Hanna Laikin (00:03)
you have a unique perspective and so much of what I research and talk about and work in is the intersection of AI. How do we use AI in the most important industries and healthcare is one of them.
I'd love to start with an introduction of how you got to where you are today and some of those moments in the beginning that triggered this thought process for you.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (00:25)
Sure, absolutely. for having me join you. big fan of the hustle, think entrepreneurship is the way to go. And I didn't start there. grew up in Indiana. fortunate enough to be nominated to go to West Point. I graduated from there as a helicopter pilot back when the world was a much safer place. served
a few years as a helicopter pilot went to Harvard to get my MBA. And then I found short-staffed at Bain & Company, but at Anthem, Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Indianapolis, which you would never think of a Blue Cross and Blue Shield company or a health insurance company as a hotbed of entrepreneurship. But within the first two years there, we had started six companies and
the CEO and another friend of mine, Mark Lubbers said, do you want to run one of them? And I was, I guess, what was I? 30, 31, 32. I'm like, sure, I'd love to. It was a trial by fire. mean, up to that point, the greatest entrepreneurial activity I had was creating and raising children. So there are some parallels there. it was after that experience that figured out that
Hanna Laikin (01:18)
well.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (01:32)
my particular skill set, is kind of taking things at the beginning and making them work. And then once they work, handing them off to someone, that's where my skills lie. And it's hard to go back once you've kind of done that, the energy and the enthusiasm of changing something I know you can relate to in a lot of your podcast guests. It's unlike
anything else and I really can't see myself working in a super regimented corporate environment
Hanna Laikin (02:05)
Definitely, I mean, like you said, once you start and you scratch that itch, you can't go back to this nine to five, but the nine to five bleeds into 24 seven, but it's more exciting that way anyways, because you get to integrate your interests and your business and then the ideas you have compound because your network is an extension of who you are and the people around you and those experts and you get to continuously learn rather than shut off and.
Go home. Balance is a hard thing for me, but I ⁓ think it's more impactful this way when you continue that conversation.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (02:34)
Yes, yes. Yes.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with any research in this regard, but I would bet most entrepreneurs are type A personalities, not not type B. Although one of the things I think I learned early on in it, I'd love to talk to you about. The entrepreneurship entrepreneurship I've seen in health care, but I think. A good entrepreneur and innovator has to have a steadying force alongside of them as well, because there's too many.
whether that's a partner or a husband or a wife or a partner, you have to have somebody that kind of keeps you grounded because it really is easy to lose balance in the middle of all that. I think I got the sense of that on the break I took from health care. think I had mentioned I came back after grad school and I had a strategy at Anthem. And then we...
started a merchant bank that invested in healthcare related companies. And I saw a lot of burnout. I saw a lot of people who had great ideas, but didn't either lack the stamina or their skill set might've been a little bit different from what their business ended up being. you can't be a cost oriented accountant and run.
Hanna Laikin (03:34)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (03:49)
A retail oriented brand strategy company. just, you have to be able to relate to a customer in a different way. I'm sure someone will take issue with that statement, but it was after we sold the, merchant bank, we grew that to about a half a billion dollars. So the merchant bank, I bought a motorcycle road from Indiana out to California. And, I picked up the phone and called space X and said, Hey, I, think I understand some issues you're having.
with sales. The next thing I know, I'm on a plane to Germany selling rockets with, you know, Ilan and Gwynne Shotwell and the team. That cemented, if I ever thought about going back to, you know, everyday corporate world, that killed that because first week on the job, we're in a meeting and I can't remember the specific nature of the meeting, but
Hanna Laikin (04:28)
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (04:36)
One of the engineers with Elon said, what are we going to blow up this week? Well, if you're an engineer, you try to avoid things blowing up. But what I think I learned at SpaceX was that their particular culture driven by Elon and Gwynne Shotwell is all about testing at the margin because you'll learn a lot faster. And I realized you can't really do that.
Hanna Laikin (04:56)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (04:58)
You can't really do that in healthcare when a mistake might kill somebody, but you can do things at the margin that accelerate healthcare. And that's really what I focused the bulk of my career on.
