Adrian Aoun on healthcare as a product, Apple's AI problem, and why you should have kids now

Adrian Aoun helped found Torch, a health data platform that was acquired by OpenAI earlier this year. He's also the co-founder of Seneca, which raised $60 million to build autonomous drones for wildfire suppression. Adrian previously founded Forward Health. He previously led special projects for Larry Page at Google, where he founded Sidewalk Labs and helped build Google's AI division. In this episode of Summation, Adrian and Auren discuss: Why curing all cancer adds only ~3 years of life but...

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

• 0:00Auren Hoffman?

  Hello data nerds, welcome to Summation. My guest today is Adrian Aoun. Adrian helped founded Torch, a health data platform that was acquired by OpenAI earlier this year. He's also the co-founder of Seneca, which raised $60 million to build autonomous drones for wildfire suppression. Adrian previously founded Forward Health, and before that, he ran special projects for Larry Page at Google, where he founded Sidewalk Labs and helped build Google's AI division. Adrian, welcome to Summation.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for having me. I'm still getting used to this new summation title, but I've been an avid listener since the very beginning, so I'm excited to be on.

• 0:37Auren Hoffman?

  You have kind of a thing where you ranked all society's problems against this kind of set of criteria. What is at the top of the list right now, and how's that framework changed?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one of the things that we had to do, you know, I spent a few years working as like Larry Page's right-hand man, and we created Alphabet, and then my focus was like, let's go create a bunch of Alphabet companies. And so we had this kind of weird thing, which is like, well, if that's your focus, like, where do you even start? And so what we did is we tried to say like, what are the things that could be most positive for humanity, multiplied by where we have like some competitive advantage, right? And so we started really naively, right? And we just said, let's just take cuts of GDP. People have all these ontologies, like, construction is this, and education is this. The problem of that is that it doesn't quite give you like all the sort of cuts that you want, right?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  You're never going to say, oh, I should go work on AI, because that's not one of the industries, you know, 20 years ago or whatnot, right? What's weird about a lot of technology is that it often starts as a vertical and then becomes a horizontal. Like, AI, you know, 10 or 20 years ago, like, so I started a company that Google bought in AI, and we were considered in the AI sector. And now saying something's in the AI sector is almost weird. You're like, isn't everything just AI, right? What we ended up doing is, as we kind of went down this path, we looked actually a lot at what the nonprofits do. So think of like, if you've ever come across, you know, players, obviously, like the Gates Foundation, etc. They get together at this cool conference called the Copenhagen Taken consensus, they get together and they try and decide like what's better for humanity.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Right. Let's say you're in one bucket for the same price, you could cure all of cancer, or you could get internet to the next billion people. Like which would you rather do? Turns out, actually, the one that's more impactful, as crazy as it sounds, is getting internet to a billion people is more impactful than cancer. I think that when I looked at the numbers.

• 2:31Auren Hoffman?

  Cause cancer will be giving people on average of three more years.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Three, exactly. That's the number. It was three more years, right? Whereas lifting a billion people out of poverty, which is in essence what giving them internet access does, is much, much, much broader. And so what we tried to do was we tried to take their ontology, which is what are the biggest problems in the world? Not what are the biggest, not what are the biggest kind of existing industries in the world? Now, there's no perfect ontology here, but the idea is we were trying to get things like, well, can people create economic value for themselves? Can people, you know, build shelter and find spouses and have children and all these sorts of problems? And get them near the top. And then we were trying to get, you know, towards the bottom, things like, you know, do you have an entertaining movie on a Saturday night?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Which is important, but nowhere near as important as, you know, living, uh, living longer. And so you can kind of think of it almost as we were trying to encode Maslow's hierarchy of needs in some, in some form of mechanism. And that worked.

• 3:29Auren Hoffman?

  But if you're gonna do that, you're like, you're basically not helping Americans essentially. Cause they're kind of at the top of the Maslow's hierarchy.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So, so that's interesting. So you're right, you would immediately go there. But then where you also go is you need some place where we have a competitive advantage to work on it. And so one of the reasons why most technology goes with a kind of high-end disruption that trickles down, right? It's like, we built the iPhone and now in India, you can buy a smartphone for $5. It's because it's a hell of a lot easier to fund building an iPhone and getting it to scale in the United States, right? Than, than in India. And obviously that's where we kind of spent the majority of our, uh, the majority of our effort and time.

• 4:08Auren Hoffman?

  You've said before that like ideas are incredibly fragile and you have to have kind of enormous amount of conviction. But there's a point where like too much conviction can kind of kill the company, right? Like where, where does that like Venn diagram overlap?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's, let's go a step before that. So one of the first things, like if you go talk to anybody who worked at Ford and say, what was the one thing Adrian tried to teach us at all times? It was actually that the problem is more important than the solution. This is really weird, right? If I come to you and I'm like, hey, Orin, I'm, I'm working on a new company, you're immediately like, what is it? Right? It's like drones providing wildfires, right? It's like, sure, but actually that means I'm attaching myself to a solution. And for all I know, in two weeks, I'm going to wake up and realize drones weren't the smart thing. Lasers were smarter, right? And so what we tried to do is just attach people to problems. We tried to do this at Google, we tried to do this at Ford.

• 5:00Auren Hoffman?

  You constantly should be thinking about the problem all the time.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Get really, really, really attached to problems. If you say, I want to work on life extension, well, people aren't going to stop dying tomorrow. We were very far off from that, right? So problems are typically very stable, especially if you work on big meaty problems. On the other hand, your solution will change all the time. Like you might work on life expansion and using GLP ones, you might get people to work out better. Like who, who knows what it is, right? And so we just tried to start by focusing incredibly heavily on what is the problem that we want to solve. Then from there, um, I, I kind of learned, learned this thing chatting with, chatting with Larry. Where I was like, you know, Larry was like, ah, I feel like I can identify entrepreneurs really well. And I was like, well, okay, like, how do you identify them?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And he said, well, entrepreneurs just will things into existence. And it really resonated with me because I had always said, like entrepreneurs walk through walls, right? There's just some, some, you know, like barrier in front of them that they just refuse to see. And it turns out wasn't a real barrier, but everybody else sort of, sort of backs down. But you're right that like at the root of all this, before you can even get that sort of, you know, momentum to walk through a wall. Ideas are fragile and I see this all the time. Somebody throws out an idea, somebody else shits on it and then we're done, right? It's like, and we'll never talk about that idea again. But for all we know, that was a really good idea. And so what you want to do is you want to find a way of giving people enough space to say like, I don't know, let's play with this thing.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I, yes, I can point out problems, but let's instead just focus on if this were true, what would make this so incredible? You know, one of the things I do on the side is I'm a pretty active angel investor. And one of the, the, the data sets that I've looked at is what happens to people as they become an expert in an industry and it turns out they become much worse angel investors in that sector. It's like, I've done a lot of healthcare. I'm probably a worse angel investor in healthcare. Why? Because now I just see all the problems, right? It's like, I don't have it, whereas whatever, some random person off the streets like, I didn't even know that, I didn't even know the FDA would say no to that. I'm just going to give it a shot. And every once in a while, these crazy breakthrough ideas work, especially since you've underwritten the old state of the world, not the new state of the world. So again, ideas can be incredibly fragile.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  And one of the things I really care for and look for is, you know, kind of stubborn entrepreneurs who are like, yeah, but I just have an insight. I have a kernel of truth that I believe that nobody else believes. And I'm not willing to let go of that kernel of truth. That's usually what great companies are founded upon.

