lot of jobs that are not not that safe for humans. Yeah, and people die in the workplace. And if we can have robots doing that work, it’ll be more. Effective and safer. So that’s, it’s great.

Marcus: Anyway, go check out this video from, from Boston dynamics, uh, with, with their new robot Atlas, it’s just, it’s just cool.

Marcus: It’s just cool. And it also kind of like really is starting to look like I robot. Like we’re, we’re, they’re, they’re getting pretty close now. I mean, this thing is fairly agile and, uh, You know, it looks like it could, it [00:51:00] could, you know, at least do a nice little jog and not look that, that clunky. So, so we’re getting there.

Marcus: We’re getting there. All right. Final thing. So, uh, hugging face, um, which is kind of the big open source repository for large language models, large action models, large media models, and just basically all AI models

Vic: have their own. Models, but they also aggregate it’s really, it’s really more repository than

Marcus: it is like, you know, the home of their own stuff and, and, uh, it’s cool.

Marcus: Like you can go on there and just like search all sorts of models that are contributed from around the world. Yeah, it’s really great. But anyway, you found that they’ve got a leaderboard for medical large language models.

Vic: Yeah. So they have made the determination that medical use is a, is a special use case that should be graded and keep track of the leading large language models for this application specifically.

Vic: And there’s multiple ways they test it.

Marcus: Um. Anatomy, clinical knowledge, biology, college [00:52:00] medicine, genetics, professional medicine.

Vic: It’s all the, All the accreditation steps in the journey to become a doctor and several others and then they run the language model up against that and just give it the test and I like it because it’s a pretty independent source I mean they are they’re advocates of AI because they’re they’re running the system but I think they are doing these tests pretty independently and then just publishing the what’s best and they put it on on this leaderboard.

Vic: Um, OpenAI’s GPT 4 got the number one, um, by a very small margin over Google’s MedPalm 2 by, you know, half a, half a point. Um, but the, the takeaway that I think is that there are many models that are very good and would pass, [00:53:00] would pass medical boards, um, across, across the, across the line. They’re passing everywhere.

Vic: And some of them are free and open source. And so you can go to Google that does MedPalm or OpenAI that does GPT or an open source one and they’re getting better. Every day, but they’re already pretty darn good.

Marcus: I just think the idea that GPT 4 base is the top rated model for medical LLMs. I mean, talk about something I did not anticipate, right?

Marcus: So we, you know, we’re seeing all these huge funded rounds for these, these startups now, now granted their LLMs are proprietary, so they’re probably not listed on Hugging Face and, you know, are not included in this, you know, assessment or this ranking, right? Um, But the, uh, the idea that the GPT four base out of the box is pretty damn good across the board in terms of medical knowledge.

Marcus: [00:54:00] I don’t know. It just, to me, continues to reinforce that the opportunity in innovation with AI. For most of us is going to be leveraging existing LLMs into great interfaces with great workflows, with great use cases that are very, very specific and validated to actually provide outsized value. Yeah. Right.

Marcus: And not like creating your own damn LLM. There’s no,

Vic: like, there’s no reason for anyone listening or anyone that doesn’t have 5 billion. to try to do their own LLM. And even if you did have five billion dollars, I don’t think that’s a good use of it. Well, it’s not enough, probably not enough. And then, there’s not a business model, I don’t think, at this point, as a late, a late comer to the market.

Vic: Um, this does show private models. Uh, if they’re willing to let [00:55:00] hugging face play with it, maybe not everyone did, but yeah, but I think my view is that there’s going to be diminishing returns, right? Like GPT five, GPT six, the Google next version, they will get incrementally better, but they’re already really good.

Vic: And they’re, it’s fine that they’ll get better, it’s good that they’ll get better, but it’s going to be how it gets integrated into the workflows and like how people start knowing how to use it that I think will really make a big difference in the next year. The models will keep getting better, but they can’t get, I mean, the top one got an 87 across all these tests, 87 percent of 100.

Vic: Yeah. It’s been it’s it’s available. Yeah, I pay 20 bucks a

Marcus: month and get to use it. That’s what I’m saying. So like, so like in my pocket right now on my phone is probably a better doctor than my doctor. I mean, that’s crazy to say. But, [00:56:00] you know, and now, you know, am I going to put my personal data into open AI?