Hanna Laikin (05:07)
I'm
So I read Elon's, I don't know, it wasn't an autobiography, but I just finished that book about his life and his mindset. And I think that's really interesting to have as one of your first big pivotal moments in thinking like that. Like you said, thinking fast, failing forward is a theme that I've heard from many people. And he often thinks on timelines that a typical person wouldn't even comprehend.
And did you take any other big impactful moments from that besides the ability to fail, tolerating failure? Were there things that you now use that you learned at that time at SpaceX that have been pivotal to your career?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (05:40)
Yes.
Yeah, I think two things that stand out in addition to that kind of fundamental story. One is if somebody tells you it can't be done, that usually means it's an opportunity to be done. And the example was the reusable rocket booster. I I was with the company early in its trajectory. I think we'd landed.
Hanna Laikin (06:05)
Mmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (06:14)
Four launches when I joined and we assembled a launch manifest, list of launchings of 52 launches. And it was really all on the promise of two things, Falcon Heavy, which is the large rocket and eventually Starship. But then second was the reusable booster. And everybody's like, why would you do that? Just dump it in the ocean, right? But it's such a
a game changer. went from the Arian spots, which is the French launch company charging $100 million for one satellite to SpaceX being able to launch two and up to four payloads on one launch vehicle and then turn around and use the booster again. We couldn't do it at 24 hours at the outset, but they can do that very quickly now. So if someone tells you it can't be done, it usually means
It can and it's an opportunity. And then the second thing was kind of a derivative of that. was if one person's cost is always another person's asset. And so that's really what I've applied in healthcare. And we were talking about Mickey's book.
Hanna Laikin (07:02)
Prove I'm wrong. ⁓
Mmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (07:26)
My book precision medicine is coming out the end of the month. That's what we focus on. It's like AI takes a lot of things that were previously considered to be costs and Translates them into assets because it connects with your value. What one example is a hundred percent of human beings have some DNA Difference that prevents them from metabolizing a medication Well, that means about 53 % of all medications you take
won't work. For the cost of a $120 test, you can eliminate that entire expense. so that's it's a $120 cost to the insurer, but it's a savings down the road to everybody that exists in every entrepreneurial situation I've ever been exposed to somebody's looking at something as a cost. And it's really an asset if you can just twist the idea a little bit. Does that make sense to
Hanna Laikin (07:53)
interesting.
Definitely. think doctors biggest constraint is their time and AI is giving back the time that you're not wasting on patients care. And like you mentioned in your book, you talk about wearables, you talk about these tests, you talk about the ability to integrate AI into the process. And as a... ⁓
patient you want the best care and why wouldn't you accept the best care if it's the doctor plus this unlimited resource that has no time constraint and can work with the doctor and provide the best care.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (08:49)
Right.
Yes, there's really two immediately recognizable implications of AI in healthcare. One is 80 % of all healthcare costs are chronic disease related or non-communicable diseases. That means they're situations. If you can identify the trigger in many of those instances, you can eliminate
all the complications, that's an innovator's term, all the predominant amount of the the complications. so companies like Tempus AI in Chicago are really just focusing AI on figuring out rather than giving a woman with breast cancer chemotherapy, they're testing to see if she has the HER2 plus gene mutation, which means she doesn't really need that.
chemotherapy, she do target therapy or something like that. AI has the ability to multiply a doctor's wisdom by bringing everything, all knowledge that's out there into their worldview. So I like to say that AI brings the second opinion to your first visit. I mean, it's you're getting the wisdom of every physician, you know, that's out there that the second set of
Hanna Laikin (09:52)
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (10:05)
opportunities are really almost not outcome related. They're just financial. I mean, it can streamline so many activities, like you said, that a doctor has to worry about like ambient AI, it can listen to our conversation, synthesize what the doctor and the patient are talking about, and change that into a prescription or a note that would take the doctor 30 minutes to type out. It's just, it's revolutionary. And I'm super excited about that for healthcare.
