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Matt welcomes UCSF sleep expert Dr. Aric Prather to the podcast this week to discuss the science of psychoneuroimmunology: the link between our behavior and immune health. After a primer on the immune system's innate and adaptive arms, Dr. Prather details how insufficient sleep dramatically increases your risk of catching a cold, significantly blunts vaccine effectiveness by reducing antibody response, and promotes a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation - a known pathway to numerous age-related diseases.Ultimately, the conversation illuminates a profound and actionable truth: sleep is arguably our most powerful, yet tragically overlooked, weapon in the daily battle for immunological health.Please note that Matt is not a medical doctor, and none of the content in this podcast should be considered medical advice in any way, shape, or form, nor prescriptive in any way.One of our sponsors this week is the biochemical electrolyte drink company LMNT, and they are very kindly offering eight free sample packs when you purchase any one of their orders at drinklmnt.com/mattwalker. LMNT is an electrolyte sports drink that I can get behind - it's created from the basis of science, and it has no sugar, no coloring, and no artificial ingredients – all qualities that are so important to maintaining your blood biochemical balance. And now their new Lemonade Salt is squeezing onto the scene Tuesday, May 20th! This limited-time flavor is here to keep you at your best all summer long, and, just like summer, it's here for a good time, not a long time, so stock up while supplies last! If you want to give Lemonade Salt or any of the fantastic LMNT flavors a try, just head on over to drinklmnt.com/mattwalker and get your free Sample Pack with your first purchase.Matt will be the first to tell you that launching his sleep-related merchandise sales was incredibly smooth, thanks to our new sponsor Shopify and their integrated sales and inventory system. And now, just for you, Shopify is generously offering an exclusive trial at shopify.com/mattwalker. Whether it's online or in-person sales, Shopify simplifies it all. So, be sure to stop in at shopify.com/mattwalker to start your exclusive journey now! Matt's good friend Dr. Peter Attia has helped develop David, a revolutionary new protein bar, and a sponsor of today's episode! 28g of protein, 0g sugar, only 150 calories – the best ratio EVER! Amazing taste, six flavors, incredibly satiating, and a great source of the protein that helps build muscle, manage metabolic health, and keep you full. Visit davidprotein.com/mattwalker now for an amazing deal: Buy 4 cartons, and get a 5th FREE! . Hurry! Your new favorite protein bar awaits!As always, if you have thoughts or feedback you'd like to share, please reach out:Matt: Instagram @drmattwalker, X @sleepdiplomat, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@sleepdiplomatmattwalker9299Dr. Aric Prather: https://www.aricprather.com/
Comprehensive coverage of the day's news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. SF Trans March SF Pride weekend kicks off with Trans March despite backlash from Trump administration, courts Newsom, Sen Padilla join activists warning “Big Beautiful Bill” could devastate CA healthcare Senate rejects War Powers Act requiring congress vote before going to war Israeli Haaretz news reports Israeli officers shoot food seekers as “crowd control” Housing activists introduce legislation against criminalization of homelessness Healthcare workers protest UCSF layoffs of 200 frontline workers, demand reinstatement The post SF Pride weekend kicks off with Trans March; Senate rejects War Powers Act limiting war without Congress approval – June 27, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.
Matias and Greg interview Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology at UCSF and a world leader in the genetics of sleep. Her lab has discovered the first-known genes behind “natural short sleepers”. Her work bridges human genetics and neuroscience to uncover how to modulate sleep for brain health, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases.In this episode, we discuss:How some people thrive on 4–6 hours of sleep with rare genetic mutationsWhy sleep efficiency is more important than total hours sleptWhat short sleeper genes reveal about preventing Alzheimer's and autismWhy current sleep research tools miss deeper brain activity patternsWhat's next in sleep science with potential therapiesCredits:Created by Greg Kubin and Matias SerebrinskyHost: Matias Serebrinsky & Greg KubinProduced by Caitlin Ner & Nico V. Rey Find us at businesstrip.fm and psymed.venturesFollow us on Instagram and Twitter!Theme music by Dorian LoveAdditional Music: Distant Daze by Zack Frank
UCSF's Dr. Rahul Aggarwal explains the role of clinical trials in advancing prostate cancer treatment and how trial design is evolving to match today's more personalized approaches. He highlights how UCSF has contributed to major prostate cancer therapies and emphasizes the importance of genetic and genomic testing in identifying suitable trials for each patient. Dr. Aggarwal explains the different trial phases, clarifies common myths—such as concerns about placebos—and stresses that trials are considered at every stage of disease. He also discusses efforts to improve access, affordability, and diversity in trial participation, including regional partnerships and digital matching tools. The talk encourages patients to be informed and proactive when considering clinical trials as part of their treatment plan. Series: "Prostate Cancer Patient Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40800]
UCSF's Dr. Rahul Aggarwal explains the role of clinical trials in advancing prostate cancer treatment and how trial design is evolving to match today's more personalized approaches. He highlights how UCSF has contributed to major prostate cancer therapies and emphasizes the importance of genetic and genomic testing in identifying suitable trials for each patient. Dr. Aggarwal explains the different trial phases, clarifies common myths—such as concerns about placebos—and stresses that trials are considered at every stage of disease. He also discusses efforts to improve access, affordability, and diversity in trial participation, including regional partnerships and digital matching tools. The talk encourages patients to be informed and proactive when considering clinical trials as part of their treatment plan. Series: "Prostate Cancer Patient Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40800]
UCSF's Dr. Rahul Aggarwal explains the role of clinical trials in advancing prostate cancer treatment and how trial design is evolving to match today's more personalized approaches. He highlights how UCSF has contributed to major prostate cancer therapies and emphasizes the importance of genetic and genomic testing in identifying suitable trials for each patient. Dr. Aggarwal explains the different trial phases, clarifies common myths—such as concerns about placebos—and stresses that trials are considered at every stage of disease. He also discusses efforts to improve access, affordability, and diversity in trial participation, including regional partnerships and digital matching tools. The talk encourages patients to be informed and proactive when considering clinical trials as part of their treatment plan. Series: "Prostate Cancer Patient Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40800]
UCSF's Dr. Rahul Aggarwal explains the role of clinical trials in advancing prostate cancer treatment and how trial design is evolving to match today's more personalized approaches. He highlights how UCSF has contributed to major prostate cancer therapies and emphasizes the importance of genetic and genomic testing in identifying suitable trials for each patient. Dr. Aggarwal explains the different trial phases, clarifies common myths—such as concerns about placebos—and stresses that trials are considered at every stage of disease. He also discusses efforts to improve access, affordability, and diversity in trial participation, including regional partnerships and digital matching tools. The talk encourages patients to be informed and proactive when considering clinical trials as part of their treatment plan. Series: "Prostate Cancer Patient Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40800]
UCSF's Dr. Rahul Aggarwal explains the role of clinical trials in advancing prostate cancer treatment and how trial design is evolving to match today's more personalized approaches. He highlights how UCSF has contributed to major prostate cancer therapies and emphasizes the importance of genetic and genomic testing in identifying suitable trials for each patient. Dr. Aggarwal explains the different trial phases, clarifies common myths—such as concerns about placebos—and stresses that trials are considered at every stage of disease. He also discusses efforts to improve access, affordability, and diversity in trial participation, including regional partnerships and digital matching tools. The talk encourages patients to be informed and proactive when considering clinical trials as part of their treatment plan. Series: "Prostate Cancer Patient Conference" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40800]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Anne V. Kirby, Associate Professor, University of Utah, talks about suicide prevention in the autism community. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40610]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Anne V. Kirby, Associate Professor, University of Utah, talks about suicide prevention in the autism community. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40610]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Anne V. Kirby, Associate Professor, University of Utah, talks about suicide prevention in the autism community. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40610]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Anne V. Kirby, Associate Professor, University of Utah, talks about suicide prevention in the autism community. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40610]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Anne V. Kirby, Associate Professor, University of Utah, talks about suicide prevention in the autism community. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40610]
Rates of chronic illness, behavioral disorders, and neurodevelopmental challenges are rising rapidly among children, often tied to underlying gut dysfunction, nutrient deficiencies, and environmental triggers such as toxins and ultra-processed foods. Conventional treatments frequently overlook these root causes, relying instead on symptom management or medication. Functional approaches emphasize foundational lifestyle changes—clean nutrition, microbiome support, movement, sleep, and stress reduction—as powerful tools to restore health. Children are especially responsive to these changes, often experiencing rapid and dramatic improvements in behavior, mood, and physical symptoms. With education, testing, and family-centered strategies, parents can take simple, effective steps to help their children thrive. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Elisa Song, Dr. Suzanne Goh, and Dr. Elizabeth Boham why a root-cause approach is just as important for children, as it is for adults. Dr. Elisa Song, MD is a Stanford-, NYU-, UCSF-trained integrative pediatrician, pediatric functional medicine expert, and mom to 2 thriving children - and she is on a mission to revolutionize the future of children's health. Dr. Song is the bestselling author of the Healthy Kids Happy Kids: An Integrative Pediatrician's Guide to Whole Child Resilience. Dr. Song created Healthy Kids Happy Kids as an online holistic pediatric resource to help practitioners and parents bridge the gap between conventional and integrative pediatrics with an evidence-based, pediatrician-backed, mom-approved approach. In her integrative pediatric practice, she's helped 1000s of kids get to the root causes of their health concerns and empowered parents to help their children thrive by integrating conventional pediatrics with functional medicine, homeopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and essential oils. Dr. Song is chair of A4M's pediatric education and has lectured around the world at leading integrative and functional medicine conferences and premier parenting events. She has also been featured in hundreds of top podcasts, print and online media outlets, including the Wellness Mama podcast, BloomTV, Forbes, Healthline, MindBodyGreen, National Geographic, PopSugar, Parents, Motherly, Parade, Verywell Health, and New York Post. Dr. Suzanne Goh, co-founder and chief medical officer at Cortica, is a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Harvard University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School who has spent decades working with autistic children. Her work as a board-certified pediatric behavioral neurologist, behavioral analyst, neuroscience researcher, and author led her to create the Cortica Care Model, an innovative, whole-child approach that combines optimal medical treatment with the most effective strategies for advancing cognition, communication, and behavior. Dr. Elizabeth Boham is Board Certified in Family Medicine from Albany Medical School, and she is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and the Medical Director of The UltraWellness Center. Dr. Boham lectures on a variety of topics, including Women's Health and Breast Cancer Prevention, insulin resistance, heart health, weight control and allergies. She is on the faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: How to Raise Healthy Kids: A Functional Medicine Approach The Surprising Causes of Autism & Why It's On The Rise Addressing The Root Causes Of Childhood Obesity
I was happy to connect with Dr. Louann Brizendine today! She is the founder of the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic at UCSF. She completed her degree in Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, graduated from Yale School of Medicine, and completed her internship and residency at Harvard Medical School. She also served on the faculty of Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Brizendine founded the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic at UCSF. Her New York Times bestseller, The Female Brain, and its follow-up, The Male Brain, continue to be read worldwide. Today, we dive deeply into her new book, The Upgrade: How the Female Brain Gets Stronger and Better in Midlife and Beyond, which was released in April 2022. IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN: The transition and the upgrade stage of life explained Celebrating the transitional time of life and not fearing it How hormones help guide behavior Transition Stages 1,2,3 and what they mean Then onward to the 3 stages of "The Upgrade" Estrogen fluctuations that affect sleep Be aware of caffeine in your food and drinks and how it may affect your sleep. If you are having a problem staying asleep, you may want to cut back on alcohol or drink it earlier in the day. The Women's Health Initiative - (almost 20 years ago) disastrous misinterpretations and negative implications it caused by instilling fear in women to not use Estrogen - including osteoporosis, brain fog, anxiety, and sleep disruptions Hormone Replacement Therapy - now viewed as a positive and much-needed step in women's health Women between the ages of 40-50 should get a bone density scan as one of the determining factors of whether or not to begin hormone replacement therapy. Dr. Brizendine suggests that women should not be fearful of using therapies today to help balance hormones. Cynthia discusses the loss of cognition later in life as another correlative symptom of not receiving needed hormones. Dr. Brizendine advocates doing your own research regarding HRT and not depending only on information from major pharmaceutical companies. Cynthia and Dr. Brizendine discuss the importance of keeping an open mind when it comes to synthetic hormones because of the good they can do. If you are not well and do not feel like you can go on, please, immediately, seek out a doctor who can prescribe medications or hormones to help your particular and unique situation. Be your best and do not suffer in silence any longer. Cynthia says the transitional time of life should and can be a very good time in your life. Consider reading Dr. Brizendine's book(s) to learn more and to keep it as a valuable resource. Connect with Cynthia Thurlow Follow on X, Instagram & LinkedIn Check out Cynthia's website Connect with Dr. Brizendine Website Facebook Instagram LinkedIn TikTok Dr. Louann Brizendine's Books The Upgrade (newest book) The Female Brain The Male Brain Resource Mentioned NAMS - North American Menopause Website
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Peggy McManus with The National Alliance to Advance Adolescent Health/Got Transition talks about barriers, inequities and policy options for youth aging out of public programs. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40609]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Peggy McManus with The National Alliance to Advance Adolescent Health/Got Transition talks about barriers, inequities and policy options for youth aging out of public programs. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40609]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Peggy McManus with The National Alliance to Advance Adolescent Health/Got Transition talks about barriers, inequities and policy options for youth aging out of public programs. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40609]
Happy Pride Month GeriPal listeners! Transgender issues are in the news. Just today (June 17th) as we record this podcast: Ezra Klein released a wonderful interview with Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of congress A judge ruled that cuts to NIH grants focused on minority groups, including transgender people, were illegal and ordered the government to restore funding. It's Pride month, and our guests remind us of the leadership of two trans women in the Stonewall riots, which started the modern fight for LGBTQI+ rights and liberation. Today's guests are Noelle Marie Javier, a geriatrician and palliative care doc who tells her story of transitioning as a faculty member at Mt. Sinai in New York, and Jace Flatt, who started their journey as a gerontology researcher at UCSF and is now faculty at UNLV. Jace was in the news recently for having multiple federal grants cancelled because they included transgender participants. We cover many topics, including: Terminology: gender identity, sexual orientation, gender expression, transgender, nonbinary, intersex, what's in LGBTQI+ Gender affirming care Major health and medical issues associated with aging as a transgender person Allostatic load Accelerated aging What can clinicians do - pointers, pearls, and attitudes Dementia risk Caregiver issues Hormone replacement therapy at the end of life Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) data, what is it, how to collect it respectfully and safely Mentioned: Harvey Chochinov's Dignity Therapy question, and our prior podcast on LGBT Care for older adults and serious illness with Carey Candrian and Angela Primbas So pleased to sing True Colors by Cyndi Lauper, with Kai on guitar for those of you listening to the podcast. -Alex Smith Many links! -Rainbows of Aging: Jace Flatt's research site. -LGBTQcaregivers -Callen-Lorde gender affirming trans health services -GLMA: organization for health professional advancing LGBTQ+ equality -Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at UCSF -World Professional Association for Transgender Health -Sage advocacy services for LGBTQ+ Elders: focus on impact of Medicaid cuts -Trans bodies, Trans selves: resource guide
Quaranteam – Book 1: Part 11 The girls suggest to Andy who to bring in. Based on a post by CorruptingPower, in 25 parts. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels. Eric's house now stood with seven women in it, and Andy had agreed that he would try to learn all of their names eventually, just as Eric did for Andy's household, although both of them agreed that the task would definitely take some time. The two men and Phil had all planned to meet up for dinner on Thursday, as they usually did. It was good to keep a routine. Also on that Sunday, Ash had commandeered the pool house, giving each girl the chance to pitch to her twice, once in the midday and then again in the evening, allowing them to improve and refine upon their pitch. That had kept the entire house occupied, and allowed Andy to spend all of his time writing, although he did make an exception for lunch, when he'd tended to Jenny and Katie's needs. In a move that had surprised him, Jenny had insisted Katie ride his cock until he came inside of her, then sucked her share out of her partner's cunt afterwards. It had proven an excellent test, and Katie had still gotten her fix out of the experience. She'd described it to Andy as "filthy in the best possible way." Other than that, Andy went two days without engaging in any sex, a sort of chance to recharge his batteries. He suspected he might have a bit on Monday, but also acknowledged to himself that he was going to be booked wall to wall with the meetings, hearing the girls pitches, so it might even be a third day off from sex. Monday morning he awoke in bed alone, an absence he definitely noted, but it let him get his morning workout in, followed by a shower. After he got out of the shower, when he went to get dressed, he found a printed schedule of his day on top of his dresser. 10 11: Asha, Emily, Hannah, Jenny 11 12: Katie, Lauren, Nicolette, Niko 12 1: Lunch 1 2: Piper, Sarah, Sheridan, Taylor 2 3: debrief with Aisling Ash had decided to just organize the girl's pitches in alphabetical order, so that Andy wouldn't see any prejudgment on her part. On the schedule, there was also a map of the house's lower level, a room marked with an X and a note from Ash that read simply "See you there!" The house was the quietest it had ever been, even his two cats seeming a little perplexed at the lack of people moving around. Andy wandered down to the marked room at about fifteen minutes to 10, finding Aisling already in the room, which had been set up as a little conference room, a large television on the wall doubling as a computer monitor. On the screen was a black screen with the words "Project Pair Up" in friendly white lettering. "Hey love," she said to him with a smile. She was dressed in professional looking attire, the most dressed up he'd ever seen her. With the quarantine, everyone had been completely casual, and Andy suddenly felt wildly underdressed, wearing just a pair of jeans and an old, faded Jesus Jones t shirt. She saw his look and immediately grabbed his arm. "Relax. You're the one everyone's pitching to, so you're allowed to dress however you like. It's good to be the king," she giggled. "You've heard all the pitches already, Ash," he said to her, as she led him to the head of the table, making him sit down. "Anything truly shocking?" "I told you I wasn't going to make decisions for you, babe, so you'll just have to wait and see." "I wasn't asking you to make a decision, Ash," Andy laughed, "simply whether or not you thought this was a good idea or not." "Oh, aye," she nodded. "There's some truly remarkable women up on offer for you today, and I'm certain there will be some hard decisions in your future, in more ways than one. A few dodgy ones too, by my reckoning, but I'm not the final say in the matter, am I?" She moved to sit down next to him, at his right hand spot, the television screen on the wall opposite him. "There are pros and cons to all of them. But all the girls have agreed nobody will be upset at you, no matter what you decide." "And you think they're all going to hold to that?" "I told them if they couldn't then they shouldn't bother pitching anyone at all. That sort of got them in line." Andy nodded sagely. "Where are they?" "Everyone's hanging out in the pool house right now, and they'll come up when we text them, one at a time, so if anyone runs short, or needs to run long, nobody will get interrupted." "Okay then, let's get to it, I suppose." Ash nodded, and then picked up her iPhone from the table, sending Asha a text to come to the room. A few minutes later, the half Indian half French girl strolled into the room in a powder blue power suit, her hair done up in a bun, wearing bright red 1950s librarian glasses. "Thanks for letting us pitch ta ye, Andy," she said, moving to sit down on the chair at the opposite end of the table from him. "Going first is a bit of a pisser, but I s'pose I'll set the bar high for the lot of'em." She picked up the little remote from the table and clicked it, as the monitor behind her sprung to life, an image of a bright, bubbly blonde girl appearing on it. "This is Olivia Shoemaker, my bestie from me London days. Now I know what you're thinkin', that she's young, and you're nervous or whateva about bringin' too many young birds into the house. But Livvy's a doll. She's a student down at UCSD, so she could just transfer up here and go ta UCSF or Berkeley or Stanford or whateva." Asha clicked the button and the screen advanced, showing Olivia in a colorful yellow sundress, standing on the Santa Monica pier. "She's also a right big social media influencer, with half a million followers on Insta and about as many on TikTok. They were tryin' to get her to appear on Love Island back home, but she said she wanted to wait until she was a bit older for that. She's 19, she's fit and she's a babe. We've been friends since we was toddlers, an' I know she'd likely fall for you like I have." "What's she going to school for?" Andy asked. "She's undecided right now, but she's thinking she might get into international finance. Banking, stocks, that lot. She changes her mind about that all the time, though, so who knows where she'll end up. Girl's got a mind that goes a kilometer a minute, you ask me." "You think I'd be her type?" Andy asked, a touch of doubt in his voice. "I have trouble imagining someone like her being satisfied with someone older like me. I'm not particularly social media savvy, and she looks like the kind of girl who would take one look at me and think 'old man.' And that's no judgment on her, I'm just saying, you want to make sure this is someone who you think is going to be happy here, and with me. Simply because I can request anyone I want to doesn't mean that I necessarily should." "She and I have been friends since we were wee high, so if I tell her she'll like you, she'll trust me on tha', and once she gets to know you, she'll fall for you like e'eryone does, Daddy." He still wasn't entirely comfortable with her calling him that, but he'd learned that telling Asha no just made her do the thing twice as much, so he was hoping she'd get it out of her system eventually. "And part of the pitch process was also you identifying what the challenges might be if I were to extend her an invite to our family. So what do you think those would be?" "Um," Asha said, looking down at the table a moment. "I'm not gonna lie ta ye, Andy. She can be a mite tad possessive. Her last relationship imploded because her boyfriend gave another girl a ride home after a party, and she thought he'd cheated on her." Andy winced a little bit. That struck him as more than a challenge. "So you think that's not going to be a problem here, where she has to share me with all of these other women?" "She'll get over it!" Asha pouted. "She just needs to be shown that not all men are lads, and that she doesn't have to have someone's complete attention all the time to get by in the world." "Do you know what she likes and dislikes sexually?" Ash asked her, cutting straight to the point. "Are you sure she's compatible with Andy?" "She's a bit more reserved than I am," Asha sighed. "More reserved than she oughta be, you ask me, but I don' like the idea of her just fallin' in with some bloke who won't do right by her. She deserves better'n that. The prude walls hafta come down sooner or later." "But do you think she and I would make each other happy?" Andy asked. "I'd like to think so, Andy," Asha said, "but I'm no' sure one way or the other. I'm just tryin' to look out for her." "Okay, Asha. You're the first one we've talked to today, so obviously we have a lot more pitches to hear, so we'll keep your friend in mind." Asha nodded, standing up again. "An' if you decide she's not