Big Picture Medicine

Jon Ronson is one of the most interesting people alive today — period. He’s the author of the Men Who Stare at Goats, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test — which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His two Ted talks have been watched 20 million times, his books have been brought to life by George Clooney on the big screen, he has written screenplays for Netflix blah blah blah. Don’t believe me, listen to a pitch Jon wrote for ‘the Psychopath Test’. If you are not dying to hear what happens next — then, I don’t what to tell you… 0:00 Jon's pitch for the Psychopath Test 1:41 Jon's story 6:00 Strategies Jon used to bypass career gatekeepers 7:03 Would Jon Ronson be on Substack/podcasting 12:05 Does Jon Ronson pay attention to analytics? Post mortems 16:26 Startup philosophy applied to storytelling 19:08 Writing Advice from Tim Ferriss: Jon's opinion on doing interesting things to write better 24:59 Does Jon Ronson like being famous? 28:49 Analysis of 'The Psychopath Test' pitch to Ira Glass 37:30 Should you make decision based on what would be a good story 38:48 Jon Ronson's habits for creative success

Max Parmentier is the CEO of Birdie, a Series B AgeTech startup who have raised $52M from the likes of Sofina, Omers Ventures and Index Ventures — and captured 10% of the UK market whilst currently scaling into Europe. 0:00 Intro 2:37 Shopify vs Amazon model in AgeTech 7:26 Product pivots: D2C never wins 11:56 Predictive AI AgeTech 13:58 I pitch an idea to Max 19:34 Lessons building Birdie 24:13 Leaving money on the table for purpose Links Birdie: https://www.birdie.care/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Tom Wicher is CEO of DrDoctor — who have served over 20M patients and just raised £10M in their recent Series A round. But he spent the first 7 years bootstrapping, and diverged from his colleagues: Opting for the slow and steady gentle disruption path. Why? 0:00 Gentle disruption beats move fast and break things 3:36 Picking a problem in healthcare 5:44 Behavioural change theory 7:52 Stop treating patients like kids 10:30 Systems-level efficiency vs personalisation 13:02 Why don't patients show up for their appointments? 16:02 Overbooking: Learning from airlines 18:54 Carrot or stick: Motivating health behaviors 22:35 There's no big conspiracy in healthcare 26:24 PIFU model of patient booking 28:14 Sometime it's better not to empower patients 31:16 Habits/frameworks that have helped Tom succeed Links DrDoctor: https://www.drdoctor.co.uk/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Drug discovery is becoming more expensive and producing less results than ever before (Eroom's Law)—why? One of the ballooning costs are clinical trials. Pharma/biotech often outsource their trials to CROs (contract research organisations). But many CROs are incentivised to make trials as bloated and inefficient as possible. That means more money and less results. Meri Beckwith is building the anti-CRO: Lindus Health—to solve this problem. 0:00 Intro 1:39 The big problem in drug discovery 4:10 Why do CROs exist? 7:24 The incentive problem in drug discovery/CROs 10:57 Pharma are anti-startups 12:11 How much a clinical trial costs 15:11 How can you compete with big CROs? 17:26 Are you going to build your own drug pipeline? 18:56 Lessons from VC to Founder 23:42 Brand/PR/Positioning as a biotech startup 29:03 Billion dollar ideas in bio/health 31:33 Habits that have helped Meri Links Lindus Health: https://www.lindushealth.com/ Meri Beckwith: https://twitter.com/meribeckwith Mithi Thaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mithi-thaya/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Rewind.ai just raised their Series A at a valuation of $350M. Investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Rewind sits on your computer and phone, and watches everything you do. Then you can ask it questions like: What was that really great Mediterranean recipe I looked at last month? Or I’ve got a call with a client next week, can you summarise every interaction I’ve had with them? But here’s where it becomes even weirder, powerful. They’ve announced the Rewind Pendant, a small audio recorder that sits on your chest. Rewind will be able to listen in to every conversation you have. You can ask it: What birthday present should I get for my partner? Did they drop any hints? Or how many arguments did we have last year? Pretty Black Mirror, right? Once you get over the ick however, you realise that this is correcting a lagging human function. Just like the cursed amongst us wear glasses; tools like Rewind will repair our broken memories. I spoke to Dan Siroker, Rewind’s founder— 0:00 Intro 1:54 Lessons from the Obama Campaign 3:28 How to use science to make your startup succeed 8:21 Privacy concerns 17:00 Rewind.ai as a brain-computer interface (BCI) 20:27 Forgetting is important for human wellbeing 22:26 Societal impacts of perfect memory 28:42 Rewind's tech stack 31:56 The existential risk of startups using GPT 35:21 D2C is harder than B2B 37:49 Leadership lessons 40:31 Perils of being a second time founder 46:44 Is any publicity good publicity? Links Rewind: https://www.rewind.ai/ Dan Siroker: https://twitter.com/dsiroker Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

People are wearing Apple Watches to their wedding days. Has this whole 'quantified self' movement gone bananas? Is any of this data actually useful? I spoke to Maitham Dib about this. He's building Vital (YC21); a startup which makes all wearable/lab data available to other startups/companies. 0:00 Wearable data is mostly useless 3:22 The case for wearable data 6:37 Wearable data is mostly useless 8:06 Wearable data is useful 10:16 The big opportunity with wearable/lab data (startups) 14:15 Naivety as a superpower (Paul Graham) 15:45 Why building Vital is so hard 19:31 Pros/cons of an infrastructure play in healthcare 20:51 How to enterprise sales 24:09 Lessons from YCombinator 27:32 The benefits of being an immigrant Links Vital: https://tryvital.io/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Dr Jared Dashevsky, Healthcare Huddle (acquired by Workweek), shares 12 frameworks for healthcare content creation. Topics discussed include the importance of consistency, unique/controversial takes, network building, injecting personality, the value of boring content, audience acquisition, lessons from Jerry Springer, and the danger of hyper-optimization in content creation.

Dr Imran Haque, SVP of AI and Digital Sciences at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, discusses why AI drug discovery is challenging, the need for better understanding of drug interactions, the trade-offs in translational models, advancements in computational modeling and data acquisition in biology, and the value of being a generalist in the field.

0:00 NVIDIA's $50M investment into Recursion Pharmaceuticals 2:28 NVIDIA is becoming a seed investor 3:45 Bull case for Recursion Pharmaceuticals 9:20 Recursion's two big acquisitions 13:05 How are Recursion going to make money? 14:15 Recursion is overhyped 19:45 Recursion is unprofitable 22:21 Kim Kardashian's full body MRI scan 26:03 Longevity doctor's advice to Kim K 31:49 Speculating on Kim K's longevity regime (what she takes) 35:00 Outro and feedback Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Ever waited months for a scan? Scan.com is making getting a scan as easy as booking an Uber. Behind the scenes of the disruptor changing medical imaging forever. 0:00 Race to the bottom? 1:34 AirBnB 11 star framework 9:57 Scan.com looks really easy to build — what's hard about it? 12:19 Lessons from working at Deliveroo 15:14 How do you make a lot of money? 19:41 Buying the domain name Scan.com 24:16 How to build a marketplace business 27:50 The perils of price transparency 30:36 What I would do to build a competitor 32:43 You need grit when building a health startup 35:46 Billion $ health ideas Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEzluDRmBTVby0WsO37V-xg Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPm... People Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/ Charlie Bullock: https://scan.com/