• 7:27Auren Hoffman?

  But there's these kind of like a couple of different sets of founders, right? That you can think of like, there's the founder who works almost like the same problem over and over and over again. And then almost like what you're saying is almost the opposites. What do you think is the better way to attack something?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  You know, as Josh Koppelman loves to, uh, loves to drill into my head every time I say, I wouldn't do it that way. I think that way is wrong. He goes, no, no, no, there's many ways to play this game, you know? Um, and, uh, and so there's no one right answer. You know, I've seen everything work and, and the, even when I'm giving people advice, I like to remind them like, like Silicon Valley is built on exceptions, right? You certainly wouldn't have said like, the hotel industry is what I want to go into. And then we get Airbnb and you're like, what the hell just happened, right? And so I, you know, I think generally what I, what I look for is just somebody who says, I'm going to be incredibly passionate about this problem for a while. Because if you, if you run out of steam for- Then you kind of get screwed pretty fast.

• 8:22Auren Hoffman?

  You do have to have like a real passion for the problem, even if you're not a quote unquote, expert in it.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Correct. Now, you can learn, you can learn that passion, right? Some people fall in love, some people, you know, are in arranged marriages and 20 years in are like, now I'm in love, right? Like, there's no one way, but you do need to have a hell of a lot of perseverance for the problem because startups are awful. They're, it's like chewing glasses, they say, right?

• 8:43Auren Hoffman?

  That makes sense because, right, you're going to be eight years in and you're going to have like, you know, some modicum of success, but not a lot. That is also helpful in defining the problem. I like what you're saying, like, okay, let's define the problem more and really, really focus our whole energy around the problem because too often people get too much in love with the solution.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  That's right. In fact, one of the things that I really, you know, I've done multiple healthcare companies, but interestingly, I don't really care about healthcare as an industry. In fact, when people ask me about the industry, I go, I'm not an expert. I know nothing about it. I care about helping people and I'm happy to work on health. I'm not sure I really want to work on the industry aspects. Now, that might've been a problem in, in one of the startups that I did, but that also was the benefit, right? And so I just encourage people to fall in love with the thing that truly, truly matters. At the end of the day, don't fall in love with building a business. Don't fall in love with having employees. Don't fall in love with raising money. Don't involve, don't fall in love with being a successful founder. Just be, fall in love with just like the key problem that users are facing. That's almost always the best way to go.

• 9:43Auren Hoffman?

  Now, I, I do consider yourself kind of a healthcare expert, especially when we're talking about like healthcare crossed with technology. We, we've got this like new AI wave, which is going to have a lot of changes on how people live and hopefully in a much healthier way. What do you think are like the near term, big changes that are going to happen?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's one really, really big thing that's happening right now that is a little like we're, we're skating on thin ice and we just don't know if it's going to give out at any point or not, which is, you know, historically healthcare has been a service, not a product, right? And what that means is like, if you want healthcare, you go to a doctor, right? And for better or worse, I mean, doctors are great people, but for better or worse, we've kind of created this industry. Industry where there's a wild amount of regulatory capture like doctors have this, you know, strong lobby called, you know, uh, the AMA. And what they're doing is they're constantly pushing laws, which is like medicine cannot be practiced by anybody but somebody with a license. And they always do it under the guise of of safety. In some ways, that's really good, right?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Like, I probably don't want hardcore narcotics being handed out to people who are just like, you know, clicking buttons on a screen and just choosing what they want for themselves. On the other hand, in some ways, it's really bad because what it means is the cost of healthcare is pretty prohibitive, right? And AI is kind of changing that. It's like, well, can't everybody just have a doctor as a product? Isn't that just called Gemini or Chat GPT, et cetera? But there's this weird thing right now where, but we have AIs giving medical advice. And the FDA has, you know, historically said, no, they can't do that. But they're kind of turning a blind eye right now, as far as I can tell.

• 11:21Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, even before the AI, we had, you do the Google search always, right? Everyone did that and you ended up at like maybe WebMD or some of these more static profiles that are out there.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and WebMD could get away with it and Google could get away with it. But when we were at Forward, we had doctors, so we had to be really, really careful because that seemed to be the bright line of enforcement, right? Now the AIs are going much deeper. They are giving very serious medical advice and they're not yet prescribing, though now there's a bunch of people trying to get them to prescribe. I think I was reading something that Lonsdale is working on in Texas, maybe? I might be butchering the details here, but you know, trying to get AI to prescribe. I was, I listened to a podcast from the head of CMS who who's like, hey, I think that, I think this could be really interesting, having AIs start to prescribe.

• 12:05Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, maybe like refilling the prescription and not giving you a new prescription or something like that, right?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Now, if we get to that world, to me, this is really awesome. Cause my, the world that I've always wanted is that healthcare becomes a product, not a service. And the reason for that is what happens to products over time? Well, we kind of know what happens, right? First iPhones, eight hundred bucks, you know, you can buy smartphones for five bucks in, you know, in developing countries. And so usually what happens is like the cost of something decreases kind of logarithmically over time. And I think that'd be really neat. And they get better. And so I personally would be really, really excited if we kind of let this, this new world come about a little more before we tamp it down, which seems to be what's happening with the government right now. So I'm, I don't want to jinx it, but I'm crossing my fingers that we might be entering into a really positive era. What I worry about, of course, is

• 12:54Speaker 01

  the first time the AI makes the mistake. Now everybody says, oh no, the robots are killing people and we pull it back. And then we forget, similar to self-driving cars, that yeah, they're gonna make mistakes, but they're still gonna be a hell of a lot more accurate than, than humans. And then more importantly, to remember, not everybody has access to those humans. Last I checked, I think it was like 50% of Americans don't have a primary care doctor. And that's in America, right? Like this is one of the most troubled nations on the planet, right? And so when you take that and you, you make that global, you realize, well, I don't know how many people in Rwanda have doctors, but my guess is not the majority, right?

