#1382 Kian Sadeghi | This Man Measures Your Intelligence Gene

Kian Sadeghi is the Founder & CEO of Nucleus Genomics. In this conversation, we talk about DNA sequencing, how he is disrupting the old school companies, why he believes so much in giving power to the people, taking control of your health with your DNA, regulation, ethics, and more. ======================= CrossFi is the Apple Pay for Crypto. For the first time in history, anyone with a web 3 wallet like Metamask can spend crypto through a physical or virtual visa cards anywhere in the world where Visa is accepted. Be one of the first to get your hands on a CrossFi card and a prize pool of $3 Million Dollars by joining and participating in their testnet today: ⁠⁠https://xfi.foundation/users⁠⁠ ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit ⁠⁠https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp⁠⁠ and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up guys? Today I have a fantastic conversation. It is with Keon Sadegi. He is the founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics. In this conversation, we talk about DNA sequencing, how he is disrupting the old school companies, why he believes so much in giving power to the people,

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  sharing your DNA information with your salt so that you're better informed and empowered to go and make decisions about your health and what you do on a day-to-day basis. This conversation is very interesting because it covers so many different nuances of the industry. There's things like regulation, ethics, and science that all come to a head and they struggle with daily inside of the business. On top of that, it's quite expensive to try to build the leading genomics startup in the United States, and they're doing a fantastic job of trying to balance capital requirements and also finding the best talent. These conversations are always fun to me. Keon is someone that I've known for a while. I've invested in the company and I continue to watch him struggle with all of these questions

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  and then come out the other side with the answers for him and his company. I really hope that you enjoy this conversation. Here is my episode with Keon Sadegi.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:01Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:47Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang, I've got Keon here. You're trying to do something that no one's ever done before, which is take this DNA information that everyone knows is possible. They've seen some of the competitors that are out there. But you're trying to give the information to the people, which I think is a very interesting detail, because most people don't know that the companies that you've previously given your DNA to, they're withholding information from you. They are not telling you everything that they know about you. So in a weird way, these other companies know more about their customers than their customers know about themselves? Is that true?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  I think there's multiple layers to this, right? One is a technological limitation that these old companies had. Another is an ideological limitation. Let's start with the technological one. You know, when companies like Twentieth Me got started in 2006, the cost of sequencing the entirety of someone's DNA, or six billion letters that makes up someone's genome, genome just means the entirety of someone's DNA, it was around $10 million per sample, $10 million per person. That's insane. That's obviously not economic. So instead, what they did is they opted for a much cheaper technology called microarray technology. This technology looks at less than 0.1% of someone's DNA. Right? Today, that cost has gone from $10 million per sample to look at less than 0.1% of DNA to around, you know, $3.99 basically to read the entirety of someone's DNA or six billion genomes.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  So the first thing that you should know is that Nucleus has far more data. Right? We actually can analyze much more. And by analyzing much more, we can give people the entirety of basically the scientific frontier of insights into their genome, far more accurate assessments of their disease risk as well as their trait dispositions.

• 5:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So the cost has come down significantly, which is a huge advantage.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Huge advantage for the company, yes.

• 5:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, that's easy for people to understand economics.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:12Anthony Pompliano?

  There's an ideological predisposition that they have, which basically means they believe things that maybe you and I don't believe.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What do they believe? And why are they maybe misplaced in those beliefs?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  You know, I think

• 5:28Speaker 02

  there's a bit of a conservatism when it comes to genetics. And I really believe that part of Nucleus's job is to empower people with information. There are studies done at the scientific frontier in the genetic architecture for things like intelligence, as an example. And these are studies, you know, they're published in the most esteemed scientific journals. They're done by, you know, some of the most esteemed private institutions in America and also worldwide. And they basically start exploring the genetic architecture of what some might say might be more controversial traits. And I think it's our job as a company, instead of sort of having this information gatecapped when it's really public in the public, you know, domain,

• 6:13Speaker 02

  it's in hands of the people, it's to provide people access to these sort of insights, while also being still thoughtful. I think we can be focused on acceleration, while also not, that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to be reckless. Right? I think it's about empowering people with this knowledge, educating them today about what exists in the genomic frontier, and then how it's going to evolve over time.

• 6:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, as you go into the frontier, there are things that are very controversial with these legacy companies in terms of what potentially is possible. When you and I first met, I think I asked you some version of a question of, okay, great, like, why are you different in doing all of this? And you explained the cost and the ideological stuff, but you also started to talk about there may be genes that people historically have thought didn't exist. Maybe they do exist, and maybe we don't actually know for sure or not, but it's worth pursuing. Intelligence gene, gay gene, right? Many of these things that, again, are almost in some degree, you know, there's certain scientists who say, absolutely not, it's, you know, heresy to even talk about it, and

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  you, if you believe it, you are just like some crackpot. And there's other scientists that say, well, actually, we should do the work and try to figure out, you know, do these things exist or not? And so, like, how do you think about some of these more controversial genes and like the pursuit of doing science around them?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  It's a good question. Genetics has evolved quite a bit over time, where the models have become basically more sophisticated. And what they found is for that more common, what they call complex diseases and traits, things like, let's say, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, on the diseases side, and on the traits side, things like intelligence or muscle strength. What they find is that they're complex in nature. What that means is that they're not driven by a single gene or a single variant. You can think of the genome as like a circuit, and basically, there's a complex interaction between many DNA differences in someone's genome that ultimately results in their disposition. If you think about like, intelligence, the same genetic architecture is true for any

• 8:18Speaker 02

  complex trait, even like height, right? It's not a single gene, it's the interaction of many differences in someone's name that also leads to someone's expressed trait or even disease risk. So, over time, basically, scientists have started saying, okay, how do we kind of, you know, how do we kind of understand this and explore this? And then I think part of our job is to bring this information, this entirety of the scientific frontier, in the hands of the people, right? So people can start understanding and making sense of where are the models today, which are admittedly more modest, but how will this evolve over time, right? And I think that's a key question that, as the leader of the genomic industry at this point, we have to be very judicious and thoughtful about while still giving people access to that data.

