How To Be Insanely Productive Even with ADHD w/ Dr. Jeff Karp | EP #111

In this episode, Jeff and Peter discuss how to be an entrepreneur in the biomedical field, Jeff’s journey with ADHD, and groundbreaking technologies pioneered by Jeff’s lab. 21:34 | The Future of Disease Diagnostics 44:54 | A Nasal Spray Against Covid-19? 01:18:26 | Surviving Imposter Syndrome Dr. Jeffrey Karp is a leading bioengineer, holding a professorship at Harvard Medical School and MIT. Karp has co-founded 13 companies, raising over $600 million. His Laboratory ‘Karp Lab’ focuses on advanced biomaterials and devices for therapeutics, and focuses on medical problem-solving fields like a nasal spray effective against viruses. Some of the groundbreaking technologies he’s developed are tissue adhesives (TISSIUM), target drug delivery needs, and 3D printing biomedical devices. His dedication to bioengineering research has led to over 30,000 citations for his publications (0.1% globally) and multiple awards by the National Academy of Inventors and TEDMED. Dr. Karp’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063010739 Website: https://www.jeffkarp.com/ Profi Nasal Spray: https://www.profispray.com/ ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, I had a lot of teachers that were giving me labels, lazy, lost cause, troublemaker. Once I was helping another child and the teacher came over and said, "Oh, isn't that like the blind leading the blind?" They asked me one day, "What do you want to be?" And I said, "I want to be a doctor." The teacher said, "Well, you better set your sights lower because you really just don't have that in you." I felt like I always had to work twice as hard as everyone else. I was the kid who was going in on weekends, like trying to meet with teachers to go over things and after school. Like, I almost felt like, kind of looking back, like I had this hardware in my mind, but I didn't have software.

• 0:35Peter Diamandis?

  What's your advice to a mom or a dad in this situation with their young child?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  What I've learned is...

• 0:43Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots. Today, I'm going to be speaking to Dr. Jeff Karp, professor at MIT and Harvard, the founder of 13 different companies, a gentleman who is using a whole slew of exponential technologies to reinvent products that impact our lives. We'll talk about this product. I love Profi Spray, 99.99% prevention of influenza and COVID-19, couple sprays in the nose. It's like a HEPA filter for your nose. But beyond that, we'll talk about his book, Lit, which is extraordinary. Talk about learning how to think about how you think, interviewing 40 extraordinary individuals on the processes that make them successful in life. Join me for a fascinating conversation.

• 1:27Peter Diamandis?

  If you love conversations like we're about to have, please subscribe. Allows me to bring incredible people to you. We'll talk about his MTP, his Moonshots, and hopefully inspire you to go bigger and bolder in the world. Dr. Jeff Karp, welcome to Moonshots.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  So great to be here. Thank you.

• 1:43Peter Diamandis?

  A pleasure. You know, it's the first time we're physically meeting. We know we have a lot in common because we both have these beautiful purple Pilot pens, which are, which I love. You're at Harvard MIT now as a professor, my alma mater, which I love deeply. What's it like there right now? Are you, is it, are you a kid in a candy store at this moment?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's... Everybody's coming up with ideas. Our access to tools is just exceptional. New tools coming online constantly. Science is moving at a faster pace than than ever. And we're really faced with tough decisions to make about what to focus on.

• 2:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's so much going on in the whole biotech, AI, robotics, 3D printing world, new material sciences, that it's like an abundance of massive entrepreneurial opportunities. And yeah, it's interesting. Do you know Martine Rothblatt?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so Martine's been a friend for 40 years. I mean, during her extraordinary journey. And she once told me something that I'd never forget. She says, "Successful people say no to most things. The most successful people say no to everything." And that's always been a problem for me, just actually saying no and focusing. How about you?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely been a challenge, especially with my ADHD.

• 3:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  I think it's, uh, because I'm, I find like I just have boundless curiosity about everything. And, um, and but at the same time, like I feel it's important to say no a lot of the time, but I think it's also important to say yes for things that you're unsure about because there's always opportunities to learn in every encounter. And I feel that when I start saying no to everything, it kind of becomes this algorithm that then limits me from, it sort of narrows what I potentially can learn about, right? Because it it almost, it it it reduces the diversity of opportunities that I'm engaging in.

• 4:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and you never know where some right angle, where you break out of a local maxima and break into a brand new space of discovery and joy. Right? I mean, that's, and and I think given where you are in the, I mean, As a professor, I mean, you run the CARP labs at Harvard Medical School. I want to dive into what does that mean? That's sort of, we mind mapped your world and I have like forty, fifty percent on your labs. We'll talk about that. You know, forty percent on your seven-year effort on building this book called Lit. And then ten percent on some other areas and there's probably another fifty percent we haven't talked about yet.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:38Peter Diamandis?

  Because it always adds up to one hundred and fifty percent. Uh, but um, in, as a professor, as a scientist, as a researcher, um, going down rabbit holes has got to be part of the job description.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and I think, um, for us, uh, it's almost one of those things where whenever we come up with ideas for projects, uh, we get excited about it, but I know now from sort of engaging in this process many times that our best ideas come from the challenges, the roadblocks, the hurdles that we encounter along the way. That's when we actually become the most creative, the most insightful. And so often we need to go down these kind of rabbit holes in order to discover what's truly most important.

• 5:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, but you have another, uh, element to you, which is the entrepreneur, um, which is building companies. And, uh, that becomes interesting because while, while you've, you've got to focus on the product, the market, and make something that people want and need and is sufficiently differentiated. And, and if you keep on chasing it, um, you never get something out the door.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had this kind of holy crap moment, um, when I was transitioning out of my postdoc into my faculty position because I discovered that I was, during my postdoc and my PhD, I had very entrepreneurial mentors. I trained in Bob Langer's lab for my, my postdoc. And it was a holy crap moment for me because I really wanted to focus my laboratory on not just publishing papers, but taking that science and turning it into products that could help patients. But I realized that I didn't have a process for doing it. I had observed other people doing it, but I didn't do it for myself. And any time in

• 6:41Speaker 00

  my life where I encounter something I can't do, or I don't feel I'm good at, I recognize that it's not because it's inherently bad at something, it's just because I haven't found a process that works for me. And so I began to explore how might I engage in experimenting with various processes to find what would work for me so that I could develop a translational program for my research.

• 7:11Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. That is fascinating. And being in Bob Langer's lab, right, who's prolific, he, George Church, there are these prolific professors who are just driving science and building companies. And it's like, again, Kid in the Candy Store type of... Yeah, when I was at MIT, I was there from eighty through ninety at MIT and Harvard Med School. It wasn't the entrepreneurial era yet. I think MIT cared a lot more about Nobel prizes than it did anything else. How do you feel it is now? I was just on the phone, literally before coming up here with two of my fraternity brothers, Dave Blunden and Mike Saylor, both

• 7:55Peter Diamandis?

  MITers and both incredibly successful entrepreneurs. We were just talking about how do we stoke that entrepreneurial fire? Is the ethos at MIT more about starting companies now versus fundamental science?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I think so. I think there's been a huge transition over the past, um, maybe fifteen, twenty years or so. And I think what's really fueled that is, um, just a few notable academics who have spun off companies that have had massive impact on society, uh, like, um, Phil Sharp with Biogen.

• 8:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Um, Bob Langer with Moderna and many other companies.

• 8:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  And I think when, uh, you know, other sort of, um, colleagues, academics, see what's possible, um, there's this huge gravity to, to sort of thi- this realization that there's, that there's opportunity to impact the world in such amazingly positive ways, um, through using company formation as a vehicle and seeing examples of it around you, I think just, i- i- you know, you kind of get inspired and it sort of creates this energy that, you know, maybe you could do it as well. And I think now there's, it's, it's, it's almost every professor, every doctor that I speak to in Boston, um, is interested in starting companies.

• 9:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, cause it's, it used to be like discovering some fundamental truth of science or physics, uh, was, was fascinating, but now it's like discovering it and actually using it to go and change the world, operationalizing it.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, I think one of the, um, you, one of the people actually I interviewed for, uh, for the book, David Suzuki, who's, uh, an environmentalist and he had, um, the longest running, um, show on Canadian television, I think it called The Nature of Things.

