00:12:32 · Robin Guo
[00:12:32] S0: I think it's important to be educated about your health and have control over your health. And so I think that's what a lot of my fellow colleagues are doing over at Superpower and Function and a bunch of other, where we're like, hey, now we have all the tools to understand what your personalized health should be, right? Everything from, now it's very easy to get a blood test and understand like, oh, here are all my biomarkers, here's my cholesterol, here's my blood sugar, here's all these various things and figure out like, hey, what are the things that I want to do to make myself healthier? And I think we're also moving away from just treating acute disease to doing improvement. So what I mean by that is before, most of medicine is like, oh you got sick. Or like, You got some disease, you got some virus, like let's treat that. Or like, You got cancer, we need to treat that. Right? Now I think, you know, one of my friends Isaac at Capable is also working on this. Like now we're moving towards like things that could actually make you better. Right? Like maybe you will sleep better. Maybe you will grow more muscle. So like they're researching this compound called amylin, which is involved in muscle growth. So maybe we'll go around and we'll all be like jacked in like five years, right? Where we have GLP-1s plus amylin and it basically makes us jacked. So I think we're moving towards a world where you have more choice, you have more data and you have more choice. And so I think it's good for people to be educated and have the freedom to choose like, hey, what are the things that I wanna do that could make me a healthier and happier human?
00:14:02 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Robin Guo
[00:14:02] S1: I love that. What's something you think will be true in a year from now when it comes to people's consumer behaviors around using things like peptides or different types of drugs that isn't true today? [00:14:16] S0: Oh, interesting. In a year. You guys pretty quick. [00:14:19] S1: Year is pretty quick. Fine. We can do a decade. [00:14:22] S0: A decade? I'm like, people, it's hard to change people's perception on it. [00:14:28] S1: Fine. Fine. Fine. [00:14:29] S0: Even ChatGPT has like what, 1% penetration [00:14:32] S1: in Exactly. The That's crazy. When you saw the S1 report from Anthropic and you're like, what? It's this little. [00:14:39] S0: Yeah, we just live in a bubble in S [00:14:40] S1: I I keep thinking the future is already here, but it's just not evenly distributed. Yeah. [00:14:44] S0: It does. I mean, you guys report on the singularity. Right? Singularity is very true. [00:14:48] S1: Exactly. Alright. What will be true in a decade from now that's not true today?
00:14:52 · Robin Guo
[00:14:52] S0: Okay. I think I think there's a few... Think it's basically diagnostics and then therapeutics. So diagnostics, I think basically like DNA sequencing has gone down rapid... Like gene sequencing has gone down rapidly in terms of costs, right? It used to cost like a million dollars and now it costs a couple $100. Same with blood tests. So I think we'll have a way more people where this is the norm, right? So like right now you go to your doctor's office like once a year and he just like tests something, like very basic things, right? Like blood pressure and heart rate and make sure you don't have any lumps or cancer. I think in the future it'll probably be mandated or very normal for you to go in and get a blood test and every year you just see your biomarkers, right? And based off that, then I think it will also be very normal for people to just go onto a telehealth website and be like, Hey, like talk with their physician and be like, Hey, I want these things. I wanna sleep better. I want to be a little bit less fat. I wanna do this and that. And then they have a conversation and then basically they get prescribed those treatments. So I think that will be the future that we have that's not true now. Because right now, you know, you basically go to your doctor and it's like very... And all the systems are very old school and you have no idea. Like, you're like, Oh, okay. Like, I'm actually like pre diabetic, but I guess I shouldn't take anything. Right? Whereas like now you have to like do... You have to do a bunch of research yourself. I don't think that'll be true in the future.
00:16:19 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:16:19] S1: Yeah, I mean, we're starting to see a lot more personalized healthcare things that weren't totally true. It's really interesting. I love my job. I get to talk to people who are building at the frontier of what's possible. When it comes to health, it comes to biotech, anything in medicine, it really feels like that is the frontier of what's possible. It's very tangible to imagine, okay, is there a world where I get less hungry, or I sleep better, or whatever it is. And so for you personally, what made you so interested in this area? Why did you dedicate your whole life to it?
00:16:51 · Robin Guo
[00:16:51] S0: Oh, I mean, was a I was a a16z, consumer a16z for five years. So I I took a break for a bit. Yeah. I... So I I loved two things in my... Okay. I loved three things in my life. It was like science, robotics, and like video games. Mhmm. And so basically my entire career has been dedicated to those things. It's like I studied biomedical engineering and then I did some pharma stuff and then really didn't like it actually because old school pharma, it's very slow. And so it like literally takes ten years to get a drug to market. Right? And there's no reason it should take ten years. Obviously we need to do tests and tests do take some time. But the clinical trial program is fully constructed by humans, right? And this is how we decided that drugs should be approved. And so I laughed and then I came to Valley, probably similar to yourself to like work on cool tech stuff, which moves much faster. But I think I was always interested in science because I think in many ways, I mean, I'm sure other people agree, like it's kind of the final frontier of like, well, space might be the final frontier, but I think in another way, bio is also the final frontier of like, how can we live longer? How can we be healthier? How can we cure Alzheimer's? How can we cure? And so I think for me starting this company, the main goal was very personal, is we work on like neuropeptides, right? Things that can go to the brain. And I have like two grandparents with Alzheimer's right now in the ward. And so that's kind of the long term goal is like, Hey, look, there's a reasonable chance my parents get Alzheimer's. There's a reasonable chance that I get Alzheimer's. I wanna make sure that we are able to deliver whatever therapeutics in the future can make us ourselves for longer, right? Because I think Alzheimer's is probably one of the worst diseases because you not only, the other diseases you pass away, but then Alzheimer's you basically like see someone slowly lose themselves and like slowly become someone that you don't know and like forget you and then basically can't walk and then all these, and then they can't swallow and all these things. So it's a very sad process basically.
00:18:52 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Robin Guo
[00:18:52] S1: Yeah. I also have a grandma who has Alzheimer's. I'm sorry to hear that about your Do grandparents as you think there'll be some preventative solution for our parents by the time that they might develop Alzheimer's? [00:19:06] S0: I think so. I think it's a combination of all the people working on interesting BCI tech plus AI. AI is very good at targeting right now. So all the protein folding models, all the omics models, they're very good at figuring out like, hey, this disease state has these things. This protein confirmation has these things, or this bacteria has these things. What are different targets that we can try? So I think we'll be able to figure it out within the next like decade hopefully. And then the matter is trying to get the therapy into the brain to actually target it, right? And so that's kind of what we're working on. It's like, hey, someone needs to develop the therapy and then you need to deliver it to the right area, right? Because it doesn't matter if you have cancer, you need to make sure it's directed at the tumor, right? You can't just throw the cancer drug all across your body because then it'll have a bunch of deleterious effects and cause a bunch of toxicity.