• 9:03Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you strike that balance? Do you give them 100% of all the information? Or do you try to give them insights?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  That's a great, that's a, that's a really great question. So, one thing to understand about genetics is that across different diseases and traits, there's basically a theoretical maximum that genetics can possibly predict. So intuitively, people already know this. Take something like height, for example. If you look at height, scientists basically estimate, you know, actually, before I even give you the number, you probably think, pump, okay. Height, that seems pretty genetically driven, right? Two tall parents, tall kids, usually there's not, there may be some deviation, but that's the same thing. Something like extraversion, less so, right? Sometimes you have really kind of more, I would say extrovert parents, but the, the children are not. And again, I'm being a little bit qualitative right now. Scientists can actually map a quantitative measurements of how much the, the basic variation

• 9:51Speaker 02

  in a disease or trait can be basically explained by genetics, the theoretical maximum, right? So there's always this tension, people say, nature or nurture. It's not nature or nurture, it's always nature and nurture. So height, for example, scientists estimate that 80% of the variation height can be attributed to genetics. Extraversion is, let's say, 30%. Intelligence is, say, 50%. So that would mean that even if you built a perfect genetic model, right? Still, obviously, 50% is not attributed to genetics, right? And that's not a bugger, that's not, you know, that's just what it is, which makes perfect sense. It's obviously a function of both the two things. So I think part of our job in our communication is expressing kind of both where the models are today and also then what is kind of remaining or what's left. So trying to, trying to think about closing that kind of gap

• 10:37Speaker 02

  of where the models are today and where they can be tomorrow. And to that point, I think people need to understand that even if someone is, you know, above average in their intelligence score, that does not necessarily mean that they're above average in terms of IQ. Similarly, it can be below average and it can still actually be above average, right? Because there's still a lot of basically error in, in these models. It's just talking about kind of population averages. And I don't think that's something to hide from, right? We all know that intelligence is one piece of a life. And we also know, based off what I just told you guys, that there's no such thing as kind of biological determinism, right? No one's going to be extremely intelligent from their DNA. And so I think that's part of the, all of that's part of the communication. It, it's complicated. And we trust that our customers can kind of understand this nuance, understand some of this complexity.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  And we do our job in nicely presenting this information so people can understand all these considerations.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, When I think of a lot of the genetics works that has been done previously, it's about understanding. It's not about taking action, right? It's very much, what am I predisposed to from a disease standpoint? Where did my family come from, right? Are the stories that my grandparents told me actually true? Or is the science saying something different? Is there some ability for me to begin to understand what I'm predisposed to from, maybe it's intelligence, or height, or whatever? But when people get information, they want usually the information to take action. It's kind of great, I now understand X, what do I do with it? And so you and I have, are very fortunate to have a bunch of crazy, insane friends who come up with all kinds of, you know, on one hand, smart ideas, on the other

• 12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  hand, could be potentially horrible ideas. And sometimes there's a very thin line between those two things. But as I've heard people talk about the advancements in genetics, I've heard people say, well, why don't we create a dating app where people's IQ, or some sort of genetic disposition, so that if you're looking for something, you can go find those people to then create, you know, babies and a life and a family, et cetera. Again, you can tell very quickly, there is this thin line between what is positive impacts of something like that, and what are the negative downsides of something like that. And so like, I'm sure you, having, you know, spent a ton of time on this every single day, have heard all kinds of ideas as to like, once we understand some of the genetic stuff, what do we do with it? And so where do you think the world is going

• 12:54Anthony Pompliano?