• 9:49Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  And one of the things that, you know, he focused on, um, in my conversation with him was, um, you know, what, what is enough and how we need to spend more of our time on exploration because that's one of the things that I struggle with in my life is that, you know, I've focused a lot on translation, um, but at the same time, the products that are being translated, it also creates environmental challenges. There's sustainability issues that come from the products that we're making. And, um, you know, it's, it's sort of like trying to strike that balance between, um, exploration and basic science and the impacts of what we're developing, but then also pushing the fringe, the, the leading edge on, um,

• 10:34Speaker 00

  maximizing positive impact for humans and for, for the earth.

• 10:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and so the question becomes when you're trying to get what what are you optimizing around? What's your optimization function, right?

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:46Peter Diamandis?

  Um, and and we'll come back to that. Um.

• 10:51Peter Diamandis?

  On this on moonshots, we talk a lot about, you know, to entrepreneurs about your massive transformative purpose and your moonshot. Like, you know, I define an MTP as something that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night. It's your north star. It is what um uh what drives you? What drives you?

• 11:10Speaker 00

  I think what drives me has changed over time.

• 11:14Peter Diamandis?

  Sure. And I one of the things, by the way, for me too, right? I'm in my third or fourth MTP. It was like started space and then went at the, you know, uh solving global grand challenges and then supporting entrepreneurs and now and longevity. But so take me back. What what have been your sort of like your decadal MTPs, if you would?

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Wow, I love that question. Um, such a great framing. Um, so I would say, okay, so I go way back. Um, the the the initial initial one was really around, you know, I was struggling with undiagnosed ADHD and learning differences when I was younger.

• 11:51Peter Diamandis?

  This was at what age?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Uh, in the second grade when I was seven years old. Um, I'd sit at the back of the class completely frustrated, um, feeling demoralized. Nothing was working. Um, my mom tried flashcards, cue cards, um, nothing worked. I couldn't and I wasn't able to keep up with anything, wasn't connected socially with anybody. Uh, and what happened was the teacher at the end of the year pulled my parents aside and said that he would like to have me repeat the second grade. Um, and my parents negotiated for me to spend time with tutors during the summer to then be able to catch up and go on to the third grade. And what happened that summer is um I went in one day and the tutor asked, uh, you know, read a passage, asked me some questions.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Um, I gave some answers, um, but then she asked me a question that no one had ever asked me before that transformed my life and led to the first, um, you called it M.

• 12:47Peter Diamandis?

  MTP.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  MTP.

• 12:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Uh, my first, uh, yeah, massive transformative, um.

• 12:53Peter Diamandis?

  Purpose.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Purpose, okay.

• 12:55Peter Diamandis?

  That's okay.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Um, and and that was, uh, so I gave I gave the answers and then she looked me in the eye and she said, how did you think about that? And and

• 13:04Peter Diamandis?

  Ah.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  That question actually created this newfound awareness for me that um that was so transformative because it then became my mission to figure out like I almost felt like kind of looking back like I had this hardware in my mind, but I didn't have software. And I had to figure out how do I test various algorithms, patterns that I was observing in other people to create my own software for functioning and surviving in the education system. So that was my first sort of mission um that uh that that I was focused on.

• 13:44Peter Diamandis?

  What what's your advice to a mom or dad in this situation with their young child?

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Well, one one of the things that

• 13:53Peter Diamandis?

  And I know you've got an entire book on this, so we'll get into it.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:56Peter Diamandis?

  But

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Well, I think for me, what I've realized um and I I feel like, you know, parenting is is perhaps one of the most challenging jobs, roles that anyone could ever have.

• 14:08Peter Diamandis?

  And the most most important for society and for

• 14:10Speaker 00

  And most important, yeah. Um, and what I've learned is um first and foremost is is just to find ways to support children in whatever they're experiencing and going through. I feel like there's been this tendency for me with my children to kind of try to push them to extract potential because I see this incredible potential in my children and I find myself almost sort of treating them as if I was it was I was treating myself, you know? Like I was sort of trying to extract, I'm always trying to extract my potential. And I feel that that doesn't work really well. And what works well, I think, is the support, just finding ways to support. And one of the ways that my mom supported me was, you know, here I was like a C and D student,

• 14:55Speaker 00

  really struggling, feeling like I didn't fit in like an alien. Um, I think a lot of kids, you kind of slip through the cracks and eh who have uh who are neurodiverse and become addicts. Um, and my mom uh wrote speeches for me because there was public speaking contests. And she would coach me in memorizing and then and and saying these speeches. And I got better and better and better and I started to win competitions.

• 15:19Peter Diamandis?

  Ah.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  And so that was the one thing that I had going for me where I was able to build my confidence. And so I think that kind of the parallel or or potential there for, you know, um Advice maybe for for parents is to find that one thing where whatever does it could be anything where the child can build a little bit of confidence every day. Maybe it's like finding a mentor who can help, um, you know, that the child's really excited to to be with and learn from and to explore and build skills and really tap into that. Um, the energy that we get from learning and gaining insights and and building a skill because I think that can really carry the day and that always stays with you.

• 16:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I I think about my parents wanted me to become a doctor. I wanted to become an astronaut, right? And and that that struggle and I went through medical school and make my parents happy. Shipped my dad a copy of my diploma when I graduated and then went on to follow my my space passions. I've come back full cycle to to medicine a few decades later. Uh, did your parents have a mission or a purpose for you or?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  I um, I felt like, you know, there was a lot of dentists in my family. There's some doctors in my family and and I I did feel that that was sort of the path that people would um, sort of, uh, there was appreciation for anyone in the family who, you know, the way people talked, spoke about other family members and going into careers. If it was like a doctor or a lawyer, you know, something like that, dentist, um, that people would get excited about it. So, um, but I also, I I think, um, you know, I had a lot of teachers that were giving

• 17:08Speaker 00

  me labels, um, and so like, like lazy, um, uh, lost cause, troublemaker. Um, once I was helping another child and the teacher came over and said, oh, isn't that the like the blind leading the blind? Um, and then I they asked me one day, what do you want to be? And I said, I want to be a doctor. Um, and the teacher said, well, you better set your sights lower because you really just don't have have that in you.

• 17:33Peter Diamandis?

  American education system at work, ladies and gentlemen.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so my parents were more focused on, you know, trying to um not let that become my label. And to for for me to, you know, my mom constantly was telling me, she was like, you know, you have superpowers. And it was kind of hard for me to believe, but she said it so often that, you know, I started to believe it. And um and I started to imagine it and kind of fantasize about that. Um, and I remember distinctly in elementary school, like being in class, like trying to almost like think like I could see things that others couldn't. And I couldn't really, but like I felt like maybe I could, you know.

• 18:11Peter Diamandis?

  It's a confidence building game to believe in yourself and not let yourself be put down by the world around you.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:18Peter Diamandis?

  So that was your sort of first MTP early on. Where'd you go next uh on on your purpose? What was it that drove you?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  So what happened was um my uh, okay, so my mom, nobody wanted to uh to do anything about these challenges I was encountering. No one was talking about ADHD at the time. My mom went up against the school board on her own with a massive file. She had recorded everything that teachers had ever said, written about me, all my grades and everything. And she went to the school board and actually got me identified as having learning differences, which then got got me special accommodations, a little bit extra space, extra time on my assignments and tests and exams. And um I had been developing all these tools, studying patterns um in.

• 19:04Peter Diamandis?

  How old are you at this point?