for you, Andy, I'd understand, but, y'know, maybe pass her on to one of your friends around the town as a thought? It'd just be nice to have one of me mates around here." Andy smiled. "I'll see what I can do." Asha walked over, leaned down and gave Andy a soft kiss. "Thanks, Da. I'll see you at dinner, yeah?" Before Andy could answer, Asha was already heading out the door, closing it behind her. Aisling pushed the button and the screen moved to a simple black background with "next: Emily" in white letters on it in a classy font. He turned to look at Aisling, not entirely sure what to say, which made Ash giggle. "They're all very different, Andy, so you'll just have to decide for yourself." She sent a text message on her phone to Emily, letting her know to start heading to the conference room. "An influencer, though?" Andy said, rolling his eyes. "I still don't get how anyone can think that's a real job." He sighed, seeing the smirk on Ash's face. "I think it's more likely that I'll recommend her over to Eric or Phil, but I'll try to keep an open mind." "That's all anyone's asking, love." "Emily's pitch isn't also for a social media influencer, is it?" he asked, caution plain on his face. "Olivia was the only one, silly, so you can relax." He nodded, hearing a knock at the door. "C'mon in, Emily!" Emily entered the room, and it seemed as though all the girls were going to be in their best professional wear today. She had a modest dress than hung nearly to her ankles and a bright red silk blouse that was almost entirely buttoned up. She looked like was planning to meet the head of some movie studio more than simply talking to Andy and Aisling. She gave a warm, impish little smile and wave, then pulled the door closed behind her. "Hey love. Ash. This is so exciting!" she giggled. "How did Asha do?" Andy was about to say something when Ash put her hand on his wrist to quiet him. "He's not going to talk about any of the pitches to anyone other than me until he's heard them all, Emily, so I don't know why you're asking." The blonde Brit giggled again, flashing a little wink. "I asked because I almost got him to spill the goss." Emily moved to sit down in the pitcher's chair, and picked up the remote. "But it's fine, it's fine. Andy darling, let me present to you Summer Steele." She clicked on the remote and the screen behind her flickered and turned into an image of a woman in her late 30s sitting behind a camera, clearly on a set somewhere. Summer was fit, although not overly muscular, with hair a deep dark brown, like a freshly cut walnut tree. Her nose was slightly crooked, like it had been broken and reset at least once. Her skin had a natural tan to it. Andy suspected her heritage was either Jewish or Palestinian. She looked focused on whatever she was working on. She was certainly lovely, but also had a tough, street fighter kind of vibe to her. She was dressed in leather pants and a leather jacket over some kind of t shirt, as she peered at the camera's monitor. "Her real first name is Maya, but professionally she's been Summer Steele for nearly a decade now. I think you can call her either." Click. The image turned to show the woman on set of one of the Daggerfall Academy movies with Emily, one of the later ones clearly, judging by Emily's age in the picture. It looked as though Maya was teaching Emily some moves for an upcoming scene. "We first met when she was the stunt coordinator and 2nd AD for 'Power Taken: Daggerfall Academy IV.' We've been friends since then, but she's gone on to direct episodes of all sorts of shows: 'The Last Garrison,' 'Everyone Dies At Midnight,' 'Uprising From Below,' and even a couple for Disney+, although she obviously can't tell me about any of those." Click. The image shifted and was replaced by an image of current Hollywood it guy Scotty Jansen with his arm around her, as she sipped from a beer, probably at some afterparty in the Hollywood hills. "She was with Scott Jansen up until January of this year when they split after Scotty got drunk and put his foot in his mouth one too many times. There were lots of reasons they were never going to work out, but this was the final straw." Click. A new image appeared, with Maya in between Sarah and Emily, the three women clearly out for a night on the town, although based on the buildings behind them, Andy would've guessed they were somewhere in central Europe. "So, she knows Sarah and I rather well, and we can both vouch that under her occasionally crass veneer, she's a sweetheart with a kind spirit. Many of the things some lesser men would find turnoffs, her tendency to drink and swear, her sometimes lacking sense of tact, her habit of acting first and thinking later, those are all things you like in a woman, so that's delightful." "Well, as long as she isn't sloshingly drunk all the time, Emily," Andy said. "I don't want to bring in a dangerous alcoholic we're going to need to check into rehab all the time." Emily flapped a hand dismissively in his direction. "Nothing so coarse, my love. While she can attack a bottle with a gusto I've yet to see rivaled, she does keep those benders to a manageable number, and never lets them affect the rest of her life." "Alright, carry on." "She likes the same kind of sex you do, Andy, she's a talker, and she enjoys both the softer and harder sides of it. She's very professional and you've made a point to tell all of us that if we want to continue working and chasing our dreams, we should do it, something she would very much appreciate, as she's certainly making headway. She directed her first film last year, 'The Secret In The Shadows,' and while it didn't win any awards, it came in under budget and over performed expectations by a sizable amount, so she's in talks to do another movie after the pandemic has passed." "Where's she from?" Ash asked her. Click. Andy suspected this was the most recent photo of the woman, and she'd undergone a drastic haircut. The left side of her head was shorn down to almost a buzz, while the front had a large flop of hair dyed bright green hanging over one eye, a look Andy had been told was called an undercut. She was wearing a white tanktop and he could see the woman had tattoos on each of her shoulders, epaulets of ink depicting fighting fish in a lake, done in a Japanese style. "Upstate New York. Her father was a rabbi and a jeweler, her mother ran a deli. Dad passed away last year from a heart attack, so her mom's running both businesses now. No brothers or sisters. Maya's got a few friends in the L A area, but for the most part, she's on the go so much that she really never settled anywhere. I'd like for her to settle with us." "What sort of challenges do you anticipate?" Andy questioned. He had a yellow legal pad of paper in front of him, and he'd been keeping small notes during the presentations, mostly so he could keep everything straight in his head at the end. "Two, but both I think aren't deal breakers. First, she's going to want to continue working so there may come a time when Andy might need to do a bit of travel to accommodate Maya's schedule, or Maya will simply need to ensure that most of her work as a director is done relatively local to here. I know that there have been some sound stages built in Oakland for the purpose of doing more film work here, so we will simply need to remind her of that." "And the other?" "The other is a little more of a challenge, but mostly just for you, love," Emily said to Andy, her coy smile widening a little. "Maya isn't at all bi curious. She is absolutely, positively, 100% heterosexual, meaning that you would need to tend to her needs without anyone else as company. I know this because both Sarah and I have made passes at her, only to be told that she's very much 'men only.' She would be completely aware of the rest of us, but simply wouldn't want to partake in any group activities. That also might mean you would need to share a bed with just her every once in a while, so she feels like she has as much a stake in you as everyone else, but you're clever, so I think you would do fine. Like you told me, constraints are simply gifts to creativity." "Do you think I would make her happy? Do you think she would make me happy?" Emily nodded. "It wouldn't be without minor complications, naturally, but I think you two would get along like a house on fire, and she would fit into the house much like Lauren does, present and eager with you when she's spending time with you, and self reliant and capable when she isn't. She started as a stuntwoman before she got into directing, so she has always had an uphill climb in her life. We aren't best mates, but she'd thrive here, she'd adore you and I think she'd make you happy as well." The tiny Brit clicked the button and the screen advanced to black once more, with white letters reading "next: Hannah" in the center of it. "No matter what you decide, love," Emily said, getting up from her chair, making her way over to Andy, "I just want to say that all of the girls are thrilled you're asking us for our opinions on this, and it means the world to the lot of us that you're letting us have a say in who we want to join the family. You didn't have to ask anyone for their opinion, so the fact that you are, well, it shows even further that you're quite the good man, Andy Rook." Emily leaned in and kissed him, soft and tender, but backed with a lot of love, before she finally pulled away and gave him and Ash a little wave goodbye, slipping out of the room, closing the door behind her. Ash smirked as he looked over in her direction. "They're all probably going to say something like that, just so you know, love," she told him. "They've all been getting stories from Niko about how things are on the base, or from the girls involved in the poker game, and so they know what a weird place the world is in right now, and everyone's delighted how you're handling this." "Hell, if I was handling it my way, I'd probably just have stopped here, Ash, and not added anyone else to the family, but based on what Phil's told me, I'm going to spend the next five years hearing that I need to help usher in a new generation to save this one." The Irish girl giggled and offered him a little shrug. "It's such a hard life, isn't it, having beautiful women constantly throwing themselves at you, begging for sex." Andy scowled, although the expression was done with amusement. "Agreed, Alcatraz it ain't, but it's still quite the change from my life six months ago." "Which reminds me, you have to be sure and call Xander tomorrow and fill him on all the changes that have happened here in the last week. He texted you yesterday offering his condolences about Matty, but hell, he doesn't know about how quickly your house has exploded. Maybe we should send him a picture of you in bed, surrounded by all your women, like a modern day Hugh Heffner." Andy started laughing at that, shaking his head. "Oh god, he's gonna fucking kill me. He had quite the crush on Emily a few years back, although I think he grew out of that. Lord, I'm never going to hear the end of it." "Well, it'll be something you two can use to keep your spirits up when you talk. Are you ready for Hannah to make her pitch?" He nodded. "Sure, she's the one who got this all started. Let's see who she thinks we should bring into the house." A few minutes later, Hannah strolled into the room confidently, although Andy was surprised to see her in her cheerleading outfit again, the first time she'd worn it again since she'd shown up to the house a few days ago. Andy found the outfit choice odd, but decided not to remark on it. "Two days enough time for you to think it over, Hannah?" he asked the Asian cheerleader, who smiled and nodded. "Totes, but I didn't know I was gonna have hella competition at the end of it!" Over the past few days, the one thing Andy had determined first and foremost about Hannah was that she was always operating at 110% energy. That's simply who she was. "It's all good, though. I think you'll vibe with my candidate, even if she's not immediately your type." Hannah picked up the remote from the table and clicked it, as a picture sprung to life behind her. The minute the image popped onto the screen, Andy was taken back a bit. "I'm fairly certain that taking on an entire cheerleading team would be well over the limit of you suggesting one person, Hannah," he laughed. The image behind her must have been from the spring of this year, as it was Hannah and her entire cheerleading team over at Woodside High, where she'd graduated from in May. There were fourteen girls in the photo, in addition to the coach, and they were completely varied in terms of size, shape and race, although he couldn't deny, they all seemed lovely. It took him half a second to find Hannah as her hair lacked the blonde highlights in the photo. "Not the team, sir," she said, clicking the button again, as the screen shifted, this time the only person on the screen being the cheerleading coach. "Just the woman running it. Tabitha Jefferson." Without all the other people on the screen, Andy could focus on the woman being suggested. She was an African American woman with milk chocolate colored skin around Andy's age, although she was in far better shape than he was. In the picture, she was in black gym shorts with an orange stripe and a large orange t shirt with the word "Wildcats" in highly stylized lettering across the front of it. She had straightened hair drawn back in a short ponytail that hung to the nape of her neck, and a friendly face, although her expression was one of shouting. "Coach Jefferson has been the cheerleading coach and P.E. Teacher for Woodside High for the last five years. She's whip smart, funny and really cares about us girls. When I was kinda a troublemaker, she'd pull me aside and give me a good talking to, tell me that she thought I was super smart, and that I was capable of anything if I'd stop fucking around and quit self sabotaging my own life. And she never gave up on me, and never let me focus just on cheerleading or the petty drama and shit a bunch of wound up girls get into with each other." Hannah pushed the button and the image changed again, showing a slightly younger Tabitha with her arm around a good looking African American man with much darker skin in military fatigues. "Just before she moved to Woodside, she was an Army wife, until her husband, Nicky, was killed in action in the Middle East. They'd only been married for about two years, and only together about four, but it still broke her heart. She moved across the country to live out here, closer to her mother, only for her moms to die last year due to lung cancer." Hannah pushed the button again. The new image also had to have been taken in the spring, just before the pandemic had set in. Tabitha had her arm around Hannah, and both of them were smiling, both of them in formal wear, this time with the blonde highlight in Hannah's hair. "She was one of the chaperons for senior Prom, and when she found out I didn't have anyone to go with, she made me go on my own, and I still had a great time. She drove by my parents house to drop off my diploma and told me to call her Tabby from now on, since I wasn't a student of hers any more, and that she hoped school would start back up soon, because she was feeling a little lost." The Asian girl sighed a little, her face contracting in sadness. "She's had a really rough go of it, Andy, between losing Nicky then her mom and now her ability to teach and be around people. I don't know a thing about what she likes sexually, so I dunno what to say about any of that, but she's a good person, the best person I know, and if I can give her just one little bit of happiness, then I fucking owe that to her." Hannah looked like she was about to cry, so Aisling reached over and took the girl's hand in her own, giving it a little squeeze. "Thanks Ash, I'm okay," she said, smiling a bit as if it might help her make it more true. "The person you most reminded me of when we were first met, Andy, was Tabby. You could've just fucked my brains out and not given a fuck about my feelings, but you didn't. You talked to me first, made sure I knew what I was getting myself into, when you so didn't have to, hell, I wasn't even expecting you to. I wanted to get back at that little shit Benny so fuckin' badly, but you wouldn't let me just charge into it without us talking it out first. That's the kind of thing Tabby did for me all the time, not letting me just leap into the first idea that popped into my head, but really making me think it all out. So I want to give something back to her, and I think that something could be her hooking up with you." "This whole polyamory thing isn't for everyone, Hannah," Ash said. "You think she'll be up for sharing Andy with all of us?" Hannah laughed a little, rolling her eyes. "Her last relationship was part of a throuple, so I totally wouldn't worry about it, Ash, although this one would be a little different." "Oh yeah?" Andy asked. "How so?" "Well, she was in a relationship with two bi guys, so she was used to having cock on tap." The busty cheerleader giggled a little bit. "But I know she's into girls too, because she refused to come into the locker room when we were changing. Said it was only respectful, but I saw that glimmer in her eyes that said she desperately wanted to peek, but wasn't going to, because that's what us girls deserved." "What ended their relationship?" "The two guys decided to move to Portland, and Tabby's mother hadn't passed yet, so she refused to leave her. They were all kinda in different headspaces anyway, I think, since Tabby never said another word about them after they left, so maybe she was kinda okay with it? Maybe it was just an easier way to end it than ending it? I dunno. It was all spring of my junior year." "Challenges you foresee?" Aisling asked. "Well, I dunno how she likes to fuck, so I dunno if you two can make that work for you or not, but I think you'd be okay. And I don't know if you're her type, so I don't even know that she'll say yes. You're a little less,” Hannah trailed off, trying to find a way to phrase what she wanted to say. "Less what?" Andy asked. "Less butch, I guess," Hannah giggled. "Dom and Mike were ultra cut, and Nicky was pretty buff himself, so I guess her type is a bit more ripped than you are, but it's not like I know everything about what kinda dudes she likes to bone. But without her being able to teach until, like, at least a year from now, I wanted to make sure she's not getting stuck inside her own head too much." Hannah clicked the button and the screen behind her changed to say "next: Jenny" on it. "Anyway, if I was you, I'd totally wanna fuck Tabby. Hell, I kinda wanna fuck her myself, if she's down for that. And she's a good person, and good people deserve to have good things happen to them in the world, so that's why I think you should invite her here. Thanks for letting me tell you all this, Andy. I didn't know how much I needed to tell someone this whole story about this amazing woman who changed my life, and I'm glad it's to the man who did the same thing." She stood up, came over and gave Ash a hug, then one to Andy as well followed by a sloppy kiss, before pulling back and heading out of the room, almost skipping in her step, making the skirt flutter a little each time. "So I know I said I wasn't going to offer you any opinions on all of this, love," Aisling said, "but I do want to make two exceptions. First, I think you should invite Tabby here. It means a lot to Hannah, maybe more to her than to any of the other girls involved, and I think Tabby seems like a fine match for you, based on what Hannah's told me." Andy nodded. "She was speaking very strongly from the heart, so I don't blame you. I won't commit to 100% saying yes right now, but I'll mark her down as a very strong likely, if that's okay." "Natch love," she said, squeezing his arm. "The other exception I want to make is to set you up for Jenny's pitch, and to tell you to tread lightly. Her pitch is for a staff person, but I suspect the person being pitched might want something more than that from you, and I think you should probably give it to her, but at her own pace. Jenny's got quite the tale to tell, and her friend has had a very rough life. I think even Jenny knows that if you bring this girl on, she's going to grow from staff to family member eventually, but that's okay with me, and all the rest of the girls, so keep all that in mind when she's talking, that we all know it's unsteady waters, and we're all okay with it, awright love?" He wasn't entirely sure what to make of that, so he simply nodded, giving himself a second to get his words in order. "She's the first staff pitch I'm hearing, but if you're telling me in advance that it's going to be different than all the rest, then that's good to know, and I'll keep it in mind." Ash smiled, kissing him on the cheek. "I think you'll like who she's pitching anyway. Has a completely different tone than anyone else you're gonna hear about today, and if I'm honest, I'd love ta meet her myself." Just as she was saying that, Jenny opened the door and made her way into the conference room, moving to sit down opposite them, her warm comforting smile well set on her face. Jenny hadn't chosen to dress up more than her usual attire, looking like a plump Martha Stewart, as she folded her hands on the table, just over the remote. "Thanks for letting us do this, sir. None of us had even thought about this until you and Ash told us about it, and the fact that you're letting the staff pitch as well, gosh, that's just the sweetest thing. My story's gonna be a little bit of a rollercoaster, so I hope you don't mind, sir." Andy chuckled, leaning back in his chair a little bit. "Fire away, Jenny." Jenny picked up the remote and clicked on it, as the image behind her changed to a much younger one of her and another woman, really more of a girl at that point, what had to be at least a decade ago. Jenny was thinner then, wearing an oversize P!nk t shirt, with her arm around a Latin girl, a little less thin, with massively blown out hair, wearing a red tanktop with a sheer mesh black shirt over it. The two girls were laughing in the picture, each holding up a red Solo cup that Andy suspected held alcohol that neither was old enough to be drinking at the time of the photo. "This is me with my college roommate, Alexis Coleman, better known as Lexi. We were both freshman at UCLA when we were randomly paired together to share a dorm room together at Hendrick Hall." The image changed again, and showed the two girls playing beer pong at some Greek event. "I'd just moved out here from Cleveland, and she'd just moved here from D.C., and so we became best friends." "You didn't go to culinary school?" Andy asked. "You're such an excellent cook, I find that impossible to believe." Jenny blushed a little. "Thank you, sir, but I did, after I got my Bachelor's degree in art history. I had wanted to become an art custodian, but couldn't seem to make it work, so I went to culinary school in SF after giving up on the art world." "And Lexi?" Ash asked. "What was she majoring in?" "Criminal justice," Jenny said, clicking the button again to show an image of Lexi, a little older, in a bikini out on the Santa Monica boardwalk, on roller skates that she looked a little unsteady on. "I know she looks like a Victoria's Secret model, but she was determined to get into law enforcement during college. She also minored in political science and theory, as well as picking up several languages along the way. I know she speaks Spanish, French, German, Russian and Portuguese, and knowing her, she's probably picked up a few more since then." "All of this has to be a while ago, though, Jenny," Andy said. "What year did you two graduate?" Jenny pushed the button again to show a graduation of the two of them together, holding up their diplomas with big smiles. "2007 sir, and I realize I'm giving you a bunch of background, but I think it's very important that I do, so you understand who Lexi is, and how she's a sweet, adorable person, despite the rest of what I'm about to tell you." Andy leaned forward a little bit. "As a professional storyteller, Jenny, let me tell you that's a hell of a way to perk your audience's interest. Go on." "Yes sir," she said, clicking the button to advance the image again. This time, Lexi was a few years older, dressed in more of jungle wear, thick pants, a heavy shirt with a vest on, and her hair pulled back tightly. The background was thick trees and dirt, with sunlight peeking through. Of more note, however, was the AK 47 slung over her shoulder. "In her last year of college, Lexi was recruited to join the CIA. My details about this period of her life are very unreliable, but I think she was training with the agency for another year or two, and then served as a combination of analyst and field agent for most of the next decade, primarily in South and Central America, until 2017." The next image took Andy a little aback, although Ash had clearly seen it before. It was relatively recent, Jenny and Lexi together, in the kitchen of some restaurant or hotel. Both of the women were older than they were in the earlier photos, and most notably, Lexi had some significant scarring along part of her neck and the bottom left part of her chin line, although it looked as though the scarring was at least a few years old. "I don't know what happened to Lexi in 2017, but it must've been particularly gruesome. She couldn't tell me how she got the scars, only that she got them in the service of her country, and that she regretted how they were keeping her out of field work, because they were too identifiable. She'd been saddled with desk duty, and in 2018, she finally quit the CIA." The image jumped again, and this time Lexi was in a dark suit with sunglasses, opening a door for some Middle Eastern shiek. "She tried her hand at personal protection for a while, but eventually gave up on that and just became a mercenary, drifting through private security firms, independent contractors who go where the money and the work is. Just before the virus set in, she'd returned to her place in Los Angeles from a six month tour as part of a PMC in Afghanistan, and she was shaken. She said she felt like her life was a mess, she didn't know what she was doing with it, and felt like she was just a giant burden on her friends and family." With another click of the button, a new image of Lexi popped on the screen, her at a gun range, the whole image practically the still from an action movie. "What I'm suggesting is this, sir. I think you should bring Lexi into the house to be your driver and personal security." Andy was about to say something when Jenny raised her hand to silence him. "I know what you're about to say, sir, and frankly it's bullcrap, pardon my French. With the small population of men remaining left in the United States, every single one of you has suddenly become a V I P, and you need to think not just of your own health, but the health of all the women who are dependent on your health for their own health. If something happens to you, you have over a dozen women right now alone who suddenly run the very real risk of dying. Being that my health is fundamentally based on yours for the time being, I know I would feel safer having Lexi watch out for you." Andy scratched his goatee for a long moment, realizing that every single thing Jenny had said to him was true, making him a little ashamed of how cavalierly he'd been treating his own health, the ramifications of it not having fully sunken in until this very moment. "You are completely justified in that thought, Jenny, and you are right, I had not been giving it the diligence it deserved." "Lexi has some heavy scars from whatever accident sidelined her at the CIA. They cover just a bit of her face, but almost a third of her neck and down to her collarbone. In spite of that, I think she's still a stunning woman, and I still wish she was bisexual, because I would do her in a heartbeat, but she only likes men. I know, because we fooled around together freshmen year, and the next morning, we woke up with very different perspectives on it. It's never gotten in the way of our friendship, though, so you don't have to worry there." "Scars only add character, they never remove it," Andy said, quoting a line from one of his books. "They're a point in her favor, not against it." Jenny's smile widened a bit more at that, as if she was proud of Andy for saying it. "That's how I feel too. She was pretty adventurous sexually in college, so I don't think there would be any deal breakers between the two of you there. The two red flags I feel obligated to bring up are