  to go? Is it simple things like dating apps? Or are there much more profound use cases for some of this information?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  So, yeah, there's a lot of questions there. Let me unravel them a little bit. So, on the disease side of the things, I think there's like, four very obvious applications. The first is what I think, consider kind of more extreme, but super actionable. So sometimes unfortunately, you see athletes suddenly drop dead. It's tragic what happens. Also, you know, my cousin suddenly died in her sleep, as an example, right? Sometimes it can be actually, we do something called Long QT, which can be genetically linked. If you are know you're disposed of Long QT, right? You may have no symptoms until later on, but if you know genetically you are, you can take something called a beta blocker, which reduces your risk 10x. Right. So that's a super actionable, super clear application of genetics. Then there's another bucket for the kind of complex diseases you've always heard of, right?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Things like breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, familial hypercholesterolemia, high cholesterol, right? These are all conditions where a genetic test can save your life. Where if you know you're at greater risk for breast cancer, for example, you can get earlier, more aggressive screening to catch the cancer earlier. And obviously, once you catch the cancer earlier, you can actually get rid of the cancer far more effectively. Okay. Then there's a third bucket like Alzheimer's, for example, where there's no actually explicit cure today, right? If you're an E4, E4 carrier, or if you're faced with a polygenic model, you're higher risk. But you already can start, I think, for me, I think it, what I've heard from people who are disposed, it brought a certain beauty to their life because they appreciate so much more their day to day and how, how kind of fragile it is.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  And moreover, they already begin participating in different sort of research studies to try to cure Alzheimer's, which I think is very powerful and informative. Then, of course, you talked about, you mentioned day naps, I think, on the kind of inheritance side of things. There are still babies that are born with basically monogenic diseases. So basically, both parents are carriers and they pass it on to their offspring. I think what's going to end up happening is you're going to have basically, you know, mass whole genome sequencing. And then every single couple in the United States should know if they're both a carrier for a disease. So they can use that information to, if they would like, it's obviously their liberty, it's their choice, to basically have a baby without a disease, right?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So I think that's a huge, powerful application that's getting missed where basically multiplication could, could, you know, potentially stop a baby being born with a very debilitating condition.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  On the day nap side of things, I think honestly, people don't need genetics for that. Like, you know, I do think though, on the, what I described where potentially what will happen is if two people are carriers and they both choose to opt in, right? If, let's say you're on Tinder or something and both people are carriers for a condition and they both opt in, maybe potentially the algorithm does it such that those two people don't ever meet in the first place, right? And it'd be really rare. And obviously, both is about individual liberties, about both parties opting in. To that point, what I'm saying right now, some might be like, oh, that's horrible. Et cetera, et cetera. To me, it's all about giving the power to the customer. The customer should choose whether they want to engage and opt into that or not. Right? It's not the job for Tinder or for Nucleus to say, oh, you shouldn't, shouldn't do this. It's our job to basically empower you with the scientific frontier of information, scientific frontier of knowledge.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  And then you use that knowledge of how you want to live healthier, happier, and potentially how you want to have, you know, a healthy family, which I think everyone has the right to, of course.

• 16:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What about things like food, right? I've seen a bunch of people say, hey, maybe not so much just genetics, but let's take a bunch of tests. Let's figure out your body, understand it, and then we're going to come up with a personalized diet. Yeah. As an example, how much does genetics or anything like that play into some of the things that maybe are more practical for people on a day-to-day basis?

• 16:29Speaker 02

  So sometimes your disease risk can be obviously directly shaped by what you eat. For example, if you have a high AMD risk, right? And AMD is a later onset condition, one that takes a lot of time. You should, you know, blueberries, as an example, is found to actually decrease your risk. So there's various cases like that where diet matters a lot. It matters a lot, and eventually we're going to be able to quantify in Nucleus how much basically what you're eating, how it shapes your disease risk. In terms of exactly telling you what you should eat, those are some softer associations generally. Strictly if you're talking about just the primary DNA sequence. But definitely, obviously, the entirety of someone's lifestyle interacts with their, with their DNA information. And that's why if you look at Nucleus, we actually incorporate both someone's genetic data, the whole genome data specifically, with non-genetic data to come up with these overall estimates of people's disease risk.

• 17:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And when I go and I use the kit, what is?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Which you have, you ordered it.

• 17:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, I did. Not only did I order it, a lot of my friends ordered it. And then we all talked and we were like, do we want the information? Like, we were a little scared, right? Because you're, because also a thing where I remember listening to Peter Attia, and I think that he did some sort of test.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did.

• 17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  With maybe Chris Hemsworth, if I remember correctly.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yes, I think it was Alzheimer's, maybe even.

• 17:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in this, and they were recording a show doing this. He was going and doing tons of different physical tests. He was like swimming in the Arctic Ocean, all kinds of crazy stuff. But, you know, cool, and people were paying attention. And in the filming of this, they figured out that he is predisposed to Alzheimer's.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so Attia had to tell him. And it seems to have really kind of messed with him a little bit.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so he said, hey, look, I'm going to take some time off. I need to figure this out, or are there things that I can do today to, to, you know, decrease the risk, et cetera?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Well, he, yeah, he recommended everyone should do it.

• 18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  He did, yeah.

• 18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but, but I think that. You know, it's one of these weird things like if you take it to the extreme, right? If I tell you when and where you're going to die, do you want to know?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  We can't tell you that. If we knew that, we would.

• 18:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you guys can't, but I just mean like if somebody could tell anybody, right? The day that they're going to die, how they're going to die, when.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  But it's the opposite part because you give you information so that doesn't happen.

• 18:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Right? So it's the ultimate liberties, the ultimate self-agency, I feel.

• 18:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's the conclusion we came to was actually, wait a second.

• 18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You're actually accelerating towards the bad scenario if you don't have the information.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But it was funny because like there is this like, maybe you're at peace because you don't know something. But if you're a high agency person, you actually want to know because you can take action.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 18:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct it, right?

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 18:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's very interesting. Let's talk about the company itself. You've raised quite a bit of money. You have this crazy story as to how you started the business.