• 19:05Speaker 00

  At this point, uh, I would have been, um, let's see, uh, maybe twelve. Um, and uh, what happened was my grades went from Cs and Ds to straight As. And the struggles remained. Uh, I felt like I always had to work twice as hard as everyone else. I was always, I was the kid who was going in on weekends, like trying to meet with teachers to go over things and after school. And just constantly working and and trying to focus, because my, I was pretty extreme uh ADHD. And so the next sort of, you know, MTP phase for me um was focusing on how I could maintain. Straight A's because my grades went to as soon as I got into the seventh grade, my grades went to straight A's.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  And so I I just kept focusing on, I guess the MTP was on, how could I improve my efficiencies? Because everything took me a long time. It was almost like, um, you know, the movie Terminator, the original one. There's this scene where um, he goes to say something and the screen pops up and there's like five or six different options, what he can say and he's trying to figure out which one. Um, and then, you know, select something. That's how I feel even today, like it's like I I see many possibilities. When I'm asked a question in, in, let's say in school, um, I don't, I I see many possible answers and I don't know which one the teacher wants the most. And so I need time to figure out the probabilities around which answer to to give back.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And that actually makes it really challenging for me to help my children with their homework. They don't like me. They they say they don't want me to help them at all because I don't, I don't really, I I don't see the linear way that this education system kind of works. And so so my focus then at that time was really on how do I, how do I get more efficient? How do I observe people around me and what are their tools and strategies for being efficient with their time? And how do they approach problems and doing their homework and doing these things? And what can I experiment with? And I almost see everything as algorithms around me. So I'm constantly trying different algorithms that I see and in environments, how people behave, what they say in certain scenarios.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  And then I try those algorithms on and see how they feel. And I'm constantly iterating and adapting them. And so that's where a huge part of my life was focused after the seventh grade.

• 21:27Peter Diamandis?

  You you sound like a a a perfect analog for an AI learning system.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:34Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, "Listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on." And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life

• 22:19Peter Diamandis?

  was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full-body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics

• 23:03Peter Diamandis?

  that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter.

• 23:48Peter Diamandis?

  It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Fast forwarding to your professional career, what was your first MTP there? What was your first purpose?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  So my PhD advisors and my postdoc advisor mentor were highly entrepreneurial. And I saw by being in their laboratories, the potential of science to have a massive impact on humanity. And so, and then I realized, kind of going back to this holy crap moment, that I didn't have a process for doing it. So I was, I was on the hunt for, how could I develop a process to maximize the translation of everything that I worked on? How could every project I worked on turn into a potential company that could then bring products into clinical trials and eventually to patients? And so what I did is I

• 24:43Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, that decision to make sure that whatever you worked on actually wasn't just for a publication endpoint, or wasn't just for some prize endpoint, was actually going to be meaningful for society, probably was a critically important filter for you.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  It was huge. It was, and it was also, I feel, because I was open to the cues. I feel all of us have this like core wisdom and in the environments that we're in, if we sort of let ourselves sort of, you know, get into a state where we can, we can feel as we're observing what's happening around us. And when I was in, for example, Bob Linger's lab, and I could just see the positivity of how science could be translated into products and really change people's lives. And that, that just, to me, seemed right. It just seemed like that's what, what I really needed to focus on.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  And so it was, it just, I would just felt deeply connected to that and that became my mission. But I didn't have a process. And so what I did was, I said, okay, you know, I started thinking about problem definition, right? So I started to realize that what separates a academic project from a translational project that can really lead to, you know, impact is, is the Problem definition. Most of the time when we're doing academic projects, we're focused on just the biology problem, you know, like what's the target, what's the, you know, this, this kind of thinking or the medical problem. But I realized that it was almost like a Venn diagram.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  An overlapping, overlapping circles where there was also the manufacturing problem. There was the patent problem. There was the regulatory problem. There was the biology problem. There was the medical problem. There was the practical implementation problem. There was the sales problem.

• 26:40Peter Diamandis?

  There was a financing problem.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:41Peter Diamandis?

  Problem, marketing problem.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Right, there's all these things. And so the overlap of all of these things is where the problem definition lies. If we don't think about all of these circles, we can't, we, we, we, we, we can't maximize our chance of solving that problem. And so I asked this question and my whole life has really been about questions, trying to figure out how to get better at asking high value questions. And so I said, okay, well, I don't have expertise in these areas, but who does? And I realized in the Boston area that there's like the world leaders in all of these circles. And so what I did is I committed to start meeting with people and not just meeting, but actually it's not just networking,

• 27:24Speaker 00

  forming relationships. And so every two to three weeks for 10 years, I would meet with patent lawyers, corporate lawyers, reimbursement, regulatory experts, manufacturing experts, people in med tech, pharma, biotech, consumer health. And I would look, I would, I would meet with them. I would go to all these mixers and networking events and seminars and I would go and I would ask questions and I would try to develop the skill of interacting with people and finding ways to develop relationships. And what started to emerge from this was I, an informal advisory board for my lab. And so as we're advancing projects. I can reach out to people and say, do you think this could be manufactured? Are investors interested in this?

• 28:07Speaker 00

  What would the clinical trial look like if this was to succeed? What would be the comparator? Because we want to include that early in our experiments to define what we're doing, if it's important or not, to make that the North Star. And so that ended up serving this mission, this MTP, because it created this North Star that then enabled my laboratory to spin out almost every major project from my lab has spun out into a company.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  I love this. This is a masterclass, you know, moment for entrepreneurs here. Because a lot of entrepreneurs figure, I need to do this myself. Right? I need to know how to do this. I need to read the right book, watch the right YouTube video. But in building this ecosystem around you, did you just go? Was it haphazard? Or were you like, I need to find a great patent lawyer? And you ask around and knock on their door? And then what were you offering them? Was it like, hi, I'm Professor Karp. I do this thing. I just would love to have a conversation with you. How would someone replicate that? Because it's a brilliant idea.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  So what I would do is, it was very experimental. It was not linear at all. I just felt this gravity that I needed to do this and that this is, and I didn't, I didn't exactly know it would lead to this informal advisory board as it did. That just kind of unfolded as, as I was advancing in this process. But I just knew that I needed to, I wasn't able to learn the expertise on my own and I had to develop relationships with people who had that expertise. And so what I offered was I would talk to the people I was meeting about the projects that were ongoing in my laboratory.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And I sort of kept it open that their input could direct, help direct the trajectory of the product, of the technologies that we were developing. And so I think that Generally, humans want to work on things that are important and that can have impact. And so by tapping into that common energy, um, you know, I was able to develop the, the connections around that. And so people kind of felt as I was meeting with them that there, that I was taking their advice seriously. And that I was going to incorporate that into the projects in my lab, which then created a connection. So they wanted to follow up. They wanted to see how their advice led to the next sort of phase of the project.

• 30:48Peter Diamandis?

  It was a purpose driven investment on their part, you know, and, and like I, like I teach and, and speak, you know, from the mountaintops where I can, do something that's meaningful. Do something that can change the world. We don't need another photo sharing app. And I mean, the reason people will follow Elon with SpaceX or with Tesla is because he's got this massive transformative purpose and people want to be part of that. People want meaning in their lives.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:16Peter Diamandis?

  And so this was not a financial transaction with these folks.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't at all. Um, in, in fact, I mean, that when I was meeting with them, it was really at the highest possible risk stage of the projects. We were just beginning.

• 31:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Um, but I think that the people in the community also felt like, um, not only that they were sort of felt invested in the process because I was taking their advice seriously, but there was also this potential for the future that if things started to work out, that they might be able to be involved in the translation process. And that's what started to happen is that as we advanced things in the lab, I kept in touch with people. I sought their advice kind of over and over again. And then at when something got kind of ready to be translated, there was a whole bunch of people who already knew about those projects. And that I felt is also one of the key things is that one of the hardest things in spinning out companies is finding a CEO.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Who has the capabilities and the network and the adaptability and the relationship component. Um, and what I realized is that when I started looking around, what sort of the standard process for spinning a company out from academia was, was to push the project as far as possible and then to go find a CEO. But what I discovered was if I could meet with C, meet with potential entrepreneurs, potential CEOs of future companies early on, involve them, then um, there was almost like a number of potential CEOs that I already was interacting with. I already had relationships.

• 32:51Peter Diamandis?

  Who were circling and felt ownership.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and feeling ownership. And by the way, um, you know, you're a serial entrepreneur as I am, and until you find that CEO, you're the CEO and you, and it, you'll get just pulled into the details and you need that amazing person.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:10Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I, I love this. Uh, you mentioned the idea of your life's been about asking questions. One of the things I speak about to my kids and to the CEOs I mentor is the single most important thing to do is ask great questions.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:24Peter Diamandis?

