Health care, for me, is quite personal, because my mom was quite ill. For a while. And so I got to watch her journey going through that. And I realized, like, it doesn’t matter who you are. You can’t guarantee the best health care, because it’s really an art right now. It’s not a science. And I believe it should be a science.
Why do you think it’s an art?
The body is a very complex system. So you have specialists, like a heart specialist or a kidney specialist. But there are not that many generalists that can pull it all together. And that, to me, is a travesty. I’m like, come on—this is solvable.
That’s what we do in tech, right? We take complex systems and put them together, and we make them work. But we’re often only looking at one aspect of health, and it’s my firm belief that if we can use technology to help pull all of that expertise together, we’ll be able to treat people better. I watched it firsthand. So, anyways, in my next life when I have time to do something other than this—
You’ll be a doctor?
I won’t be a doctor, but I hope to be someone who can help bridge the divide and use technology for what it’s actually capable of.
You could do that in this lifetime, too.
I have a few things to do right now.
Was your mother able to recover?
No, unfortunately.
I’m sorry.
But you know what I mean? I just realized that—wow.
You realized, it could happen to any of us.
Yes, but it’s about the quality of care, even with the best doctors.
About a year ago my own mother had some really serious health issues, and she ended up in the ICU on a ventilator. Doctors kept coming in and looking at scans and couldn’t figure out what was going on. And I was sitting in the hospital thinking, I’m so deep in the world of reporting on AI, where people are touting incredible medical advancements, but we can’t tell what’s happening from these scans?
So you know. You know exactly what I mean. It’s infuriating for me to think my mom was in the ICU for 60 days, and people said, “Nobody walks out of that.” They were like, “She’s not going to be able to do it.” And I was like, “Yes, she is. I know she is.” I wasn’t the one qualified to make those calls, right? And she did. She survived another two years after that.
You talk often about resilience. How do you personally—not the company, but you—stay resilient? Is it Starbucks? I noticed you had one at your AI event.
Yes, this is a passion tea lemonade, and it does a lot for me. I’m not a big caffeine drinker, so this and a bit of exercise does it for me. I go in waves [with Starbucks]. Sometimes I have a lot, and sometimes I cut myself off.
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