• 19:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds like you were already doing some genetic kind of like study and understanding in what I'll call the traditional, you know, kind of college world, et cetera. But then at some point you're just like, all right, screw it. I got it from here, guys. You dropped out and like basically it's self-study.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, so my, my interest in genetics goes way back, as I mentioned, so let's just take a step back. I think understanding this story goes back to the beginning. I'm a first generation American. Both my parents are from Iran. They escaped during this time of revolution, came to America. I like to say that, you know, we have the kind of first generations have the immigrant drive and that hunger with the opportunity of America. Right? It's a beautiful combination. And then I'd mentioned my cousin who kind of suddenly, you know, passed away in her sleep. And at the time I kept asking my parents, you know, how does this happen? How does this happen? I was eating, I didn't understand. They kept saying, oh, bad genetics, bad genetics. What does that even mean? I didn't know. Eventually I started studying genetics and what I realized was that disease isn't really necessarily kind of an inherent property of someone. Right? Maybe you could actually kind of correct a, you know, mutation or a variant and DNA difference that actually causes a disease.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Could you cure a disease? So in high school I joined a duties of genome laboratory. It was actually in Brooklyn, kind of second floor of a warehouse, right? Where, you know, in this closet, effectively we engineered yeast to make them illuminate. We edited bacteria to make them resistant antibiotics. And I love this kind of beauty of biology. And I started thinking about what if you combine this kind of depth and beauty with something that's a little more interable? Because one thing about the wet lab is that the life cycles could be so long, right? You make a mistake. It's like, forget about it. It's another week on the computer. You made a mistake. You just need to click delete button. So I went to Penn where I studied a computational biology for around a year and a half. And at Penn, I remember I was in bio two, two, one, which is genetics class. And The chairman of the biology department basically brought up this beautiful chart of the decreasing cost of whole genome sequencing. Okay. And when you look at this chart, you know, you can look it up and look it up.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  It basically says that whole genome sequencing was around a billion dollars in 2000, right? Sequencing a single genome was $1 billion. And then at that time, it became $1,000. So it's an exponential decrease on a log and mix scale. Right? It beat out, it beats out Moore's law. And I thought to myself, wow, this price is going to go to zero. Then what? What's going to happen? Right? So I kind of told this to my friend and he was like, is this going to be on the midterm? I was like, he's got to miss the point there. Right? So I was like, you know what? I kind of want to analyze my own whole genome data. Right? This is what I really want to do. And then I became kind of obsessive. I couldn't get this out of my mind. And also combine that with, I found college should be very stifling, right? Very limited, you know, kind of this like, it just felt, just felt, I think suffering is a great word, just felt so limiting. Like I wanted to become free almost. Right? I want to express, express my kind of deep, deeper inner soul. Right?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  I told, I said, there's the Joseph Campbell quote, have the inner being matched the physical plane. That's what I wanted.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  So I left. I left, moved back into my bedroom. Covid's going on. So I'm in my bedroom in Brooklyn and basically this begins a year long, like intellectual journey where I filled in 18 subject notebooks on statistics, on genetics and some programming things to figure out, okay, how do I actually answer this question? How do I actually analyze my whole genome data? And the way I like to think about it is like, basically during that year, I built myself up to kind of an intellectual frontier. And it's almost similar to being in a plane and looking down. You first see like a sea of green when you look at a forest. But as you get down and down and down, it starts to become more granular and you start seeing basically huge holes in the forest. And then you go, you know, how's no one here? So then you go and you say, wait a second, I'm going to start planting my seeds. And you start planting your seeds, start planting your seeds.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  And suddenly you start what I think of as productizing intellectual alpha. Right? You have this intellectual alpha, you have this frontier knowledge, then you start taking that knowledge and basically creating a product. And that's what nucleus is. And that's why it's the deepest expression of my soul. So in doing that eventually, you know, you know, my parents, of course, were immigrants. They weren't, you know, too happy to, you know, what are you doing in your bedroom all day? Thankfully, we managed to, I texted eventually at some point, a year later, I texted Cold, an angel investor, Corey Levy from Z Fellows. Highly recommend, by the way, if any early stage founder is getting the journey started, highly recommend Z Fellows. I texted Corey and then, you know, a couple of weeks later, you know, God bless, he gave $100,000. So that was kind of the journey. That was the beginning of it.

• 22:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And when he gave you the hundred thousand dollars, it was just you?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was just me.

• 23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And what was the plan?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  The plan was to build the next Google. No, um, at that point, what happened was we ended up raising around three hundred thousand dollars from Corey, Ed, and a bunch of others. Um, and I went and I basically recruited a, you know, what the person who became the CTO as well as the head of operations, COO. And then we started basically creating a mock-up. And in parallel to that, I was also emailing this scientist, who became our chief scientific officer. I was asking him kind of very technical questions under actually a student imprint, funnily enough, because I figured, oh, I'll do all the science, you know, I just need, you know, I, once you come to the frontier of knowledge, you know, well, who knows, you know, the frontier of knowledge, what other scientists do, right? So I was basically able to speak to other scientists, ask them very technical questions.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  And then eventually, I think we realized that we had the kind of same vision, right? Because um, there was a, one of the first papers I ever read when I was in the bedroom was a paper on this kind of D to C polygening score site. And so the creator of that, we actually ended up acquiring that software that I read about years ago, around, you know, whatever, a year later. And then he, the creator of that, actually ended up coming on as our CSO. So there's a, you know, complex, you know, kind of web of people, but it all started with that first, you know, three hundred K approximately. And at that point, you know, there's this funny video of, of me kind of bursting out of my home with this little nest cam, like bursting out of this home screaming when the first a hundred K basically came in, right? When they say, well, invest, because it was so much pent up fanaticism, love, energy, you know? So.