  That is everything.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Everything, yeah. Well, um, there's actually, uh, like maybe just three points that I can, I can um, sort of shed on, on the questions. Um, the first is, is actually, um, between the second and third grade, when I had this transformational experience with, with the tutor who, who said, how did you think about that? That sort of led, sort of created this newfound awareness for me and um, I realized that when I asked questions, that, you know, I couldn't really pay attention in class, but anytime I asked a question, I could hyper focus for a few moments afterwards. And whatever was said to me, imprinted in my mind, I could connect it to other things I knew and I could recall it later.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  And so I discovered very quickly after that moment that questions were key to my learning.

• 34:13Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  And that's why, as I navigated my undergrad and my grad school, um, I, I stopped going to a lot of my lectures and I would just, um, focus on figuring out questions that I could ask other students or go and ask the professor. Um, you know, so, so, so, you know, questions became the key to my learning. If I was in a class where I couldn't, a lot of, a lot of lectures were so big that they didn't allow questions. So I, I stopped going to those lectures because it just, you know, I, I needed to ask questions. So that's like one, so so so I discovered the discovery of questions being important was sort of like happened in elementary school. But then what happened is I got into grad school and um I it it was like I was about

• 34:55Speaker 00

  to learn this this whole new avenue of asking questions, this whole new level. And what happened was is that, you know, academics typically go to into seminars and you go to these invited speakers and you sit there and, you know, I started going when when I entered grad school at University of Toronto. And then at the end, there's the question and answer period. Yeah. And people start asking questions. And I was blown away by the level of questions that people are asking, and those questions weren't coming to me. And these questions were going right to the heart of what the seminar speaker was talking about. And I almost started shaming myself, like, why aren't these questions coming to me? Because I had focused my whole life on asking questions.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  And so I started to think, um, you know, what could I do to develop my skill? Because again, it's like I know that if I'm not good at something, it's because I haven't engaged the process that works for me yet. And I started to think about it and I realized that there was potentially an opportunity for pattern recognition. So the next seminar I went to, everyone was focused on what the speaker was saying, but I was focused on something different. Faster. I was focused on the questions that were being asked. And I wrote them all down. I went to seminar after seminar and I wrote the questions that people in the audience were asking, pages and pages for like two or three months. And then one day I just stopped and I looked at it. And next day I'm looking, next day I'm just sort of thinking about it, and then boom, lightbulb moment.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  I realized that all the questions that were being asked fit under four or five different categories. One of them was, was the experiment working? Did the person act, did the scientist have the right controls? Right. Um, you know, some experiments are really complicated. Another was, are the results important? So if they were developing a diagnostic for blood and they did all their work in saltwater saline and the results looked amazing, um, you know. Was relevant. It's not relevant, exactly. And then so another one was, um, did the, uh, did the speaker overstate their conclusions? Did the data support what they were concluding? A lot of the time it actually doesn't. Then there were questions around statistics and there were some other questions. So. Once I had that awareness of the motivation behind asking the questions, the next seminar I went to,

• 37:03Speaker 00

  it was like I had my detective hat on. I was taking notes. All the questions that others were asking before are now coming to me. And not only that, I'm like tapped into my curiosity. Like I'm because I'm thinking of questions. I'm I'm also thinking of the next potential experiment that that person could perform or other applications of their work. So I'm able to tap into my creativity. And so what I realized is that questioning is a skill. Regardless of where you're at, you can always, you know, move that skill forward. And I've brought that to social settings as well, where there's always like, you know, early in my life, I really struggled socially to connect with people. And so what I started to do was observe what are the the people who are really good at at connecting with people and, you know, the schmoozers in social settings.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  What questions are they asking? And I start listening to those questions. And then I start asking those questions, experimenting.

• 37:55Peter Diamandis?

  You're training up your neural net.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, it's it's a it's a beautiful thing. You know, questions are such a powerful part of our lives. I mean, I learn. So I use questions. For example, when I'm I'm going to give a presentation. Um, I will write out the questions that I want to ask myself.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 38:15Peter Diamandis?

  And then present answering the questions I've asked myself in that structure.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Wow, I love that. Yeah.

• 38:22Peter Diamandis?

  And then for me, when I'm on stage, uh, the most fun I ever have is in is the Q and A that follows a keynote, right? And a lot of times I'll just forego slides and forego everything and just have a conversation with the audience. My favorite time is like, I'm gonna say a few provocative things up front.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 38:44Peter Diamandis?

  And then I jump into the audience and I challenge them. Call bullshit. Tell me what you disagree with.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:50Peter Diamandis?

  What are you concerned about? And just get into a conversation because it's so more. Unfortunately, when we go into a lecture mode, otherwise it just. You know glosses over, people numb out.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I totally relate to that. In fact, one of the things that I like to to um to do in my laboratory is um when people are presenting data, I like them to put a title with a very bold conclusion that may even overstate the what the the results, but that will provoke a reaction in the room. So we get the best thinking to happen at that moment versus just like watching somebody, you know, speak and there's no.

• 39:27Peter Diamandis?

  What is this, what does this mean, right?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:30Peter Diamandis?

  What is the, what is the data mean in its best possible case?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:34Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, I, I want to take you to um what your massive transformative purpose is now and on the, on the lab side, we'll talk about the book side a little bit.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 39:45Peter Diamandis?

  And what is, do you have a moonshot or a set of moonshots? Where, you know, define a moonshot as going 10 times bigger in the world where everyone else is moving at 10%, right? Where you want to just make, you know, to use Jobs's words, make a dent in the universe. What, what is it that drives you there?

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Right at this moment?

• 40:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, so uh, well, we, you know, really it's about uh, it's about the book and.

• 40:08Peter Diamandis?

  And we'll come back to that, but I want to focus on your science a little bit first.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Science.

• 40:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, well, for, for, for me, I feel like um the, the, the moonshot is really in, in training and in trying to, I feel like I, I've spent so much time in deconstructing problem definitions and creating an ever-evolving process for solving problems. And I would love to bring that to the world in the most massive way possible.

• 40:42Peter Diamandis?

  So, so the learnings that you've had in doing, in the successes you've had, you know, I was talking to Elon and once he said, you know, the design of something rounds down to zero in the opera, in, in the process of manufacturing or making it um live on. And so it's like. It's all of the processes that you've been developing that you think of as the most valuable assets you've been creating. Is that true?

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I think that's I think that's it. And and and and I think a big part of that is is problem definition. Like, for example, when I look at the X Prize RFAs, I'm very inspired by the problem definitions. Because to me, the way to make the big the biggest impact in the world is to focus on problem definition. And that can then mobilize the problem solvers to come in, many who which are not able to to really define the problems. But once they see a defined problem, they can contribute their skills and their creativity to solving it. And what I see in the world is that a lot of the problems are not well defined and they're ambiguous.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  And so what ends up happening is that they're great sort of maybe discoveries or science that is done. But that is not translated. The goal of a lot of these initiatives is outwardly stated as translation. But yet the problem definition is not defined in a way that the problem can be solved or that you maximize potential for the solution. So I think that needs to be.

• 42:18Peter Diamandis?

  Move forward. I I I think in the entrepreneurial world, that's also defining a product market fit. Becoming really clearly defined about what the market needs and what you're delivering and and.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, like one example, just just to throw it out there is is it's like in in an academic lab.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  You know, for for trying to think of a a solution for something, we might say, okay, we're going to have a drug delivery system. And we're going to put like, you know, three or four different molecules to deliver in there. And each one has a purpose, and this sounds really great. But then if you look at it from a translational angle, that becomes extraordinarily complex. It becomes so risky to to do. And even like, you know, the clinical trial of of having individual arms for each of the agents. And and there's the complexity of quality control and, you know, all of these things. And it just to me, there's all these amazing problem solvers who are thinking that like that that that that are are missing this concept of radical simplicity for being the guardrail.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  The guardrails for bringing their science to, you know, to people in the most impactful, most efficient way possible. And to me, that there's almost like this process, we're not formally trained in science in terms of how we could impact the world. And I think that because I've focused for many years on trying to figure that out, and I'm still trying to figure it out, trying to make it more efficient. And there's always things we encounter that are big unknowns. I just feel, how do we bring that process to, to the scientific community in the most, you know, most impactful way so that people can start thinking about, like, you know, there's a dip, like, if we're going to focus, for example, on, on an academic,

• 44:10Speaker 00

  sort of exploratory project, it's okay to have a 10 step synthesis to create something to test, to question, to, you know, that's fine. But if it's a translational project, and it's a 10 step synthesis, you know, most of the time, that's not okay. That's gonna, that's far too complex. Now, it might be okay if you can demand, you can, you know, create it, you know, get like massive investment and how, you know, like, it just, it's still possible, but it's so risky to advance something like that. It's sort of like, okay, how do we take that stem 10 step process and turn it into one step?

