Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Naveen Jain: Becoming Astronomically Ambitious | Entrepreneurship | E22

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

Shoot for the moon! In this episode we’re yappin’ with billionaire entrepreneur Naveen Jain about moonshots or astronomically ambitious projects that address a huge problem, propose a radical solution and use breakthrough technology to achieve the goal. Moonshots like Google’s self-driving car or SpaceX’s goal of humans becoming an multi-planetary species live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; instead of mere 10 percent gains--- they aim for 10x improvements. Naveen Jain is a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist who is driven to solve the world's biggest challenges through his moonshot projects. He is the former CEO of Infospace, one of the largest internet companies before the dot com bubble. Now he spends his time on Moon Express, a company determined to harvest energy and resources from the moon. And another company, Viome, a gut microbiome testing service which applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide personalized nutritional recommendations to reduce diseases like cancer and diabetes and increase human lifespans. Tune in to this episode to learn why we need to shift from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance, how to become more imaginative and open to possibilities, and hear Naveen’s amazing vision for the future of energy, health, AI and more! Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Earn rewards for inviting your friends to YAP Society: bit.ly/sharethewealthyap Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

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Go to rethink. com agency slash yap. And our listeners get a special gift if you sign up to work with them. That's rethink.com agency slash yap. You're listening to Yap. Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. I'm Halitaha, and today we're yapping about moonshots, or astronomically ambitious projects that address a huge problem, propose a radical solution, and use breakthrough technology to

achieve the goal. Moonshots like Google's self-driving car or SpaceX's goal of humans becoming a multi-planetary species live in a gray area between audacious project and pure science fiction. Instead of a mere 10% gains, they aim for 10x improvements. Joining us today is Neveen Jane, billionaire, serial entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is driven to solve the world's biggest challenges through his moonshot projects. He is the former CEO of InfoSpace, one of the largest internet companies before the dot-com bubble. Now he spends his time on his company Moon Express, which is determined to harvest energy and resources from the moon. And another company called Viome, a gut microbiome testing service, which applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide personalized nutritional recommendations that can

reduce diseases like cancer and diabetes and increase human lifespans. Neveen is a recipient of many awards, like the Ernest and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the Albert Einstein Technology Medal. And we here at Yap are absolutely floored to speak with someone so dedicated on pushing humanity upward and forward. Hey, Navine, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me, and I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, it's such an honor to speak with you today, so I appreciate you taking out the time. Well, thank you. Okay, so let's get started. You are a widely successful entrepreneur, a visionary, the recipient

of numerous philanthropic awards, and basically a walking example of success and limitless ambition. But you really came from humble beginning. So let's start back then. Tell us what it was like growing up in India for you. Well, Hala, I want to focus more on the audience as opposed to me, but just to give you a brief idea, you know, that I grew up in India. We didn't have food to eat. We didn't have a place to stay.

I came to the United States with $5 in my pocket, didn't speak the language. And God has been very, very kind to us. And we have, in fact, received from the society. more than I could have ever imagined. And at this phase in my life, I have dedicated my life to figuring out how do I repay my debt to the society?

And I know the people who helped me become who I am today don't need my help. So I found that the only way I can pay back is to really pay forward. And I do my part to making sure that can we start companies that could help a billion people live better lives? I start to think about what can I do?

do to educate and inspire the next generation to go out and be extremely successful. And when they become successful, they will find exactly the same way to give back to the society. And we can create this movement. And in this movement, we're going to have enrolled millions of people who are going to come together and want to make sure everyone around us lives a better life. That means we can go out and focus on what can each one of us do that will change the way people live their life.