• 24:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And today, you guys operate in person or remote?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Uh, we're predominantly in person. I'm trying to move everything to in person, predominantly in person.

• 24:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And how do you operate the company? Like, it's unique in that you're trying to build what some would look at as a tech company, some would look at as a science kind of lab and research and, and, you know, kind of non-tech in that way. So how do you operate on a day-to-day basis?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  That's a great question. Uh, Nucleus is complex because I like to joke that, you know, half of us have a PhD, half of us are under twenty-five. Um, but. If you think about Nucleus, there's multiple components. One is like kind of statistical genetics and bioinformatics. And there's like classical software engineering, full stack development, systems architecture. Yet another is like clinical operations, right? Part of clinical operations is like actually building a genetic testing infrastructure, right? Genetic testing infrastructure itself has multiple components, requires multi-different expertise. There's a regulatory component. There's a kind of more classical operations component, just like, you know, operating, like, you know, customer service, et cetera. Then there's design, right? Actual product design, UI, UX. There's communications. Communications is very huge, as I alluded to earlier, right?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Our product is communications, right? We give people information. That's communications. And I can go on, but as you can see already, there's such a diversity of skill sets and backgrounds required to operate a company like Nucleus. So it really requires, I think, someone who, and I'm fortunate that, you know, I spent so much time kind of building what I think of as the intellectual castle. So once you build the intellectual castle, what new employees may not fully appreciate, which is okay, because employees should abstract things away, is they're walking around your castle. So I like to say when a new employee is onboarded, there's actually 10,000 assumptions that have gone into what the ask is, right? There's 10,000 things they actually don't know was assumed before I say, hey, go do this thing.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  I like to say, like, if you're in a castle, I can go back to the castle analogy. You know, if someone's like fixing a window, right? They're not thinking about the plumbing, not thinking about the lights, not thinking about the floor, they're not thinking about the foundation of the castle, right? They're not thinking about who comes and cleans the castle every week. They're just focused on their specific task, right? So I think as a founder, you have this kind of intimacy where you understand and appreciate what the person's job is, and then how it fits into the broader picture, right? And that requires, I think, quite a unique skill set of being both very investigative, right? But also enterprising. I think often someone's one or the other. To be both is extremely powerful, especially for building a frontier tech company like Nucleus Genomics.

• 26:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, what is like the long-term vision? Obviously, you don't want to just do kind of the genetic readings. There's a whole bunch of things you could do. Like, how do you think about the idea maze of where this goes?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  I think you have to build a consumer-centric, real-time, quantified health platform. So ideally, eventually, the platform goes, you know, hey, Kian, as a 24-year-old in Brooklyn, wow, you had super high LDL levels in your last blood test. We found people, wait a second, that's actually not a surprise, because we found people with similar, who are in the 90th percentile, like you, in their genetic disposition for familial hypoglycemia, of course, you're going to have a high blood pressure call, excuse me, blood. High blood cholesterol, so high LDL levels. So then it says, well, maybe if you actually want, we found people similar to you. If they go on their Peloton three times a week for the next four weeks, they see a, you know, 10% reduction in their LDL levels. And by the way, when you go to Amazon, I eat Whole Foods, you probably shouldn't buy that white rice and never buy steak. In other words, the actual integration of this entirety of this data.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  And then part of this too is leveraging, you know, AI. People always say AI, AI, AI these days. AI is a tool, right? It's a tool and that tool I think will be most consequential in the application of genomics. If you look at the founder of Nvidia, Jensen, he actually talks a lot about this a lot. He says, it's actually not the B2B software tool. It's actually in genetics where genetics and biology more broadly where AI will be most consequential. And I think part of that is alluding to what I said earlier, which is if you look at any disease or trait, there's sort of this like missing gap between how much genetics theoretically explain and how much they currently explain. I think closing that gap is obviously the one of the grand missions of nucleus to basically

• 28:34Speaker 02

  perfectly predict us to the theoretical maximum from a primary DNA sequence.

• 28:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting that we need artificial intelligence to understand the machine that has created intelligence, right? Like to a degree, you know more about your car than you do your body.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in order for us to better understand ourselves and the quote unquote, you know, superior intelligent, you know, being, we need artificial intelligence to get it, get there.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think genomics, you know, the DNA is a very complicated circuit. And I, I think, I suspect that what's going to end up happening is it can be more of a black box model that hopefully becomes more and more interpretable over time, but initially probably a more black box model that can already start making predictions that go beyond actual kind of causal mechanism explanations, right? And to put that a little bit simpler, it's like, I can make a prediction about something without necessarily understanding how it shapes that thing, right? And that, that can be very true in genetics too, where you have like an association, but you don't necessarily understand how that DNA variant actually shapes the disease or training question, but you do understand it's associated. And I think that's something really fundamental to think about in, in statistics and with

• 29:46Speaker 02

  AI, which is that you can have prediction without explanation.

• 29:51Anthony Pompliano?