• 44:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  That's how I think you switch from exploratory to a translational project.

• 44:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure. I want to dive down and explore one of your companies, one of your products. In fact, we've got one right here called Profi, which I love, and thank you for this. What, what's the story behind Profi? Where, where did it begin? Where'd this, where'd the seed for this originate?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  So when, when COVID hit.

• 45:15Peter Diamandis?

  And what is it?

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. When, when COVID hit, we were developing a nasal spray to treat multiple sclerosis. There's a lot of immune cells in the nasal lining. And we had developed a platform spray that could attach to the lining of the, the nose, stay there for long periods of time, and deliver drugs. To those immune cells and we started to get some pretty interesting results. Um, COVID hit, um, and we asked this question every single project in the lab, how can we help? And we started to discover, um, based on previous reports and some new science that was being developed. That, um, COVID spread via droplets. Um, they stayed in the air for long periods of time, even after someone infected left the room.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  That these, um, droplets.

• 46:03Peter Diamandis?

  So the six foot rule was not actually going to be a valid option.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, some arbitrariness to that, to the, to the six feet. Um, but you know, we got to start somewhere, right? We got to put something in the ground and then, and then sort of use that as a way to, to discover. You know what, how we might change it. So, um, we also started to learn that COVID can bind to goblet cells that are in the nasal lining. And that's a major anchor point. And in fact, we started to understand that many respiratory pathogens actually anchor and get, uh, you know, kind of take hold in the nasal lining. That's the major entry point into the body. And so we started to think, okay, how can we help? And we thought, okay, could we develop a three-pronged approach, um, for creating a nasal spray?

• 46:51Speaker 00

  That could effectively capture respiratory droplets? That could prevent a barrier for the virus to cross the epithelium of the nasal lining? And could we also neutralize the virus and potentially bacteria? Um, uh, when it binds to this, um, this spray? And so what we did is we also in the concept, we, we, we sort of applied this concept of radical simplicity. Because we didn't want to include drugs in it because we knew if we put drugs in it, that it was going to take six, eight, 10 years to bring this to, to market. And so we said, we're only, the guardrails were, we're only going to use agents that are on the generally recognized as safe list.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Or have previously, previously been used as excipients, pharmaceutical excipients in nasal sprays. And so we looked at that entire landscape and we started, um, um, sort of looking at the individual components. There's preservatives in nasal sprays that can prevent bacterial growth. There's surfactants, uh, in nasal sprays. Surfactants can, you know, soap is highly effective for most viruses and bacteria. If you, um, you know, kind of wash your hands long enough, you, you kill most things. And so we started to experiment, um, You know, looking at hundreds of different combinations of agents that we thought might sort of achieve the these properties.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  And we discovered a formulation where we got in laboratory conditions, 99.99% kill of COVID-19, H1N1, influenza A and B, adenovirus, RSV, E. coli, and a form of pneumonia. And this was with an infectious disease researcher that we teamed up with at the Brigham. And then what we also did is we administered 10 times the lethal dose of H1N1 via nasal drops to a mouse and they all, the mice, they don't do well, they all die. But if we pre-administer the Profi formulation, they all survive and we saw minimal viral load in the lungs.

• 48:51Peter Diamandis?

  That's extraordinary.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  So what we did is we teamed up with two regulatory advisors, one Peter Hutt, who was previously the general counsel at the FDA, another regulatory advisor, and then an international toxicology consulting firm. They all agreed that the agents that we had in Profi were safe and that we could regulate this as a cosmetic. We can't make strong claims about this product, but we can talk about the science that we've conducted in the lab and the article that the science that we've been doing, we've put out into the public access so anyone can see our data and we've submitted it for peer review, so it's out for peer review right now.

• 49:30Peter Diamandis?

  So when did this become available?

• 49:32Speaker 00

  So I launched the product at the Near Future Summit in October.

• 49:38Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing conference, yes.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:42Peter Diamandis?

  So October of...

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Last year.

• 49:44Peter Diamandis?

  Of last year, that was 23.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 49:48Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, this sounds like what everyone should have on their shelves and I now have this.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 49:56Peter Diamandis?

  Can I just try it?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  For sure, yeah.

• 49:58Peter Diamandis?

  So, um, what is happening, um, as, so what's in here? A surfactin?

• 50:04Speaker 00

  So we have, uh, yeah, there's, there's a few ingredients that are in there.

• 50:09Peter Diamandis?

  Profi, everyday nasal spray. So this is actually something that you would recommend Rose a prophylactic everyday use.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I-

• 50:17Peter Diamandis?

  Before you got on the airplane, when your kids are sick at home.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, before a meeting, before you go to an event, a concert, um, so I take it twice a day when I get up in the morning, uh, and then midday. Um, and, uh, and actually, we, we have some data that's emerging from the lab, um, that this may be effective for allergies as well to prevent, um, allergens from getting, so kind of creating a barrier to allergens. Um, so the data actually is quite compelling and we're still doing some experiments to-

• 50:48Peter Diamandis?

  I think of this as sort of a, a HEPA filter for your nasal cavity.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 50:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 51:00Peter Diamandis?

  Um, yeah, yeah, super easy.

• 51:04Peter Diamandis?

  Pleasant, nothing negative.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's like a, a gel composition, um, most of it's actually water, um, so there's, you know, it's like 2% gel and, and other components.

• 51:14Peter Diamandis?

  So, so I'm, I'm just thinking about this because it seems like this is extraordinarily simple, effective, but you can't make medical claims. But you can't, what, what can you say about this?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Well, what's on the box is kind of what we could say and we're sort of experimenting with that, um, as well. Uh, and we do have plans to, uh, to investigate this more rigorously in people, um, and, um, you know, we're just sort of in the process of-

• 51:47Peter Diamandis?

  Is this, is this available online or?

• 51:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you can purchase it online.

• 51:51Peter Diamandis?

  What's it cost, by the way?

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Uh, it costs, uh, $20 for a month's supply, uh, so, so that would be two, uh, sprays, uh, a day, you know, one in each, each nostril, so for 30 days or so, yeah.

• 52:04Peter Diamandis?

  I, I have my longevity platinum trips that I, I give out, uh, products and I need to put this in everybody's, uh, everybody's bags, yeah. No, this is, uh, so I remember, um-

• 52:16Peter Diamandis?

  University of Washington has a protein design labs. And they had been talking about a nasal spray for something that would bind the spike protein. And disable it in that regard. But this doesn't work in that way.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  No, this works, I think, like, you know, it's similar to how soap works essentially. So we're disrupting the membranes of the viruses and bacteria. And that can neutralize them.

• 52:49Peter Diamandis?

  And so it basically reduces the load that your immune system has to to fight.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, I kind of think of like protection in layers. So, you know, masks will provide a certain level of protection. Depending on the masks, actually, I do a lot of work with masks. When COVID hit, I co-led this initiative to create a backup plan for N95 masks. So just in case the hospital system ran out of masks.

• 53:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  And we made a lot of interesting sort of observations, which is when people wear generally a surgical mask, that the mask material is quite good at filtering out COVID and other pathogens. The problem is, is that it only filters about forty or fifty percent of the air because there's gaps that occur in the mask. So a lot of the air that you're breathing in and out is actually not being filtered. And that's where N95 comes in. And we actually, one of the technologies that we also developed during COVID was we developed a surgical, we took a surgical mask, which is readily available and has a wire on the top.