Marcus: No, I’m not doing that. So that’s, you know, there’s, there’s plenty of upside for my doctor for the foreseeable future, but look, I mean, we’re going to, just in terms of having recall and the ability to respond to prompts over a large base of knowledge. Yes. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of already here in our pockets.

Marcus: Yeah. That’s crazy. That’s just crazy that that’s the case

Vic: and Google allows a million tokens in the context window and everyone’s going to so you can put your entire medical record and your entire family’s medical record and a bunch of anything else and you’re not close to a million tokens. You can just like dump your entire situation into it as you’re asking the

Marcus: question.

Marcus: Probably plus your genome. Plus, yes, right.

Vic: Yeah, so, um, [00:57:00] the models aren’t incredibly powerful, but we aren’t really using them that effectively right now. A lot of it is generating. You know, videos or blogs of average quality, but that will change over time.

Marcus: Well, uh, I feel like I talk about Nick Holland, every show, but, but he, we need

Vic: to have him on probably.

Marcus: Yeah, we, we actually should have him on because he’s really interested in healthcare. But, um, for, for listeners don’t know, Nick is, um, he’s the head of, uh, the, the, the marketing slash content hub at HubSpot. Um, so he’s a good friend of ours. And, uh, he was talking about sort of what they are realizing at HubSpot because they, they just rolled out like all these new AI features and just Now that they’ve rolled it out, they have a, it’s HubSpot, so they have a huge user base.

Marcus: Right. Yeah. And they great at tracking sort of usage and stuff, and they’re like, yeah. You know, the tech is way ahead of the usage. Yeah. Like, like we’ve rolled out all this AI stuff out there and it’s overwhelming people. Mm-Hmm. Like, we, like, we don’t know how I, [00:58:00] I don’t, I don’t use AI every day. I don’t, I mean, you know, I think you use it more than I do.

Marcus: Um, but I, I do not use it every day. And

Vic: I, I’ve tried to carve out an hour. And limit that because you can go down a rabbit hole and be like, well, it’s like, it’s like 10 hours later and you, you learned a bunch of stuff that you can’t have any application for that. So it has to be kind of gated, at least for me, it has to be gated.

Marcus: My problem right now is my time is probably over allocated to necessary productivity. I don’t have enough play time in my, I don’t have enough bandwidth for play in my schedule. So it just eliminates the. The, the utility of AI in most situations, if I’m writing, it’s a good place for me to use, use AI, like I’m writing for publishing and I’m like, okay, you know, Hey, here’s an article, give me like a starter.

Marcus: Let me kind of work from there. But, um, outside of that, I’m not using it that much. Um, and I feel like I know how to use it. I know how to do prompt engineering. I know how to, you know,

Vic: yeah, but the agent stuff there, that’s why I [00:59:00] was using yesterday. The agent stuff is a whole different. thing. I mean, I, I paid 8 to get to first month of this tool.

Vic: Okay. And what’s the tool? It’s called task aid.

Marcus: Okay.

Vic: And you know, I don’t, I’ve only been using it for two days, but eight bucks a month. Like, okay. I mean, I can, yeah, I can spend that. Um, it came with I think it was 40 built in agents just came with. So there’s a writer, there’s a, uh, like a content, um, keyword developer, there’s a VC associate, and they, they have these out of the box agents that are, you know, the VC associate is designed to analyze pitches and ask questions and, I don’t know, help a VC partner.

Vic: Yeah. And I don’t have any work to give that VC associate yet. But I can try to figure out something, but yeah, [01:00:00] but for eight, it’s 8 out of the box. It has these 48. I could, I only used one yesterday.

Marcus: Well, hold on. We’re, we’re in season right now for selection of jumpstart founder companies, right? Yeah, I mean, you probably could run some of some of those decks through there, right?

Marcus: And just kind of see what it says. Yes. You know, it’s we don’t have to base what we do on it, but you can at least sort of evaluate it side by side with what we would normally do during our selection period. Right?

Vic: Yes.

Marcus: Okay. So here’s that.

Vic: Yes, but here’s the so hugging face is accurate. And, uh, Nick’s accurate.