these. First, she has a bit of PTSD, so she can tend to be a little jumpy from time to time, and likes to keep as much of her life as she can to routine, because it helps her feel organized about all of it. I don't worry about her having a full breakdown, but she gets stressed by firecrackers on the fourth of July, so there's clearly some strain still going on there." "I think New Eden is about as far from a warzone as you can get, Jenny." "Sure, but we won't be locked in here forever, sir. And your family already includes two women who are actresses known to love doing action films, so if you go to visit them on sets, you'll need to be aware of Lexi's elevated stress levels when you do." "That's entirely manageable," Andy said. "What's the other red flag?" Jenny frowned a little bit, looked to Ash, who nodded, then looked back to Andy. "The other red flag is that I suspect she's going to want more than a staff relationship with you at some point. I don't know that for certain, but Lexi is a diehard romantic, and when she finds out that so many men have died, it's going to hit her very hard, because she's always dreamed of having her own prince charming, someone who will love her for her, through thick and thin. I think she'll be able to get past the idea of sharing you with lots of other women, I think she'll be okay with you dividing your time or having multiple people in your bed, but I think she's going to want to forge that emotional connection with you like your partners do, and that's more than what you asked us for in terms of suggesting staff. She will absolutely be the best bodyguard you could ask for, and I don't think there's a better driver I know. But the terms Ash laid down were pretty clear, staff should only recommend staff, not partners, and I think Lexi might well end up being both, so I'm hoping that's okay." "As I told ya when you pitched her t' me, Jenny," Ash said, "sometimes exceptions have to be made for exceptional people, and Lexi seems like a hell of an accomplished and talented woman. If Andy's okay with it, the rest of the house will be okay with it." Andy smirked a little bit. "No pressure or anything, but it's fine. And you're right, I hadn't been thinking about how much my health impacted so many people until right now, so it's important that I give that consideration. She seems like a lovely woman, and you speak of her very fondly, so while I'm not making any final decisions until I've heard from everyone, I think you wouldn't be wasting your time if you wanted to start crafting a video invite for Lexi." Jenny jumped up and ran around the table to hug Andy tightly, crying a little bit. "Thank you so much, sir. When I talked to her on the phone last week, she told me how much she wished she could meet a nice man just like you, so I just know she'll say yes. I already know she thinks you're cute." "Don't tell anyone else about this, though," Ash said. "All the staff decisions are being made independently from the family member ones, and while I know all the girls were rooting for Lexi to be brought here in some regard, not a word to anyone, not even Katie, until it's final, yeah?" Jenny pulled back and wiped the tears from her face, nodding so quickly Andy was afraid her head would roll off. "Yes. Got it. Very clear. Understood, ma'am. Sir. And thanks again." The portly girl made her way out of the room without even remembering to push the button to advance the screen to the next person, leaving Andy and Ash alone in the room. "Okay, Mr. Rook," Ash said to him, "five minute break. Stand up, walk around, stretch a bit. I'd ask if you wanted to squeeze in a quick shag, but I had me turn yesterday, so I'm good to wait a few more days. Wouldn't want to deprive some of the other girls of getting their itches scratched." Andy stood up, pulling one arm behind his head, then the other, stretching out. "Four presentations down, eight to go,” Chapter 25 After a handful of minutes stretching, Ash sent a text message for the next girl to make her way up. Andy had turned his notes over so that Aisling couldn't look at them, and he smirked a little, noticing her frowning at the back of the legal pad. "You said you didn't want to influence my decision, so I don't know why you should want to look at my notes, Ash." They had built a wonderfully natural teasing rapport with each other over the past few months, so Aisling knew he was joking with her, but was willing to roll with him. She grinned up as she reached across the table to push the button and advance the slide. "Next: Katie." The redhead moved to sit back in her chair, and shrugged in his direction. "I'm mostly just curious how you're reacting to what you've heard so far, and how your opinions differ from mine, which I'm sure they will, here and there. I've heard all these pitches a couple of times, so it'll be interesting to see how many predictions I get right." "Did you write them down?" "Well, no," Ash said. Andy grabbed his yellow legal pad and ripped out a single sheet from the bottom of it, sliding it and his pen across to her. "Alright, predictions then. Write them down now. Don't show them to me, but fold up the paper when you're done. We can have whoever's after Katie bring us an envelope to seal it up. Just around the time that Aisling was folding up the sheet of paper, Katie walked into the room, confident in her stride. Andy cocked his head to one side as she walked in the room. The Hispanic woman was, as it seemed she always was, wearing a button up shirt underneath jean overalls. "Do you own other clothes besides overalls, Katie?" he asked her. She stuck her tongue out at him, which made Ash giggle again. "I can be girly and shit, sir, but I mostly keep that for Jenny. How're the presentations going so far?" "You know the rules, Katie," Aisling politely scolded, "no talking about anyone else's pitch until the very end." Katie winked at her, shrugging a little. After Andy had settled her nerves about keeping a level of removal between him and her and her wife, Katie had relaxed massively and grown into a more comfortable relationship with the rest of the house. "Had to try. Anyway, let's get this fucking show on the road!" She grabbed the remote in her calloused hand and clicked the button as the screen behind her changed to an image of a slightly matronly looking woman in her early 40s, dark chocolate hair up in a bun, skin just slightly olive, some mix of European heritage that surely had to include either Italian or Spanish. The woman on screen wasn't overweight, but was certainly the most bulky woman that had been on the screen thus far, not fat, simply hefty. "This is Doctor Morgan Fitch. She's a general practitioner in Los Altos who also dabbles in pediatrics. In talking with everyone in the house, it's clear at some point, you are going to be in dire need of a nanny around this place, and having one who's also a damn doctor just seems like smart thinking to me. By this time in a couple of years, this house is practically gonna be a little city, so you need to make sure all the major staples are taken care of. Some of the girls will wanna be full time mommies, no doubt, but for the rest, you're going to want to have child care. If you need that anyway, why not have that person be a doctor?" "How do you know Dr. Fitch?" Andy asked. Katie blanched a little bit. "She's kinda an ex of mine." She raised her hand immediately, a sheepish smile on her face. "We didn't part on bad terms, promise! At the end of the day, she was into the whole polyamory thing, and I wasn't, so we split, but remained good friends. That was five years ago, just before I met Jenny, so it all worked out okay in the end. She's had relationships on and off since then, but nothing's stuck. She's mostly a lesbian, but doesn't mind the occasional bit of cock here and there, so I think she might be a good fit for a staff member. She once told me that she likes to fuck men, but never gets emotionally attached to them the way she does to women, and what with her being staff, she'd be okay to pursue a female partner to take care of her emotional needs." "What makes you think she'll want to join the household?" Ash queried. "Morgan loves constantly shifting problems, and this house is like nothing I've ever seen before. Even before you start spawning, you're gonna need a doctor to make sure your family is in the best condition possible. Until you're having kids, she can staff a clinic in town on a volunteer basis, so she's getting settled here in the mean time. She's bored with the people in Los Altos, and we've always been good friends, so I think knowing I'm here would make her more likely to come aboard." "Challenges you anticipate?" he said. "She'd be the oldest person in the house at 46, but I think it gives her wisdom. Also, you might find her a bit, blunt, until you get used to her." "How blunt?" Katie tried to hide a little smile, shrugging, as she pushed the button to advance the slide to a screen reading "Next: Lauren" in friendly white letters. "Subtle she ain't, sir. I have never met anyone more direct in my life. I've always been a little thankful that she wasn't my doctor, because her bedside manner is more than a bit lacking. But sometimes you need someone to just slap you upside the head. Sir. We all do. Morgan would fill that role. And if she ever gets too blunt for your liking, you can tell her, and maybe she'll dial it down a little bit, or realize that she might've once gone too far. She's direct, but she's never intentionally mean. And even if you don't think Morgan's a good fit for here, and I can completely respect that if that's what you decide, I still want to stress that you're going to be in dire need of a nanny here at some point soon, so to keep that in mind moving forward." "Point taken and noted, Katie. Anything else you wanna say?" Katie brought her finger to her lips, considering for a moment, then slowly stood up. "Just one thing. I know Jenny brought you her old roommate Lexi as a candidate, and I want to throw my weight behind that, even if it's at the cost of my own candidate. I would've not pitched someone else if I could've pitched Lexi twice, y'know what I mean? Lexi's had a shitty go of it and I desperately want her to be happy, and I really think she can be here." Andy chuckled a little. "Unorthodox, but sure, I'll keep it under advisement. Alexis did seem like an excellent candidate, so we'll see how it goes." "Thanks sir! Enjoy the rest of the cunt parade!" she laughed, heading out of the room. Ash shook her head at him with a smile. "I have no idea how you can be such a good poker player with a poker face like that." He grinned, giving her a saucy wink. "It's easier when you don't give a shit about your opponents. This is family, so I don't have to stay so stoic. Besides, I know Jenny and Katie are close, so it's okay to let them share a little secret on my behalf." "Oh we've all got our little secrets, Andy. If you're nice, maybe I'll even let you in on one eventually." He tsked her in jest, waggling a finger in her direction. "My girls are keeping secrets from me? Heaven forbid, what next?" "What's next is Lauren, and frankly, I will probably be spending this entire presentation with my hand over my mouth, desperately trying to stay quiet, and likely failing miserably." Aisling had a strange grin on her face that told Andy this next one might be a little unusual. He didn't have long to consider it, though, as the door opened and the statuesque Lauren strode into the room decked out in a workout track suit with the 49ers logo on it. "Hey Andy, Ash. Thanks for letting all of us do this. I can't tell ya if I'm presenting my candidate to you on a lark, because I think she's actually a good idea or because of the girl herself. Maybe some combination of all three. So let me just get right down to brass tacks," the Aussie said, as she moved to sit down across from them. She picked up the remote and clicked the button as the screen sprung to life. On the screen was an image of a 49ers cheerleader, a fit woman with a large blonde mane of hair like sun dried grass, bubblegum pink lipstick and a smile that was so wide Andy wondered if it hurt when she finally let her face relax. She was pretty in a sort of pageant kind of way, although he suspected she didn't look quite so forced in regular photos that weren't taken from the 49ers website. "This is Jade Dillon. She's been a cheerleader for the 49ers for about three years now, and is literally the most optimistic person I have ever met in my entire life. She is bubbly and chipper and all smiles even at the worst of times. When the pandemic set in, she sent the entire 49ers organization an email reminding them that adversity is simply opportunity in disguise. No lie, Andy, she is completely unflappable in every way possible. She's, she's like a golden retriever in a person! Peppy and enthusiastic and always full of confidence." Andy looked over and saw that Ash had, indeed, both of her hands over her mouth, trying to hold in her desire to laugh, but he could still hear tiny giggles threatening to escape. He looked back to Lauren, a slightly quizzical expression on his face. "I can't tell if you admire her for that or if it drives you crazy." "Both!" Lauren said, throwing up her hands, laughing at herself. "It's infuriating! Even when she was kneeling in protest alongside Colin Kaepernick, she was still smiling about it. I don't know what to do with her! I mean, I get it. She's a kindergarten teacher as her day job, so pennies on the dollar that's what helps her keep all that energy up, but strewth, I just don't know how she does it! I mean, she comes from money, so I imagine that's gotta help." "Oh yeah?" The tall blonde tanned Aussie nodded, pushing the button to show Jade in a more normal setting, in an evening dress standing next to an older gentleman who Andy knew he'd seen somewhere before. "Her daddy is Cormack Dillon, one of the cofounders of Bindr, that teleconferencing tool everyone's using these days, but she's sort of tried to distance herself from 'er daddy over the last few years. An', in a 'ain't it a small world' moment, Cormack Dillon was the guy Katie used to work for before she came here, so she and Jade know one another already." "I could've asked Katie about her then," Andy lamented. "Shame she was just here." Jade looked much more lovely without the pancake makeup, her blonde hair a waterfall of curls, although Andy was also taken aback for a moment, reflexively trying to estimate how much that necklace she was wearing must have cost. After a second, Andy recognized where the photo was taken “ at the prestigious Palace of Fine Arts, where every year the Silicon Valley elite held their own private high end gala. Lauren pushed the button again and the image changed to Jade in more casual clothes, sitting with a handful of other girls in some sidewalk cafe overlooking the Pacific ocean. She had to be under thirty. There was no denying she was fit and lovely, although Andy did wonder if growing up steeped in money had warped her in some way. "Well, you kin ask her before make your mind up. She might have some things to say to sway your mind one way or another, but I simply gotta tell you this one thing, because it is first and foremost the reason I want to bring her to you,” Aisling looked like she was ready to turn blue, trying to hold in her breath and her laughter, her face scrunched up, actual tears rolling down her cheeks, all to Andy's confusion. Lauren pushed the button again and the photo zoomed in, showing just Jade now, laughing and smiling. "Jade Dillion,” She pushed the button again and the image of Jade suddenly had a very large cartoon cherry resting on top of her head. "...is an honest to god twenty six year old virgin." At that, Aisling couldn't help herself, and started laughing furiously, which only made Lauren grin even wider as Andy kept looking between the two of them, wondering desperately if they were putting him on. "It's not for religious reasons, an' it's not something she goes out of her way ta advertise, hell, I doubt very many people even know that she's cherry. But I went out drinking with her and the rest of the Gold Rush girls one night after an away game, and Jade got pretty hammered so I had to help her back to her hotel room. And when I was holding her hair back while she chundered in the dunny, she told me that she'd never lost her virginity, and that boys suck, and sh
On today's episode of Death Clock, host Brent Franson speaks with Dr. Aric Prather, a professor at UCSF, clinical psychologist, and author of The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest. Dr. Prather unpacks the critical relationship between sleep and stress, explaining how poor sleep increases stress sensitivity and creates a vicious cycle that can degrade long-term health. They also discuss the latest in sleep research, including wearables like the Oura Ring and Eight Sleep, and how these tools can help—or hinder—our understanding of rest. They also explore the role of diet, nighttime routines, and the often-overlooked psychological aspect of sleep perception. Whether you struggle with insomnia, want to optimize your rest, or are simply curious about the science of sleep and longevity, this episode provides helpful insights from one of the leading experts in the field. Hope you enjoy.
Maria Artunduaga is the founder & CEO of Samay, the winner of the 2024 MedTech Innovator accelerator, as well as a groundbreaking physician, scientist, and inventor. Maria discusses her inspiring journey from a small town in Columbia to leading a top MedTech company in the US. After pivoting away from plastic surgery training, she channeled her efforts into creating Sylvee, an AI wearable sensor for COPD patients. Maria shares her relentless determination, innovative problem-solving strategies, and the creation of a company culture that emphasizes learning and diversity. Guest links: https://www.samayhealth.com/home | https://www.linkedin.com/in/drartunduaga/ Charity supported: ASPCA Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at theleadingdifference@velentium.com. PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Lindsey Dinneen Editing: Marketing Wise Producer: Velentium EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode 057 - Maria Artunduaga [00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world. [00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them. [00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives. [00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives. [00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives. [00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and I am delighted to welcome as my guest today, Maria Artunduaga. Maria is a physician, scientist, and inventor with 60 plus prizes, including becoming the first woman to lead a US LATAM company to win MedTech Innovator, the world's most competitive accelerator for medical technology surpassing over 1300 global companies. A top 1% student in Columbia, her country of birth, she relocated to the US to pursue plastic surgery training, but abandoned it to dedicate herself to solve the problem that killed her grandmother-- a lack of home technologies that can detect COPD exasperations early. Maria has raised 5.2 million, almost 60% in non-dilutive capital from NSF and NIH to build Sylvee, an AI wearable sensor that can provide COPD patients with continuous data on pulmonary functions similar to what continuous glucose monitoring sensors do for diabetic patients. Her invention has been featured by a hundred plus media outlets, including Forbes, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Fierce Healthcare, and more. Before Samay, Maria completed postdoctoral studies in human genetics at Harvard Medical School, started a plastic surgery residency at the University of Chicago, and completed two master's degrees, one in global public health at the University of Washington, and another in translational medicine at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco. She lives in Mountain View, California with her husband, 2-year-old daughter, and four pets. In her free time, she enjoys flamenco dancing, bolero singing, traveling the world, and fostering diversity in and outside the workplace by mentoring underrepresented scientists and entrepreneurs. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here, Maria. I'm so excited to finally get a chance to speak with you. I'd love if you would share a little bit about your background and your career trajectory. What led you to MedTech? [00:02:40] Maria Artunduaga: Sure. So it's gonna be a little long and I'm gonna tell you everything about my life because the personal history is very important to me and for my company too. So, as you have noticed, I have an accent. So, I grew up in Columbia in a very small town in the southern part of the country. My parents were both doctors and I'm the oldest of four kids and two of us followed their lead. So my life in my city was pretty chill. Everyone knew everyone. I spent most of my days at a Catholic school studying very hard on weekends where I usually spent tagging along my parents to doctor events. One of the things that I really like to tell, it's how my parents work as entrepreneurs really shaped my life. They were real pioneers. They built in my hometown the first big clinic back in the eighties and the nineties. And my mom was the only woman in that group, and she actually was the CEO for a while, which was a big deal. She was the only woman in a partnership of 10 people. And watching them build that clinic, that hospital really taught me a lot about dealing with uncertainty and finding solutions. Every day we'll have supper or lunch and I'll just hear all of these challenges and stories, their struggles and how they solve things. Something that was, that is definitely super helpful in what I do now, right? So, and then I was 16 and after high school I moved to Bogota, the capital, which is up in the mountains, it's very cold. I got a scholarship 'cause I was always a very good student. You know, career I spent my last year, I spent nine months in the US. Honestly, coming to the US blew my mind. The technology that I got to see, the speed, effects on science, it was nothing like I've ever seen before, and that was true inspiration for me. So I knew that I had to come to the US. I needed to come back to learn from the best, of course. And it's interesting because my parents didn't want me to relocate to the US. I was the oldest. I was supposed to follow into their footsteps and obviously, like inherited that clinic, right? That hospital, we call it clinic, it's actually a hospital. And I was a very contrarian. I didn't listen to them. I told them, you know, I really wanna be where the best people are. And what I did was that I, it took me three years to save the money to come to the US, to get Harvard to actually sponsor me my visa because they wouldn't pay me for the first year. So I remember I had to save $30,000, which in pesos is significant. So back in 2007, so many years ago, I made it to Boston, and the original idea was that I wanted to become a pediatric plastic surgeon and bring that level of care back to Columbia. I spent four years of researching a genetic ear condition that's called microtia. And with that work, I was able to land a plastic surgery residency spot or position at the University of Chicago. And I shared this with a lot of people. I actually had a really negative experience. Things didn't go as planned. I actually faced discrimination. I eventually, you know, had to leave and I made the top choice to never ever go back into clinical practice. And I changed paths. I was 32 years old and yeah I decided to switch gears. I retrained into public health and tech. And then in 2016, I moved to the Bay Area where I am right now. And I got another scholarship to finish master's in translational medicine at UC Berkeley and UCSF. And during the courses that I took, some of them with business class etc., etc., I decided to found Samay in 2018. I really wanted to build something that would really make a difference in respiratory medicine. And this is where my grandmother comes. So my, the grandmother, my abuela, her name was Sylvia and she had Chronic Obstruct Pulmonary Disease or COPD and she's the reason behind my company. So, she often couldn't tell when her symptoms were getting worse. That's a huge problem. Catching the respiratory attacks, exacerbations is definitely key to keeping people outside of the hospitals, and obviously feeling their best to have a better quality of life. So, that's what we are trying to solve with a company, right? If we are able to catch those exacerbations even with a day or two notice in advance, right, that we can all make a difference. And so by missing these exacerbations, we are having really high expenses in hospitalizations and ER visits and the problem we trying to solve is that today technologies that are adequate enough to be used outside of the hospital because the ones that are considered to be the gold standard, they are very expensive. They are confined to their hospitals and they are very difficult to complete for the patient, especially when they're exacerbating. They need to blow out forcefully for about 10 seconds, 21 times. So what we are doing is, we are developing a sensor that makes it super simple for people to use it at home to track their lung function without doing those forceful maneuvers and ideally in the future to warm them, right? Like to let them know when things are starting to go south or obviously, you know, not going very well, and that's what it's all about. I mean, that's what we do with Sylvee right here. And it's wearable sensor and we have done significantly well over the past couple of years. We actually just won MedTech Innovator. [00:08:04] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Significantly well over the last few years. Yes. So congratulations on that, and I want to dive into all of those exciting milestones in just a second. But I am, first of all, so inspired by your story. Thank you for just sharing that your resilience and your grit and your determination are really admirable. So thank you for sticking with something that was not easy, not an easy path. [00:08:29] Maria Artunduaga: I know. I know. [00:08:31] Lindsey Dinneen: It continues not to be, ironically, as we've kind of touched on before, but just going backward a little bit in your story. So I, it sounds to me like getting the opportunity to watch your parents have this incredible impact on their community and the healthcare and the opportunity is just so valuable for you. And even just learning about how your mom was the CEO and those kinds of things, did that help shape the idea for you that not only is entrepreneurship possible, is innovation and healthcare possible, but you can also be this in incredible leader as a woman in whatever capacity? I would just love to dive into that. [00:09:13] Maria Artunduaga: Yeah, it's super interesting, right? My mom really taught me a lot about leadership. She's a surgeon, so you can imagine how good of a leader she is in the operating room at home, everywhere, right? I mean, she's definitely the general, that's how I call her. And I honestly, I try to replicate, so my leadership and styles pretty much shaped by her. So I always call her my best role model whenever somebody asks me about the question, right? So I'm just like her. I lead from the front. I like setting the pace by working the hardest. So I really like to lead by example and I also, just like she did, and obviously because of her surgical training, I hold myself to a really high standard, and I expect everyone on my team to do the same. So people in my company know that I'm very strict, I'm very disciplined, and they know that from the beginning. It's so funny because when I interview all of them, at the final interviews with me, and I actually do the anti sale to join Samay. It's like, this is, these are all the reasons why you shouldn't join. I start describing myself as a very intense, obsessed CEO with insomnia, which I still have, because I really wanna make this work, right? So, yeah, I, ask them, and most of them say yes. I really like, I attract people that like challenges, especially intellectual challenges. So, yeah, to this point, most of them say yes. Some of them have obviously, you know, because probably too much. But at the same time, I tell them, "Look, this is going to be very hard in terms of the deliverables, the things that we're expecting from you." But at the same time, my goal is to not only help people with respiratory problems, I try to sell the company