• 13:28Auren Hoffman?

  It also depends on like what you want to ask and what's there. You know, if you think of,

• 13:35Auren Hoffman?

  you know, maybe getting therapy or something like that. My guess is that 10% of human therapists are, are net good and 90% of human therapists are net bad. So if you happen to go to that net good one, that is good for you, and that's the right fit for you for all these other types of things, like, yeah, that's great. But I think most people who go to a therapist actually have an, have a net negative end up experience. And of course I have to pay for it too. Maybe the AI is not going to be as good as that perfect human, but it might be better than the 90% of the net bad ones that are out there.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're touching on something that we've seen in the self-driving car world, which is that, you know, when you go out and drive, there's not a whole bunch of sensors monitoring you and measuring you. And then in the self-driving car world, we know every single mistake it makes. And we're like, look at these things. I can't believe they missed the stop sign once every, you know, 15,000 miles. It's like, yeah, sure. But how many stop signs did Orin or Adrian miss? We don't know, right? And so you're right.

• 14:31Auren Hoffman?

  While I'm checking my phone while I'm driving or something like that. Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. One of the exciting things. One of the exciting things is as we move these things into a more silicon world, right, into a more kind of, you know, bits than atoms, it's much easier for us to instrument, monitor, instrument and monitor and say, hey, we can now improve these models. We can improve the accuracy. But you're right, we're going to see some things that are scary. Like, you know, there's zero question in my mind that that an AI has caused somebody or, you know, encouraged somebody to commit suicide. That's terrible. Also, I'm pretty sure some, you know, therapists have also caused it before.

• 15:06Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  But we only have data on one of those, not the other.

• 15:10Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Now, we've been, there's this whole, like, SaaS accursed, SaaS couple, all these things that have been, people have been talking about where AI agents have been a threat to SaaS. But, but you've been saying that it's more of a threat to, like, an Apple and the iPhone. Like, walk us through that logic.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Well, well, I think both things are happening. So the first thing is everybody's like, oh, SaaS is dead, software is dead, it's easy to create. Well, I don't know if I totally agree with this. The way I think about it is, you know, 20 years ago, you could get me to pay a lot of money for a calculator. And these days, you can get me to pay like a dollar for a calculator. It's just kind of a commodity product, right? Well, you know, five years ago, I'd pay for Adobe Photoshop. Now I don't. I just go to, you know, Nano Banana inside of Gemini and tell it what I want, and it just kind of does it for me. And so the way I think about it is that the bar is going up. I'm still paying for Workday, I'm still paying for Rippling, I'm still paying for an enormous amount of my software, but the bar is going to go up. And so that's kind of one element that I think about. Now, the other element that I spent a lot of time thinking about is the

• 16:13Speaker 01

  moves of the platform providers, particularly Apple, I think, is really making a bunch of missteps here. So Apple's stance, and this is, this is not just kind of me from the outside, I've spent a bunch of time with folks there. Apple's stance seems to be, well, when search came out, everybody told us that we would need to own search. And in the end, we didn't own search. We did a deal with Google, and frankly, we did fantastically. We don't have the costs of search. We get a bunch of revenue from Google. Doesn't seem to be causing us a problem. The iPhone's selling like hotcakes. We're really happy. And so now they're saying, hey, we tried to do this AI thing. It didn't really work very well. We weren't really able to kind of get the talents to stick around or hire the talents. And frankly, we don't really want to, you know, put in tens of billions or hundreds of billions of CapEx into this.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  So why don't we just go do a deal with Google and Google will kind of handle it for us? And I think this is an enormous mistake because in search, search was truly a thing that you kind of sectioned off. It was like a portion of your behavior. But I think that the way AI is going to work is that it's not, you know, the predominant interface to AI is not going to be a chatbot. It's going to be your entire computing experience. So let's just take a step back. And if I think of AI as the apps, right? If AI can basically write code, AI can generate apps on the fly. At some point, the AI is the apps, right? I just go to Gemini and I say, I want to order a call and it says, cool. Here's an Uber like UI. I want to order some food. Here's a DoorDash like UI. It just kind of generating, controlling all that.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Well, if the AI almost becomes the operating system, then you start to ask, well, then what keeps me coming to the iPhone? Like, there's really only two things that keep me going to my iPhone today and not switching to someone else. The hardware is actually kind of a commodity, like Samsung's got pretty good hardware. A bunch of people have, even startups have produced good phones at this point, which is crazy. So what keeps me going? Well, first is just the app ecosystem. It's the millions of apps that are really good quality and kind of the default is on the iPhone. But again, AI can replace that one. And then the second thing is messaging. It's iMessage and FaceTime. I love FaceTime. I love seeing my nephew's, you know, cute faces, right? I don't want to be a green bubble for whatever weird ego reason I have. Like, I want to be a blue bubble, right?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And so at some point, that's going to kind of be the main moat. And so the thing that I worry about if I'm Apple, is I say, okay, well, let's say Gemini is able to create the apps. Let's say OpenAI is able to create the apps. Wouldn't you just kind of walk, if you're OpenAI, wouldn't you just walk up to Zuck and go do a deal with him? Because he's got messaging. He has Instagram Messenger. He has WhatsApp. Like, he has massive messaging. And if anybody wants to kill Apple, it's Zuck. I mean, there's almost nobody they've pissed off. More in their in the history of the company than than Mark Zuckerberg. And so so I think that I think that the iPhone franchise is actually under far more threat than I think most people think it is.

• 19:03Auren Hoffman?

  Why? Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard to like to do? You can get an open source model. I've installed. I installed an open source model the other day on my Mac. It was super annoying. I wish like it was easier to do that. I wish Mac made it easier. To do it. It took me like a whole day to install it, but I was able to do it and it works great. Like you can install one on your on your phone, not too hard to do. You could install a more powerful model on your Mac like they could do that right now and they could just choose the right model and they could update it as part of the operating system. They don't have to pay anything to go do it and it's using the user's power and the user's hardware.

• 19:44Auren Hoffman?