  As you think through, again, understanding now this evolution to action, there are "don't eat this, you should eat this" kind of external inputs to their impact on genetics. What about just changing the genetics themselves, right? So obviously CRISPR, we've seen a lot of talk around steroids or peptides or, you know, many of these things, and some of them don't actually impact directly the genetics or kind of DNA sequencing. But there are quite a bit of conversations right now about do we have the technology? And will it be ethically kind of approved to actually begin to edit what our genetics, you know, kind of are initially?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, before you can edit anything, you have to actually understand like causality. You have to understand like mechanism. So we're still ways off from understanding sort of the complex architecture of some of these diseases and traits. Right? As I said, it's a complex interaction of many different DNA differences in someone's genome. So that's the first step is actually understanding more and more, which is to say, how did these different DNA variants actually save someone's trait? Then the second part of that is to theoretically at least, do kind of, if you were actually going to employ genetic engineering, I think it's, genetic engineering is a very powerful technology, very powerful technology. I don't think it's discussed enough. I think we need a lot more conversations as a society to think about,

• 31:14Speaker 02

  hey, this technology is coming, this technology is improving. How can we appropriately integrate to society, right? It's not something to, it's kind of similar to the information thing. I think we believe that, you know, oppressing technology, hiding technology, hiding information, it just splinters society, right? I think sunlight is the best disinfectant and we should bring technology and empower and educate people so they understand its implications. And to that point, if you were going to actually employ some of this technology, due to the nature of the architecture of some of these diseases and traits, you'd have to do something called like multiplex engineering, which is basically you have to engineer multiple sites in the genome, which is actually very difficult already. It's hard, people are trying to have no off-target effects where that means basically, if I intend to change, you know, DNA letter, I actually change a different one. That's obviously really bad.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  And then there's another implication. Is that you know genetics and and nature it's it's all balance. And what I mean by that is that like, you know, if you can optimize, say, if you could actually engineer for for something like intelligence, right? Someone might say that. What you find is that, you know, in these different intelligence variants are actually associated with different potentially neuropsychiatric diseases. Or even, you know, like autism, right? So I think we have to be very deliberate and understand that there it's not like a kind of panacea solution here for genetic engineering. Nature is is is all about balance. And there's something fundamental to that, that I think as as humanity is going to start appreciating more and more as we come across these questions of genetics in society.

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, if you guys are successful, how does the world look differently in the future?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  I think a couple of things. Every time baby is born, their DNA is sequenced. And basically, ideally, you kind of track the entirety of all their different molecular data in real time. The second, you know, the baby is born, right? So I I always think that the vision for a company like Nucleus is to basically, there's two kind of main parts. One is on the kind of, I think, inheritance part, one is kind of human health part. So that's part of the human health part. I think you have to basically look for all possible molecular signals prior to there's any obvious phenotypic signal to flag before the onset of disease.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  In other words, what I'm saying is that diseases, diseases, there's always actually some, and you can see this with a lot of the different people in the quantified health. If you really start quantifying your health, you find that there's always some molecular anomalies prior to, you know, you get a cough, prior to, you know, you start feeling not good. Or prior to there's some like obvious phenotypic like signal that something's wrong. If you can actually flag those molecularly, that is the ultimate disease prevention, right? I actually think there's very small examples of this already. Let me give you an example, eight sleep, Mateo is a friend of both of ours. If you look at eight sleep, I have an eight sleep. One time I went to sleep on the mattress. And you know, I woke up the next day and said, your heart rate was up 50%. Heart rate's up 50%. That must be a bug, must be a mistake. I feel perfectly fine, right? I do the kind of, you know, check.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Everyone does this kind of mushy qualitative check when you wake up. Oh, I feel fine, whatever. And then around 24 hours later, you know, I, I think this was a while ago. Was it COVID, whatever? It was some, some, some sickness. I had some sickness and I was like, you know, basically knocked out. And I remember thinking to myself, huh, that's interesting. Actually, in a way, the A C kind of flagged it even before I knew. Yep. And then if you take that to the extreme, imagine tracking and also talking about A I. If you're tracking all these different molecular signals at one time in real time as a consumer health platform, that's probably the most powerful health technology that could ever exist, right? It's actually the ultimate, the integration of all this data on, on a single layer. And there's probably going to be an A I that actually sits on top and, and tracks everything you eat, everything you do, every time you work out, right?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Constantly adjusting and updating its estimates of your risk for conditions, right? It's almost like this, like super health. I don't know, like this, this health omniscience that like sits inside of you that tracks everything, right? That's on the human health side. On the inheritance side, I think a couple of things. One is I think, you know, people still don't understand, as I mentioned earlier, that the power of carrier screening, every person to get sequenced because once you get sequenced, and this is one of the reasons is you can identify if someone's a carrier for a condition. If mom and dad are both carriers, then obviously there's a lot of implication for the offspring. You have to be very judicious and careful because you don't want your son or daughter necessarily to be born with the disease.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  So given that, I think one of the first things that's going to happen is you'll basically see the elimination of sort of kind of monitoring diseases. I think monitoring diseases, like if parents both want, they have the liberty to say, actually, wait, you know, I don't necessarily want my son or daughter to be born with this disease. And it's literally just a punnet square, like everyone learning is in eighth grade, right? It's, it's, you know, multiplication. So that's another thing. And I also think there's going to be eventually, probably very, very much long term, but the, the kind of integrated genetic stack from, you know, sequencing, analyzing to what you alluded to earlier, editing where I think genetic engineering technology can be very powerful. We have to be very judicious. Obviously, as I said, nature's balance, right? Nature's this delicate balance. You have to be careful. But I do, do think that the kind of genetic stack is going to get built, right? From the kind of theoretical to, to the practical.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  And I think that's going to, that's going to, you know, obviously be, I mean, literally,