as a company where everyone that gets hired can be themselves and thrive. So, so for example, I tell them," Look, I'm trying to be the boss that I never had." And this goes obviously very tied to the very negative experience that I had during my surgical residency and even before, right? So, I never had a boss that really supported me, who recognize my true self and those characteristics as good things, right? So they always try to tone me down. I'm very energetic, as you can notice, and I'm also super ambitious. I'm really ambitious. I wanna do all of these great things. And they always thought that I was aiming for too much, especially for a woman. It's like, " You need to lean in, Maria. You need to behave." So I remember my residency, they were criticizing like, "Why are you behaving like this, Maria? Why are you asking so many questions? You're asking too many questions. You look more as an internal medicine doctor. Why are you always smiling, Maria? Why are you so happy?" So now, with everyone that I hire, what I try to do is that I focus on understanding their dreams and I try to figure out how this job is gonna help them get there. So if they wanna become a top engineer, maybe they wanna learn managerial skills, or they wanna run operations, or they eventually wanna become a founder themselves. So I try to create a partnership with them where they obviously help me succeed with the company, build Samay, but at the same time they get to do this personal growth. So it's extremely important that they get to place where they wanna be. [00:12:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's wonderful. And such a gift to your employees. And I also honestly, that sort of anti interview or whatever technique is brilliant because you do want it to be a fit for everyone, and it's so much better to have aligned expectations from the start. So, oh my goodness, that's so interesting. So, okay, so then. Speaking into that, how do you develop a company culture for yourself? You've learned from some pretty negative experiences, so obviously that's what not to do, but you know, as you're crafting your own company culture now, what kinds of things are sort of your core values, other than of course, your hard work and your excellence and holding yourself and others to high standards, but what kinds of things do have you developed that make it special to be where you are? [00:13:19] Maria Artunduaga: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. I'm very true to myself, and one of the things that I wanna do with Samay, it's I wanna create legacy. If you go to my WhatsApp, that's exactly the little logo or the slogan that's below my name: I'm creating or building my life's legacy. That's how I pitch myself. So I really wanna be remembered as someone that made healthcare more accessible, especially for the people that get left behind. So growing up in Columbia, I saw firsthand how unfair things will be and I wanted to change that. So that's how the values of Samay go, people first. I think legacy, it's extremely important, right? It's about getting those life changing tools and opportunities into the hands of people who really need them. And again, it's not necessarily, the group that we're building. It's the own experience of building a company with me, learning from the company, from the people that are working with. I really wanna make it accessible for people. And I wanna also be obviously a source of inspiration. You don't necessarily need to be this perfect person to be a CEO. You know, life is a struggle and that's totally fine. Just be very passionate about building legacy, right, your work and how you're impacting other people. And especially for me, I do a lot of work with women and minorities. I really wanna empower them to chase their dreams in science and technology. I really care about people. I don't know, I'm selfless about me. It's all about the others and creating legacy and being remembered. So, yeah, that's how I, that's how I roll. [00:14:59] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. I love that. So speaking of you embracing the CEO role, when you first started your company, did you feel ready to step into this kind of position? Or was it something where you just were like, "You know what? I see the need. I know I can make a difference in this field. I'm gonna do it and I'll learn along the way." [00:15:19] Maria Artunduaga: No, not at all. And let, so there's a very good anecdote that I'm sharing. Again, back to all of these life changing experiences. I got into medtech because of, I don't know, somehow the planets got aligned, right? So I was doing a master's in public health because I thought that was going to be my real call, working for Gates in Seattle, because that's where I actually lived for about two years. Then I came to realize that it was very bureaucratic. It's very, was very slow. I have a type A personality. I really like to fix things very quick. I like to implement stuff. So I decided to do a second master's degree, and as I mentioned, here in Berkeley, I decided to join one of Atma METs minority programs for students, right? It's called SMDP. And I remember that was back in 2016, and they sent me to Minneapolis for the big conference. And that's where I got my first real taste of MedTech. And I remember watching the MedTech Innovator finals with Paul Grand. He was introducing the program, the finalist. I remember clearly seeing all of his pitches and how Green Sun Medical CEO won, and it was a game changer to me because when I saw them pitch, it was very exciting. You know, all these technologies, the many millions of people they could definitely impact, I saw that, and it clicked. I could turn the scientific ideas into something that helps millions in a way, the way how I would practice medicine, but in a more impactful way. So interesting story though. So the other thing that was very inspiring or at least that motivated me, I was the only person in the room who looked like me and spoke with an accent from South America, from Latin America. So it was like two reasons behind it. For me, it was I wanna be a medtech entrepreneur, but at the same time I wanna be able to break the glass ceiling, right? The first Latina physician CEO building a company that has hardware, software, and AI, this is what we actually do. And yeah, so it, it's mainly that. I really like challenges and I'm very motivated to show people that I can do things that might seem impossible or too difficult. So I really like showing people that anything is possible with a lot of hard work and determination. So yeah, that's mainly it. [00:17:47] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Embracing those challenges, running full steam at them and having that, I don't know, that gumption is fantastic too. And the desire, like... [00:17:57] Maria Artunduaga: Thank you. [00:17:57] Lindsey Dinneen: ...you said, to break through those ceilings and to represent and say, "No, it is possible." It is, and I love that. So, excellent. Okay, so can you share a little bit about the journey that the company has gone under recently and some of the really exciting milestones? I know there have been bumps and whatnot, but maybe some of the exciting things that have been developing and what you're looking forward to as you continue down the road. [00:18:24] Maria Artunduaga: Sure. I mean, whew. There are so many things that have been happening for the last couple of months. So it's been a long journey. It's been six years so far. Initially, you know, I wanted to build a company with an idea that was inspired, obviously, by the fact that I lost my grandmother to exacerbation and also because, at the time, I didn't know what I wanted to build. When I was doing an interview with a pulmonologist, what I realized was that I could actually build a technology that could be inspired by consumer devices, so hearing aids for example. And funny story is that my husband who is also Columbian, and went to MIT, he's been working at Google for over a decade and he's an auto engineer. He does a lot of things. He's very smart and he's one of the main architects. What I decided to do back then was, let's repurpose hearing aid technology by sending signals through the chest, and let's use the physical principle of acoustic resonance to understand what's going on inside of the lungs. And that's exactly what we are doing. We have 10 granted patents so far. We have 20 more pending on pulmonary so far. So we've done a lot of things. So we've tested that device on 450 people almost. All of our numbers of accuracy are over 90. Sensitivities and specificities are also between 82 to 98. Right now we are starting to see changes a few days before an exacerbation is actually diagnosed by a physician, which is extremely exciting. We have data from two people. Obviously it's a small sample size. We are following eight of them, and we're aiming to finish at 60 to hundred people in the next year or so. So that's our main goal. We've raised 5.2 million, 60% of that money is coming from grants, federal grants, and we just submitted a breakthrough designation to the FDA about a week ago, so fingers crossed, though, we get it right? There are a lot of things in the pipeline, things that are very exciting. Right now I'm super excited 'cause those six years were very hard. I was running a science project with my nails, getting money from grants, help from people who have known me forever. It was very hard for me to recruit a full-time CTO. So my husband has been helping me with some hours here and there. And we have right now 12 people in Columbia. So for developers, designers, clinical researchers, we are running most of our operations in Latin America because it's extremely, well, obviously cost efficient, and more importantly, we have access to people that are patients especially that are, that exacerbate more often. So we are to leverage all the different angles that we can get. [00:21:04] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Wow. So lots of exciting things in the works and in the future, and oh my goodness, I'm so excited, can't wait to continue to celebrate all those wonderful accomplishments. So I'm curious, as you've taken this journey and even before with your other health experiences and finding this path, are there any moments all along the journey that really stand out to you as affirming, "Yes, I am in the right place at the right time, in the right industry." [00:21:31] Maria Artunduaga: Yeah, beyond the MedTech Innovator, the experience eight years ago, I mean, every day I find that this is the perfect fit for me. I always tell people, "Look, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It really needs to be a fit of personality." So when I talked to my parents, because at the beginning they weren't very agreeable with the idea of me becoming an entrepreneur 'cause physicians don't do this, right? I was sort of like a black sheep of a family, 'cause my sister, she's successful and she's a pediatric radiologist as she's working for an academic center in, in Dallas. So, my personality, I'm Type A. I'm very anxious. I really like doing things super fast. I really like to get things done, right? So, I dunno if I picked the wrong career, probably could have done a better job as an engineer, as a scientist myself. So at heart, I'm a true scientist. That's what I really enjoy. I like practicing medicine, sort of miss it a little bit, but I'm more in the quest of solving questions and discovering, right? That's what really excites me. And then, every day is a new day when you're building a company. And the challenges that I have every day, all of the problems I have to solve, I really enjoy the process of solving them. And this is a little crazy. Who gets excited with problems, right? So, I don't know, that's probably me. So I guess every day, the moment I go home or that I go to sleep, I say, "This is perfect. I don't think I'll be as happy as I am right now if I had stayed medicine. I don't think so." [00:23:10] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. And that says a lot. And that just affirms to you on a daily basis, "Yeah. I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing. That's wonderful. [00:23:17] Maria Artunduaga: Exactly. Right. It's like, yeah, I'm good at this thing. You know? I like solving problems. I got, I really enjoy the fires. I really like them. I's like, I don't know. I'm, yeah. I'm addicted to them. [00:23:30] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Well, and that is unusual, and I'm curious, do you? But it's a great thing. No, it's a wonderful thing. Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that. So, so when you're at finding yourself up against a problem, do you start with any particular kind of established framework? Do you like to just brainstorm solutions? How do you approach problem solving? [00:23:53] Maria Artunduaga: Gosh, this is a really good question. It's like, you know, if I had to teach something, right? So I'm very good at solving problems, at connecting different disciplines, right, to solve those issues. So for example, the way how I go about them, first of all, I don't get frustrated or too anxious about it. I always try to think first, right? And then, yeah, I start brainstorming. I'm very quick at thinking, my mind goes super quick. I have a whiteboard right behind me. I do a lot brainstorming on my own. I ask a lot of questions too. So I rely on a lot of people, and I get a lot of feedback on the way, how I think a problem needs to be solved. And obviously with time and experience, the older that you get, the better you become, right? So yeah, honestly, every problem is different. I just like seeing it from different angles, right? I'm very good with social stuff. I'm very good with arts too. I really like doing science, learning a about engineering. I really like different ways of solving problems. For example, I remember that I we had this NIH grant and we were working collaboration with a big, famous academic center right here. And things weren't working very well. That was through during a pandemic and I was getting charged things that we actually didn't approve. So things were getting a little awkward. I decided to finalize that agreement. But then I got through this situation that I had no access to patients here in the States, and at the time, I didn't have my clinical site in Columbia opened up. So what I did was the craziest thing, which is what I did, was that I bought an $80,000 machine and I came into an agreement with a friend from medical school who has a pulmonary practice in South Florida, one of the largest pulmonary practices. He's a partner with nine other guys, and they see probably a hundred patients every day. Can you imagine that? So respiratory patients, and I told him, "Look, I don't have any money to pay your rent, but I'm gonna give you equity for that rent, and you're gonna use this machine from Monday through Thursday, and I'm going to test your patients from Friday to Saturday. And I'm going to bring people, I'm going to become my own CRO, right? So I'm gonna bring people, doctors, from Columbia on a J1 visa as a research scholar visa. I'm gonna train them and I'm gonna get them to do the recruitment, review everything, test the patients. We are going to become our own CROs, and we are going to do as many people as we can every single week." So we were able to do 430 people in a span of a probably a year and a half. Something that usually would cost us thousands of dollars. I dunno how much money I spend, probably just 300,000 to do everything. Can you imagine? I mean, that's significantly cheap compared to any other quote that I've been getting from an academic center. So, I sometimes go for the crazy idea, right? Like, what's the craziest thing that I could think of? I literally, I write it down, right? And then I just try to double check with my lawyer. "Am I doing something illegal here?" And I, yeah, I cross reference with other founders. " I'm thinking of doing this, how that's that sound?" And they're like, "This is pretty non-traditional, Maria, but I mean, if you can get it done..." I'm like, "Yeah, of course I can get it done." And I just get it done. I just don't take a no for an answer. I'm very good at also finding, convincing people to jump on board with the vision, the mission. This excitement, this energy, people really get very engaged with Samay and with me as a founder, and they love it. Most of these people either have invested in the company, they are helping me many more hours, pro bono, literally free, and we are building together. [00:27:43] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow, that is so cool. And what a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing that one as well. Oh my word. [00:27:50] Maria Artunduaga: I have way too many stories to share. This is the one I really like to, to tell people. [00:27:55] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that, and I love the willingness to come up with those crazy ideas. And it might be just so crazy that it works. So, hey, you never know until you try, and that's fantastic. Oh my gosh, I love that approach. Alright, so pivoting the conversation a little bit just for fun. Imagine you are to be offered a million dollars to teach a masterclass... I know! ...to teach a masterclass on anything you want. What would you choose to teach? [00:28:22] Maria Artunduaga: Yeah. So, good question. So, gosh, I, I tackle problem. So my, my brain again is very good at figuring stuff out. That plus the fact that I'm very stubborn. So if I'm into something, I don't give up easily. And now I'm gonna tell the story about our winning MedTech Innovator. We beat 65 companies globally, right? And I still like, sort of, I cannot process that we won. So the story goes like this, but a year ago, I tried to raise five millions, my very first institutional round, and I totally flopped. [00:28:55] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh. [00:28:56] Maria Artunduaga: I only got $200,000 because multiple funds that I was talking to, they wanted me to feel half of the round before weighing any money or signing anything. So you can imagine. So do I got, you know, chicken or the egg problem? I failed. And instead of crying or mopping, I thought, "Okay, wait. I got into Medtech Innovator. You know what? I'm just gonna win that competition, still $350,000." And why not? So obviously people, my advisors, my best friend, "Like, you're crazy. It's the most competitive thing ever. You're not established in the field. People know who you are, but it's not like you have exited a company or anything, right? You're not even an engineer, Maria." So what I did was, again I went back to my whiteboard. Again, I probably should have become an engineer before, I dunno. I'm really good at solving problems. So I was like, "You know, this is a problem. These are the different ways how I can tackle this." And more importantly, I'm very good at the studying stuff. I really like, again, knowing, wisdom, information. I just love that. I really love that. So what I did was, I treat it like a big project, and I talked to the past winners, anyone who had done or won any sort of like prize with MedTech Innovator, and I figure out their secret sauce. So I either talk to them, I studied every single video, every single pitch. I spend many hours studying everyone who had one or had done significantly well throughout the accelerator. So what I discovered was the accelerator was kind of a school, like a school. So the harder you work, the better you do. And one of the things that I realized was that mentors and reviewers were key players. So I focused on building those connections. I met with many of them. I probably spent about, I don't know, probably four to five hours meeting with mentors, anyone who I thought could help me somehow, obviously, for free, because a lot of the help that they give used for free. And I also spent a lot of time doing homework, the webinars, et cetera, et cetera. I ask a lot of people for advice. I really got people excited about Samay. I recruited my mentors and they got on board from day one. Because of that, I started building those relationships and it was authentic. I mean, don't get me wrong, this wasn't like, you know, I'm trying to play anybody. I really care about what they had to say, and I incorporate all that feedback into my company to this day. So the other thing is, I make sure to go to everywhere, every webinar, every event, everything. My camera was always on, because most people, when they do their webinars, they don't even turn on their cameras, right? So I was very engaged. I was asking questions, I was getting involved with everything. Same thing with the Slack channel that we have for MedTech Innovator. I was helping people, I was sharing stuff. I was even offering to make introductions. I really made sure that people knew who I was. And I obviously also asked the MedTech Innovator people, the staff, for help, feedback, right? Am I doing this right? What do you think I should do? Anything that you can share with me that you think. I was very clear with them. I wanna go to the, I wanna get to the finals. I told them, and I remember they telling me, "Oh, Maria, about getting to the finals, it's so hard. It depends on the strategics and the sponsors." And I was like, " I'm gonna get there. What do you think I should do?" So I literally ask a lot of people how I needed to get there. And with the finals, the way how they pick the finalist, it's actually the mentors who go in front of the strategics, and they sort of champion your company. And they really went to bat for us. They told them how committed I was, the many people that from my team were actually going for participating to the winner because I brought people from my team... [00:32:45] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:32:46] Maria Artunduaga: You know, very few founders did that. I brought people from Colombia, obviously online, people who barely could understand English. But, I made them prepare questions. "You need to do this and that we need to be super engaged. We need to help other people." And they saw it was hard work. And at the end, we got into the finals and what I realized was, okay, so after the finals, I understood that the game was, obviously it changed. The way how the winner is chosen is that the audience votes, right, during The MedTech Conference. So what I did was, I went all in on social media. We made an awesome video for the best video competition. I remember that that was the first thing that I did back in June. I scheduled two weeks. I flew to Columbia. I hired right people. I made sure that I was perfect, so I was part of the creative team. I designed everything. Again, I really like arts, right? That's why, one of the reasons why I didn't, I was in pleasantry and that's why I really like dancing too, right? So I'm obsessive with everything that we do. I really am into the details and I supervise everything. And we also got into the finals for the best video competition. So I was going to this problem from every single angle. I didn't let anything up to chance. I, yeah, I'm a freak. I'm a control freak. That's what I did. I remember that even for the pitch, the four and a half minute pitch, I practiced, I don't know how many hours, but every single thing that I say that was obviously memorized, needed to be perfect. The way how I, let's go back to dancing since you're a dancer yourself, the way how I moved my hands, right? The way, how I walked on that stage, everything was rehearsed. So, yeah, I mean, I just I worked my ass off. I mean, everything was the way it needed to be and that's how we won. [00:34:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Wow. That's great. What a fantastic story. Yeah. Amazing. Yes. I love how it's so choreographed. Yeah, that's [00:34:48] Maria Artunduaga: great. It was choreographed, [00:34:50] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Excellent. Well, I know you have touched on the importance of legacy and how much that means to you, but how do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world? [00:35:03] Maria Artunduaga: Oh gosh. Yeah. I mean, so I have a little daughter, I want to some somehow replicate the same experience that I had with my mom. Maybe she doesn't even realize how much of the inspiration and the impact that she had on me. And again, leading by example, I don't spend a lot of hours with my daughter, right? I have a nanny for 12 hours. So my salary goes to her payment, right? Yeah, I wanna be remembered as somebody who tried very hard, who literally, instead of saying things, I walked the talk. The things that I said I was going to say. For example, I'm very opinionated with anything diversity and inclusion because, as I've said, I've experienced discrimination myself. So I walk the talk, I build a product, I build the change. I worked really hard. I impacted a lot of people. And more importantly, the world has changed somehow because I existed. So that's that. It's as simple as that. I wanna help other people get to fulfillment of their lives and their dreams. And yeah, and I obviously wanna be happy while I do all of these things. And more importantly, I wanna feel that I learned a lot. I really like learning. The process of learning every single day, learning a new thing makes me super happy. So if I don't learn something new, I consider day as, you know, as like a flop or something. So yeah, it's very simple. I'm actually a very simple person, I'm not that complicated. [00:36:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Okay. And then final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it? [00:36:39] Maria Artunduaga: Oh, cute. I mean, obviously my daughter. So I'm a mom. I'm 44, well, almost 45, and I had her at 42. So just thinking about her makes me smile every single time. She's a miracle baby. She's, you know, after four years of IVF, eight retrievals, it finally happened. I finally had her, and having her in my life has turned my world upside down in the best way. She's determined, and she's only three. She's diving into doing all sorts of things. She's doing gymnastics, she's building Legos, she's doing engineering stuff. I really like that "I can do anything attitude" and obviously I'm sort of like reinforcing her to do anything she wants to try. So seeing her try all these new things, all this confidence that I, that she has. It's like, I don't know. I mean, that inspires me. That motivates me to be a better mom, a better CEO, and to do exactly the same thing with the people that I work with. So everyone in my company, I I tell them I'm a mom, right? So, remember that, and I try to do the same with them. It's like I tell them, what do you wanna do? What do you wanna learn this month? What do you need? Right? My work as a CEO is getting the resources and put out the fires. Just tell me, and this is your playground, so I'm trying to do exactly the same with my daughter too. But yeah, I'm very happy with her. [00:38:07] Lindsey Dinneen: Aw, that's wonderful. I'm so glad. Well, oh my goodness, this conversation has been amazing. I kind of wish it didn't have to end, but I also wanna respect your time 'cause obviously you have so much going on. But thank you so much for sharing about your story, your advice. You're so inspiring, and I know this is gonna inspire so many people to go for it, and not to have the fear, to have that problem solving mentality, and growth mindset and learning and, hey, look where curiosity got you. [00:38:37] Maria Artunduaga: Yeah, exactly. That's a perfect slogan. It's all about that curiosity and it gets you places. Look at me. [00:38:43] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is just the start. [00:38:47] Maria Artunduaga: Yes, of course. [00:38:48] Lindsey Dinneen: Indeed. So I just wanna say thank you again for your time today, and we just wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. [00:38:58] Maria Artunduaga: Thank you so much and thank you again for invitation. I really enjoyed it. [00:39:02] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Me too. And we are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is dedicated to preventing animal cruelty in the United States. We really appreciate you choosing that organization to support and thank you just again, so very much for your time here today. Yeah, and holy cannoli, thank you so much to our listeners for tuning in, and if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we'll catch you next time. [00:39:44] Ben Trombold: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.