  It doesn't cost them anything at all, except for like some good software that they have to write. Why can't they just do that tomorrow?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  I I might think of this a little as cultural, right? There's no like first principles reason of like, well, they don't have the data. Of course they have the data. Well, they don't have the computer like like they kind of have all the elements, but I think there's a big cultural element. Where at the end of the day, what Apple has been incredibly, incredibly good at is well is deterministic, well scripted out experiences. And in some ways, AI is the opposite of that. AI is a little more like Wild West, you know? The second thing that that I would think about is that Apple loves to ship on this kind of long cycle waterfall model and AI doesn't live in that world.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  AI development lives in a very fast, rapid iteration, ship a few times a day, be comfortable with something being broken and, you know, fixing it five minutes later sort of world. And that's just not, they don't like this uncontrolled, happening fast sort of world. So I think that's kind of one element. And then I think the second element is, as far as I can tell, Tim Cook is just incredibly reticent to spend a lot of money on this sector.

• 20:53Auren Hoffman?

  But again, like he doesn't have to spend anything to get me a good experience, like almost nothing.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I'm not sure I totally believe that. I'm not sure I totally believe that. I think you would have to spend it. You'd have to spend a lot, especially I didn't for. Time you can't run all these models on the phone, not good, not the best models. So you're gonna have to run things.

• 21:08Auren Hoffman?

  Sure, yeah. But then people can decide if they already have. You know, everyone, a lot of people already paying for these other things. They could just kind of hook it in and stuff like that. But and they could decide they could just have like a smart layer like you use open router or anything like that. I like open router, right? So it's like, it's just, you just have like an open router layer that sits on your phone and then. Uses the local one for a lot of things, but then every once in a while jumps to. For most humans, like the open ones probably.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what they're doing today. In essence, there's a bunch of models running on your phone and then they and they have models running in the cloud. If they truly wanted to like dive headfirst into AI, they'd have to run a lot more models and have a lot more infrastructure and ergo a lot more services costs. So I think I I still maintain that's kind of one point. And then I think the second point is that there's this cultural element of they would also have to pay up on people, right? They lost Rumen who was running their their models team.

• 21:59Auren Hoffman?

  Think they do. I don't. I don't think they need it. I don't think you need any AI engineers to do this. I think you need zero.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the other side on that right now, which is, um, which is that the models, if you wanted the model to just be a chatbot, you're right. But that's kind of terribly uninteresting. That's skating to where the puck is, not where the puck is going. If you want the model to become the operating system where it's handling all of your interactions with the apps, which is where the future is going. That is not a well baked problem today. That's what a lot of people are working on. You're starting to see versions of that, the open clause of the world, et cetera. But there's an enormous amount of people trying to make that work well.

• 22:37Auren Hoffman?

  Because they also have like great chips, like they have, they have this advantage where the chips on your Mac are great. The chips on your iPhone are pretty good, like they work better than the chips on your Windows computer. So they are, they already have this advantage if they could just kind of lean into it a little bit more. Now, I agree with you, the the engineer, like, I don't think any good AI engineer is going to work for Apple, no matter how much they pay them like they're just not gonna. That's just, they're not the right culture, so they're not even gonna go there today.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  But I think if you really want to become a leading AI company, you have to change that culture. And I suspect that the way Apple is going to do that, because I do suspect that they will eventually have to. Do it is probably with a leadership change. I think that if Tim left and there was a new guard, I think the first thing that they would do is they would turn, they would say, fine, we are now focused on AI.

• 23:23Auren Hoffman?

  They could buy perplexity tomorrow if they want to, right? It's 4.1% of their market cap. Like they could buy a very like the CEO perplexity is like an absolute genius. He's amazing. He's a visionary. They could bring, they could bring a few people like that in really quickly if they choose to.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  I think that, I think that you're right that buying perplexity. Well, first off, that's absolutely something they've looked at.

• 23:45Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and they absolutely should do it. I don't know why they have it. Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I, I could see reasons why perplexity doesn't get you as far as you would hope, but that's not to say that I don't think perplexity gets you a nucleus of a team that's now kind of part of, part of what you're trying to do when you're the leader of a company is just go create a bunch of momentum in an area. And I think that buying perplexity would help them do that for sure.

• 24:07Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Now, you said that you want everyone to live to a thousand. Okay, that's great. I wanna, I wanna like get to 150. Like what's the first bottleneck that we have to work on together?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Uh, it's a good question. So there's this kind of funny thing where if you were to, um, if you were to basically cure all disease, a few folks modeled this. And, and I read a paper on this. It was basically like, well, the average person would live to 350 or something. I was like, what? We cured all disease and we're only at 350? What the hell just happened? Right? It's like, well, yeah, you're still going to get like hit by a car, you know, as you're crossing the street or something. So I think that if you, if you want to get to 150, we should probably mostly just focus on the big diseases, right? Let's go focus on cancer or let's focus on heart disease, et cetera. And frankly, I think we have some miracle drugs. Like I think GLP-1s are as close as we've seen in our, in our lifetime to pretty, pretty much miracle drugs. And I think going.

• 25:03Auren Hoffman?

  You're a, you're a huge proponent of the GLPs?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely a huge proponent. Yeah. If you just look at the kind of the

• 25:08Auren Hoffman?

  I keep changing my mind on it. Like I started off and then I kind of keep changing my mind like I'm not totally sure because it's like one of those things where it has it has some it's not all the effects are good, right?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Well, so typically the only downsides, the only kind of side effects that that happen in any real amount of prevalence right now are kind of think of it as like habituation issues where you're you're adjusting to it as you first get on it. So it's a lot of GI issues, nausea, etc. I think, you know, taking that

• 25:37Auren Hoffman?

  And the muscle stuff you think is is overblown?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I think I think it's a no, no, no, that's an absolutely real thing. I think that it's a little unfair to to blame the GLP one for that. Most of that comes from and and just to give folks listening some context. What happens is you lose a bunch of fat. You also proportionally roughly proportionally lose a bunch of muscle. And so people say, oh, have you lost muscle? Well, sure, but you've also lost an enormous amount of mass across the board. I think that the way I think about that is we should just have a separate thing, which is everybody should be both doing some cardio and doing some strength training. And I think that's incredibly important. I don't think you can do a GLP ones and then turn your brain off to every other part of health by any any stretch of the imagination.

• 26:19Auren Hoffman?