Hanna Laikin (10:34)
So what were some of the first pieces of feedback that you got when you brought this idea? Because everyone in the beginning was really fearful of AI taking jobs, but now the idea of working together is more prevalent. But what were some of the first obstacles that you faced while coming up with this collaboration, and how did you overcome those fears?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (10:55)
Yeah, no, that's a great question. think when we started looking at the space and I left SpaceX to come back to run a healthcare organization, most recently I was the inaugural CEO of DecisionRx, which is pharmacogenomics company headquartered in Indianapolis. When we looked at the space, we figured that augmented intelligence beyond artificial intelligence,
could really help payers streamline things. It could help providers streamline things. But there wasn't, we didn't really think that there was a lot of immediate applicability to the patient. What we found out was exactly the opposite. Payers went immediately to cost reduction, which had no impact, actually negatively correlated with care improvement.
didn't like it because it typically told them they were doing something wrong. And they weren't. They just didn't have the information. But then the patients loved it. The patients were like, what do mean if I I can't take this medication, but if I take this other one, my leg pain goes away or, you know, I'm not depressed anymore or anything like that. So it completely changed our worldview. And people, individuals started embracing AI.
Hanna Laikin (11:42)
You
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (12:05)
and the people that we thought the entities that we thought would really weren't looking at the same way. That hasn't really changed much. Most of the investment dollars in healthcare are still going into things that make sure your billing is correct or that you, you know, carried through on a particular, you know, health checkup or something like that. All things which contribute to your health, but they don't really immediately impact it.
And it's really been late to the game that providers have embraced it as an ambient listening tool or embraced it as a second opinion. So I think we still have a far way to go on that. There's probably, my research at Harvard would indicate we've barely scratched the surface. If you're an entrepreneur and you're looking for someplace to make a lot of money, it's at
Hanna Laikin (12:50)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (12:51)
the end of the spectrum with patients and AI. So I'm trying to think of a particular story that relates to that. And I think it's probably along the lines of someone who for years might have struggled with, in my book, I four vignettes about different individuals that benefited from the application of AI. For years, someone struggled with pain management, a woman named Amy.
And the doctor kept telling her it was all in her head. It she was getting older. She was on her feet all day. Well, it turns out only through big data and AI were they able to deduce that she was standing on a surface that aggravated nerve sensations through the balls of her feet. So you could change that with a anti-fatigue map. And then she was working in a place. ⁓
Hanna Laikin (13:35)
Wow.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (13:38)
patient that had that used toxic industrial cleaning chemicals. They fixed that. She was all better. Didn't need drugs, didn't need anything. Well, for the previous decade and half, she'd been going from doctor to doctor, hearing them say that she was crazy. There's all kinds of stories like that. You name the predicament and there's probably an application of AI, say,
Hanna Laikin (13:58)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (14:01)
you could have short circu
Hanna Laikin (14:11)
Well, I was going to say,
what point do you think you start integrating? Because this is the generation today can, if you have a kid, you can have AI implemented in your life from day one to understand your everyday life, how to improve that, the things that are causing you difficulties. You could either input it or it's just continuously gathering data so that
your environment would already know that you're in a toxic household or you're coming across these obstacles. For me, I haven't used it for my health per se, but I have AI integrated into every aspect of my professional world. And it's allowed me to go into new industries and offer ways to...
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (14:36)
Right.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Hanna Laikin (15:01)
integrate these tools into businesses to help solve their problems because the confusion and I think this is one of the biggest obstacles is what tool does this business use? How can we implement it? What is the organizational structure that will receive this in the best way because it can be so overwhelming. But I use it as a productivity tool and also on the creative side of how do we minimize costs. It's the same thing for
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (15:08)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Hanna Laikin (15:26)
many businesses, minimize costs, increase output, and then focus on the things that humans can do better than AI, which I think a lot of it is the connection element and ⁓ figuring out ways to use the data to improve our customers lives. But it's across all industries, so I can learn about any industry because it's at my fingertips, ask those questions, and receive the data.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (15:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Yeah, no, that's a great point to the focus of my experience has been on health care with the exception of the couple years they spend in SpaceX, but almost all the things that we learn in health care can be applied to any industry. What one example or another example would be current health care is episodically focused. So what that means is.
It waits until you have an infirmity and then you go in, they look at just what's happening around that particular point in time. They treat it and they send you back on your way with no really longitudinal learning. Well, if you use AI to look at the series of events. Not in random, which is what a doctor does intuitively, if they can afford the time.
Hanna Laikin (16:34)
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (16:35)
you can start predicting those events. And there's a lot of innovative opportunities in healthcare and in other industries where somebody just stepped back and said, hey, you're buying this from me today, but you've bought it from me every three months for the past six years. What's your underlying need? And so you see companies like Amazon suggesting that you buy something that you typically do. I don't know if you've ever had that happen or.