Vic: The tech is amazing. What is hard is for me to get the applicant’s information Yeah. in a form that I can easily get the VC agent bot to review. In a way that is in my workflow and streamlined, but you could do, you can do that. Just, I haven’t done it yet. So it takes time to do it.

Marcus: You know what we need?

Marcus: We need [01:01:00] those kind of agents behind a like Slack bot. So we can just like connects

Vic: to Slack.

Marcus: Yeah. So that’s what I’m saying. Like, so you just treat it like it’s a team member. Like, what would we do if we were sending it to an associate on Slack? We’d just be like, Hey, Would you review this deck and tell me X, Y, Z, right?

Marcus: I mean, either slack or Asana, you know, assign the task in Asana or message them in slack and just say, Hey, I need you to do X, Y, Z for me. Like that’s that’s the interface we are used to working in, not some other interface. So if we can get these tools behind. The tools we actually use. Yeah, there really should be no excuse at that point, right?

Marcus: Because then literally it’s just a slack message and upload the deck.

Vic: Yeah. I mean, I,

Marcus: which is what we do today told

Vic: Doug this yet, but I was thinking of getting this agent, a slack ID. Well, luckily, luckily, you

Marcus: know, the guy who runs it here and an

Vic: [01:02:00] email, and then, you know, the, we can name it, whatever you want, the VC AI agent.

Vic: Okay. And they, maybe you call it they, they can slack in back and forth. Now it’s, uh, it’s not programming, but there is a configuration that is significant, right? So you have to get it, you got to get it all queued up so that when, when it receives a slack message, the agent wakes up and reads it and then takes whatever action.

Vic: But, um, but it’s pretty close to being in the next six months it’s going to be. There’s a lot of people that would pay 8 to have 40 people working for them, 40, 40, uh, not people, 40 agents.

Marcus: I mean, back, I mean, back to being prolific. So, okay, well, look, I, I mean, this is normally something we would talk about off, off the pod, but, uh, but yeah, like send me that stuff and then, you know, I’ll start playing with it and we’ll figure out if we can get it behind a Slack channel.

Marcus: Yeah. That’d be great. It’s cool. Okay, great. All right. Well, thanks for sitting in on our little [01:03:00] meeting here, everybody. And, um, yeah. We’ll be back next week. Oh, I’ll be out next week. Oh, yeah. I got to find a guest to come on with me. I’ll figure something out. Maybe Nick. Hey, do you want to share a little bit with the listeners about your heart health series?

Marcus: Just like frame that up a little bit.

Vic: So I have heart disease early, early stage with both my grandparents died of Heart attacks as well, and so I’m interested in it, and I’m also looking for Just content that is a little more long lasting I mean these roll up news shows are really helpful But you know three weeks from now a lot of these news stories are not going to be yep that relevant anymore And so I think I’m gonna do four shows around heart health Uh, I recorded the first one, it’ll be out in a week or two, which is really an overview with, uh, Dr.

Vic: Sina Reddy, who’s a cardiac surgeon, friend of ours, an investor, known for a long time, and I had him sit down and just explain to me, [01:04:00] what is, heart disease. What, what, how does it, how does it appear? What are the different components of it? Uh, meant to be kind of a, a very basic, like, for the everyday person.

Vic: You don’t have to be a surgeon to understand it. And he does a great job sort of explaining it. We have lots of video and images and things. And I, I learned a ton. I think it’s going to be really good. And it’ll be long lasting. If anyone wants to learn about, you Heart health, you can take maybe 45 minutes, 50 minutes and get an overview and then I’m going to have some deeper dives into How do you do diagnostics better?

Vic: Can we do prevention or maybe some of the interventions that CNEW and other other folks do? that, uh, have real specific applications. So, Sini was one of the first people, I think it was the first person with a guy, another guy named Dr. Riddick, to do a valve replacement. So, replacing the valve in your heart intravenously, through, through the artery, you know, up through your thigh.

Vic: Um, [01:05:00] obviously recovery is much faster because you don’t have to open up the chest and all of that. Yeah, so it was good. I enjoyed it. Hopefully the listeners will like it too.

Marcus: Awesome. So glad you’re doing that. And, um, yeah, we’ll be back next week. Me with someone else on the mic. I got to figure out who I’m going to bring in here, but, uh, it’ll be good.

Marcus: All right. See you then.