  And do you think it's uh there's this whole like meme that it makes people a little bit less alive, less risk taking, less other types of things. It doesn't it's not just hitting their appetite, but hitting other things.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  I think that's accurate. I think at this point, we've seen more than enough data to show that what it's doing is it's mostly giving you more frontal lobe authority. So the way your brain works is, you know, if I come up to you right behind you and I scare you and you you turn around and you immediately like punch me. Well, that's coming from kind of the middle of your brain and then the front which which reacts very, very quickly. And then the front of your brain takes a split second longer to kick in. But that's the one that goes, no, we don't hit people or and don't do that. Right? And so what it's doing is it's increasing frontal lobe authority. And what that means is that you know, whatever you're addicted to, you're addicted to gambling. Well, you might be, you know, gamble a little less. You're addicted to drinking. You might drink a little less and generally that I think is seen as mostly a positive thing, though. You can argue that, you know, that there's negative in there.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  The way I think about that one is there's no right answer, right? Like, what sort of personality do you want to have is entirely up to you.

• 27:24Auren Hoffman?

  What else do you think we should be tackling to get to 150? Like, where else are we?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  I think mostly this is going to come from novel, uh, novel biologics, right? So, so basically, there's a lot of companies out there that are working on, can we introduce, uh, can we introduce the signals to your body to reverse aging? And to me, those are likely the most interesting places to start. Like, there's something coded in us inherently that causes us to continually get older and older and older, right? That is a decision we are making, maybe not consciously, but at our kind of cellular level. And I think that if people can either put a pause on that or reverse that, that becomes incredibly interesting.

• 28:07Auren Hoffman?

  And where do you think we're, I mean, we've been reading about this for probably the last 20, 25 years. Where are we on this?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, in some ways, we've been reading about it, but we're starting to see kind of elements of that become true, right? There's a lot of medicines that we take today that, in essence, have us act as roughly a younger age. And so I don't think this stuff is incredibly farfetched, very, very, very hard to predict.

• 28:31Auren Hoffman?

  Anything you're taking that is like a little bit more on like the bleeding edge?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  No, I tend not to, frankly, like, by the time I'm taking something, I usually want to see some pretty good research on it. I'd rather somebody else be kind of the guinea pig. I think my risk tolerance for that will change as I age because, you know,

• 28:47Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, as you get older, yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  But no, I, look, the main thing, I, I am taking GLP-1s. As you know, I was, you know, fairly skinny before it, but, um, but I just looked at the all-cause mortality and said, this is, this is fantastic, like, the data on it's really, really compelling.

• 29:01Auren Hoffman?

  What, what are some things that maybe people believe about their health you think is just like flat wrong?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Well, one of mine is, I'll give you two that are a little controversial. The first is this whole move, uh, movement towards walking, I think is a waste of everybody's energy and time. Um, and, you know,

• 29:18Auren Hoffman?

  What's the, I will explain the movement.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I know like, Apple, Apple has multiple times come out and been like, you know, sitting, sitting is the new smoking. And so you just need to kind of get up and walk a few times a day. And it's like, if I'm going to spend, uh, spend my cycles, uh, spend my credibility, educating all of America to do something, you damn well better believe it's not just walking, right? I want the, I want either strength training or I want.

• 29:43Auren Hoffman?

  Get the heart rate up a little bit more.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Heart rate up, right?

• 29:46Auren Hoffman?

  Decide like she, what you're basically say like the zone one isn't that is, is at least get the zone two or something.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  It's, it's nowhere, nowhere near as interesting as I think other people might think. And then the, the other, the, the other element that I would think about right now is like all data is showing us that basically skinnier is better. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not, I'm not trying to discount, you know, eating disorders and people that are underweight. It just turns out that like 99.999999% of us are, are not that person and underweight. And so I strongly, strongly, strongly encourage the vast majority of people to lose a lot of weight. In fact, I think you want to lose weight to the point of it not looking aesthetically pleasing. Our, our kind of society is calibrated towards a, let's call it plumpness level that is not optimal for health.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Because it's based on, you know, a now obsolete view of the world, which is you look at somebody and you want them to be a little plump. Because you're like, that means they have resources. That means they were able to find food continually.

• 30:43Auren Hoffman?

  Turn around their face in a way, right? Like people's face. It was just why people are getting fillers and all these other things now, right?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Correct. Totally, totally correct. Yeah. And then my other kind of, I'm not sure this is the most important one, but I think the flu shot's roughly ridiculous. I think that this is another example of us spending God knows how many billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars in this country. And, you know, getting everybody to go take an action, drive across town, go get this shot, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out the amount of lives that we save every year from the flu shot, even as, as estimated by the CDC is I, last I checked, it was like single digit thousands. I'm like.

• 31:18Auren Hoffman?

  So you don't, you don't get one yourself?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  No, I think it's ridiculous. If you want, you want to get all of America to drive across town and go see a medical professional, can we please talk about their cholesterol? Can we please talk about heart disease? Like that's kind of the ballgame, right? Like you should just be putting everybody on Lipitor or GLP-1.

• 31:35Auren Hoffman?

  Does the flu shot decrease the chance of you getting the flu? Or should you just like sleep a little bit longer or something?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Mostly what it's doing, nobody is really worried about me having issues from, from the flu or you having issues.

• 31:50Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  The elderly and mostly, mostly what you're doing is you're.

• 31:53Auren Hoffman?

  But by the way, I freaking hate getting the flu. Like I, I, I haven't got one, I haven't got one a while, but like the last time I got it, it like knocked me out. Like I hated it. Like I would prefer not to get one if I, if I, if I, I would definitely take a shot to not get one if I, if it was effective.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Mostly, well, the problem is it's not incredibly effective because there's a bunch of different flu strains. And yet there is one flu shot. So we kind of choose, you know, one strain and you might get a different strain. But mostly what we're trying to do is we're just trying to kill the spread of it. Because what the flu is doing, which is what you saw a lot of what COVID did, where it didn't take super healthy people and kill them. Instead, what it's doing is taking people kind of towards the end of their life and it's just moving them on the curve. It's saying, hey, I'm just going to advance that end of life stage, like, I don't know, six months, a year, two years, something like that. And so if you were to take a step back and say, what are the total, not just what are the total amount of deaths caused by the flu? But actually to say, what are the total amount of life years saved by the flu shot?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  You'll realize it's incredibly small number and terribly uninteresting, given the amount of money that we spend on.

• 32:58Auren Hoffman?