And there has never been a time in the human history that individuals and a small group of people are capable of doing things that used to require the large companies or even nation states to do. And that's a fundamental shift that exponential technologies is allowing for any person,

anywhere in the world, to have access to the same resources, access to the same set of technologies, and to be able to do things that was unimaginable. just five years ago. And that to me is what's going to allow any young person to go out and completely reinvent any industry that they dream about. Wow, that's very powerful and inspiring. And I can't wait to dive deeper into all the things that you said. But for those listeners who

really aren't familiar with you, I just want them to understand how successful you are, who you are as a person. So can you talk to us about some of the key milestones that you've taken over your life to kind of become the successful billionaire entrepreneur that you are today. So I think, Hala, that's where you and I are going to have a discussion after this thing. That's because I'm not going to talk about myself at this point. What I'm going to do is actually give you better than that. To me, of all the things that I have done, the biggest thing that I am most proud of is our three children. And to me, it was easy for me to come from nothing and have that hunger in my stomach to go out and do things.

our children grew up in an amazingly affluent home. But watching them grow up and become an extremely productive citizen of the society and going out and doing things that actually can change the way people live their life is really what's most satisfying. So our oldest is Uncle Jan, he's 29 years old, he graduated from Wharton. When he was 17-year-old, he started something called Cairo's and K-A-I-R-O-S. and that is now world's largest college entrepreneurship thing. After he graduated, he started a company, he sold that company,

and now he's 100% focused at this young age, trying to find a way to create affordable housing, affordable child care, affordable senior care, and working with millions of young entrepreneurs. So he has these Cairo's chapters around the world in 140 different colleges where all these college entrepreneurs come together and he brings them the right set of mentors to help them grow and succeed.

Our daughter graduated from Stanford and she is a Stanford STEM fellow, Stanford Mayfield Fellow, and she's the Youth Ambassador for United Nations. And she wanted to focus on helping girls and women around the world. What does she do? She is now working at an AI company to remove gender bias

by completely essentially removing the resume, the idea of who this person is And using that artificial intelligence technologies, the companies that she's working with have increased the women employment by 300%. Our youngest one is graduating from Stanford this year, and he is now a Schwartzman scholar, and he's going to be going to Tsinghua University in Beijing, to really go out and see how not only we can start to work with entrepreneurs around the world, but as China is growing a great entrepreneurial power, and realizing that, unlike political devices, The entrepreneurs have no geographical boundaries. Entrepreneurs work with other entrepreneurs around the world. And in fact, even the capital is not patriotic. Capital goes where the opportunities are.

And my hope is that him as a Schwartzman scholar and really understanding the culture in China to be able to bridge that divide where great entrepreneurs from China and the great entrepreneurs from around the world are able to work together and solve the problem that's facing humanity, whether it is a climate change,

whether it is creating abundance of, energy, abundance of food, abundance of water, and really reinventing education system, reinventing healthcare. And that is really something we all can be proud of. So there you have. My accomplishments are our three children. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so that's wonderful.

And it seems like you've raised children who are really accomplishing moonshot projects. And speaking of that, I read your audiobook on moonshots. And it was so inspiring, so entertaining. And I think in order for my listeners to really understand what you're about and your vision for the future, it's important to understand your theory on scarcity and how it's the root of all problems and how it holds humans back. So let's start there. Can you just talk a little bit about scarcity and how we as humans to unlock our potential need to shift to a mindset of abundance to solve some of our world's biggest challenges? The reason we think there is value to something and the only way we have,

as humans create value for something is because we believe these things are somehow scarce. Scarcity is what creates value. What if you start to believe the things that you value today can be in abundance? Suddenly, not only they can be democratized, they can be completely demonetized. And this is where most people think that humans are so greedy. It doesn't matter how much we have. We will always want more. and that's why we'll always have a value of scarcity.

Until you start to think about that we as humans actually have generosity built into our DNA because we realized during evolution that when our tribe died, we all died because we only could live when we were all healthy and happy and lived as a tribe together to be able to deal with the harsh environment that we were living in. And that is part of our generosity that built into our DNA. But more importantly, we all as human, as human, can enjoy a sport. We could be sitting in 70,000 people arena

and we can all be enjoying the game and never fighting over air or oxygen. Why is that? Because we inherently believe the air is abundant. The oxygen in the atmosphere is abundant. So we don't slap the guy right next to us and say, hey, stop breathing, you're taking my oxygen. It's because once something is in abundance

and we believe it is in abundance, guess what? It has no value. We don't pay for the air. We don't pay for that oxygen. And now, imagine if the energy was the next air, what if we have enough energy on this planet that there is no cost to energy? And what I mean by that is, today, every 90 minutes,

more solar energy falls on planet Earth than we use in the whole year. It's simply the matter of converting that solar energy into a useful form of energy. That is a problem that will get solved. It's already on that exponential curve down that today the cost of solar is coming down to at a distribution level at par with other forms of energy. Within the next five to ten years, the solar energy will have a marginal cost of close to zero. And once that happens, imagine it's going to be the next air.