Hanna Laikin (17:01)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (17:02)
suggesting an alternate that might be closely related to something that you may have purchased in the past. So there's all kinds of opportunities to create longevity around the customer experience. It just happens to be a life or death investment in healthcare, but you can make the same case for just about every product out there. so...
Hanna Laikin (17:16)
Yeah.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (17:22)
Thinking longitudinally about the customer as you said, and how it improves the customer's life is really gonna create the value, whether you're selling a paperclip or a coronary artery bypass operation, the scale might be different, but both have the need, yeah.
Hanna Laikin (17:34)
Exactly.
a company that I work with. We are trying to create a personalized customer profile. And then if they come to our website for a piece of clothing, we try to offer, like you said, or suggest something that would also benefit that customer. But it's not a general profile. It's a customized profile.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (17:37)
Go ahead.
Hanna Laikin (17:59)
based on what we know and the data that we have received, what product or service would also improve their lives. Even if it is something as simple as a t-shirt, maybe they also want a jacket or maybe they also want socks. It's just creating that customer profile based on the data that we've received. And we have so much data and AI is giving us the ability to organize that and then personalize it for the user experience more than ever.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (18:14)
Mm-hmm.
I think you touched on something super important, which if I looked at the sum of my, I don't know what it is now, 50 different entrepreneurial exposure to 50 different entrepreneurial experiences over my career, there's so many times where someone has a good idea, but misunderstands the application of it, which is usually related to
The customer aspect, you might know that somebody needs something, but they might prefer not to want to know that.
Hanna Laikin (18:48)
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (18:54)
if someone has the empathy to put themselves in the shoes of the consumer and kind of think outside of that from the inside out, a lot of innovation and entrepreneurial values are going to come from that. AI is perfect at that. I mean, I use Chet, GBT and Grok and Claude ⁓ every day to say, hey, I'm looking at this situation this way.
How might the target or the subject look at that? And I'm astounded at how little I actually think I know. In fact, one nugget of entrepreneurial opportunity here is 37 % of all healthcare outcomes, variation in healthcare outcomes, are driven just by fact whether you believe your doctor or not.
Hanna Laikin (19:37)
Wow.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (19:39)
Yeah, 37 % of the variation is just, I don't like what my doctor's telling me because I don't believe them. And there's a host of different reasons you might not believe them. You might not trust them. They might have explained it poorly. You might have be having a bad day, but AI can kind of get through all of that. And I'm working with a company right now that's created a product that does that. I'm not using it on the podcast right now, but it has the ability to look at our video streams and our audio streams.
Hanna Laikin (20:05)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (20:06)
and tell
me what you're actually feeling but not saying. ⁓
Hanna Laikin (20:09)
Wow, so is that increasing the patient's
trust or is it decreasing it if they know that AI is being used in their interaction?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (20:16)
Brilliant question. The answer is there's three cases. If the patient knows it's AI and the doctor's not involved, they're going to be more trustful of the AI because the embarrassment factor or the hurdle factor goes down. To them, it's more of a trusted confident that won't judge them, right? If they know it's the doctor and not an AI, they hit a
different level of baseline trust, which is kind of hit or miss to be candid, unless the doctor has really good bedside manner. But the worst case is if the doctor uses AI and doesn't tell the patient, and then the patient finds out you're never going to recover from that. And so I think if you think through that, if you're going to adopt AI, adopt it bravely and say, well, I don't know, let me ask.
Hanna Laikin (20:53)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (21:04)
our database here. And that's what's so exciting about ambient AI in the clinical environment is it's going to pick up on that. And so it will actually increase trust. ⁓ Or if not increased trust, it will decrease the timeframe to communication and get to better outcome. Does that make sense?
Hanna Laikin (21:16)
Mm-hmm.