Superpowers for Good should not be considered investment advice. Seek counsel before making investment decisions. When you purchase an item, launch a campaign or create an investment account after clicking a link here, we may earn a fee. Engage to support our work.Watch the show on television by downloading the e360tv channel app to your Roku, AppleTV or AmazonFireTV. You can also see it on YouTube.Devin: What is your superpower?Nicole: Willingness to take bold leaps and embrace the unknown.Imagine a world where cancer is as treatable as the flu. That's the vision Nicole Paulk, the founder and CEO of Siren Biotechnology, is working tirelessly to bring to life. Driven by groundbreaking science, Nicole's company is on the brink of launching clinical trials for a revolutionary cancer treatment.Nicole's work leverages engineered viruses—those that don't make you sick—to deliver genetic medicines directly to cancer cells. These “good viruses” act as a delivery system for anti-tumor drugs, targeting difficult-to-treat cancers like recurrent high-grade gliomas, a fatal brain cancer. “We started to see data that looked really promising in this space,” Nicole explained, adding, “We felt a moral obligation to go after this cancer where there's just this huge unmet need.”Siren Biotechnology's approach is designed to have broad applications. Unlike treatments that target specific genetic mutations, their method has the potential to work on various tumor types. Nicole describes it as using viruses like a “little FedEx delivery truck” that can be engineered to deliver medicine precisely where it's needed in the body.This innovation didn't happen overnight. Nicole, a former professor of virology at UCSF, took the bold step of leaving academia to launch Siren Biotechnology. “I decided to resign from my faculty position and go be the founder and CEO just because I was so excited about the data and what we had so far,” she shared.In addition to traditional venture capital funding, Siren Biotechnology is inviting the public to invest through a regulated investment crowdfunding campaign. This unique opportunity allows patients, families, and supporters touched by cancer to be part of their journey. “We wanted to bring patients and their families onto our cap table,” Nicole said. “It's a way to involve them in the conversation much earlier.”Siren Biotechnology's work could redefine cancer care and inspire a new model for patient-centered innovation. With clinical trials just months away, the future looks brighter for those battling cancer—and for all of us who dream of a world where cancer is no longer a death sentence.tl;dr:Nicole Paulk's Siren Biotechnology transforms viruses into targeted cancer therapies with universal potential.The company focuses on recurrent high-grade gliomas, a fatal brain cancer with no standard treatment.Nicole left academia to lead Siren, leveraging her groundbreaking virology research to launch the company.Siren's unique crowdfunding campaign lets patients and families invest in the fight against cancer.Nicole's superpower, fearless innovation, drives her bold mission to revolutionize cancer care.How to Develop Fearless Innovation As a SuperpowerNicole's superpower is her willingness to take bold leaps and embrace the unknown. After spending nearly two decades building her academic career, Nicole left her position as a virology professor at UCSF to start Siren Biotechnology. She explained, “I feel like my superpower is just kind of being willing to jump off the cliff without a parachute and be like, we're going to figure it out. We're going to make it work.”Nicole exemplified fearless innovation when her research led to a groundbreaking discovery about the biology of a virus, one that required rewriting existing textbooks. Initially met with skepticism, her work was later validated and became a foundation for Siren Biotechnology's cancer treatment. This pivotal moment highlights Nicole's courage to challenge conventional knowledge and pursue transformative ideas.Tips for Developing This Superpower:Be willing to question conventional wisdom and explore new paths.Take calculated risks, even if it means stepping away from a well-defined career path.Embrace discomfort and uncertainty as a necessary part of innovation.Engage others by communicating your vision in relatable and accessible ways.By following Nicole's example and advice, you can make fearless innovation a skill. With practice and effort, you could make it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.Remember, however, that research into success suggests that building on your own superpowers is more important than creating new ones or overcoming weaknesses. You do you!Guest ProfileNicole Paulk (she/her):CEO, Founder, President, Siren BiotechnologyAbout Siren Biotechnology: We are combining two transformative therapeutic technologies – AAV gene therapy and cytokine immunotherapy – into a single, reimagined modality that overcomes key challenges and redefines how we destroy tumor cells and elicit anti-tumor immunity.This is the first AAV gene therapy drug product that can be made once and used in numerous indications – a huge leap forward for the field. This drastically reduces clinical development times, manufacturing timelines, and capital needs for each clinical trial. Most importantly, ‘universal' means countless solid tumor cancer patients – regardless of tumor type or mutations – may benefit from this breakthrough approach.Website: sirenbiotechnology.comX/Twitter Handle: @SirenBioCompany Facebook Page: facebook.com/SirenBiotechnologyOther URL: wefunder.com/siren.biotechnologyBiographical Information: Dr. Nicole Paulk is the CEO, Founder, and President of Siren Biotechnology and has dedicated her career to advancing the field of gene therapy. With nearly two decades of expertise, Nicole has been at the forefront of developing cutting-edge advances to propel the field of gene therapy forward for a wide range of diseases.Before founding Siren, Nicole held various leadership positions in academia and industry and most notably was an Assistant Adj Professor of AAV Gene Therapy in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics before leaving to found Siren. Nicole has a B.S. in Medical Microbiology, a Ph.D. in Viral Gene Therapy and Regenerative Medicine from OHSU, and completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship and Instructorship in Human Gene Therapy at Stanford University prior to starting her lab at UCSF. Nicole is a pioneer in the development of next-generation AAV platforms for gene repair, gene transfer and gene editing, directed evolution for novel engineered capsid evolution, and comparative multi-omic approaches to interrogate translational AAV biology.Nicole is a renowned expert in gene therapy and has consulted extensively for big pharma, written draft CMC guidance for the FDA, and sits on the Scientific Advisory Boards for Sarepta, Astellas, Metagenomi, Dyno Therapeutics, CEVEC, GRO Biosciences, Excision BioTherapeutics, WhiteLab Genomics, Johns Hopkins Gene Therapy Initiative, the Gene Therapy for Rare Disorders Searchlight Program, and several stealth startups. She has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Endpoints, STAT, Phacilitate, GEN, BioPharma Dive, Evaluate Vantage, SF Business Times, WIRED, Drug Discovery World, MIT Tech Review, C&EN, and more. She sits on the Scientific Editorial Boards of the journals Gene Therapy, Human Gene Therapy, and Biopharma International Gene Therapy. She is the Chair of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) Translational Science Committee, and a member of the ASGCT Cancer Cell and Gene Therapy Committee and the Biocom California Cell and Gene Therapy Committee. She has invented numerous AAV gene therapy technologies that have been shared or licensed to dozens of gene therapy companies and nonprofit groups working in rare diseases.Outside of work, you can find Nicole adventure traveling (think whitewater rafting meets backcountry trekking), snowboarding, planning elaborate Halloween parties complete with animatronics and ghoulish menus, tending her vegetable garden, and obsessing over the latest wearable gadgets. If you're trying to track her down at a conference and can't find her, it's because she snuck off to an oyster bar.X/Twitter Handle: @Nicole_PaulkLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/nicolepaulkInstagram Handle: @sirenbioSupport Our SponsorsOur generous sponsors make our work possible, serving impact investors, social entrepreneurs, community builders and diverse founders. Today's advertisers include FundingHope, Kingscrowd and Crowdfunding Made Simple. Learn more about advertising with us here.Max-Impact MembersThe following Max-Impact Members provide valuable financial support:Carol Fineagan, Independent Consultant | Lory Moore, Lory Moore Law | Marcia Brinton, High Desert Gear | Paul Lovejoy, Stakeholder Enterprise | Pearl Wright, Global Changemaker | Ralf Mandt, Next Pitch | Scott Thorpe, Philanthropist | Matthew Mead, Hempitecture | Michael Pratt, Qnetic | Sharon Samjitsingh, Health Care Originals | Add Your Name HereUpcoming SuperCrowd Event CalendarIf a location is not noted, the events below are virtual.Impact Cherub Club Meeting hosted by The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation, on June 17, 2025, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Each month, the Club meets to review new offerings for investment consideration and to conduct due diligence on previously screened deals. To join the Impact Cherub Club, become an Impact Member of the SuperCrowd.SuperCrowdHour, June 18, 2025, at 12:00 PM Eastern. Jason Fishman, Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), will lead a session on "How to Spin $1 of Advertising into $10!" He'll reveal proven strategies and marketing insights drawn from years of experience helping successful crowdfunding campaigns. Whether you're a founder planning a raise or a supporter of innovative startups, you'll gain actionable tips to boost visibility, drive engagement, and hit your funding goals. Don't miss it!Join us on June 25, 2025, at 8:00 PM Eastern for the Superpowers for Good Live Pitch—streaming on e360tv, where purpose-driven founders take the virtual stage to present their active Regulation Crowdfunding campaigns to a national audience of investors and changemakers. Selected startups are chosen for their commitment to community, alignment with NC3's Community Capital Principles, and their drive to create real-world impact. Thanks to sponsors DNA and DealMaker, this event is free to watch and amplifies the voices of underrepresented and mission-aligned entrepreneurs. Don't miss this inspiring evening where capital meets purpose—tune in to discover and support the next wave of impact-driven innovation.SuperCrowd25, August 21st and 22nd: This two-day virtual event is an annual tradition but with big upgrades for 2025! We'll be streaming live across the web and on TV via e360tv. Soon, we'll open a process for nominating speakers. Check back!Community Event CalendarSuccessful Funding with Karl Dakin, Tuesdays at 10:00 AM ET - Click on Events.Devin Thorpe is featured in a free virtual masterclass series hosted by Irina Portnova titled Break Free, Elevate Your Money Mindset & Call In Overflow, focused on transforming your relationship with money through personal stories and practical insights. June 8-21, 2025.Join Dorian Dickinson, founder & CEO of FundingHope, for Startup.com's monthly crowdfunding workshop, where he'll dive into strategies for successfully raising capital through investment crowdfunding. June 24 at noon Eastern. Regulated Investment Crowdfunding Summit 2025, Crowdfunding Professional Association, Washington DC, October 21-22, 2025.Call for community action:Please show your support for a tax credit for investments made via Regulation Crowdfunding, benefiting both the investors and the small businesses that receive the investments. Learn more here.If you would like to submit an event for us to share with the 9,000+ changemakers, investors and entrepreneurs who are members of the SuperCrowd, click here.We use AI to help us write compelling recaps of each episode. Get full access to Superpowers for Good at www.superpowers4good.com/subscribe
Dash Miller may not be a CEO, but like many of the people we feature on this show, he is a true leader, he has a vision, and he's executing on his plan.Sometimes life forces you to grow up quickly, and that's exactly what happened to Dash. He lost his 16-year-old brother Callum after a five year battle with cancer. And out of that tragedy, dash started a unique corporate outreach campaign on LinkedIn making inspiring and grateful videos about companies that touched his family's life while Callum was in treatment.Dash joins us to discuss the inspirations behind the campaign and the incredible responses he's received from both individuals and companies.Highlights:Callum's Story (2:16)Dash' work at UCSF (2:58)Dash' work with LLS (4:08)Why LinkedIn? (5:23)Biggest Challenges (7:33)Nestlé (9:55)Hasbro (10:50)What's next? (12:19)Links:Dash Miller LinkedInFundraiser WebsiteICR LinkedInICR TwitterICR Website Feedback:If you have questions about the show, or have a topic in mind you'd like discussed in future episodes, email our producer, joe@lowerstreet.co
House Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs Legislative Hearing on H.R. 411, H.R. 2916, H.R. 3620 & H.R. 3670 Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | 10:00 AM On Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 10:00 a.m., in room 1324 Longworth House Office Building, the Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs will hold a legislative hearing on the following bills: H.R. 411 (Rep. Bergman), “Keweenaw Bay Indian Community Land Claim Settlement Act of 2025” H.R. 2916 (Rep. Stefanik), To authorize, ratify, and confirm the Agreement of Settlement and Compromise to Resolve the Akwesasne Mohawk Land Claim in the State of New York, and for other purposes H.R. 3620 (Rep. Begich), “Southcentral Foundation Land Transfer Act of 2025” H.R. 3670 (Rep. Stansbury), “IHS Provider Expansion Act” More on Indianz.Com: https://indianz.com/News/2025/06/10/house-subcommittee-on-indian-and-insular-affairs-schedules-hearing-on-four-bills/
Listen to our latest podcast as Dr Brian Feeley and Dr Drew Lansdown break down how to excel as a rotating medical student.
In our broadcast on June 9, 2025, co-hosts Wendy Rose Williams and Gregg Kirk interview author and researcher, Mark Gober. Mark is the author of the “Upside Down” series of seven books — spanning the topics of consciousness, politics, economics, UFOs, medicine, cosmology, and more. His first book, “An End to Upside Down Thinking” published in 2018, won the IPPY award for best science book of the year and was endorsed by researchers with affiliations at Harvard, Princeton, UVA, and UCSF (among others).During the interview, Mark discusses the thinking that drove him to study the nature of consciousness and that how we as individuals (especially in Western cultures) have accepted a limited view of ourselves and our place in the universe. He has written six other books — “An End to Upside Down Living” (2020), “An End to Upside Down Liberty” (2021), “An End to Upside Down Contact” (2022), “An End to the Upside Down Reset” (2023), “An End to Upside Down Medicine” (2023); and “An End to the Upside Down Cosmos” (2024). Mark is also the host of the 8-episode podcast series “Where Is My Mind?”To view the 55-minute broadcast in its entirety, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QapQg9INydwCONTACT WAKING UP SPIRITUALLY HERE...Our website: https://wakingupspiritually.com/Wendy Rose Williams' website: https://www.wendyrosewilliams.com/Gregg Kirk's website: https://greggkirk.comWaking Up Spiritually YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@wakingupspiritually6114/videosWaking Up Spiritually Facebook page (ask to be invited): https://www.facebook.com/groups/wakingupspirituallyEmail us: wakingupspiritually@gmail.com
Headlines for June 06, 2025; Musk vs. Trump? Quinn Slobodian on the Risks of Billionaire Rule; Trump Budget Bill Would Lead to 51,000 More Deaths Each Year, as Health Experts Urge Medicare for All; “Completely Unwarranted”: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka Sues Trump Officials over His Arrest at ICE Jail; High Seas Update from Aid Ship Sailing to Gaza: Activists Vow to “Win Through Solidarity”; Fired over Gaza? Dr. Rupa Marya Sues UCSF, Says She Was Targeted for Speaking Up for Palestine
In today's episode I sit down with Dr. Thomas Boyce, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at UCSF, about his 40 years of research on temperamental differences in children, specifically focusing on his concept of 'orchid' and 'dandelion' children. Dr. Boyce explains how while most children are resilient like dandelions, a significant minority are sensitive 'orchids' who react more strongly to their environments. We discuss Boyce's research, the biological underpinnings of these temperamental differences, and how different environments impact these children.I WROTE MY FIRST BOOK! Order your copy of The Five Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans Here: https://bit.ly/3rMLMsLSubscribe to my free newsletter for parenting tips delivered straight to your inbox: draliza.substack.com Follow me on Instagram for more:@raisinggoodhumanspodcast Sponsors:Ground News: Go to https://groundnews.com/HUMANS to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan–the same plan that I use to stay informedIris & Romeo: Visit IrisandRomeo.com and use code HUMANS at checkout for 20% off your first purchaseActive Skin Repair: Visit https://www.ActiveSkinRepair.com to learn more about Active Skin Repair and to get 20% off your order, use code:HUMANSWater Wipes: Visit WaterWipes.com to learn more about how Water Wipes effectively cleans with minimal ingredients that leave nothing behindKiwico: Get $15 off on your Summer Adventure Series at kiwico.com/RGHQuince: Go to Quince.com/humans for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five-day returnsPlease note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.Produced by Dear Media.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Headlines for June 06, 2025; Musk vs. Trump? Quinn Slobodian on the Risks of Billionaire Rule; Trump Budget Bill Would Lead to 51,000 More Deaths Each Year, as Health Experts Urge Medicare for All; “Completely Unwarranted”: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka Sues Trump Officials over His Arrest at ICE Jail; High Seas Update from Aid Ship Sailing to Gaza: Activists Vow to “Win Through Solidarity”; Fired over Gaza? Dr. Rupa Marya Sues UCSF, Says She Was Targeted for Speaking Up for Palestine
Recently I was asked to review a forthcoming book for American Scientist magazine. The book was entitled, Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes us Sick. I did the review, and now that the book has been published, I'm delighted that its author, Murray Carpenter, has agreed to join us. Mr. Carpenter is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and has been featured in places like NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Interview Summary So, let's start with your career overall. Your journalism has covered a wide range of topics. But a major focus has been on what people consume. First, with your book Caffeinated and now with Sweet and Deadly. What brought you to this interest? My interest in caffeine is longstanding. Like many of us, I consume caffeine daily in the form of coffee. And I just felt like with caffeine, many of us don't really discuss the fact that it is a drug, and it is at least a mildly addictive drug. And so, I became fascinated with that enough to write a book. And that really led me directly in an organic fashion to this project. Because when I would discuss caffeine with people, mostly they just kind of wanted the cliff notes. Is my habit healthy? You know, how much caffeine should I take? And, and in short, I would tell them, you know, if you don't suffer from anxiety or insomnia and you're consuming your caffeine in a healthy beverage, well, that's fine. But, what I realized, of course, is that by volume, the caffeinated beverage people consume most of is sodas. And so that led me to thinking more about sodas because I got a lot of questions about the caffeine in sodas. And that led me to realize just the degree to which they are unhealthful. We've all known sodas not to be a health food, but I think that the degree to which they are not healthy surprised me. And that's what led me to this book. Yes, there's some very interesting themes aren't there with addiction and manipulation of ingredients in order to get people hooked on things. So let's talk about Coca-Cola a bit. Your book focuses on Coca-Cola. It's right there in the title. And certainly, they're giants in the beverage field. But are there other reasons that led you to focus on them? Other than that, the fact that they're the biggest? They're the biggest and really almost synonymous with sodas worldwide. I mean, many people don't say ‘I want a pop, I want a soda.' They say, ‘I want a Coke.' I quote a source as saying that. You know, what that means is you want a sugar sweetened beverage. And it's not just that they're the most successful at this game, and the biggest. But as I started doing this research, I realized that they have also been the most aggressive and the most successful at this sort of disinformation that's the focus of the book. At generating these health campaigns, these science disinformation campaigns, we should say. This is not to say Pepsi and Dr. Pepper have not been at this game as well, and often through the American Beverage Association. But it is to say that I think Coca-Cola has been the most sophisticated. The most invested in these campaigns. And I would argue the most successful. And so, I really think it's a league apart and that's why I wanted to focus on Coca-Cola. That makes good sense. So, in reading your book, I was struck by the sheer number of ways Coca-Cola protected their business interest at the expense of public health and also the degree to which it was coordinated and calculated. Let's take several examples of such activities and discuss exactly what the company has done. And I'd love your opinion on this. One thing you noted that Coke acted partly through other organizations, one of which you just mentioned, the American Beverage Association. There were others where there was sort of a false sense of scientific credibility. Can you explain more about what Coke did in this area? Yes, and one of the organizations that I think is perhaps the exemplar of this behavior is the International Life Sciences Institute. It's a very successful, very well-funded group that purports to you know, improve the health of people, worldwide. It was founded by a Coca-Cola staffer and has, you know, essentially carried water for Coke for years through a variety of direct and indirect ways. But so front groups, the successful use of front groups: and this is to say groups that don't immediately appear to be associated, say with Coca-Cola. If you hear the International Life Sciences Institute, no one immediately thinks Coca-Cola, except for people who study this a lot. The International Food Information Council, another very closely related front group. This is one of the ways that Coke has done its work is through the use of front groups. And some of them are sort of these more temporary front groups that they'll establish for specific campaigns. For example, to fight soda taxes in specific areas. And they often have very anodyne names, and names again that don't directly link them to Coca-Cola or a beverage, the beverage industry. And the reason that this is so important and the reason this is so effective is journalists know if they were saying, Coca-Cola says soda isn't bad for you, of course that raises red flags. If they say, the International Life Sciences Institute says it's not bad for you, if they say the International Food Information Council says it's not bad for you. The use of front groups has been one of the very effective and persistent, strategies. It almost sounds like the word deception could be written the charter of these organizations, couldn't it? Because it was really meant to disguise Coca-Cola's role in these things from the very get go. That's right. Yes. And the deception runs very deep. One of the things that I happened onto in the course of reporting this book, Sweet and Deadly, is Coca-Cola two different times, organized three-day seminars on obesity in Colorado. These two attendees appeared to be sponsored by a press organization and the University of Colorado. They were funded and structured entirely at the behest of Coca-Cola. And it wasn't until after people had attended these seminars and reported stories based on the findings that they'd learned there. Much, much later did people find out that yes, actually these were Coca-Cola initiatives. So yes, deception, runs deep and it's a huge part of their public relations strategy. It's like reputation laundering, almost. Well, it is, and, you know, I make frequent analogies to the tobacco industry in the book. And I think one of the things that's important to remember when we're looking at tobacco and when we're looking at Coca-Cola, at the soda industry writ large, is that these are industries that are producing products that science now shows unequivocally are unhelpful. Even at moderate levels of consumption. So, in