  But if it stops, I mean, again, I have no idea whether it works or not. But if we could get a shot that just like had made healthy people get the flu less often, those healthy people would have more time working, they'd have more time with their family, they would feel better. Like, there is a huge net benefit if it actually worked. Like, so my question is like, does it work? Like, if it works, like, I think it's great. If it doesn't work, like, well, then who cares?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  So in medicine, they have this thing called the number needed to treat. And it's been a while since I've looked at the flu shot. But what you're asking is for every shot that I give, how many, or sorry, for how many shots do I need to give for it to be effective to one person? Right? Where in this case, the outcome is not actually getting the flu. That's not what we're trying to prevent. The outcome we're trying to prevent is a death from the flu.

• 33:42Auren Hoffman?

  Well, I think that I, for at least personally, the outcome would be to, for me, and my, you know, my kids and so. It's like, I don't want to get it. My kids don't want to miss school if they get it, you know, all this other stuff, right?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know the number on that. My guess is 50, 100, 200. It's an insane number. It's not, it's not two. It's not two people. I assure you that.

• 34:02Auren Hoffman?

  It would be good to like rename these things. Like, it's not a vaccine. A vaccine is you get some sort of thing and then you never get that. You never get, you know, if I get a polio vaccine, I'm almost certainly never going to get polio now, right? That's, that's the whole idea of a vaccine is it's supposed to be like 99.99%. Like, it should be a, we need a new name for these things. Then you could decide whether you want them or not. Yeah, it's like, you're like 20% less likely to get it or something or whatever. It's like, great, then you can make that choice if that's good for you or not.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's definitely compelling.

• 34:38Auren Hoffman?

  Now, you, you wrote that your traumatic heart attack is someone else's financial windfall back, you know, back in 2017. Has anything about that sentence changed over the last nine years?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  No, in fact, this is like, why healthcare? So like, for, for folks listening that don't have context, I started a healthcare company and got a roughly half billion dollar lesson in the incentives and economics of, of healthcare, AKA I lost about $475 million learning this lesson. And mostly the lesson is that doing the right thing for people is not actually what makes you money in healthcare, and that's really, really terrible. And I don't think that's changed fundamentally. I do think there's an opportunity for that to change because of AI. AI is inherently a deflationary kind of technology, as most technologies are. And if AI can really hit healthcare hard, that can be really good for-

• 35:31Auren Hoffman?

  Who's the most evil companies in healthcare? Or is it like the weird software companies? Is it the insurance companies? Is it the, the benefit corporations? Like who are, who are the evil?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  I, I tend not to think of a company as evil. What's weird is that a lot of these companies have really great people working at them, and yet, you know, the company's kind of doing an awful thing, right? Like, it's like, when you think of ExxonMobil, you're like, I don't know, people working at ExxonMobil are probably good people trying to put food on the table and do, and good engineers, et cetera, et cetera. And then you're like, well, it kind of sucks that we're polluting this much, right? Um, I think what you'll find is that if you were to say, how could I realign this industry? The people that would be most affected would frankly be the insurers and, and what I think of as the, the unions or lobbying groups, right? Like the AMAs of the world, right? So just think of the AMA a little like, do you remember when Uber was trying to take off and every, you know, in New York, like the taxi medallions

• 36:27Speaker 01

  or in Paris, you know, they were like, no, we don't want this. Why? Because it's deflationary to your taxi medallion that you probably spent a million dollars for, right? And so here it's the exact same concept where, at the end of the day, if you go spend, I don't know, 500,000 or 200,000 or whatever it is in med school, and God knows how many years, you don't want your license devalued by letting- Anybody else practice medicine? Did you imagine if you just graduated med school last year? And now the FDA comes out and says AI can do everything you were doing. Well, that kind of sucks for you, right? You're just like, I got bills to pay, right? And so you pay into these kind of organizations that protect the value of your license. But they're doing it at a cost to consumers.

• 37:07Auren Hoffman?

  If I had to like rank order the bad guys and stuff in the healthcare world, I don't know if I'd put like doctors in the top 50% or something. That seems like there's a lot. Yeah, yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  You'll notice I didn't say doctors.

• 37:19Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  I said the lobbying organization of doctors, right?

• 37:23Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  The difference, it's the difference between the, uh, the, uh, the individuals at the insurance companies are often not bad people, right? That doesn't mean that the incentives of that insurance company aren't to create a world that's not good for consumers.

• 37:38Auren Hoffman?

  Now you are, you're, you're prolific angel investor. What makes angel investors better than a venture investor? Like why, just in general, a lot of these like really good angel investors, while they're investing the last money have like way better returns than, than most venture firms.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. Again, harkening back to Josh Koppel, I only think there's one way to, to do it well. And, and I would push on that. I think that there's an enormous amount of angels that are throwing money away every time they invest. They're just not good at it. And I think there's some that are really incredible at it. And then obviously there's some venture funds that are great and some venture funds that are terrible. The way, the way I think about it is, so if I look at my portfolio, I'm in about, I'm in about 300 companies of which almost about 40 are kind of unicorns and decacorns. And so mostly, if you think about that strategy and what I just told you, it kind of means that I'm not actually really great at picking. It just means that I'm indexing Silicon Valley. But I'm doing something more interesting than that, which is I'm indexing kind of the, let's call it the upper echelon of Silicon Valley.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Mostly for me, because the way that I get deals is almost entirely inbound to me from other people. And so there's a natural kind of filtering for it. Now, I generally think that the best companies want the best advice and they want the most helpful people. And the fact that I'm an entrepreneur means that a lot of people will come and want me on. Their cap table because hopefully I can give them some advice. I can say, hey, here's what I learned not to do it forward. And here's what you should do, you know, they can take my incredibly expensive lessons and learn from them themselves, you know? And I think that it's harder if you're a venture fund to differentiate today because there's so many of them. You know, somebody asked me the other day, they sent me a list of 20 or 30 seed funds. And they said, rank them. And I think I looked at two and I said, oh, that one's really good. And that one's really good.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  And I looked at the other 28 and I said, I don't know. I don't know that I care. They're all kind of same. They're dollars. None of them are going to be helpful. None of them have an incredible brand. Like I, I just don't know the differentiation. And I think that's what you're seeing a lot in venture today.

• 39:36Auren Hoffman?

  What is there a, you're having a meeting with a founder or founders. Often it's a very quick meeting and then you're basically making a decision, right? Like, what are you trying to get at it? Like, how do you know if that person is good? Like, what, what is? At how important is the resume? When you, you know, how, all these other kinds of things?