• 36:25Speaker 02

  it's literally going to change society and how we, how we, how we.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I mean, who we are. I think we have to be careful again. I want to, I want to, you know, really stress that, which is that we need to start having these conversations today. It's not for me. It's not for nucleus to make these decisions on behalf of society. We're a part of society, right? We understand as being the kind of leading genomic startup, there's a lot of responsibility and we want to be very much bringing constituents and parties now before the technology is obviously fully baked and start talking today about the implications. Because they shouldn't just be something that's like, you know, you bring out, you know, 30 years and hey, by the way, we can do this, right? It's not the job for the academics or scientists just to have and kind of, you know, cover up. It's our job to give this information and this power to the people.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, there's going to be a lot of people who watch this, listen to this, and they're like, these two guys are full of shit. What are they talking about? There's no way that we're going to be able to scientifically do this, or it is dangerous to go do this. What do you think the real risks are, if any? And how do you think about mitigating risk as you build the business?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Well, I definitely think there's a lot of risks. I mean, as I mentioned, one is we don't currently understand the architecture of a lot of these conditions. So there's a lot of unintended consequences, unknown unknowns, right? Even if someone wanted to do multiplex engineering, the technology is not there. You might end up, you know, engineering, you know, different parts of the DNA unintended, people might get disease, they might die, right? That's obviously not what we want. It might be the case that if you actually do optimize for something like intelligence, what might end up happening is you optimize for a disease, right? So there's a lot of unintended consequences. I also think there's always that question of humanity taking control over your kind of own genome, right? In some way, you can make the argument that different innovative technologies has been always taking

• 38:12Speaker 02

  more agency over our bodies, but there's something very primary about DNA that we have to be, I think, very thoughtful about. And I, and I really want to stress that, like, In this podcast, this conversation, it's an opportunity for people to start engaging. I don't see these things being spoken enough about, right? I think like things go through their hype cycles, right? GenX has never had its hype cycle, which is good for us, right? It's alpha for us, right? But on the hand, I do think it's important people start really thinking seriously. In the same way, they actually think about like general artificial intelligence, thinking seriously about genetic engineering, thinking seriously about this kind of genetic stack and saying, you know, what, what? You know, how are we as a society going to start kind of integrating this technology? Right, that's really important and it's not being spoken about enough, I think.

• 38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say that there hasn't been a hype cycle yet and it's a positive thing.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  It's a good thing, it's a great thing.

• 38:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you anticipate that there will be a hype cycle in the future? Or actually, the ideal condition is that the industry avoids all hype cycles and kind of continues to grind upwards?

• 39:07Speaker 02

  I don't really know, it doesn't really matter to me. We're gonna win. It can be a hype cycle, be not a hype cycle. I don't know, I feel like we.

• 39:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, hype cycles, they bring capital, they bring talent, they bring attention, right? They bring noise as well. And so there's positives and negatives to it. Obviously, AI, crypto, where we've seen some of these over the last couple of years. And so I think some companies say, look, when the hype cycle comes, I take the positives and try to avoid the negatives. Other people get smacked by the negative, right? They completely, you know, business blows up or whatever. And so it's an interesting way to think through, like if you haven't had a hype cycle in your sector, whether you actually want one or not.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  I mean, we're just building, right? Like we, some of the things I think about, if anything, I think about in the context of like, it's almost a good distraction. There's other hype cycles, right? Like I think people are building like commodities wrappers over, you know, LLMs. You know, let them do that. Like we're building what I think will be one of the most consequential companies ever, right? Let us keep doing that. Money, you know, the hype cycle can come, it can not come. I've been doing this, you know, forgot hype. I mean, I've been doing this, you know, hour 11, you know, you know, sick in my bedroom, you know? 11pm, you know, on notebook page, you know, whatever, 249. Talk about lack of hype cycle.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  In other words, I'm saying is like, there's a level of kind of focus that we have that can come, it can not come. We're locked in. So, yeah.

• 40:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do you think that comes from? Like, why are you so focused?

• 40:42Speaker 02

  I think it comes from, uh, I think it comes from both a love and fear. I think there's definitely a love, I mean, to me, like, the intersection of kind of science and product and alchemy of creating something from nothing, it's so, so beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing I've said, it's an expression of my soul, I love that. Also comes, I think, a little bit from fear, and that definitely, you know, I'm a first generation American, as I said, right? There's definitely an expectation, right? I, as I, I think I said this in Alex's podcast too, which is like, there, you know, when you're in your bedroom, it's, it's as many people you don't want to disappoint, right? Your parents came here, they made a lot of sacrifices, right? You, you, you, you don't go to, you know, a school like Penn and then leave it,

• 41:25Speaker 02

  you know, because I'm gonna, you know, follow my dreams, what does that even mean? You don't do that, right? It's, it's like against the culture, you don't do that. Similarly, you don't want to disappoint yourself, right? Because there's, there's always, of course, always,

• 41:39Speaker 02

  there's always doubt, especially in the, in the bedroom. There's doubt, can I do this? Can, can, can, can one person do this, right? And that doubt is, is fear, but I do think there's both in that push and that pull. There's that love and that fear, right? There's, there's that fear, like, I don't wanna, you know, like, I'm, I'm scared for, you know, out of my mind, but also then, and that, that, you know, pushes you, that motivates you, but there's the love of what you're doing. So the combination of both is intense, unwavering, focused, so.