Definitely. so what would some of the pushback be? Just misunderstanding of how it's being implemented?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (21:34)
Sure, so and I don't want to geek out on you too much, but you can define the entirety of human experience by 27 emotions. And I'll just stop there and let that sink in. The entirety of the richness of our experience, it has been salted down to 27 human emotions. The color of each emotion is usually generated by
the combination of two emotions and where you are on that gradient. But if you know where they are and you know someone is apprehensive, and then you can also figure out in that clinical environment that are apprehensive because they're confused, that would be one reason, scared, another reason, third lacking information or fourth lacking trust. Each one of those four
precipitates a different response by the physician. Right now, the physician would just assume what they think the problem is, but our research would show that over half the time you're wrong because you're thinking that the patient is thinking how you think. Just by peeling the layer bag saying, you're not buying what I'm selling and then asking why.
Hanna Laikin (22:36)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (22:44)
fear apprehension, you can get to a solution a lot quicker. And over time, that does absolutely impact trust and impact outcomes. The sad thing, though, is nobody's really focusing on that right now. They're focusing on streamlining costly procedures and things like that, which have a definable financial value, but they don't really impact the outcome. So that's where I'm spending all my time right now. And that's what I spend.
large portion of the book talking about is what happens if we actually liberated physicians and just said, you do what's right because we trust the outcome. When you do that, the results are 37 % better. And that's just shocking to me.
Hanna Laikin (23:12)
You
So then
do you then see the outcome in the next 10 years integrating wearables one of the big next Apple products is the the AirPods that can translate in real time and we know that there's ⁓ meta glasses that can see and integrate AI with that if a doctor has an AI in their ear and glasses that are
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (23:37)
Yeah. ⁓
Hanna Laikin (23:45)
looking at the environment, like you said, understanding human emotion better and they're able to better respond and they understand what's going on with the individual person's environment. Is that the AI integration that you see in the next decade?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (24:00)
Yes, there's four drivers that are really changing healthcare. You mentioned one of them, wearables, which is a data input. It could be a data output. I'll come back to that. Genomics, which everybody's genome is different. So if the FDA says this drug works for 68 % of the population, that doesn't matter if you're 32%, right? So wearables and genomics, but then big data, understanding the population of other people that might have had a similar experience to you.
Hanna Laikin (24:19)
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (24:27)
and then synthesizing that with AI. All three of those data inputs can make a doctor a heck of a lot more precise with your care, as in Amy's story with pain management, or in the book, Emily's story with just behavioral issues that she's dealing with in her life. I think wearables are probably the most easily adoptable.
Hanna Laikin (24:27)
you
you
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (24:50)
technology, but even there we talked at the outset. Some people don't want to know what the wearable is telling There's a story. Yeah, we wrote a case about this at Harvard Business School. The company Medtronic created an implantable device called the Chronicle that would predict when you're going to have a heart attack from congestive heart failure five days in advance.
Hanna Laikin (24:52)
Okay.
Yeah, right. You don't want to know how bad your sleep was.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (25:13)
So the only other way that they could predict that was to weigh yourself every day. And if you had a more than X percent weight gain, come into the doctor's office because you're probably gonna have a heart attack. Well, this device eliminated all that. But what happened then was that the device was sending so much information back to the patient and the doctor that the doctor turned it off because
Hanna Laikin (25:37)
wow.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (25:38)
They didn't have that integrating factor of AI to sift through the noise and find the signal and say, this person always has a late afternoon weight gain because they eat chocolate at three o'clock like my mom used to do at three o'clock in the afternoon. And she has a bottle of water, right? AI is able to ingest all of that data and then know what signal what's noise. So I really think wearables are probably as you indicated,
Hanna Laikin (25:57)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (26:04)
the cutting edge of all of that, both in receiving data and feeding it back to us. How much people will trust that data comes back to your initial question, which is what is the level of trust? Sometimes you don't want to want to know. Here's another fact just to throw this out. Diabetes affects a lot of people. It's one of the leading causes of chronic disease in the country.
Hanna Laikin (26:10)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (26:31)
63 % of diabetics have as the trigger of their insulin malabsorption a behavioral disorder. So they're depressed or they're manic or they're obsessive that causes them to change their eating habits that triggers the diabetic manifestation. So what do do there? Do you give them?
an insulin pump or do you give them a wearable to say meditate when you start to feel this way? Or do you give them, do you give them an SSRI, a medication that will calm them down? The answer to questions is yeah, the first two are much more effective at preventing than the latter is at correcting. ⁓ But we got a long way to go there because people just
Hanna Laikin (26:57)
you
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (27:16)
sometimes don't want to know those kinds of things or they're slow to adopt them.