And once you have abundance of energy, you can have abundance of clean water because you can desalanized. you can take the dirtiest water in Africa and you can distill it. So my point is as you start to think about how to solve these problems, and I'm going to give you many examples of how do you think about a problem and what are the right set of questions to ask. And then are you actually solving the root cause or are you simply solving the symptom? And as we start to dig into this concept, we'll discuss a little bit more and more specific examples. The last point I want to make on this particular subject is that most people,

When they go out and want to solve a problem, they always somehow are stopped by their own mind power because they believe they know nothing about this subject. So how are they going to go out and make a impact on something they know nothing about? And that is the second thing that I learned is that if you are an expert in a field, you become useless in that field. And what I mean by that is once you are an expert, the best you can do is to make an incremental improvement. And you can make a 10% improvement. You can make a 15% improvement. But you'll never be able to go out and change it 10x or 100x because as an expert, you have to take the foundation of that thing for granted. And unless you're willing to challenge the foundation, you can never make a disruptive improvement in anything.

you'll always be stuck with incremental improvement. Got it. So let's hone in on the scarcity piece of it. I love everything that you're talking about. We're going to touch on all of that. Later on in the interview, I'm going to pry into some of those things that you had mentioned. But let's stick on scarcity for a second.

Can you explain why sustainability doesn't work? Because sustainability is such a big theme with corporations, with organizations. Everybody is rallying behind sustainability, but you fundamentally think that sustainability it doesn't work. So can you just elaborate on that a bit? Yeah. So I think the sustainability really has become a synonym for conservation. So essentially when people say we need to be sustainable, what they are really saying is we

need to stop using resources and start really conserving resources and use less. And we all know, I mean, it's like somebody is telling you that the best way to get rich is to not spend. The best way to get rich is to earn more, not to spend less. And to me, the only way we can make something sustainable, because let's assume the air is scarce. And we start telling people, hey, we need to be sustainable. Stop using air. That means you essentially stop breathing every five minutes,

you stop breathing for 30 seconds. Oh my God, now there are more people. You have to stop breathing for 45 seconds. Oh my God, now we have more people on the planet. Now we have to stop breathing one minute every five minutes. Now you have to stop breathing two minutes. And at the end of the day, people, that's just unsustainable because people can't stop breathing. And the fact is the only way we can live, whether it's $7 billion or $10 billion or $20 billion, is to create enough of those resources that just $20 billion people will need.

Now, the question will we come down to say, how can we constantly keep creating without destroying? And the answer is because we're always thinking the limitations that we are dealing with. So we believe somehow that humanity can only live on the planet Earth. And we forget that our planet Earth is nothing but a tiny pale blue dot in our own solar system. Our solar system is nothing but a tiny dot in our own galaxy. Our galaxy is nothing but a tiny dot in our universe. In our universe, maybe a tiny dot in this multiverse. So where is that scarcity of places people can live on?

And that to me is that mindset once you start thinking about that, then where is that resource limitation that we keep talking about, how do we get enough resources? And we can talk about, you know, how do we go out and make every one of these things possible? How do we get people to start thinking that living on the planet, Earth can be same as living on the moon or somewhere else? It's just a matter of what technologies we need to develop.

So this is a good point for you to maybe explain and how Moon Express aims to help solve some of these resource problems on Earth? So, first of all, I hate talking about myself and the company. Please, for the sake of our listeners. But I'm going to talk about the concept of going to the moon, why go to the moon or why do the space exploration when there are so many problems on planet Earth? What people don't realize is these are not mutually exclusive.