• 39:59Speaker 01

  In the early stage, mostly what I'm trying to do is just decipher the person, right? The idea is going to change. I'll talk about the idea, but mostly I'll talk about the idea to say, is this a way that I can learn how you think and learn why you care about this? But mostly I'm just trying to get at your story at the end of the day. Now, if you have like, I am going to go build the world's best soda can company. And I'm like, I don't understand why this is the next, you know, trillion dollar company. And you can't defend it to me, then that tells me enough. Either I don't get it, so I shouldn't be involved. Or frankly, maybe you're just not that brilliant. Um, and so you shouldn't be doing this. But mostly what I'm trying to get at is, is this person, somebody who has a compelling view of the world that they want to create?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  And that I, I believe, well, you know, have some good chances of getting there. And good chance might be, you know, 10%, 20%, but it turns out those are the odds that we play.

• 40:53Auren Hoffman?

  And is there any other kind of like factors you're evaluating in that? 20 minutes you're with that person like it's very, very hard to evaluate somebody.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  You're evaluating.

• 41:03Auren Hoffman?

  And how do you, and how do you change that over time? I'm sure you've got it wrong on both sides. So how do you?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Definitely, I've definitely gotten it wrong many, many, many times. If you haven't made a billion dollar mistake in this town, you're probably a nobody. But the way that I think about it is I'm just looking at what spikes in the positive and what spikes in the negative. And again, just trying to build some, some image in my mind of can I see this person as a true founder? And you know, going the distance, I wish I could give you like the list of criteria, but it's a little like that Supreme Court definition of pornography, right?

• 41:37Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  You don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it. It's much easier to, to, um, uh, to see the, the dispositive. It's very obvious when somebody isn't a founder.

• 41:47Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  You know, and then sometimes they look like a founder and you're a little unsure and you're like, oh, you're going to be an okay founder, not in growth. But it's often very clear when somebody should not be doing a company.

• 41:58Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's almost like the Charlie Munger, just focus on the inverse and you could probably get rid of a lot of them right there. And if you're doing 300 and you just get rid of the bad ones, then it's probably a good chance.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  And that's actually how I view my job. My, my, my job is not to pick the winners. My job is to remove the ones that are obviously losers.

• 42:16Auren Hoffman?

  A few personal questions. Most people don't grow up with a parent that was the president of a major university. What have you learned from your, your dad?

• 42:25Speaker 01

  I hope that you go ask my dad what he learned from me one day, just so that I, you know, I, I get, I'm 42 and still living in his shadow. It's quite enjoyable. Let me tell you.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  What did I learn? Well, more than just being like a president of a university. The interesting thing about my parents is that they were, they were immigrants to, um, to this country. They, they were in Lebanon. They grew up in Lebanon and fled during the war to France. And then came to the U S from there and they came with literally like the shirts on their back. I mean, we did, we, we did not have a silver spoon in our mouths growing up by any stretch of the imagination. And what I learned is, um, is this just kind of extreme level of resilience. And that's been very positive and very negative. I remember, you know, I, I was like the little Frenchy boy. You know, I had a French accent growing up in LA and kids would make fun of me and I was the outsider and I would come home and I'd, you know, be crying.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  And I remember my parents would, uh, would be like, wait a minute, why are you crying? Like the kids were made to be in there. Like, was anybody shooting at you? And it's like, no. And then like, then what the hell are we talking about?

• 43:24Auren Hoffman?

  Right, exactly.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  That toughness comes from, you know, the kind of immigrant mentality. And it's been incredibly useful when I work on things. I've worked on many things that have not been popular. I've made a lot of decisions that have not been popular. And it gives you an enormous amount of like fortitude and resilience to, to see through those things. So that's been, that's been incredibly positive. That being said, there's also some negatives to that, right? Which is you grow up with a frame that maybe, maybe isn't the most appropriate. I'm not sure I want my kids to grow up with that framing. You know, I want my kids to, to, to grow up with a different frame. It's kind of-

• 43:56Auren Hoffman?

  Why, why not? Why, why, why wouldn't you want your kids to have that kind of framing? Like, hey, like appreciate what you got. Like, hey, who cares if someone's booing you a bit?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't, I might be misattributing this quote, but I want to say it was Ben Franklin, who said, "Our parents were soldiers so we could be engineers, so our children could be poets." Right? Now, if I, if I had a kid today and they said they wanted to be a poet, I'd be like, "Shut up, you're an engineer." Right? But like, but in some ways, like actually you want all engineering problems to be solved for humanity so that your children can be poets. The same way you want all war to be solved on this planet so that nobody ever has to experience that again. And so the way that I think about it is like, growing up with the framing of your parents gives you some positives, but it also gives you some negatives. It's an outdated framing, right? We do not live it, at least today, thankfully, nobody's shooting at me. And I'd like to keep it that way.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And so having that frame is not actually the kind of most optimal.

• 44:51Auren Hoffman?

  All right, last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  What conventional wisdom or advice is generally bad advice? It's a good, good, good question. Um, I'm going to give you an incredibly odd one. You know, it's funny, is I've listened to this pod about 100,000 times and I didn't actually prep an answer for this, but I'm going to give you an incredibly odd one. So this one's going to be more personal. I was in, I was, as you know well, I was in a long-term relationship, about 10 years. About halfway through the relationship, we started to talk about, you know, maybe we should, you know, think about having kids. But you know, her and I, we hadn't figured everything out in the relationship yet. We still had some issues, we weren't sure. So we said, "Let's go ahead and..." Wait on that and really decide like, hey, do we want to have kids? Once we we kind of iron out all of our issues.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And in the end, we didn't iron out all of our issues and we didn't have kids. And so we're not together. And what what that's done is that's actually just caused for me a delay in life and having kids. And what I realized is I would have played that differently if I had done it again, which is I just would have had kids anyway. Like if you're with somebody.

• 45:59Auren Hoffman?

  Even if it's and so if you happen to and then, you know, you maybe in what worst cases you co-parent in a and then kind of a.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  You're not with somebody for five or 10 years. If they're a bad person, they're obviously an incredible person, or you have terrible judgment. But I I don't think I have terrible judgment.

• 46:15Auren Hoffman?

  So it might it might have just been like, it's a good person, it's just not the right match. Right. And then like, okay, well, we could have kids together or something.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think I think that one of the things that I didn't appreciate enough when I was younger is the value of having kids when you're younger. And and that's that's something that I wish I wish I had thought through better. And so my advice to everybody else is have the kids, they're awesome.

• 46:40Auren Hoffman?

  What do you think is like the perfect age to start having kids?

• 46:44Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, what's the best time to start a company? It's like yesterday, but the second best time is today, you know, like.

• 46:49Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I I don't know, you know, maybe it's not, you know, 16, I'm not pushing that by any stretch. But but I I don't know that there's some huge problem of having kids in your 20s that that society has pushed us away from.