Hanna Laikin (27:24)
there's so many options and there's so much overwhelm of what can be implemented. What do you think is the number one takeaway from your book, if you could summarize it, from the patients? And you talked about integrating these tools with the doctors, increasing trust, but what would be something that a reader who isn't in the healthcare realm could look at and take away from your book?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (27:25)
Thank
Sure, each section of the four drivers identified has a what you can do section that kind of synthesizes that. But if I were to say, I'd probably take those in reverse order. The easiest one is if you hit a wall with a dread disease like cancer or, you know, congestive heart failure or something like that, don't be shy with your doctor. There are AI tools out there.
Hanna Laikin (27:55)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (28:14)
like Tempus AI's cancer prediction work that can say, do this, don't do that. You don't need to take chemo. You don't need to do radiotherapy. But the doctor isn't paid to do that. The insurer says, try chemo, try radiotherapy. And so be your own best advocate, especially if it's a dread disease.
I mean, kind of coming back down the ease of implementation, though, I'd say get a PGX test. If you haven't already ordered one, go to decisionRx.com and pay for the pharmacogenomic test. And you'll find out the 50 % of the drug, 53 % of the drugs that you can't take. People typically in America, on average, we take four medications. The deductible is a loan on that. Pay for the test.
and then get a wearable and start listening to it. I use my Apple Watch a lot. Friends of mine say their lives have changed with the loop band and the Aura ring. I don't know if you use any of those, ⁓ but if you listen...
Hanna Laikin (29:05)
Okay.
Yeah, I've used an aura ring and alter ring, different
ones.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (29:18)
Okay, I mean if you use any of those and just pay a little bit of attention to that, your life can become measurably better. So my mom's experience is actually real. She enjoyed chocolate every afternoon at three o'clock and she would sit down with this huge thing of water and she would have a, you know, weight gain and be like, I'm going to have a heart attack. No, mom, you just ate chocolate. And so just paying attention to little things.
to little things like that. And I guess the last thing I would say is relates back to my experience at SpaceX with Elon. Don't ever let anybody tell you it's not real or it can't be solved. I mean, if you have a lifetime of pain and you happen to be like Amy, you've been in a job that had you standing eight hours a day on a hard, smooth floor in an industrial environment.
There's a good reason why, and it probably doesn't have anything to do with some mind-numbing medication that they want to put you on. I hope that's helpful. That's what we tried to do in the book at any rate was come up with what you can do steps that really synthesize
Hanna Laikin (30:15)
It's very helpful. What's been the biggest
think that's really motivating and empowering for the patient, for individuals in any industry, like you mentioned. What's been the biggest takeaway for you from this entire process and what keeps you going to work through these? Because you're going to come up, you personally, upon these obstacles and these companies that want to push drugs and not find a solution to empower the patient. What was the first?
trigger for you where you're like, this is going to save a lot of people and empower them to make their own decisions.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (30:49)
Yeah, I'd like to say it was positive and inspiring like that, but I'd probably, and this might get back to my kind of warrior ethos, but in the military, but it was probably the opposite. was much more like, damn, why are we still doing it this way? You know, my parents have passed away, but both of them passed away from...
Hanna Laikin (31:06)
Okay.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (31:10)
situations that probably could have avoided, it's called amenable mortality. Almost everybody can extend their life a number of years. And so it kind of makes me angry. It kind of makes me upset that not that I think there's an ill motive with drug companies or providers or whatever. It's just that we don't, we're not compensated to think outside the box. And so we just keep going to work doing the same thing.
So the easiest takeaway is probably, you know, the reflection on the last one, which is don't let anybody ever tell you this isn't real for you. And if you're an entrepreneur and an innovator, find someone who tells you that and that's your business opportunity because that's the one that resists being involved. I do think that in five to 10 years, we're going to move from electronic health records
to predictive health records that will say, we had your PGX test done, we know this is gonna happen to you, this is what you have to do today to avoid this problem in the future. And that's probably what the positive thing that keeps me going is every time I go out and somebody says, yeah, but we make so much money doing it this other way. It's like, well, do you sleep well? You know, thinking about that. And then that's the card.