• 53:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  We added wires to the sides and the bottom of the mask so that you can face fit it like an N95. And then we created this flap on the inside. So if you cough, the flap opens up and captures the cough more efficiently. And then we put these little kind of additions here so that you could cinch the, you could cinch the strap to make it tight, like to have a really good fit.

• 54:17Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we ran a mask competition at X Prize. We asked the wrong question, right? We were asking, we over, we overspecified. Because we asked for a competition to design a new mask that would be more effective, manufacturable and so forth. What we didn't ask was create a mechanism that was cheap and affordable and easy to filter out.

• 54:42Peter Diamandis?

  Because this would have been an even better solution.

• 54:47Peter Diamandis?

  So, um, uh, your process, you found a, you, you flipped, you floated this as, you spun this out as a company, found a CEO.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:56Peter Diamandis?

  How long was that process going from the idea to the product and then getting it launched as a company?

• 55:02Speaker 00

  So we started working on this in, uh, twenty twenty. So I think it was about three years for us to, um, to, for the discovery phase, um, the iteration, all the experiments we did, you know, the formulation, um, then to find a CEO, to find, uh, an angel investor in New York. So we raised a million dollars for it, um, through a sing- single investor, um, and then to find manufacturers to, um, you know, and, and, uh, you know, build the right model systems for testing and then to eventually launch the, the product.

• 55:38Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. Um, how's it doing so far?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's doing great. It's doing really great. Um, we haven't really put much into marketing. It's more just sort of word of mouth right now.

• 55:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Um, and, uh,

• 55:50Peter Diamandis?

  And where do people go? What website? Where can they order it from?

• 55:53Speaker 00

  It's, uh, just profispray.com is the, is the website. Um, and,

• 55:59Peter Diamandis?

  Can you get it on Amazon as well?

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can also get it on Amazon.

• 56:02Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Um,

• 56:04Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool, and can tell you so much about your health.

• 56:44Peter Diamandis?

  They've tested over seven hundred thousand individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, Members reported the following: a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities.

• 57:29Peter Diamandis?

  Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. You've been playing in the AI world. And I have to imagine that every biologist, every biomedical engineer, every medical technologist is seeing AI as a whole new set of tools. How do you think about AI? When did you start playing? How are you incorporating it into your research and your company formation?

• 58:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, AI is, I use it more, I would say, personally than in the lab so far. We do have a project in the lab where there's a platform that we've started using that kind of takes all the omics data and allows us to mine it in a very efficient way. So we can identify new targets or new molecules to target old targets. And so we've been using that right now in the hearing loss space to develop new therapies that can functionally restore hearing. So that's a kind of an ongoing project that's early, but you know, we're gaining momentum on that.

• 58:51Peter Diamandis?

  So what, there's a moment in time where you say, we're going to go and invest time in that. What led you to focusing on hearing loss?

• 59:00Speaker 00

  So what happened was, um, we, um, I've always been interested in regenerative medicine and, um, a lot of-

• 59:08Peter Diamandis?

  You and I have that in common?

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Um, a lot, a lot of my, um, training, um, was in the area of mesenchymal stem cells or mesenchymal stromal cells.

• 59:20Peter Diamandis?

  Would you define what that means for folks?

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Sure. Uh, so these are cells that exist, um, pretty much in all areas of the body. Um, there's debate over the nomenclature and, you know, how to define them, but essentially, um, they derive from parasites which exist on blood vessels within all tissues. Um, they also, you know, they're in the bone marrow, they're in fat. Um, people might be familiar with, um, stromal vascular fraction. They're one of the, the core cells, um, that, that have function in, in that type of a therapy. Um, and, um, so these are adult stem cells, um, that are with us for life.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Um, they're very easy to isolate, to culture, expand, to freeze, to administer. Uh, and, um, they, there's, they've actually been quite challenging to bring to market as a therapy because you can apply them both as an autologous approach as well, as well as an allogeneic approach, so-

• 1:00:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we're, right now, one of the things we're doing at my company Fountain in partnership with another of my companies, Cylularity, is we're, uh, we're beginning to bank adult mesenchymal stem cells.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:00:36Peter Diamandis?

  And, um, just having that, uh, on, you know, sort of an available asset for people over time.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:44Peter Diamandis?

  So, so go on, please, yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, um, so, so mesenchymal stem cells are really interesting because, um, they're almost like living, um, anti-inflammatories. Um, and so they have this immunomodulatory secretome, um, that can down-regulate inflammation. Inflammation is a component of pretty much every disease.

• 1:01:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  And so there's been a lot of work that's been done to demonstrate mesenchymal stem cells have potential to treat many possible diseases, although there have been few cases where they have actually been able to be brought over the finish line in controlled, randomized placebo-controlled trials, which are, in regenerative medicine, very difficult trials to run because there's a massive placebo effect. In fact, I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. One of the major trials that was done several years ago was in graft versus host disease, extremely debilitating from bone marrow transplantation. And if you administer mesenchymal stem cells, you tend to see a very significant response,

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  not just in the experimental group, but also in the placebo group, which is amazing. Some of these trials showed over 50% response rate. Mind over body, amazing. Amazing. And so I've actually been looking into that, and I think that, you know, we don't fully understand the placebo effect, but one thing that really intrigued me was something I read about how, you know, when we were all hunters and gatherers 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, and way before that as well, how there would be this sort of evolutionary pressure or sort of aspect of life where if there was a treatment developed or a ritual performed

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  and when people believed collectively that there was going to be benefit, that that actually would have benefit, that we could... So it's almost like if we believed in an outcome, if we believed in the positive potential of what was being performed, even if the science wasn't there, and if there wasn't a particular mechanism of action, you know, in the way that we describe it now in pharma, just the belief that something could help, there's some reason, from an evolutionary perspective, that that can actually work in causing us, you know, benefit. And I think it's just, to me, it's like tapping into the life force.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  We don't fully understand it right now. But it's there. I mean, if you just look at these, so many incredible trials where the response rate is just massive, especially in regenerative medicine with stem cells and other types of related therapies where placebo effect is just ginormous and it makes getting experimental approaches difficult to get through medicine. And before we started speaking, you were asking about, you know, kind of FDA and how you'd run it differently. I really think there's something there. Like, I really think in some ways, you know, and it's challenging, but in some ways, I feel it's unfair, all of these massive placebo effects that have helped people.

• 1:03:59Peter Diamandis?

  We're trying to weed it out instead of to amplify it.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Like, there's gotta be a better way. And I think if we just set that as a goal, perhaps that's even an X Prize, to try to understand how could we actually commercialize, you know, the placebo effect.

• 1:04:15Peter Diamandis?

  One of my favorite stats that I wrote about in my longevity book was a study done with 69,000 women and 1,500 guys, one of the few studies with mostly women that showed optimists were living 15% longer than pessimists, which again is the impact of mindset.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, because, you know, I was thinking about this this morning. I was walking along the boardwalk and I was thinking that, you know, like, I think, living with a very positive mindset for some people almost seems like a fantasy. You know, sometimes when you talk to, when I've talked to other people and they kind of say, oh, well, you're living in a fantasy world. But you know, what struck me this morning as I was thinking about it is that it's, it's almost the same if you're thinking negatively, right? Because it often, things aren't inherently negative. They're just negative in your mind.

• 1:05:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we perceive it. We, we, we give it meaning. We are meaning-making machines, constantly. You know, it's interesting, the, we are, our mindsets determine what we do with a datum. We either, it's an attack or an opportunity. You know, it's a scarcity or a, a trend, a opportunity to create and transform into abundance.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Actually, just one more thing to add on that.

• 1:05:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  I feel like we're, we're at this snapshot in time, right? Snapshot in evolution, where we have this, um, this survival wiring that really served us well ten, fifteen thousand years ago.

• 1:05:48Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred thousand.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Right, a hundred thousand years ago, really served us well. We have, and then with that, there's like this impulsiveness, there's this kind of reactiveness, um, very much focused on survival, but we also have this significant consciousness, this ability to leverage our prefrontal cortex, our neuroplasticity, to be able to plan, emotionally regulate, to, um, to, um, you know, we can actually decrease the size of our amygdala through practicing rituals that allow us to be more mindful and, and you know, in a relaxed state. And I feel like over time, what doesn't serve us well, this impulsivity, this survival wiring, will get, will evolve out, but we're not at that point yet.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  And so it's kind of up to us individually to have strategies in our life where we can really tap into our prefrontal cortex. And, you know, neuroplasticity, our brains are constantly rewiring regardless of what we're doing, but we can actually be intentional about that rewiring by using the conscious part of our brains. And I think it's through rituals and practices that we can actually, you know, tap into that.