• 47:01Auren Hoffman?

  I do you think AI is going to help people have more kids and increase kids? Or do you think it's going to continue the trend of fertility rates going down?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I I have a maybe a slightly weirder view, which is I think that kids will become a resource that we can dial up or down. Because I think that we're going to basically have artificial wombs sooner rather than later, and we'll be able to.

• 47:25Auren Hoffman?

  And sooner meaning what, like 10 years?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Well, there's this, there's this kind of crazy, I'll give you a way to think about the problem. There's this kind of crazy thing, which is, you know, we've been attacking the problem from both sides, right? So obviously, on the on on one side, it's we used to have sex and now we know how to do, you know, like in vitro fertilization. And then on the other side, you used to have to gestate for 40 weeks and that's come down. And I think last I was reading like some of the best hospitals in the US are at like 22 to 24 weeks, which is wild, right?

• 47:54Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, obviously, that's not ideal, but you can do it, right?

• 47:57Speaker 01

  By by no means ideal and not 100% success rate, but. They're willing to attempt, which is an insane concept, right?

• 48:04Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  What's weird is that number is, I shouldn't say weird, what's fascinating is that number is coming down one or two weeks every one or two years. And so I don't presume that the problem is linear. I think it might get harder and harder, but let's just pretend it was linear for a second. I don't know, that's 20 years from now. Now, we've got some competing things. One is the first weeks are probably some of the hardest. And on the other side, like, we also have a bunch of new technology, like AI helping us out. So I don't know, if I had to guess, like, 20 years from now, we'll be able to just kind of turn on the microwave and pop out a kid. And I think that could be really interesting. I think there will be some downsides to it, and I think there will be some upsides to it.

• 48:41Auren Hoffman?

  One of the things that's happening in our social circles of, um, is more and more people that, that I know and you know, are having kids through a surrogate, um, which in some ways is kind of like an artificial womb for super rich people. How do you think that kind of affects things?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think what's fascinating is if I go up to, so I, I give a talk, there were a bunch of mothers in the audience, and I said, yeah, you're just gonna be having kids through artificial wombs. And a bunch of mothers came up to me after the fact, and they were kind of a little mad at me, if I'm being candid. And I thought this was really funny, because I say, well, aren't we kind of doing that? They're like, I'm never gonna outsource motherhood. I'm like, really? Because, you know, 500 years ago, you would have a kid, and you'd basically have to, you'd have to provide shelter, you'd have to make clothes for the kid, you'd have to feed the kid, you'd have to educate the kid, everything was you. And now you have a kid, and whatever, you buy clothes from Target, and you get food from Whole Foods, and when you want to drive them somewhere, you can, you know, send them on the school bus, and when you want to educate them, you send them to school, when you want

• 49:42Speaker 01

  them to learn tennis, they go to the after-school program, and you want to, and it's like, actually, the parent is like, at best, a quarterback at this point. But like, you know, they're not doing that much in comparison to what we were, you know, a few hundred years ago. And what we've done is we've kind of abdicated that responsibility, um, or I should say delegated that responsibility to society. And society is doing 99% of raising of your kid, you're doing kind of that final 1%.

• 50:07Auren Hoffman?

  They're doing less than they're doing 300 years ago, they're doing way more today than they're doing 30 years ago.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:13Auren Hoffman?

  So that has increased, like, it kind of like maybe bottomed out, and now it's coming, like, people are spending way more time with their kids than they were 30 years ago.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Think of that as a local bump in the road.

• 50:23Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Even at this point, we don't even let you really personalize your kids upbringing. If you, if, if Orin woke up tomorrow and you said like, my kids are not going to school. Well, then you're going to be put in jail, right? Like your kids are going to school whether you like.

• 50:37Auren Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, so many of my friends are, are homeschooling their kids, right?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Sure, but they're, they still have to do some form of school. In fact, we even tell you, you have to get vaccines and you have to do this and you have to do that. And it's like, you know, it's like, again, we're just, society will over time just trend towards the needs of the collective outweighing the needs of the individual. That's kind of how society advances. And so, don't get me wrong, sometimes there's some fits and starts and we pull back and we say, ah, we want more homeschooling or whatever. Which by the way, might make sense because the quality of schools is terrible. But we'll figure that out over time and, and then we'll, you know, once schools are really, really good, then we'll say, you know what? You're no longer allowed to homeschool, right? Like we'll get there eventually. And that's kind of how I see the world progressing. And for me, surrogacy is just something else along that path where you're just farming out more and more of the, of the child to, to other people.

• 51:25Auren Hoffman?

  You could have a child right now. I mean, you, you could have a child, you could, you, you have the means to go do that. Like, why don't you have, why don't you have like four more? Why don't you have four children this year?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a super good question. One of the things that I think is actually really positive about the fact that old people die is that we're stuck in the past. And I, like many, I'm stuck in the past. You know, I, I would like a, I'd like to raise kids with a partner. Yeah, which is kind of funny. You know, it's, I remember you said my dad, you know, ran, ran a college. I remember when I was growing up, he had this valedictorian that he, that I guess he chose, or I don't know how it works, but whatever. The, the school's valedictorian at, at USC had like a nose ring. And my parents were really like, oh my God, we're so progressive. This person has a nose ring, like, oh my geez, you know? Yet they're so smart, you know?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  And, and then I guess now like, you know, we look at, we look at kids who are, you know, trans and we go, whoa, like that's a new concept. That, that wasn't around when I was growing up, right? But like, our kids are going to look at, at whatever their kids and be like, oh, that weirdo, he has three arms because he decided to grow a third arm using AI. And that one's. You know, his flesh is green and that one, you know, it's like, technology allows us to redefine the constraints of humanity. And I think that's really wonderful. And I think the reality is that us, as old folks, you know, I'm in my 40s now. As old folks, we, we don't adapt. We're not as neuroplastic as, as, as the youngers. And, and so my, I don't have some brilliant reason of, of logic for why I have eggheads.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  By the way, I also eat meat and I think eating meat is like the dumbest thing in the entire world. I think we should all be vegetarian. But I'm also like, you know, it's like, it's like my, my parents smoked and they're like, we know it was dumb, but whatever, we did it, you know?

• 53:12Auren Hoffman?

  This has been awesome. Thank you, Adrian Iwun for joining us on Summation. I follow you at Adrian Iwun on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of, I knew this would be great, but this has been awesome.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate you having me. Always a pleasure.

• 53:28Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.