Naveen Jain
speaker
886 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 6 Jul
Naveen Jain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He had diabetes. He had all these chronic diseases. And we just accept it. That's how it is. He's getting older. Obviously, he's going to have high blood pressure. Of course, he's going to have heart disease. Of course, he's going to have diabetes. Of course, he's going to gain weight. This is all we accepted. And we say, wait a sec. Why does it have to be this way?
Because humans have not changed in the last 100 years as a species, yet younger and younger people are getting more and more chronic diseases. There has to be something we actually have changed. So this is how I started. I said, what if? And every moonshot idea, every project I do, I always start, what if? What if we can actually understand what changes in the human body
at the onset of these chronic diseases, whether it is cancer or diabetes or heart disease or Alzheimer's. If we can do that, if we understand what is changing in the human body, then we will be able to potentially prevent the disease from happening, diagnose them early, and God forbid, outright reverse them. If we can do that,
Then I asked myself, if I could actually be successful in solving this problem, would it help a billion people live a better life? And the answer was 8 billion. Every one of us is going to suffer from it. So I said, good. So why this is checkmark? Because we know that this is a big problem that we could attack. And then I asked myself, why now?
And we said, look, to solve this problem, there are three things that have to happen. We have to be able to digitize the human body. We have to be able to take massive amount of data that's coming from this digitization and to be able to process the data. And number three, the AI has to be powerful enough to be able to make sense of all this data.
So I said, okay, let's understand what is it that's going on in the industry that will allow us to do so. The cost of sequencing is still $1,000 to understand just the one simple sample. And if you were to sequence, it's $1,000. And we said, that's too high. We can't solve this problem. But it used to be $100,000, $10,000. It is $1,000.
In the next three to five years, it will come down to $100 because its cost is plummeting. Guess what? Seven years later, Ilana, it is now down to almost $5, right? So think about it for a second. When we were 10 times optimistic, it turns out we were 20 times pessimistic because the costs were plummeting even faster than we imagined. I will come back and explain.
When technologies are on exponential curve, our human mind cannot ever fathom how fast they move because human mind is designed to think linearly, whereas these technologies are growing exponentially. And for example, if you were to ask and say, Ilana, you have two options. I'll give you a hundred million dollars right now. Or I can give you $1, but for the next 30 days, I will double every time.
So I'll give you $1 today and the $2 tomorrow, and I'm going to give you $4 and then the $8. And you do the math and say $8 becomes $16, becomes $32, $64. And then with $64, $128, $256, $512, $1,000. And I'm already at eight days. And I'm thinking in 30 days, never is going to be a million dollars, let alone $100 million.
without realizing that 30 doubling later, it is a billion dollars. And that is the part of the thing that human mind just never, because it looks at the early things and it forgets the part. So that was first part was cost of sequencing was coming down. And then we looked at and saying to process, we will never have access to supercomputer, but we can use the cloud computing.
And we looked at the cost and they said cost was at that time was about $47. And we say, wow, that's a lot of cost to process a single person's data. But it has come down. Cost of storage is coming down. The cost of CPUs are becoming more faster and cheaper. This should come down to about $10 in the next three to five years. And today we spend about $1.50 on that.
And AI, by the way, everyone has realized that AI was going to be more and more powerful and we will have the AI that we needed for doing that. So we realized the time to start was there. Then came the biggest part, why me? And again, I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. And here is the problem that I'm trying to solve in healthcare. Know nothing about it.
And most people will be so scared about not knowing anything. People say, you're not a doctor. You're not a scientist. How are you going to solve it? And I think as I was telling you that non-experts are better at solving the problem than experts are. And here's why. Every expert takes the foundation to be granted because that's what makes them an expert.
The foundation of the industry, they take it for granted because the foundation knowledge is what makes them an expert. Non-expert are the only one that can challenge the foundation of everything that experts have taken it for granted. So here I am. never done a healthcare company. And my first thing was, wait a sec, everyone in the industry is asking, they want to know about your DNA.
And there were, you know, tens of companies doing DNA testing, and everyone thought DNA is unique to every individual. If they could somehow understand the DNA, which they understood as the software of our body, if they knew your DNA, they could find out what is going on. And my first reaction, as in non-expert, was, Does your DNA change when you gain 100 pounds?
So if you do my DNA test today and I gain 100 pounds, has my DNA changed? And the answer is no. Now, if I become diabetic, has my DNA changed? No. If I have heart disease, my DNA changes? No. I have depression, anxiety, does my DNA change? The answer is no. And my point was, in fact, even after you die, your DNA doesn't change. So if you were to look at DNA of a dinosaur, it's the same DNA.
So if DNA can't even tell you you're dead or alive, how will it ever tell you you are becoming healthier or sicker? And that was my first thing was, as a non-expert, I say, wait a sec, DNA is not the place to look for. What changes? And then back to my Khan Academy, What happens to the DNA? And we say, what? DNA makes RNA.
And it's the gene expression or your RNA that's always changing, but not your DNA. So your genes don't change, but your gene expression is always changing. So what does someone like me say? Let's go measure gene expression. We don't know how to do that. But in my framework, you never focus on how. You simply say, okay, so we're going to go measure gene expression. Does that solve the problem?
And then as I started to dig in, it turns out 99% of all the genes that actually are expressed in our body don't come from our mom and dad. They actually come from these microbiome that are in our gut, in our mouth, and all over us. 100 trillion, these microbes. So I say, why? So then I start doing the research.
So you go to Google Research or Google Scholar and you see diabetes and microbiome, obesity and microbiome, heart disease and microbiome, Parkinson's and microbiome. It turns out every disease has microbiome that is connected to it.
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