• 1:06:57Peter Diamandis?

  Jeff, I, I love that, right? Our default wiring is fear and scarcity. Cause that would save us a hundred thousand years ago. And they, fear and scarcity doesn't work for us today. It puts you in a very bad situation, a bad place. And I think actively choosing your mindset and shaping, and the way we do this is our, you know, our brains are, are neural nets and you shape a neural net by showing it example after example after example. And if you're willing to take the time, like you've been doing, to say, I'm going to, and this is some of the work I do in a program I've been developing called Mindset Mastery, which is I want people to develop a purpose-driven mindset.

• 1:07:38Peter Diamandis?

  A abundance mindset, a longevity mindset, a moonshot mindset, because these are the mindsets are gonna serve us, a curiosity mindset.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:46Peter Diamandis?

  Right, and

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that.

• 1:07:48Peter Diamandis?

  And I think um we can actively shape our mindsets and it's the differentiator between success and failure and happiness and sadness and all of the things that we care about. And interestingly enough, right, genetically, we're very similar to hominids twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago. You could probably grab a population, put them through our educational system and have some some percentage go to MIT and Harvard. But society is what's been sort of shifting.

• 1:08:24Peter Diamandis?

  And I think we need to be very careful about how the societal overlay is being shaped going forward. What do you think about that?

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Well, I think that it's an indulgence to live in negativity.

• 1:08:41Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  I think that um because the negativity often is the default mode for most people.

• 1:08:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  If you listen to conversations in coffee shops or restaurants or

• 1:08:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:08:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  And I feel like it's an indulgence.

• 1:08:55Peter Diamandis?

  Or the media, the media who just abuses your amygdala for their own, their own financial benefit.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I mean, to that point, I I think that um, you know, and kind of going back to AI, I mean, that one of one of the thoughts that I've been having is that um, you know, technology can impact our brains, not just functionally, but but also um, the structure of our brains. And so like the hippocampus can, you know, the gray matter can densify or we can, we can reduce the density dependent on how we, what media we engage, what we consume, what technologies we embrace.

• 1:09:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  And I think that we need to study more how technology not only impacts the function of our brains and the rewiring of our brains, but also how it impacts the structure um, you know, of parts of our brains, like the amygdala, like our our hippocampus, and use that as potentially biometrics for how we, you know, move technology forward. And I think that, you know, what really strikes me is that I like to think about what am I up against in society? And to me, there's two things that really stand out. One is nine hundred billion dollars every year with a B is spent on marketing and advertising to hijack our attention and to serve us what's important.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  And you know, the algorithms that were served and you know, who's ever behind the algorithms is essentially controlling us. And one of the major reasons is, is because the second thing that we spoke a little bit about that we're up against is this, this wiring that we have, this primitive wiring for survival, that where our brains also, another component of that is our brains gravitate to a low energy brain state and our bodies gravitate to a low energy body state. You know, it's not, it would not have made sense to exercise fifteen thousand years ago because we were outside working hard to survive. And even our brains, it wouldn't have made sense to, you know, engage in, in things that would diminish our cognitive capacity.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  We need to keep that open for survival scenarios, you know, deplete resources to problem solve and figure out a way to

• 1:11:05Peter Diamandis?

  Survive.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  To survive.

• 1:11:06Peter Diamandis?

  It was all about survival.

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  And so these two things, when you bring them together, what happens is, is that if you don't have rituals and practices in your life to really activate your conscious part of your brain, then you essentially just become robots. And so as your served technology, you know, people are served technology. Um, I think that's one of the biggest challenges is that the people developing technologies, we really need to deeply understand and every day remind ourselves that when we serve this technology to humanity, the majority of people who are not engaged in rituals and practices to activate their conscious brain are just going to be robots and do whatever they're

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  told, um, whatever the algorithms are served to them, they're just going to live those algorithms. And we need to start to better understand what the consequences of that are.

• 1:11:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think that is potentially one of the benefits that AI could serve.

• 1:12:06Peter Diamandis?

  As a warning system for you, right? So one of the things along this lines is we we develop these cognitive biases. Right, because our brain cannot process the amount of information coming our way. So we are reactive, we have a, we have, you know, there's a hundred cognitive biases. Familiarity bias, bias, you know, uh, recency bias, negativity bias. And and these biases basically allow us to make very quick snap judgments and not use the precious resources of our hundred neural, you know, hundred, hundred million

• 1:12:42Peter Diamandis?

  nerves in our, in our cognitive capacity. But I want an AI that I can turn on to say,

• 1:12:52Peter Diamandis?

  Peter, you're being manipulated, you're being used, you're, you're being lied to. You're overweighting information from this person because you like the way they look or, or because they've gone to the same school as you, but the reality is, let's look at this information over here. So, I mean, there's the countervailing force that could be offered by AI. I think of Jarvis as my AI wraparound that is my interface with the world.

• 1:13:26Peter Diamandis?

  If you want to, if you want to. I want to dive as we, as we close out into your book Lit. And we, we, we got a little bit of its origin in, in your childhood, but

• 1:13:41Peter Diamandis?

  what's the, the, let's jump into the, why do you write it? What's its message? Please.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  Uh, so I, I wrote Lit because um, my life has really been a living laboratory and I have developed a lot of tools and strategies to navigate all sorts of scenarios. And I really wanted to share those tools with the world. That's really the, the kind of the, the origin motivation for writing Lit. My wife reminded me that even when we met, um, in over twenty Years ago, I carried around a little book and would just write thoughts that that came to me. Kind of like journaling, but um but but more like around like processes, really focused on tools and things that that

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  were coming to me on a daily basis. And um and so that that's kind of the origin of Lit, but it evolved. And I interviewed um forty people, including Nobel Prize winners and Olympic medalists and social justice leaders and indigenous leader. Um and astronauts and people from my laboratory and really just started to ask questions around. Um, how how do you be intentional? How do you make decision? How do you make deliberate decisions in your lives? How do you intercept patterns?

• 1:14:57Peter Diamandis?

  Were these questions the same for every person you interviewed?

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  They were different, yeah, different. Um, and just sort of looking for stories to tell in Lit. Um, that might uh connect with different audiences and and resonate with people in different ways.

• 1:15:16Peter Diamandis?

  So share a few of your favorite stories.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  Uh, sure. So um, well, one of the this, one of the people that I interviewed, Nelson Dellis, is five times US memory champion. And um.

• 1:15:27Peter Diamandis?

  I could use that.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we all could use that. He um, so he he spoke about how when he was younger, he he didn't have a good memory at all. He didn't, wasn't able to memorize things and it didn't come easy to him. Someone in his family developed Alzheimer's and that really created a pain point for him to uh find ways to improve his memory. And so he was, he was motivated and he sort of practiced a number of different techniques. One that he landed on is called the Memory Palace, where essentially um you envision, uh, let's say, a house that, your childhood home. And you have a deck, a lot of the stuff he does is with a deck of cards. And so he, someone will give him a deck that's completely, you know, randomly shuffled.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  And he will go through and look at the cards and I I forget the exact time, but it's like in a minute and whatever. He can memorize a complete deck of cards. And um, and so maybe it's like forty seconds or I forget, I forget what the exact number is, but. Um, and so what you do is. You assign a card for each person in your life. So like his mom might be like the queen of hearts and his dad, the king of diamonds. And so he, based on what he sees with the cards, he'll walk through his house and sort of, you know, put the card in different rooms and different picture frames and stuff. So anyhow, he, he talked about how um he got better and better and better at it and, and, and I asked him about the monotony of that process.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  And, and how did he, you know, practicing can get very boring at times and hard to bring yourself to practicing. And he said that he, you know, he talked about a variety of techniques that he used to bring in fresh energy into the, like, you know, by adding, um, like mixing things up or adding cards in or taking cards out or like he just had ways of kind of changing it up. So it would always create, um, you know, be interesting and intriguing.