• 42:10Anthony Pompliano?

  How does that feed into who you recruit to come work at the company?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  I mean, people need to be, I think, I think people, people need to be absolutely focused. I mean, there's, there's no doubt about that. I think we have a very diverse eclectic mix of people. And Nukleus, I think that's something that's just like underappreciated too. People from all across the political spectrum, people with a variety of different kind of ideologies, et cetera. And, and I think part of that is actually beautiful, because I almost wanted to, um, kind of, you know, in a way emulate society, right? I almost want, you know, there's that kind of Steve Jobs analogy with the rocks hitting each other. They're boxing each other and then all of a sudden they both come out polished. I really believe in that fundamentally. And that's why I think these conversations are so important. Because we can talk publicly about these things. Some people might love it, some people might hate it, but they're definitely talking about it.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  And that's very important to me, which is bringing this and giving this information, this knowledge to people. I think internally, people need to have that intense focus, but I don't necessarily expect people to agree with me either. But I think that will make us all better, that makes the product better. That would make us even more judicious and thoughtful while still accelerating.

• 43:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And then my last question is around like regulation.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Or maybe I'll just call it the rules. And the rules are both, we've talked a little bit about maybe kind of like society's perspective on like what's in bounds and what's out of bounds, even if it isn't necessarily backed by science. Right. It's just kind of like the public thinks something. What are the regulatory kind of considerations for something like this? I'm assuming that there are multiple regulatory bodies that you all interact with on a daily basis. What are they trying to accomplish? Do you feel like those rules are good, bad, that need to be improved? Like just talk, talk about that kind of apparatus.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Nucleus is fully, we follow all regulations and we always follow regulations. It's definitely evolving space, intense regulations. And we're excited to work with all the regulatory bodies to, you know, continue to make sure we're kind of fully compliant. I definitely think that people have the right to their whole genome data. People have the right to know basically what's going on inside their body.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  And I think part of Nucleus's mission and part of, I think, the government's mission is to make sure that we can give people lifesaving insights. Right. If a piece of information can save someone's life with a swab, a single swab can read your entire genome finally.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  And you know what? What one, one piece of communication can save your life? That, that to me, sounds like something that everyone should have access to. In a manner that's, you know, sure, regulated, that's also, I think, HIPAA compliant. You know, we're also clearly cap accredited as well. So there's a way of doing that kind of responsibly, but still making sure that people have access. It's really important to me. And I think Nucleus, I think Nucleus and Vodiment, that that's true today. So I'm happy about that.

• 45:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there anything that surprised you so far in building the company?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Everything, everything. It's, I mean, this is a classic answer. I can give you a non-classic answer, but the classic answer is it's so hard. I mean, everyone says it's so hard. It's so hard. So what does it actually mean? It's just, it's just like, I think there's a Paul Graham quote where he says, you know, one thing about when you, when you leave college, if you leave college and you start a company and it works, or it starts working, you know, it's like you start running as fast as you, as fast and as hard as you, a human being can run at age like twenty, twenty-two. And I think reading that when you're fifteen, you're like, I don't even know what that means. That sounds kind of fun. But then you live it. And basically, the idea is you see it, it becomes like all-consuming. It's just all-consuming. It just takes over everything you have, every being, every part, like every spirit, soul, whatever. Everything goes into the company. And I think that kind of process is beautiful. It also definitely takes a certain kind of personality.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It is not for everyone. It is. You gotta, you gotta be willing to, you know, quote-unquote, die in the court, I think.

• 46:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the percentage confidence you would put right now on the company succeeding?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, it's funny because it's almost like always trick questions. Sometimes VCs ask me this. And I'm like, but they don't understand, like, either company succeeds or like I die. It's like if I throw my head into the wall to make it succeed, it's gonna succeed. It's almost like I, I read, I read this thing recently. I think Dorkish posted this. It was basically said like, if you do everything, you will win. If you do everything, like everything. And I think the Lyndon Johnson as example, Lyndon Johnson is a complicated person. But in terms of like persistence and just doing absolutely everything. Sometimes I think to myself, you know, oh, it's interesting, like Lyndon Johnson's interesting because, you know, if you read Caro's biography, there's this like level of intensity and like insanity and like pathological likeness to his, to his work. But he literally did everything. He literally did everything like a human being could do.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  And then he became president. So you have to wonder like, who becomes president? Well, maybe the person that does everything. But in the same way, like if you went to him and said, what's your confidence he's gonna succeed? He'll be like, a hundred percent. And again, I think you have to learn from these stories and that he did a lot of things that he honestly shouldn't have done. That was a little bit ethically fraught, right? So I think doing everything is not an excuse for that. I do think though, that there is something to this idea that's like, if you do everything, everything that you can in your capacity, if you give out something your all, it has to be inevitability.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  You bend nature to your will.

• 47:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Um, so let's just say 99%.

• 47:29Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we'll keep track and we'll do this again.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Keep track, Bob.

• 47:32Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll do this again in the future.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Okay, that's great. Thank you so much for having me.