order for the industry to continue selling this product, to continue leading, they really have to fight back. It's imperative. It's a risk to their business model if they don't do something to fight the emerging health science. And so, yes, it's very important to them. You know, it's easy, I guess, to ascribe this kind of behavior to ill meaning people within these organizations. But it's almost written into the DNA of these organizations. I mean, you said they have to do this. So, it's pretty much be expected, isn't. It is. I think young people when they hear something like this, they often shrug and say capitalism. And, yes, there's something to that. But capitalism thrives also in a regulated environment. I think that's maybe a little bit too simplistic. But the aspect of it that does apply here is that Coca-Cola is in the business of selling sugar water. That's what they're there to do. Granted, they've diversified into other products, but they are in the business of selling sugar water. Anything that threatens that business model is a threat to their bottom line. And so, they are going to fight it tooth and nail. So how did Coca-Cola influence big health organizations like the World Health Organization and any equivalent bodies in the US? Well, so a few different ways. One of the ways that Coca-Cola has really extended its influence is again, through the use of the front groups to carry messages such as, you know, a calorie is a calorie. Calories and calories out. That's, that's one of the strategies. Another is by having allies in high places politically. And sometimes these are political appointees that happen to be associated with Coca-Cola. Other times these are politicians who are getting funding from Coca-Cola. But, yes, they have worked hard. I mean, the WHO is an interesting one because the WHO really has been out a little bit ahead of the more national bodies in terms of wanting soda taxes, et cetera. But there's a subtler way too, I think, that it influences any of these political entities and these science groups, is that Coca-Cola it's such an all-American beverage. I don't think we can overstate this. It's almost more American than apple pie. And I think we still have not sort of made that shift to then seeing it as something that's unhealthful. And I do think that that has, sort of, put the brakes slightly on regulatory actions here in the US. Let's talk about the Global Energy Balance Network, because this was an especially pernicious part of the overall Coca-Cola strategy. Would you tell us about that and how particular scientists, people of note in our field, by the way, were being paid large sums of money and then delivering things that supported industries positions. Yes. This was a Coca-Cola initiative. And we have to be clear on this. This was designed and created at the behest of Coca-Cola staffers. This was an initiative that was really an effort to shift the balance to the calories outside of the equation. So energy balance is one of these, sort of, themes that Coca-Cola and other people have, sort of, made great hay with. And this idea would be just calories and calories out. That's all that matters. If you're just balanced there, everything else is to be okay. We can talk about that later. I think most of your listeners probably understand that, you know, a calorie of Coca-Cola is not nutritionally equivalent to a calorie of kale. But that's what the Global Energy Balance Network was really trying to focus on. And yes, luminaries in the field of obesity science, you know, Stephen Blair at the University of South Carolina, Jim Hill, then at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Center, the Global Energy Balance Network funded their labs with more than a million dollars to specifically focus on this issue of energy balance. Now, what was deceptive here, and I think it's really worth noting, is that Coca-Cola developed this project. But once it developed the project and gave the funding, it did not want to be associated with it. It wasn't the Global Energy Balance Network 'brought to you by Coca-Cola.' It appeared to be a freestanding nonprofit. And it looked like it was going to be a very effective strategy for Coca-Cola, but it didn't turn out that way. So, we'll talk about that in a minute. How much impact did this have? Did it matter that Coke gave money to these several scientists you mentioned? Well, I think yes. I think in the broader scheme of things that every increment of scientific funding towards this side matters. You know, people talk about the science of industrial distraction or industrial selection. And, you know, partly this is this idea that even if you're funding legitimate science, right, but it's focused on this ‘calories outside of the equation,' it's sucking up some of the oxygen in the room. Some of the public conversation is going to be shifted from the harmful effects of a product, say Coca-Cola, to the benefits of exercise. And so, yes, I think all of this kind of funding can make a difference. And it influences public opinion. So how close were the relationships between the Coca-Cola executives and the scientist? I mean, did they just write them a check and say, go do your science and we will let you come up with whatever you will, or were they colluding more than that? And they were colluding much more than that. And I've got a shout out here to the Industry Documents Library at the University of California at San Francisco, which is meticulously archived. A lot of the emails that show all of the interrelationships here. Yes, they were not just chatting cordially - scientists to Coca-Cola Corporation. They were mutually developing strategies. They were often ready at a moment's notice to appear at a press conference on Coca-Cola's behalf. So, yes, it was a very direct, very close relationship that certainly now that we see the conversations, it's unseemly at best. How did this all come to light? Because you said these documents are in this archive at UCSF. How did they come to light in the first place and how did shining light on this, you know, sort of pseudo-organization take place? Well, here we have to credit, New York Times reporter, now at the Washington Post, Anahad O'Connor, who did yeoman's work to investigate the Global Energy Balance Network. And it was his original FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that got a lot of these emails that are now in the industry document library. He requested these documents and then he built his story in large part off of these documents. And it was a front-page New York Times expose and, Coke had a lot of egg on its face. It's then CEO, even apologized, you know, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And you know, the sort of a secondary aspect of this is after this funding was exposed, Coca-Cola was pressured to reveal other health funding that it had been spending money on. And that was, I think over a few years like $133 million. They spread their money around to a lot of different organizations and in some cases the organizations, it was just good will. In other cases, you had organizations that changed their position on key policy initiatives after receiving the funding. But it was a lot of money. So, the Global Energy Balance Network, it is sort of opened a chink in their armor and gave people a view inside the machine. And there's something else that I'd love to mention that I think is really important about the Global Energy Balance Network and about that initiative. As Coca-Cola seems, and this became clear in the reporting of the book over and over again, they seem always to be three moves ahead on the chess board. They're not just putting out a brush fires. They're looking way down the road. How do we head off the challenge that we're facing in public opinion? How do we head off the challenge we're facing in terms of soda science? And in many cases, they've been very, very effective at this. Were Coca-Cola's efforts mainly to influence policies and things in the US or did they have their eyes outside the US as well? I focused the book, the reporting of the book, really on Coca-Cola in the US. And also, and I just want to mention this tangentially, it's also focused not on non-nutritive sweetened beverages, but the sugary beverages. It's pretty tightly focused. But yes, Coca-Cola, through other organizations, particularly the International Life Sciences Institute, has very much tried to influence policy say in China, for example, which is a huge market. So yes, they've exported this very successful PR strategy globally. So, the corporate activities, like the ones you describe in your book, can be pretty clearly damaging to the public's health. What in the heck can be done? I mean, who will the change agents be? And do you think there's any hope of curtailing this kind of dreadful activity? Well, this is something I thought about a lot. One of the themes of the book is that the balance of public opinion has never tipped against Coca-Cola. And we talked about this earlier, that it's still seen as this all American product. And we see with other industries and other products. So, you know, Philip Morris, smoking, Marlboro. Eventually the balance of public opinion tips against them and people accept that they're unhealthful and that they've been misleading the public. The same thing happened for Exxon and climate change, Purdue pharma and Oxycontin. It's a pattern we see over and over again. With Coca-Cola, it hasn't tipped yet. And I think once it does, it will be easier for public health advocates to make their case. In terms of who the change agents might be, here we have a really interesting conversation, right? Because the foremost change agent right now looks like it's RFK Jr. (Robert F. Kennedy), which is pretty remarkable and generates an awful lot of shall we say, cognitive dissonance, right? Because both the spending of SNAP Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds for sodas, he's opposed to that. He has just as recently as the week before last called sugar poison. He said sugar is poison. These are the kinds of very direct, very forceful, high level, initiatives that we really haven't seen at a federal level yet. So, it's possible that he will be nudging the balance. And it puts, of course, everybody who's involved, every public health advocate, I think, who is involved with this issue in a slightly uncomfortable or very uncomfortable position. Yes. You know, as I think about the kind of settings where I've worked and this conflict-of-interest problem with scientists taking money and doing things in favor of industry. And I wonder who the change agents are going to be. It's a pretty interesting picture comes with that. Because if you ask scientists whether money taints research, they'll say yes. But if you ask, would it taint your research, they'll say no. Because of course I am so unbiased and I'm so pure that it really wouldn't affect what I do. So, that's how scientists justify it. Some scientists don't take money from industry and there are no problems with conflicts of interest. But the ones who do can pretty easily justify it along with saying things like, well, I can help change the industry from within if I'm in the door, and things like that. The universities can't really police it because universities are getting corporate funding. Maybe not from that particular company, but overall. Their solution to this is the same as the scientific journals, that you just have to disclose. The kind of problem with disclosure as I see it, is that it - sort of editorializing here and you're the guest, so I apologize for intruding on that - but the problem with disclosure is that why do you need to disclose something in the first place because there's something potentially wrong? Well, the solution then isn't disclose it, it's not to do it. And disclosing is like if I come up and kick you in the leg, it's okay if I disclose it? I mean, it's just, there's something sort of perverse about that whole system. Journals there, you know, they want disclosure. The big scientific association, many of them are getting money from industry as well. So, industry has so permeated the system that it's hard to think about who can have any impact. And I think the press, I think it's journalists like you who can make a difference. You know, it wasn't the scientific organizations or anything else that got in the way of the Global Energy Balance Network. It was Anahad O'Connor writing in the New York Times, and all the people who were involved in exposing that. And you with your book. So that's sort of long-winded way of saying thank you. What you've done is really important and there are precious few change agents out there. And so, we have to rely on talented and passionate people like you to get that work done. So, thank you so much for sharing it with us. Let me just end with one final question. Do you see any reason to be optimistic about where this is all going? I do. And I've got to say maybe you're giving scientists a little bit of short shrift here. Because, as the science develops, as it becomes more compelling and a theme of the book is that soda science really, over the past 15, 20 years has become more compelling. More unequivocal. We know the harms and, you know, you can quantify them and identify them more specifically than say, 15 years ago. So, I think that's one thing that can change. And I think slowly you're seeing, greater public awareness. I think the real challenge, in terms of getting the message out about the health risks, is that you really see like a bifurcated consumption of Coca-Cola. There are many people who are not consuming any Coca-Cola. And then you have a lot of people who are consuming, you know, say 20 ounces regularly. So, there is a big question of how you reach this other group of people who are still high consumers of Coca-Cola. And we know and you know this well from your work, that soda labeling is one thing that works and that soda taxes are another. I think those are things to look out for coming down the pike. I mean, obviously other countries are ahead of us in terms of both of these initiatives. One of the things occurred to me as you were speaking earlier, you mentioned that your book was focused on the sugared beverages. Do you think there's a similar story to be told about deception and deceit with respect to the artificial sweeteners? I suspect so, you know. I haven't done the work, but I don't know why there wouldn't be. And I think artificial sweeteners are in the position that sugary beverages were 10 to 15 years ago. There's a lag time in terms of the research. There is increasing research showing the health risks of these beverages. I think people who are public health advocates have been loath to highlight these because they're also a very effective bridge from sugar sweetened beverages to no sugar sweetened beverages. And I think, a lot of people see them as a good strategy. I do think there probably is a story to tell about the risks of non-nutritive sweeteners. So, yes. I can remind our listeners that we've done a series of podcasts, a cluster of them really, on the impact of the artificial sweeteners. And it's pretty scary when you talk to people who really understand how they're metabolized and what effects they have on the brain, the microbiome, and the rest of the body. Bio Murray Carpenter is a journalist and author whose stories have appeared in the New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, NPR, and PRI's The World. He has also written for the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and other media outlets. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Colorado and a Master of Science in environmental studies from the University of Montana, and has worked as a medical lab assistant in Ohio, a cowboy in Colombia, a farmhand in Virginia, and an oil-exploring “juggie” in Wyoming. He lives in Belfast, Maine. He is the author of Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us and Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spread
Our esteemed panel of doctors/scientists will explain common questions about cholesterol. What is cholesterol, and what is its role in the body? Why is it important? What are the various types of cholesterol? How do you interpret your test results? How have recommended levels changed over the years, and why? How do cholesterol-lowering medications work? Are they safe long-term? How does food affect cholesterol levels? These questions and more will be explained in this important program. About the Speakers Dr. Joshua Knowles is a physician-scientist at Stanford. He earned his M.D.–Ph.D. at UNC with Nobuyo Maeda and Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies, and his internal medicine residency and fellowship at Stanford University primarily. Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L., is emeritus professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, and member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. Dr. Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, with expertise in obesity, diabetes, metabolism, and nutrition. Dr. Ethan Weiss is a cardiologist whose special interests include preventive cardiology, the genetics of coronary disease, risk assessment for heart conditions and heart disease in the young. A Nutrition, Food & Wellness Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. OrganizerPatty James Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this podcast episode of Integrative Cancer Solutions Dr. Karlfeldt interviews Dr. Chris Apfel about his integrative approaches to cancer treatment. Dr. Apfel shares his journey from traditional medicine to integrative oncology, sparked by his father's lung cancer diagnosis. This personal experience led him to question conventional cancer treatments after learning about their low success rates, particularly for stage four lung cancer. Dr. Apfel discusses his development of the Onca test, which can identify effective cancer therapies within a week by culturing tumor fragments. This test evaluates a wide range of treatments including chemotherapies, targeted therapies, and repurposed drugs. He emphasizes the importance of avoiding ineffective treatments that can harm the immune system and diminish quality of life, while highlighting the potential of repurposed drugs like statins, Metformin, and Itraconazole. The conversation addresses tumor heterogeneity and the need for representative biopsy samples, particularly from metastatic sites. Dr. Apfel explains that the Onca test is commercially available, with discounts offered to patients willing to share their data for research purposes. He discusses various methods for obtaining tumor samples and the importance of timing in the collection process.Dr. Apfel emphasizes patient advocacy and the need for patients to be informed about their treatment options. He notes that the Onca test can double the odds of a positive tumor response and significantly increase median survival rates. The podcast concludes with Dr. Apfel expressing interest in collaborating with Dr. Folt's center to help more cancer patients through this innovative approach to personalized cancer treatment.About Dr Chris Apfel:Chris Apfel, MD, PhD, MBA is a physician and clinical researcher with over 100 published papers, including a six-factor clinical prediction model published in NEJM that led to the development of The Apfel Score, a clinical calculator used universally to predict the risk of postoperative nausea and vomiting, and Dr Apfel's ultimate recruitment to the US and the University of California, San Francisco.Dr. Apfel was driven to revolutionize the field of cancer patient treatment after losing his mother to a long battle with ovarian cancer and his father to lung cancer. Witnessing their suffering inspired him leave the clinical department at UCSF to develop more efficient ways to identify the best treatment plans for cancer patients.Dr Apfel received his MD and PhD from the University of Giessen in Germany and his MBA from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the founder and CEO of SageMedic.Dr. Apfel developed the Onca test, which can identify effective cancer therapies within a week by culturing tumor fragments, potentially doubling the odds of positive tumor response.Personal experience with his father's lung cancer led Dr. Apfel to question conventional treatments after discovering their low success rates for advanced cancers.The Onca test evaluates chemotherapies, targeted therapies, and repurposed drugs like statins and Metformin, which have shown promising results in cancer treatment.Tumor heterogeneity makes it crucial to obtain representative biopsy samples, particularly from metastatic sites, to avoid ineffective treatments.Patient advocacy is essential in cancer treatment, as patients need to make informed decisions about tissue handling before surgery and find oncologists willing to consider alternative treatments based on test results.----Grab my book A Better Way to Treat Cancer: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Preventing and Most Effectively Treating Our Biggest Health Threat - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CM1KKD9X?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860 Unleashing 10X Power: A Revolutionary Approach to Conquering Cancerhttps://store.thekarlfeldtcenter.com/products/unleashing-10x-power-Price: $24.99-100% Off Discount Code: CANCERPODCAST1Healing Within: Unraveling the Emotional Roots of Cancerhttps://store.thekarlfeldtcenter.com/products/healing-within-Price: $24.99-100% Off Discount Code: CANCERPODCAST2----Integrative Cancer Solutions was created to instill hope and empowerment. Other people have been where you are right now and have already done the research for you. Listen to their stories and journeys and apply what they learned to achieve similar outcomes as they have, cancer remission and an even more fullness of life than before the diagnosis. Guests will discuss what therapies, supplements, and practitioners they relied on to beat cancer. Once diagnosed, time is of the essence. This podcast will dramatically reduce your learning curve as you search for your own solution to cancer. To learn more about the cutting-edge integrative cancer therapies Dr. Karlfeldt offer at his center, please visit www.TheKarlfeldtCenter.com
It's estimated that 4.3 million older adults across the United States live alone with cognitive impairment. How do these individuals navigate the challenges and concerns that arise due to these memory and thinking changes, and what recommendations are there to support them as they continue living independently? Dr. Elena Portacolone joins Dementia Matters to discuss her research focused on identifying these challenges and developing equitable policies and programs for older adults living alone with cognitive impairment in the United States and worldwide. Guest: Elena Portacolone, PhD, MBA, MPH, principal investigator, Living Alone with Cognitive Impairment Project, professor of sociology, Institute for Health & Aging, Pepper Center Scholar, Division of Geriatric Medicine, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Show Notes Read more about Dr. Portacolone and her work at her profile on UCSF's website. Learn more about UCSF's Living Alone with Cognitive Impairment project, led by Dr. Portacolone, on their website. Learn about the Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience (GUIDE) Model, mentioned by Dr. Portacolone at 22:51, on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website. Connect with us Find transcripts and more at our website. Email Dementia Matters: dementiamatters@medicine.wisc.edu Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to the Wisconsin Alzheimer's Disease Research Center's e-newsletter. Enjoy Dementia Matters? Consider making a gift to the Dementia Matters fund through the UW Initiative to End Alzheimer's. All donations go toward outreach and production.
The future of Public Health depends on protection against unrestrained corporate power. A sicker humanity means increased pain and suffering at large. In the past, we have identified numerous exposures that have made us sick, many of which are addictive, and created shield laws to protect the corporations that peddle them. We also know it's our most toxic addictions that are killing the planet and its people currently, whether due to climate crisis or ingesting harmful chemical substances. When Big Tobacco tried to convince the world that ingesting tar and nicotine made people healthier (“9 out of 10 doctors smoke Camels”), science revealed otherwise and insisted upon laws to regulate the industry more closely. Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L suggests that we consider a similar strategy for sugar, particularly the fructose or refined fructose molecules commonly found to be overdosing society through packaged products. Per his biography, he wants to help “fix the food supply any way he can.” Lustig explaine that one of the essential patterns to recognize in battling addiction is the dichotomy between pleasure vs. happiness. Dr. Lustig is an Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology and a Member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. He is a neuroendocrinologist with expertise in obesity, diabetes, metabolism, and nutrition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What makes a good surgeon? Listen to Dr Brian Feeley and Dr Nirav Pandya as they take a deep dive into the complexities of what allows surgeons to excel in the operating room.