• 1:17:16Peter Diamandis?

  Is that a beginner's mind as you speak about?

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  I think it's the beginner's mind. Yeah, yeah. I, I've been actually reading a lot about the beginner's mind recently. And so anyhow, what happened was he, he tells the story about how he had gone, uh, tried to climb Everest twice and failed to reach the summit both times. And he trained again for a third time and he was on his way up. He went into the death zone where, you know, oxygen levels are so low, you can't survive for very long. He was able to memorize a deck of cards in under a minute in the death zone. And because he was practicing the cards, um, he realized as he continued to kind of make his way up, that he didn't, he wasn't going to be able to make it the third time, even though he had failed two previous attempts, even though he had trained for it.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  And he really wanted to make it, that his ability to, you know, the, the process of engaging in this, this memory work as he went up, made it like he was cognitively sharp at that moment, was able to convince himself to turn back and survive.

• 1:18:14Peter Diamandis?

  And there's a ridiculously high, you know, uh, mortality rate in going after Everest.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that's one, one, you know, story that, um, I just found really fascinating. Another, um, uh, Joyce Rocher, um, was an executive at, uh, at Avon. And she had worked her way up the corporate ladder and she described how she had really, um, debilitating imposter syndrome. Um, she just couldn't figure out how she made it that far. She never felt like she was, you know, she, she just, she, she, she wasn't really tapped into what she had brought to the company. And somebody in her, um, Someone was up for a promotion and it sort of created a pain point because she was like, wait, I should have that promotion. For some reason, she was like.

• 1:19:02Peter Diamandis?

  Just you just used to progressing.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, she was just used to progressing, but then someone was up for promotions. She thought, well, I I'm, you know, that felt like I she felt like she should have that. And so what she did is she went home and she did some deep thinking and she um basically like journaled on um what her what what what um what the value that she had brought to Avon and um what was holding her back. And she started to realize through writing out all the valuable things that she had brought, that she was indeed qualified for this position and that she really was deserving of it. And that prompted her to really be able to break free from this imposter syndrome,

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  advocate for herself and get that promotion. And um and she told a number of stories around how that was just really empowering for her. And I think to me, it was just so fascinating because a lot of people suffer from imposter syndrome. And I think that in many ways, I think it's connected to the beginner's mind. I think it's connected there because we engage in a lot of things in our life. Like, I feel like I feel most of the things I do, I'm not qualified to do, but that actually maximizes my chance of bringing value to it because I'm focused on what's most important. Yeah.

• 1:20:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's interesting, right? I remember always thinking, um, there's got to be somebody who's much more of an adult leading the stuff than we are, right? But you find out that's not the case.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:20:30Peter Diamandis?

  Um, uh, how many total stories do you tell in the book?

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  So there's uh forty forty stories um of uh people that I interviewed. And then there's a bunch of my own stories um as well. And and to me, you know, lit lit is really about resensitizing our aliveness. Uh, it's about intercepting patterns and algorithms and habits.

• 1:20:54Peter Diamandis?

  Thinking about your thinking.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  Thinking about thinking. That is the core of it.

• 1:20:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I I talk about this a lot that um that people don't stop to think about their thinking enough. And the other side of the equation is we don't know how to think other than the way we know how to think.

• 1:21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Peter Diamandis?

  Which is an interesting question. So one of the things I love using large language models about is. This is what I'm doing. This is the challenge I'm having. How would Steve Jobs solve this? Or how would someone else? You know, so it's interesting that you can use, even within a company, within your board or your leadership team, you're limited by the cognitive experiences and react, you know, thinking that that's within that corpus of individuals. But if you can bring in external, this is where you bring in consultants and disruptors and so forth, but large language models can play that role for you too.

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  Neurodiversity and just diversity in general powers evolution.

• 1:21:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  Right? If if everything was the same, everything would have become extinct.

• 1:21:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  And I think that that's the case for for everything, that the diversity of thought, the ability to switch between different frames of reference, the ability to look at things through different lenses. Um, and, uh, you know, uh, one of the CEOs that I've worked with, I think what made him such an incredible CEO is that on the scientific advisory board, he populated it with the most critical scientists he possibly could in all the potential areas where there were holes in the story. And so it's about trying to look at things from different angles, to to be able to kind of put the ego aside and be able to consider the different perspectives,

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  the different views. And to me, that's also what makes life so incredible is that there's so many different ways of being, so many different ways of experiencing the world, different ways of questioning and doing things. And when you're with somebody who does something different or thinks differently, it's an opportunity to contrast that with your process and to discover whether is what is your process really working optimally for you? Or is it time to try on another?

• 1:23:12Peter Diamandis?

  But therein lies some challenges because you have to be willing. You know, it's, uh, I know a lot of people, including myself sometimes, I'm so sure of how I'm doing what I just don't want someone to tell me.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:23:26Peter Diamandis?

  A a different approach, right? It's like time is marching along. I have a limited amount of resources, money, whatever it might be. And I'm just like, no, we're going down this road.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  I look at everything on a pendulum. So I kind of think that like everything's a pendulum swing, right? And so I feel like there's times where, you know, for me, like, I'm really certain about the approach. And then there's times where I'm considering all kinds of different frames of reference. And I feel like that pendulum, it's like, almost like a pendulum for everything is constantly kind of moving back and forth. And so in life, I just, you know, I've heard a lot, you know, you want to strike balance. But to me, it's more, you want to have awareness of where you are in the pendulum swing. And you want to sort of be intentional of like, okay, that's where I want it to be. Or do I want it to be more center? Or do I want it to be over here?

• 1:24:13Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, this, it could be for an entrepreneur, for a leader, for anyone trying to make a difference in the world, for mom and a dad, to, I mean, just being, taking the time to understand that, understand your processes and your thinking and be conscious, right? And not reacting.

• 1:24:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Peter Diamandis?

  That's, that is.

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  Huge. Oh, my God.

• 1:24:32Peter Diamandis?

  It's everything.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  That's everything. Yeah. And I recognize that with my family, my interactions with my family. And, and, you know, there was times where I became a workaholic, I became addicted to the dopamine hits that I was getting from my work. And I really needed to change my way of being. And I got into experimenting with meditation and various mindfulness strategies. And I started to realize that when I was interacting with family members, that there was an energy of the conversation. Like, let's say if I'm having a conversation with my son, for example, it's like, if he's speaking about something, I have an urge to intercept, to show, hey, take a look at this on my phone, or, or I try to say something. And I realize that I take the energy from him and I put it on me, that he stops speaking. And that, that's not what I want. Like, what my intention

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  is to support him and what he's saying, and for him to find his voice and to continue speaking. And so to me, that's one of the, the things that I've been working on is to really, in a conversation, you know, I used to interject all the time, because I was, you know, with ADHD, I lose my train of thought, I want to say it, I want to get it out there. But I realized that, you know, other thoughts will come, and, and that's fine. And, you know, things go, things come, things go. But I, I, I want to, my intention is to support the people that I'm interacting with and, and to create the right, you know, environment for deep connections.

• 1:25:57Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. So.

• 1:26:00Peter Diamandis?

  Lit, uh, on Audible as well?

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Peter Diamandis?

  Do you read the book, or did you have someone else read it?

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  Actually Fred Saunders, or Sanders reads the book, who read Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk.

• 1:26:12Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  So amazing voice.

• 1:26:13Peter Diamandis?

  I can't wait to download that. It sounds like a beautiful use of time. I mean, an amazing investment. Uh, so, thank you for that. Um, jeffkarp.com?

• 1:26:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:26:23Peter Diamandis?

  And folks can find you there to learn about your work, hire you as a speaker for their events. Uh, profispray.com. I'm, I'm gonna probably buy this as a subscription gift for all my friends. I mean, this is like, thank you for this gift.

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  Hey.

• 1:26:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I love it. I love the science behind it, and I love the simplicity. Uh, I'm excited to build our friendship.

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  Me too.

• 1:26:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Jeff, thank you for spending our time together.

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you.

• 1:26:54Peter Diamandis?

  Pleasure.