That's the cognitive dissonance that opens their thinking to the new way. I'm pretty positive those of your listeners in their 20s and 30s are going to have an enormously more wellness oriented life in the 10 to 20 parents had.
Hanna Laikin (32:39)
Okay.
there's so many ways, to take control of your health now that are going to be predictive for the future rather than waiting for something negative to happen. And that's why these tools have been adopted so quickly because you can use that data and change your life today and live longer, but live healthier lives rather than just the quantity and ultimately a happier lifestyle that's more.
enjoyable to spend on the things that you want to do. it's these moments of understanding what could happen, but knowing that you can change it today. And that AI integrated in medicine, in patient care is able to change lives of everyone going forward. It's incredible resource.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (33:26)
Yeah, think,
yes, I would ask you kind of a summary question ⁓ that we kind of pose bleakly in the book. If three years from now, somebody came to you and said, your health care doesn't cost you anything. In fact, we'll pay you for every
Hanna Laikin (33:34)
Yeah.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (33:48)
diagnostic that you do in every health. Would that change how you approach the health care system?
Hanna Laikin (33:54)
They would pay me.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (33:55)
And depending on your... Yeah, yes. If somebody said...
Hanna Laikin (33:57)
yeah, mean I would take control.
I would rather take control today and extend my life and understand the risks that I'm taking rather than sit back idly and allow it to happen to me. No question.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (34:12)
Yeah, and even better, if someone paid you to do that, ⁓ you would do that. That's been our experience. Well, we've developed a that uses a blockchain technology that basically does that. You take a test, you put it the blockchain, then carriers, providers, others...
Hanna Laikin (34:16)
yeah.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (34:34)
will pay you to access your healthiness. that's just, that's earth shattering. That's an environment we really don't even understand today. But it's safe, it's private because nobody has access to your DNA except you. They could just access the result and you control it. It actually becomes a revenue source for individuals who want to take care of their health.
Hanna Laikin (34:38)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (34:58)
It doesn't necessarily help those of us that don't want to take care of our health, but it's a straight in the right direction.
Hanna Laikin (35:02)
No.
said I'm a human guinea pig for experiments and I'm very into health and wellness. So I like to test these different tools and I've seen a lot more digital tools, whether it's an at-home test and being able to see that and then get the data directly to me rather than having to go through a healthcare provider. Even if it's an extra cost is important for me because I can change that lifestyle modification tomorrow rather than waiting.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (35:28)
Yes.
Hanna Laikin (35:32)
and spending more time in a doctor's office. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to go the ability to go directly and access your data is where the future will be.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (35:33)
Yes.
100 % agree with you. There's one last story. mother-in-law, who's 87, received her blood chemistry work from a recent physical and she got before was able to go in to see her doctor. But it was accompanied with so much information that she was able to read it and understand before she ever got to the doctor what
Hanna Laikin (36:08)
Mm-hmm.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (36:09)
lifestyle changes you need to make. Now, most of them were dietary, but you're exactly right. We're approaching a place in healthcare where AI is going to convey information to patients in a way that's immediately actionable. And that's just super, super thrilling, even more because my 87 year old mother-in-law, could do it, who, has difficulty
Hanna Laikin (36:30)
Hmm
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (36:34)
with video players and iPhones, but ⁓ I hope she's not listening. in any event, lots of opportunity for
Hanna Laikin (36:36)
No.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (36:40)
for someone that wants to hustle in health care.
Hanna Laikin (36:40)
So many opportunities and when
and when does your book officially come out when where can people buy it?
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (36:48)
Sure, it's on Amazon.com. you Google precision medicine and James I've been on a coast to coast tour at different meetings and I'm happy to say it's typically in the top 10 ⁓ in our category. So it's achieving some success already, but at end of the day, it's a consumer book.
And with what you can do things in there, it tells you how to take charge of your health. And if you're an entrepreneur, it tells you what to look for for opportunities in healthcare in the future. So I appreciate the mention.
Hanna Laikin (37:18)
Of course, I'm excited to read it. And thank you for sharing your perspective and so many actionable tips to take control of your health because ultimately that's all we have. It's important and an exciting opportunity to do so. So thank you for coming on The Muscle by Hannah.
riverside james wallace raw synced video cfr hanna laikin's stud 0156 (37:37)
Thank you so much, Hannah.