Send us a textIn this episode of Causes or Cures, we explore insights into brain health and longevity with NYT bestselling author and neurologist Dr. Dale Bredesen.Dr. Bredesen explains why he believes cognitive decline is not an inevitable part of aging and outlines six biological processes he identifies as impacting brain aging. He also shares practical tools he recommends for assessing how well your mind is functioning. We discuss the alarming rise in early-onset dementia among people in their 30s and 40s and the potential causes behind this increase. Dr. Bredesen also talks about the links between COVID, sugar intake, and dementia risk. He offers science-based advice on diet, sleep, and lifestyle strategies that support an ageless brain.Additionally, Dr. Bredesen addresses how the for-profit healthcare system can hinder Alzheimer's management and shares his comprehensive ReCODE Protocol™, which he presents as a promising approach to preventing and potentially reversing cognitive decline, though it has sparked passionate discussions and differing opinions in the Alzheimer's and broader medical communities.About Dr. Dale Bredesen Dr. Bredesen is an internationally recognized expert in neurodegenerative diseases and the author of The Ageless Brain and The End of Alzheimer's Disease. He earned his M.D. from Duke University Medical Center, completed his neurology residency at UCSF, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner's laboratory. He has held faculty positions at UCSF, UCLA, and UC San Diego, and was founding President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Dr. Bredesen's pioneering research has led to innovative treatments and the development of the ReCODE Protocol™, offering new hope in the fight against Alzheimer's disease.You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.Follow Eeks on Instagram here.Or Facebook here.Or X.On Youtube.Or TikTok.SUBSCRIBE to her monthly newsletter here.Support the show
Truth is our own internal wisdom that defines who we are. Finding our own truth means figuring out the difference between what we've been told we should be, verses who we really are. Often time in the past our true feelings, passions, opinions, and experiences were ignored, rejected, or just not encouraged. When we can relearn to identify what our own truth is, we are able to put into action what our heart and soul desires. Dr. Daganzo is an Internal Medicine physician with over 15 years of experience. She holds an MA in Physics from UC Berkeley and an MD from UCSF, bringing a uniquely analytical and integrative approach to patient care. Her advanced training in psychiatry and functional medicine allows her to address health challenges at the intersection of mind and body.Based in Marin County, Dr. Daganzo's clinic specializes in treating complex chronic conditions, eating disorders, and hard-to-diagnose symptoms. She prioritizes identifying root causes over simply treating symptoms—rejecting the "pill for every ill" mindset in favor of promoting long-term vitality and health span.Committed to science-driven, innovative care, Dr. Daganzo utilizes cutting-edge diagnostics and personalized interventions to empower her patients in achieving optimal wellness. She is known for her deep intellect, logical rigor, and genuine curiosity, balanced by compassion and a relentless dedication to her patients. As a tireless advocate, she ensures each patient receives the specialized, comprehensive care they need to reach their health goals. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Dr. Shalabh Gupta, founder and CEO of Unicycive Therapeutics, shares his inspiring journey from practicing medicine to leading groundbreaking innovations in kidney disease treatment. Dr. Gupta discusses his comprehensive framework for identifying and developing medical solutions, his vision for Unicycive's future, and the importance of focus and execution in medical startups. He reveals the challenges and triumphs of bringing life-changing products to market and offers profound advice for new entrepreneurs in the industry. Guest links: https://unicycive.com/ Charity supported: Feeding America Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at theleadingdifference@velentium.com. PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Lindsey Dinneen Editing: Marketing Wise Producer: Velentium EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode 056 - Dr. Shalabh Gupta [00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world. [00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them. [00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives. [00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives. [00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives. [00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and today I am so excited to introduce you to my guest, Dr. Shalabh Gupta. Dr. Gupta is the founder and CEO of Unicycive Therapeutics. He is a visionary in healthcare, leading groundbreaking efforts to design innovative therapies and reimagine how we approach unmet medical needs. His work goes beyond the lab as he's driving a healthcare revolution by developing innovative therapies addressing critical gaps in treatment. His perspective combines decades of experience and expertise in drug design with a deep commitment to equity in health care. Well, welcome to the show, Shalabh. I'm so excited that you're here with me today. [00:01:35] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Thank you. Thank you for hosting me. [00:01:36] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. I'd love if you wouldn't mind just telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what led you to MedTech. [00:01:45] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: By way of background, I'm a physician, trained, practiced, did my medical training in internal medicine, residency in physical medicine and rehab, research fellowship in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, board certified physician, practice in New York at NYU hospital, NYU Medical Center. This is where I did my medical training for roughly decade after finishing medical school. I also have a graduate degree in finance management from NYU. While I was doing my residency training, I realized that I wanted to find a way to have a broader impact on society as well as what we were working on in learning medicine. So, I started my career working initially with a biotechnology company at the time to help them get their drug with FDA through a regulatory approval process. The beginning of the process is called IND following a investigation new drug application, IND application. I actually visited FDA on their behalf, met with FDA back in the time when everything used to be in person. Built from there onward, joined Wall Street from working as a stock analyst. So I covered biotech companies as a stock analyst, and the weekend and holidays that were available, I worked to continue to practice the medicine at NYU as an attending physician, and then joined another bank and covered pharmaceutical stocks and worked covering six of the largest pharma companies that include Pfizer, Merck, Viacom, Selling Power, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb. From there, I moved to California. I worked for Genentech in corporate strategy. Genentech, at the time, and continues to be, one of the largest biotechnology companies. And from working at Genentech, I got my inspiration to start my own companies. So I founded two companies prior to finding starting Unicycive. All my companies are focused on aesthetic therapeutic area. Unicycive is focused on nephrology, treatment of kidney diseases, and we have two drugs in development. We have a lead drug that is pending approval from the US FDA in June of 2025 this year. And the second, I guess, finish phase 1 clinical trial in the UK. And we are in discussion with the agency to proceed with the next stage of clinical trial in the US. So that's a quick background. [00:04:14] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. That's incredible. Thank you for sharing your story. Yeah. So let's talk about your company now. You've become CEO of this company. You're developing these products that are going to change lives. What first made you realize that there was a gap that needed to be filled in the market for this? And then, what prompted you to go, "You know what? Hey, I think I can have the solution for this or I can have the answer to this." [00:04:38] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: The first question that you ask, understanding the unmet need in medicine, there are a lot of problems that you can address. So, to give you a framework, if I am thinking about a problem, I want to understand if a couple of things, and in order of priorities, these are: can I find a solution that with my resources-- resources is time, energy, and money-- can I create a product that will truly make it to the market? Number two is that I also feel that one can get very blindsided that "I have a solution," but not understand what other solutions exist in the market. So understanding the competitive landscape. If I create this drug, this device, this product, and it is going to take three to four years in the market to come to the market-- which, by the way, in medical word is a still very fast track because it takes much longer-- what will the competitive landscape look like for 5 years down the road? So that's the second part. And third is that what is the solution that I'm developing? Is it unique in terms of having a novel, either as a drug device or drug device combination, or as a patented drug, patented device, because in our industry, it's not really possible to scale up something until unless you have an IP or intellectual property protection. And then from there onward, the last thing is also, who's going to fund me, how I think about funding, not for next six months a year, but also a continuum of the product development. If I think about all these 4-5 problems, then you start to narrow it down. There are some problems that are very much worthy of exploration. For example, treatment of Alzheimer's, we all know it's a big unmet need, we all know there's a big market opportunity. But I realized that was something we couldn't do it with the products or the development candidates that I had seen. So, being able to define where is the end point and goal. Being able to understand, can I make an impact? And when I say I, I speak for myself, but each one of us, I always remind entrepreneurs, we each one of us have our own deck of cards. We have to play with our cards, we can't compare ourselves with somebody else, or we can compare some other cases study. So understanding more about what is so unique that I can bring to table that can I make a difference and then making a business around this where the thesis lies. Once you identify that, then there's a question about continuing to execute and keep changing your plan as you go along. [00:07:11] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love your framework for thinking through all of those things. And so of course you use that when you thought, "Hey, here's this issue. I could potentially have a solution," and you went through this process. And then can you tell us about your innovation now and how that is helping and how you expect it to help change all these wonderful lives? [00:07:33] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: So, so for treatment of kidney diseases, first of all, it has been one area of development that has not had that much of innovation. And, and I think that is where the initial part of the thesis was that focusing on nephrology of kidney diseases is not same as developing a drug for cancer treatment. Cancer treatment changes every six months a year. The standard of care continues to evolve. Is there an unmet need in cancer treatment? A hundred percent, but the part is that the pace of innovation is very rapid. Is it same in nephrology? It's getting there, but it's still the development of a new products in nephrology still is not at the same pace. So I thought there was something we could make a difference by a small company. The drug that I acquired from another company was a drug that had finished a clinical trial. So it had shown that the drug is safe. It had also shown some signal of it working in healthy volunteers. That's a phase one trial. And the innovation came from a car battery company that had figured out how to make a big, large size pill to make it smaller. And sometimes greatest innovation, greatest insight come from the fact that when I talk to the kidney doctors, the physicians who take care of these patients there with the treatment of kidney diseases, they said the problem for these patients are the patients have to take 12 to 15 pills per day. And this innovation allowed us to be able to make that number of pills go down from 13 to 12 or 15 to three pills per day, one pill with each meal. And then the regulatory pathway became a bit more clear that if I can show that our drug is similar to the drug that was in the market, maybe there was an opportunity to go through expedited pathway, which is what we did. And I acquired the drug in 2018, went to FDA right after acquiring the drug to expedite the pathway again, thinking about de risking the development pathway. And as I mentioned in 2025, we are expecting the approval. So that is the process about it. And that's the story behind the lead drug. [00:09:51] Lindsey Dinneen: Great. Excellent. So that is really exciting. And as you continue to go forward with this company and the innovations that you're creating, what is your ultimate goal or dream that you're really striving for? [00:10:06] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: So, the focus for Unicycive is building new novel treatment for kidney diseases. Our lead drug is expecting approval in June 2025. But we have a second drug in development, and we continue to think about what will be something that we as a small company can bring to market. There are other areas of unmet need in kidney treatment. But instead of doing too many things at the same time, we continue to think, "How do we grow our company? What will be the vision for the company three years down the road, five years down the road?" And what we want to continue doing is to develop the drug candidates, advance them. Right now, after the first drug we get through approval, it will be the second drug. There is a thought process behind it. One of the biggest challenges that I've seen for smaller companies and startups is that they end up in doing too many things at the same time, which is difficult to do, even for big companies. You know, big companies, they have a one product that is a marquee product, they launch that and then they develop other things. So, being able to stay focused is also key because you can have a lot of energy, you can have a lot of ideas, but you have to focus on which one you can do first. [00:11:22] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that is so true. It's such great advice, a good reminder. Yes, focus is so important. You know, honestly, that's probably one of the tricky things that startups in this particular field might struggle with is that focus. So I'm wondering what kind of advice do you have for say a brand new entrepreneur in the industry who has these great ideas, but you know, maybe has so many that they're a little too scattered. [00:11:52] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Right. So, I think you may start with 10 ideas but the framework I gave you that: can this idea in this given timeframe with my resources and the funds that I can raise, can it make a difference? So you start to narrow it down. You start with a big funnel, narrow it down. And then maybe you have two or three ideas. Instead of thinking to yourself that "No, I'm not going to tell my idea to anyone because somebody else can take it away," find people who will be willing to pressure test those ideas. Then you will have identified something, maybe one Idea that is worth the pursuit. So then you focus on that. So that's one part of how to triage it because we all have ideas, but those ideas may not be worth developing once you go and talk to the marketplace. And marketplace is your investors, the physicians, and the patients. I keep saying about these three stakeholders, because if physicians cannot prescribe what you are developing, then it's of no use. If patients don't necessarily benefit, then it's of no use. And if you cannot get insurance companies a reimbursement for that means the product will never get here. So it's a process, but nobody can come up with an idea. And there is no great idea. There are ideas that you have to, and then once you find that one idea that resonates with all the stakeholders, physicians are excited about it. If you talk to patients, and you want to do that early on, you don't want to develop an idea and then go, you know, that is the greatest idea but nobody really perceives it that way that except you and a couple of your friends and people who work with you. I don't mean in a bad way. I mean, that you want to be able to test this idea very quickly. So once you get that idea, once you identify what is that the company should be focused on, then the question about is actually building an execution plan. And the only advice I can give is that at any given day for a company, startup, especially whether you're a founder or you're a founding team member, the list of priorities is 50, 5, 0, or maybe 100. It takes time to figure out of those 50, which are the top three that are most important and then being able to focus on those three. You know, the reason I say that no one can work on 50 priorities at the same time. But we all can take two or three priorities and say, "These are the three things that I'm going to work on today. That is this week. Those are the things I'm going to do this month." And therefore you start to develop identifying priorities. The right ones takes time. Sometimes it is a fundraising. Sometimes it's a building a team. Sometimes it's a product development. Sometimes it's all three of them, but being able to allocate your time and energy and focus is a key. People say it's the question of money. I don't think it's a question of money. Money is one of the resources, but the biggest resource we all have is a time and energy and focus. In a company of our size, we are a publicly listed company, and we now have grown from where we used to be, and it's still small. Even today, there are a lot of things we choose not to do. We choose not to go to conferences. We choose not to publish papers. If something is a priority to us, we say, "This is the only thing we're going to focus on. This is the next three months, this is our main goal." And every team meeting I have, I always remind people, three priorities. More than three, way too many. One may not be enough. But because if you can't remind people, what is the priority for the company, then you will not succeed. It is a very challenging environment to think about a startup company or companies in general. And when you have too many priorities, you tend to lose focus on. By building priorities, having priorities, executing them. You create momentum, you create confidence. They create success and you keep climbing the ladder. But truly the biggest challenge for us in the beginning of the career is that identifying which are those three priorities that matter. And once you have had some experience, then the challenge is to keep those priorities and change them as you go along, right? As you go along, you have to continue to grow. For example, in the beginning, it may be the five people you have and that may be enough. But as where we are in the company, it's a question about growth of the organization, right size, not too many people, not too little, hiring enough people so we can continue to execute on our vision and the promises that we made to ourself and to our investors. [00:16:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Thank you for that advice. That was fantastic. And such a great way to narrow it down and help people understand how to narrow down so that they can actually focus and succeed before moving on. I love that. Thank you. So, you know, looking back over your life, and of course, you've had such an incredible career that has really taken you in a lot of different directions. Could 10 year old you have ever anticipated where you'd be today? [00:16:54] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: I don't think so. I think I think we all have a what I call a true north compass. What I did think at the 10 years of age, if I can go back, maybe 10 is too early but maybe 15 or 16 or 17, that hasn't changed. Let me tell you 2 things that I always felt most inspired and excited about. Number one was that I wanted to be in healthcare because, intellectually, I like biological sciences. I felt, "My gosh, what could I do with that if I could make a difference?" And number two was that I, from very early on, I wanted to be something which could help people directly. As you know, there are many ways you can help people, but being in medicine or healthcare, I felt there was a direct impact. Now, looking back after several decades, I feel that part of the influence was my dad. My dad is a physician, continues to see patients and do pro bono work. So that had a very lasting influence on me. That helped me to think about, okay, this is what I want to do. Then being trained as a physician, then going to work on Wall Street, then there was a question about understanding how the impact can be broadened, if you will. The way to think about what I do today versus what I did, say, as a physician, physicians see, say, 10 patients, maybe 12 patients if you're seeing an outpatient basis per day. And if you're in an ICU or ICU doctor, an ER doctor, you could see more number of patients, but then smaller time. And you multiply that impact that many patients, let's just say 10 patients per day, and you work at 300, 350 days, 360 days, 365 days, don't take any break, but that is that many patients a year. What we do today has a potential to impact hundreds and thousands and millions of patients and not just in the U S, globally. So from one vantage point is just magnifying the impact. And the other vantage point is doing what I would have done before. I still love sciences every day. My job is to not just talk about business, but also think about, "How do we fundamentally solve the problem?" And having had those experiences you know, it helps you to keep yourself grounded. One part, I know this wasn't your question, but one advice I can give people who are thinking about developing their careers as an entrepreneur, if you are a founder and CEO, especially think about your career or skill set as I spoke, a wheel, a circle. Every skill that you have, some of us start with more technical background, like me and MD. Then you have to develop their finance and business skills and the business development skills. So sometimes people say, "Well, you know, ABC went to grad school and they dropped out of grad school and they started a company." That's wonderful, but think about much longer beyond a two-year, three-year, five-year time horizon. And that's what helped me to think about my career. So I worked on the Wall Street, but that gave me a finance and understanding about how public companies are valued, not just by the company, but how stock analysts value the company, how investors value the company, what moves the stock, what did Genentech to understood. That gave me the chance to understand how a big biopharma company thinks about their product development. And at Genentech, in some interactions we have had, we were looking at the products from other smaller companies, either to collaborate with them or to acquire those products. So that's a different skill set. I went very early on, as I said, in my career, I went to FDA. So even though I'm not regulatory expert, but I understand how agencies think about the product approval so that helps you to make a more of a holistic viewpoint because the business has become more complex, and you cannot just have a only business degree and you say, "Well, I'm going to succeed." Some people have rounded that up by years and years of experiences. And then there is also innate desire to learn. I learned from not just doing the work I do every day, but my, my, you know, talked a lot about it. I read anytime I get I read books that are not related to medicine, that are not necessarily related to health care, because you have to understand how to grow a revolution. You have to understand leadership skills that are not necessarily taught in schools. So, you have to find a way to continue to refine yourself, because the only way you can create a great company is to become a better version of yourself. [00:21:31] Lindsey Dinneen: Thank you so much for talking about that and for sharing your advice. And I love that image of the wheel. It's a good reminder that sometimes life takes you on very interesting tangents, but sometimes they all do merge at some point. You've got this little sliver of this knowledge that you're working on, and then this experience, and then they start building and I really love that, that, that way of thinking about it and also remembering that It's very useful. So, so like even earlier, I was struck, you talked about how there was inspiration from car batteries, right? And so how interesting is that to go from, what you might expect within your industry, here's how to solve a problem. But then you guys went outside and said, how do other people solve problems? Like maybe we can borrow from that. And I think that's really cool. [00:22:21] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: And I also think that if you stop focusing on only in your industry, learn from anywhere. Some of the best learnings that I have personally, that felt inspirational to me, did not come from biotech companies. They come from tech companies, truly. When you think about the worst, most successful tech companies like Amazon, Apple. I can go on and on, but there are things that you can learn from them. There are things you can learn from the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. He talks about building Amazon and he talks about doing many experiments at a smaller scale that fail at Amazon in order for them to succeed at a few that really work. And this is where I was saying that culling the ideas, you may start with 10 ideas, but no one can develop 10 ideas, no one. And it's not because of money. People say, "Well, that if I had money." There have been numerous examples where companies have been funded with lots of money and the companies fail. Part of the problem is that when you get too much money, I think you may not realize that you still have to deliver. Because focus and execution takes really knowing what the target is, and then hitting the target and not one time and time again. Targets may change, but the companies cannot focus in 20 different things. In the beginning, you have to start with a very key thesis. [00:23:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, so learning from other industries, and that actually kind of also brings up a thought. So as you've gone along in your career and you've had many different iterations of who you are and what you bring to the world, now, are there any moments that really stand out to you as affirming, "Yes, I am in the right place at the right time?" [00:24:04] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Yeah, that's a very good question. And I have had a chance to think about it every now and then. So there are there, there are certain observations I'll make. You know, people always say, " What will be your dream job?" And I think the dream job for someone is the job that which you will do any given day, and you will feel a joy that you're doing it and you're not doing for remuneration. You're not doing because you're going to get paid. And we all have those different moments in time. People talk about "flow" where the time stops because you're doing something so deeply engaging that you lost track of time. You forgot where you are. You're not feeling tired. For me building of this company and the team that we have assembled at Unicycive is that flow. Any day that I'm not traveling, I am in my office. I don't work from home. I am every single day in my office. And sure we have a small team, but when we work with the team, these are motivated, driven people with decades of experiences. We feel that we are in a common mission, like we are solving the world's greatest problem. And I know that may be exaggeration, but that's how it feels. And being with them in a room and thinking about a complex problem-- and not just thinking of a problem like how big companies think about it-- but thinking of the problem in a scientific way, but delivering it a solution that only a small company can do that to me is a joy. Number two part is that as I've gone further on my career, I, I am a mentor to a number of startups from Stanford and UCSF, and many Stanford companies, many of them come with a very different problem than purely a biotech company. Since the pro bono work, I do this because I find by telling other people from their problem, I get to reflect on my own problem, and I do that on every quarter. There's one or two companies and I've been really privileged. I feel one of the greatest joys to meet with these great CEOs and Stanford has been a great collaborator. They have a program called Start X in which they have these companies that are participating in a accelerator program. And Stanford's accelerator is different and unique that they don't take any equity. They provide you the opportunity for mentorship. I was part of that program many years ago. So I meet with the CEOs and many of these CEOs will come very different problem. As an example, there is a company that's focused on artificial intelligence using interaction between a physician or healthcare provider and patient, and being able to use AI to streamline that interaction. That is a point that I saw of 10 years of clinical practice, how that communication is broken, literally is broken. Patients go to doctors, not because doctors are the world's greatest knowledge source, but patients at the end of day, they need someone to help them feel better, help them understand the problem that the physician can solve it. What ended up in being in today's healthcare system in the U. S. is that doctors have become mechanical and not because doctors are bad, because we are given these many things to document these many things to chart. If you talk to a physician, a primary care physician, many times the physician is sitting behind the computer screen. Those bedside manners are gone, like literally they are not there until you go into concierge medicine because the physician has to fill up this chart. I practice medicine. So understanding how this company and this CEO, this entrepreneur is trying to solve that problem, I lean back to the years of clinical practice. Then I lean back to the building the company. They're prioritizing it, having three priorities, having five priorities, and then being able to understand. And every company has some things which are similar, growth of your product development, continuing to advance the company, continuing to tell the story, attracting the right team members. It just gets magnified at a broader level. But the problems start similar, very similar. You know, think about when we talk about tech companies, Apple, the first thing they had to do, develop a product, then build a team, then sell the product, tell the, sell the vision, you know, and then continue to raise money. And that part is seems sometime very lonely. It also seems that I am uniquely burdened with these problems. And I always remind people, "You know, as much as you would like to think that you are unique. I assure you, it is not a problem that we are gifted with. We all have to face the same set of problems, sometimes more, sometimes less." So then you start to take them less personally. You start to say, "Okay, I'm not the first one to face this problem. These problems have happened to people like me before and they will overcome. How can I do it?" Then you'd become safe, a solution based thinking versus a place where you get overwhelmed with the problem because problems exist. And if anyone is listening to this podcast and if they've developed a started a company, I can assure you the problems come with a flood. They are not going to end ever. So it is disappointing. Sometime it feels that, "Oh my gosh, it is me versus the world," but it is not so. If you have good set of mentors, people who are not directly involved in day to day in your business, there are people who can help you think through it. And that is something that I find a great joy in talking to these CEOs, being able to help them understand the problem. And I say, you know, a couple of hours a month, but then when I go back to my own work, one that I realized this was the same problem I faced a few years ago. Two, it's a similar version of the problem I face at a slightly larger scale today. And three, being able to step out of from your own narrow zone, it gives you perspective. Then what I said to you about that problems are not, these are not personal problems. These are the problems we all face developing a product. It doesn't matter whether you healthcare. People tell me health care or product development is really hard. You talk to my colleagues, our CEOs who are running tech companies. Products in development and tech companies may seem easier, but to create a great product that truly solves customers problem, it's not easy. [00:30:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, and well, I love that mentorship and sort of teaching and guiding, giving advice to the next generation is something is of a core value of yours and something you really care about. And it actually is a great segue into my next question, which is just pivoting the conversation for fun, imagine that you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be within your industry, what you're doing right now, but it doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach? [00:31:02] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: I think as much as we all feel that entrepreneurship is an external game, I think it's a lot of internal mindset, being able to understand yourself better. Being able to understand who you are, what are your true core values, what really drives you. It takes time and it requires a continuous interrogation, asking yourself, "Is this really what I enjoy?" Some of us feel it's a glamour that we feel like we want to be CEO. Some of us would be better off as a CTO, Chief Technology Officer. Some of us would not want to do startups. It's not for everybody. And it's okay because you can work in a bigger company and can be, you know, people talk about entrepreneurial pursued within a large organization. Maybe that's what for you. But being able to understand yourself, it's a very important part. And I think unfortunately, formal education does not help us no matter what degrees and which schools. And it really doesn't matter whether you a science degree, MD, PhD, or your business school degree like MBA, we're all very uniquely different, and we have different values. What one person sees inspired by, for somebody else, it may be a nightmare, you know. It's a thing that people think that startups are so much fun. I read a joke. It says, "People leave 9 to 5 job to work from 5 to 9, which is 5 a. m. to 9 p. m." So I think that's because this is some truth to it. And I've said to people again and again that if making money is your objective, please don't go as to run a startup. It is probably the worst way to think about pursuing the financial part. You do something because you have a faith and belief in something. And it doesn't have to be the faith about changing humanity. It's about something that you have a unique skill set or unique product idea that you believe you can bring to the marketplace. The biggest focus we all can have is making an impact. If I can serve a large number of patients, I can serve a large physician, I will have a product that will make money, therefore, that will make money for enterprise that will make money for investors. And therefore, as a company, we will make money. It's a very simple truth, but we like to make it complicated. I really mean it. The more I got to understand this part of the process better, which goes back to the basic thing that I said to you, if you said that you have a master class, the one thing I will say to you, it's spend time to understand yourself. And it's okay to realize that what I thought I like, I don't like it. The part that I talked to you about flow, it takes efforts. I've had many careers, but when I work in my company, the time can stop for four or five hours, literally we can be working on something. And I have a team and it's not just me alone. I have a team that when we think about a problem, these are people who have spent three decades in working in different companies, large, small, many size companies, we could work cohesively, collectively, think about a problem. And that to me, it's a joy. For me, that is a creation, right? You know, we're thinking about the problem, which may be a design of a clinical trial, because we have to think we have to use brains. And I always say, "God gave us a gift, which is a neuron. So use it, let's use them." And challenge yourself, right? And the challenge in a good way, not be a condescending ending jerk and say "No, how could you do it?" I try to say to people, "Look, I understand this is how it is done, but I want to do two things. Number one, please believe me that we can do better, faster, cheaper. And number two, I promise you that whatever I'm telling you, I'm not going to tell you and walk out of the conference room. I will work hand to hand." We call it a hand to hand combat is essentially that I'm not just telling you I'm going to work with you. I want to find the solution, but we can't do that thing that are you used to. Every trial, people tell me it's going to take 18 months, 12 months, it's going to cost as much. We shrink that thing timeline cost by not 10, 20%. We talking 50%. And these are people have done this before. So, so I need the courage to be honest and say, "No, we can't do it. We have to do it faster, better, cheaper, but how?" And then asking them. So, I say, "It's okay that we walk away and we don't have a clue. It's okay. Today's Thursday. Let's come back. Take three days to think about it." But the reason is that because when you ask yourself from a place that I can't do it, the mind is start to find solution versus when you say, no, I can't do it. Because in that case, it's a subconscious mind that keeps on giving you 15 reasons why you can't do it. People talk about growth mindset. I've always said to people, "We may not be able to do this thing today, but the understanding that with a little bit of help, a little bit of patience, a little bit of it, making ourself better, we can become that company, we can become that organization." And that really requires challenging ourself. And that's where I went back to. I want to go back to this question you asked earlier. People talk a lot about entrepreneurship as if it is some very specific skill set. I think because if you know yourself, you know what is your true zone is, then you want to surround yourself places that you are either not good at, or you don't enjoy doing it, right? In the beginning, it is just you and a vast amount of problems to face. Then you start to build your team. Then you start to see yourself, "You know, maybe Bob can do this work. I really, I'm not that good at it. I don't like doing it." Then you start to rely and surround yourself with not same skill set, but the people who are complementary skill set. And that's how you build a team. That's the foundation of team. Then you build trust and you say to Bob, "Whatever you do, it's not your fault. I'm here to protect you." You don't point fingers at each other. We always remind the example of Navy SEAL. You know, I've never worked in the US Army. I was not an Army veteran, but the ethos that Navy SEAL uses where the team wins, I always tell people we are a winning team. We are not looking for MVPs, you know, because the teams win. Teams create products, teams create value. Individual glories is not useful and this is something you have to keep reminding us that we keep drilling it down and say " No, it's not Bob. It's not John. It's not James. It's us. It's as a team." Again, as you grow through the company stages, your skill set has to continue to evolve and people always say, "Well, how do you lead a team?" The first thing that I always said, "Every single person in my team, you are a leader. Why? You wake up in the morning, brush your teeth. You're leading yourself." Really! Like, what do you do with your day? If you happen to be a parent or partner, a spouse or somebody, you have people you influence around yourself, right? So instead of worrying about, "Oh, you know, I want to lead a company." First, you have to lead yourself and you have to lead with courage. It's starting a company, building a company, right? Yeah. No matter what the media tells you, it is hard. It's hard to develop a product. It's hard because the challenges are not one or two. There are many. Being able to drill down, saying "These are the three things I'll focus on. These are the only things that matter." And then if something new comes up, you have to face that challenge and put the third in your list. It comes in a different page. You know, I use this basic exercise. I have a notebook, a physical notebook and not electronic one, and a piece of paper. What are the top three priorities? And then the other part is that I've asked people to do this exercise when startup companies, CEOs come and tell me all their problems, all the things they want to do. I said, "Humor me if you will. This is the end of the year. And let's say today is we are in 2025. What would you like to tell yourself a year from now? If everything happened the best you could imagine, how many customers, how many products, what will be the stage of product, who would have funded you? Who are the people behind you?" And I asked him to write in a whiteboard. And I say, imagine, no, this is the five thing. If they write 25 things, I say, "No, this is down to five things. What are those five things you would like?" And again, everything has just gone and you can't believe you're sitting there. What will it take? Is it this? And then you start to have a goalpost, right? It's a target. Then you work backward. [00:39:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great. That is such great advice. So thank you, first of all, for sharing, but I think in general, your masterclass would be so much-- you'd have to have a full day or more. That's great though. I love that. How would you wish to be remembered after you leave this world? [00:39:57] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: That's a very good question. That's one that I ask myself every day. The most important thing for me is to be who I am to make a difference for people who are around me. For me, my family is very important. I have kids and I always think about it. What will my children remember? Then it comes down to people who work with me. We want to give an experience to people. I've had people who have worked for I keep saying it two or three decades. My true wish is that I always say for whatever time they work at Unicycive, I want them to be remembering this is the best time they work for a company and that is the best hope we can do it. Because as a entrepreneur, if I can make our company the best experience, best environment, then that creates the best products. And a company like us, we realize that we are going to face challenges and it's not a question of this, the question is how many challenges. The question is not going to be, "Will the challenge defeat us?" The question is, "How do we overcome the challenges?" So it's about growth mindset, having a very distinct, clear vision and empowering people. And last thing is that what we do in healthcare affects millions of people people. Our drug is not going to be just in the U. S. We have partnerships outside U. S. We think about patients in China, South Korea, Southeast Asia. We are talking to companies in Europe. It's an opportunity to make a difference globally. And that is what keeps us going. That's what, you know, when that's when I talk with flow, that is what makes you want to work, whether it's a weekend or whether it's a late evening. And I think that is something which we all need to do to find something that is meaningful. And meaning means different things to different people in different phases of life. So it doesn't have to be, you know, I tell even my own team member, " Unicycive does not have to be the purpose of your life, but let me help you to manifest your best version so you can work well, because you are working here, you are spending your time, might as well make it meaningful for you and for the company." So finding that balance is key and it's a constant challenge. I never take anything for granted. It's a constant to my own team members. How can we make it better? You know, people always say the company grows and we started with the company. We went to IPO with one person. That was just me as an employee, which is not a common thing. I frankly don't know any other company that I've ever seen that went to a straight IPO with one employee. But that wasn't about me. It was about building the company, building the team. Today, we have 25 or so more, but it's still a small team. And people always ask me, "How do we go from 25 to 50 and it still remain the same." I said "Exactly how we became 5 to 10 to 15, 15 to 20." Because if you keep the culture same, focus same, and you remind people that it's not about who we are individually, but it's what we could be collectively. And you have it going and you know, something you're passionate about, you will give all that you got and then some more or else there is not worth fighting for because life is hard and building a product developing a technology or running a company is hard. So, either you are a full believer or else you can't do it. I mean, if you can do it, it's going to be miserable on both front. You want to do a good job and you will find it very difficult. So. [00:43:24] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. Excellent. Well, and then final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it? [00:43:36] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: I think when you look back on the challenges that you once thought were unsurmountable, and then you say to yourself, "Huh, that was just a curve in the road, not a roadblock." Then you start to smile because of not because how smart you are, but how much together a team can accomplish. And you start to find, if you're working in a company setting, you start to feel that people start to feel empowered. My team says that you did it. I said, "No, we did it. I just showed you a judicious path, but you did it. I didn't do it. All I said to you is to change your framework." Because it's a framework. It's a mindset. And I keep saying about mindset because if you come with the idea that " No, I only, I need this much money, this much time, these many resources," you'll find you the subconscious mind keeps on validating those challenges. But if you say, "No, people like us have done it before I can do it, we can do it." And give them the time and space and say, "Look, you don't have to have an answer right now, but please go back and just think about it." Then they come back with the answer and they themselves surprised. But it truly requires a authenticity, a vulnerability, and being absolutely willing to fall on your face and get up and just fight again. And that's part people don't realize. People think about that every company is a smooth road up, but the companies go through the cycle. It's not when you're going up, it's what happens when you fall down. Can you pick yourself up? And it's not just with your team, but with your investors too. You know, we thought that we're going to file an NDA in 2020. You know, 2024, we had planned for everything and the whole thing was there, but we ended up in having to run an additional trial and then you have to communicate with integrity through transparency. This is what happened. This is what is there, but we can accomplish that. So then that all of all that helps you to look back a smile, laugh and say, "Okay, I accomplished that. We can do the next one." And that keeps the growth happening. And at the end of the day, we are not happy because we accomplished small things by doing small effort. Most of us as human beings want to be challenged in the right way and we feel joy in doing hard things that take a lot of efforts and once seemed just impossible to do it. And the question is, can you do it with your entire team, not just personally? And that's what inspires people. We want to be that company that people want to work for not because they need a job, not because we can take care of their 401k. I mean, those are a wonderful thing and I'm blessed that we can do all of that, because once upon a time, we didn't have any of that. So I don't take it for granted, it is something. But the fact is that what was the mission hasn't changed ever. And you know, that that is something which is worth pursuing it. And I think if people start to see that they can accomplish that, these challenges are not personal, that they are bound to come. And then they have a support group, you know, we all need somebody other than ourselves and people whom we are surrounded with somebody to hold our hand and say no, you fell down, but it's okay. You can get up. I think it's that support system, right? The more you can have it, the more different types of people you can relate to and call them friends, mentors, that helps. And I have tons and tons of them because my gosh, I mean, there are days seems like, how would I ever get out of this? As much as you may think that I have all the source of inspiration, but then if somebody else holds your hand, they say, no, you can do it. That is what gets you going to the next step. [00:47:25] Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Well, goodness, this has been an amazing conversation, just packed full of incredible, helpful advice, and just very practical down to earth sharing. So thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate everything you're doing to, to make an impact. So thanks again for your time. [00:47:44] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Thank you very much. Thank you for hosting me and thank you for your time and interest. Really appreciate it. [00:47:49] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. We are so honored to be making a donation on your behalf today to Feeding America, which works to end hunger in the United States by partnering with food banks, food pantries, and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger. And also they advocate for policies that create long term solutions to hunger. So thank you so much for choosing that charity to support, and we just wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. And thank you also to our listeners for tuning in. And if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time. [00:48:31] Ben Trombold: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.
Josh Monday Christian and Conspiracy Podcast Ep. 257If you want to support the ministry: patreon.com/JoshMondayChristianandConspiracyPodcastJoin the Patreon here: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/Joshmonday_podcastIf you want to donate to the Ministry or Buy the Mug Here is our CashAPP:https://cash.app/$JoshmondaymusicNew affiliate: https://wsteif.com/ Sign up for Gold and Silver 7Kmetals: https://www.cocsilver.com/Flat Earth Books by Sakal Publishing Affiliate Link: https://booksonline.club/booksonlinecYoutube: @joshmondaymusicandpodcast Tips for the show to Support our Ministry: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/joshmondayCoffee Mug Is Available email me your mailing address Joshmonday@rocketmail.com Please subscribe to our Spotify and You Tube Channel Joshmondaymusic and Podcast and help us grow so we can keep on spreading the good news.To all of our current and future subscribers thank you for your time, we appreciate you. Please do us a favor subscribe to our You Tube Channel, hit that bell, share, like and comment below on our You tube. Please leave us a 5-Star review on Apple and Spotify.Check out my new show Sunday Service and Wednesday Brought to you by Cult of Conspiracy Podcast. On Cult of Conspiracy Spotify, Patreon and Apple Podcast Channel.Join the study as I go deep into the Bible. Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Romans 10:17.Mark Gober is the author of the “Upside Down” series of seven books—spanning the topics of consciousness, politics, economics, UFOs, medicine, cosmology, and more. His first book, “An End to Upside Down Thinking” (2018), won the IPPY award for best science book of the year and was endorsed by researchers with affiliations at Harvard, Princeton, UVA, and UCSF (among others). He then wrote “An End to Upside Down Living” (2020), “An End to Upside Down Liberty” (2021), “An End to Upside Down Contact” (2022), “An End to the Upside Down Reset” (2023), “An End to Upside Down Medicine” (2023); and “An End to the Upside Down Cosmos” (2024). Mark is also the host of the 8-episode podcast series “Where Is My Mind?”, released in 2019, which explores the scientific evidence for telepathy, the afterlife, and more. Additionally, since 2019, he has served on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Previously, Mark was a partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and worked as an investment banking analyst with UBS in New York. He has been named one of IAM's Strategy 300: The World's Leading Intellectual Property Strategists. Mark graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, where he wrote an award-winning thesis on Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize–winning “Prospect Theory” and was elected a captain of Princeton's Division I tennis team.Mark Gobers Website: Mark Gober - Speaker, Author, Podcast HostBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/josh-monday-christian-and-conspiracy-podcast--6611118/support.
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Dr. Adiaha Spinks-Franklin provides a brief overview of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40608]
As part of the 2025 Developmental Disabilities Conference, Dr. Adiaha Spinks-Franklin provides a brief overview of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Series: "Developmental Disabilities Update" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40608]
Distraction is making you anxious and sleepless. Here's how to fix it. Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D. is the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry, and Founder & Executive Director of Neuroscape at UCSF. He co-authored the 2016 book “The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World”. In this episode we talk about: The impact of multitasking on our attention, relationships, emotions, anxiety, and memory The difference between top-down and bottom-up attention What it means to have cognitive control—and some practical tools for restoring your own cognitive control. Controversial technologies that could eventually help us have a stronger brain The impact of music and rhythm on the mind And how to use technology for your brain's benefit Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Send us a textIn this episode of At The Bench, Drs. Misty Good and Betsy Crouch speak with Dr. Stephanie Gaw, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UCSF, about her path to becoming a physician-scientist and her translational research on placental infections. Dr. Gaw shares how early lab experiences, time in the Peace Corps, and a pivot from infectious disease to OB-GYN shaped her focus on maternal immunity and global health.The conversation covers Dr. Gaw's work on sepsis in pregnancy, COVID-19 and RSV vaccine responses, and congenital infections like syphilis. She also discusses her approach to building and managing a large placental biorepository, and the importance of thoughtful sample collection for reliable research outcomes. The episode includes practical insights on balancing clinical duties with research, the benefits of peer mentorship, and how clinical observations can drive lab-based investigation.This discussion offers a clear look into the realities and rewards of bridging bedside observations with bench research in maternal-fetal medicine. It's a valuable listen for early-career physician-scientists and anyone interested in the complexities of immunology, placental biology, and perinatal infection.As always, feel free to send us questions, comments, or suggestions to our email: nicupodcast@gmail.com. You can also contact the show through Instagram or Twitter, @nicupodcast. Or contact Ben and Daphna directly via their Twitter profiles: @drnicu and @doctordaphnamd. The papers discussed in today's episode are listed and timestamped on the webpage linked below. Enjoy!
Interested in hand injuries? What does a hand surgeon treat? Listen to our latest podcast as we sit down with Dr. Lauren Shapiro of the UCSF Department of Orthopedic Surgery.
What does it really mean to “listen to your body”? In this episode, I talk with Beatriz (Béa) Victoria Albina, a UCSF-trained Family Nurse Practitioner, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and Master Certified Somatic Life Coach. We explore the world of somatics - the study and practice of embodied awareness. Béa unpacks what somatics truly means, how our nervous systems hold onto old patterns, and why building a sense of safety in the body is essential for real change. We discuss practical tools for grounding, regulating emotions, and cultivating agency in the face of everyday stressors. Get more information and full show notes here: https://jackiedecrinis.com/somatics-bea-albina/
New research from UC San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center suggests that a decline in one region of the brain can cause other regions to “step in to help” – unlocking surprising capacities like deeper empathy or creativity. We talk to two UCSF doctors about why this has implications for any neurodegenerative disorder, including dementia. They join us to share their dementia-related discoveries. Their new book is “Mysteries of the Social Brain.” Guests: Dr. Bruce Miller, A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor in Neurology, UCSF; Director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center; founding director of the Global Brain Health Institute Dr. Virginia Sturm, professor in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
While the global health community wrenches its clothes and gnashes its teeth in Switzerland at the 78th World Health Assembly, Dr Mike Reid, Associate Director of the Center for Global Health Diplomacy, UCSF joins Ben in an entertaining and wide ranging exploration of a positive, forward-looking agenda for global health. Topics include global health security, one health, mis- and disinformation in the doctor-patient relationship, health technology and specific future uses and pitfalls of AI to improve access to healthcare in developing countries. Mike offers a promise of a future episode on channelling philanthropic dollars into sovereign wealth funds for global health investments. And finally they reflect on their upbringing in the UK with its “free at the point of delivery” National Health Service, and argue over which of the modern Cambridge University Colleges they went to most resembles a multi-story car park. 00:00 Introduction and Overview 00:09 World Health Assembly Insights 01:18 Guest Introduction: Dr. Mike Reed 03:40 Mike Reid's Background and Career 05:58 Global Health Security and Solidarity 11:28 The One Health Agenda 14:12 Artificial Intelligence in Global Health 37:26 Navigating Healthcare Systems 43:48 Closing Remarks and Future Topics Mike's Substack: https://reimaginingglobalhealth.substack.com/
If you’re worried about memory loss or have a family history of Alzheimer’s, this episode is a must-listen. Angela sits down with world-renowned neurologist and author Dr. Dale Bredesen to unpack the groundbreaking science behind Alzheimer’s prevention and reversal—even if you carry the APOE4 gene. With over 30 years of research, Dr. Bredesen shares how to optimise your brain health through metabolic flexibility, inflammation control, and personalised interventions. In this powerful and deeply personal episode, Angela also opens up about her own genetic risk and experience caring for her mum with Alzheimer’s. They explore why cognitive decline is not inevitable and how Dr. Bredesen’s new book, The Ageless Brain, is putting the power back into your hands. Whether you're 35 or 75, the steps to preserve your cognition start now—and the tools have never been more accessible. KEY TAKEAWAYS: Alzheimer’s Is Preventable and Reversible: Dr. Bredesen explains how addressing root causes like inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and toxicity can stop and even reverse cognitive decline. Perimenopause and Brain Fog: Oestrogen loss affects brain energy metabolism, making perimenopausal women more vulnerable to cognitive decline. Your Brain Runs on Supply & Demand: Cognitive health depends on supporting your brain’s high energy needs while reducing inflammatory load and toxic exposure. Check Your Cognitive Biomarkers Early: Blood markers like P-Tau217, GFAP, and A-beta42 can reveal risk decades before symptoms appear. Lifestyle = Medicine: Sleep quality, insulin sensitivity, resistance training, brain stimulation, and even stress reduction all play a critical role. GLP-1s and Alzheimer’s Risk: While popular for weight loss, these drugs may negatively impact cognition in some people—especially APOE4 homozygotes. TIMESTAMPS AND KEY TOPICS:0:00 – Introduction 6:48 – Pathogens, toxins, and the real cause of Alzheimer’s 13:32 – Menopause, oestrogen, and female brain vulnerability 24:05 – Judy’s story: reversing cognitive decline for 13+ years 32:18 – Most common risky behaviours for brain degeneration 42:21 – Best exercises for insulin sensitivity and cognition 51:10 – Supplements that protect brain structure & function 54:22 – How to use The Ageless Brain as a practical guide 58:45 – Final thoughts + where to learn more from Dr. Bredesen VALUABLE RESOURCES Click here for discounts on all the products I personally use and recommend A BIG thank you to our sponsors who make the show possible: Get 20% off the Creatine I love at trycreate.co/ANGELA20, and use code ANGELA20 to save 20% on your firsts order. Brain Boost: Try Neuro Regenerate at lvluphealth.com/angela and use code ANGELA15 to save 15% ABOUT THE GUEST Dale Bredesen, M.D. is an expert in the mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. He is a graduate of Caltech, and received his MD from Duke University Medical Center. His career has included serving as Chief Resident in Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and served as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow. His faculty position included working at UCSF, UCLA, and the University of California, San Diego. He was the director of the Program on Aging at the Burnham Institute. He was the founding President and CEO of the Buck Institute. He has developed a new therapeutic approach to treating Alzheimer's disease. He is the author of The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline. Dr Dale Bredesen’s latest book: The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime - https://amzn.eu/d/gdrjKQm https://www.apollohealthco.com/ https://www.instagram.com/drdalebredesen/ https://www.facebook.com/drdalebredesen/ ABOUT THE HOST Angela Foster is an award winning Nutritionist, Health & Performance Coach, Speaker and Host of the High Performance Health podcast. A former Corporate lawyer turned industry leader in biohacking and health optimisation for women, Angela has been featured in various media including Huff Post, Runners world, The Health Optimisation Summit, BrainTap, The Women’s Biohacking Conference, Livestrong & Natural Health Magazine. Angela is the creator of BioSyncing®️ a blueprint for ambitious entrepreneurial women to biohack their health so they can 10X how they show up in their business and their family without burning out. The High Performance Health Podcast is a top rated global podcast. Each week, Angela brings you a new insight, biohack or high performance habit to help you unlock optimal health, longevity and higher performance. Hit the follow button to make sure you get notified each time Angela releases a new episode. CONTACT DETAILS Instagram Facebook LinkedIn Affiliate Disclaimer: Note this description contains affiliate links that allow you to find the items mentioned in this video and support the channel at no cost to you. While this channel may earn minimal sums when the viewer uses the links, the viewer is under no obligation to use these links. Thank you for supporting the show! Disclaimer: The High Performance Health Podcast is for general information purposes only and do not constitute the practice of professional or coaching advice and no client relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast, or materials linked from this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for medical or other professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should seek the assistance of their medical doctor or other health care professional for before taking any steps to implement any of the items discussed in this podcast. This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/
View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter's Weekly Newsletter Susan Desmond-Hellmann is a physician and scientist whose remarkable career has spanned clinical medicine, oncology, biotech innovation, and global health leadership. In this episode, Susan shares insights from her journey training in internal medicine during the early AIDS crisis, treating HIV-related cancers in Uganda, and developing groundbreaking cancer therapies like Herceptin and Avastin. She reflects on her leadership roles at UCSF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offering lessons on guiding large-scale health initiatives, navigating uncertainty, and fostering scientific innovation. The conversation explores the promise of precision medicine, the integration of patient care and policy, and the evolving role of artificial intelligence in transforming diagnostics, drug development, and global access to care. We discuss: Susan's medical training, the start of the AIDS epidemic, and the transformative experiences that shaped her career [3:00]; Susan's experience working on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Uganda [12:30]; Susan's time working in general oncology and her transition to biotech where she helped develop taxol—a top-selling cancer drug [26:30]; Genentech's origins, and its groundbreaking use of recombinant DNA to develop biologic drugs [33:45]; Susan's move to Genentech, and her pivotal role in the development and success of Herceptin as a groundbreaking therapy in targeted oncology [44:00]; The rise of antibody-based cancer therapies: the development of Rituxan and Avastin [52:15]; The step-by-step drug development process and the scientific and strategic challenges involved [1:01:30]; The ethical and economic controversy surrounding Avastin's high cost and limited survival benefit [1:12:30]; Susan's tenure as chancellor at UCSF: leading during a financially strained period, and her strategic approach to fundraising and institutional development [1:14:45]; What Susan learned as CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: strategic processes and decision-making frameworks [1:26:00]; Susan's philosophy of leadership and how she sought to build an empowering, values-driven culture at the Gates Foundation [1:35:15]; The erosion of public trust in science during COVID, the communication failures around controversial treatments like ivermectin, and the need for better public health engagement and transparency [1:39:30]; The role of AI in transforming medicine: from drug development to cancer detection and beyond [1:53:00]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube
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