First of all, any time you have a choice of going to the space or solving a problem on planet Earth, that choice should be to do both. We can explore space and we can solve the planet on Earth. And by the way, we can explore space to solve the problem on planet Earth. Let's take an example of energy. Today, we believe the energy can only be produced by the resources that we have on planet Earth. What if we can bring helium three, which is an isotope of helium? What if we can bring the helium three from moon or other places on space to planet Earth? And it can be used as a completely non-radiactive, clean energy source for fusion energy.

And I know some of the people who just heard the word fusion thinking, this guy is nuts. doesn't he know that we don't have a fusion energy right? And answer is we don't have helium three either. The point is you have to be where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is. We know in the next five to ten years we will have the fusion energy and we'll be able to develop the fusion reactors and then someone is going to ask and say, does someone have helium three? And you want to be that guy and say, yep, got one.

So the point is we have to start thinking about what resources that are available. outside planet Earth that will allow us to create abundance of clean energy. Sure, we should use the resources that are already here, such as solar, such as air. But imagine even with the solar, the biggest problem with the solar is, unfortunately, we have times where we don't have the sun shining, and that means we have to store the energy, that means we now have to develop the storage technologies such as battery and stuff. But what if we can put the solar panels above, the Earth atmosphere? What if those solar panels can always have access to sun? In that case,

we can essentially have the solar energy 24-7 around the year and we can microwave the energy down to all over the world simply from these solar panels in the space. So idea really is that we have to think about not what the world is, start dreaming about what the world can be, Don't think about what is impossible. Think about how to take the problem that seemingly looks impossible and say what technologies need to be developed to make that possible. And I can give an example which I think will probably bring this point home. We talk about living away from the planet Earth.

How can you possibly live on the moon? It is impossible. And instead of saying that, what if the question you were to ask is say, what technologies we will have to develop to be able to live on the moon. Now you are in a solution mode. And the first thing people say, well, of course you can't live on the moon because there is tremendous amount of radiation. Without realizing that nature has already solved that problem, we see the bacterial

organisms growing in radioactive nuclear waste. That means nature has already figured out how to protect its DNA from very very high radiation and use the radiation as a source of energy. So what if we can take these genes from these bacteria, modify the human genes using CRISPR to essentially make us completely radiation resistant. Now, of course, the CRISPR is not perfect today, but CRISPR is going to be perfect in three to five years from now by the time we decide we want to live on the moon. That means there is nothing that needs to be done other than the technology to continue to get matured, which is going to happen anyway.

So that means that's not a problem that we need to solve for us to be able to live on the moon. That is a problem that's being solved for other reasons. Second question, people say, okay, fine, I give it to you that you can live on radiation by making the human beings radiation resistant. Then how are we going to grow the food on the moon? And I think that's really the wrong question to ask. The question we need to be asking instead is, why do we eat food?

Because once you ask that question, you say, oh, you need to really eat food because we need energy and we need nutrients. Now, we say, okay, if you need energy, just like the plants can get energy from photosynthesis, bacteria gets energy from radiation. Can we use either one of them to essentially provide the energy that our human body needs? And in terms of nutrients, what kind of nutrients we might need? well, we need hydrogen, we need oxygen, we need nitrogen. And you say, okay, so what if we know there is water on the moon? Can't we just split the water into ingredients? That's hydrogen and oxygen.

We got that solved. Now the nitrogen part is interesting. We don't know if there is enough nitrogen on the moon or not. So let's just shelf that and say, okay, to live on the moon, we need to figure out how to take enough nitrogen to the moon, and that is the problem we need to solve. And suddenly you start to realize the living on the moon is simply about either finding the nitrogen on the moon or taking enough nitrogen to the moon. And that is a solvable problem. So you took something that seemed impossible and broke it down into something that's easy to solve or at least easy to put your arms around.

Wow, that's really incredible how you just broke that down. And it's a great example of a moonshot project, something that's really hard to achieve more than 10% incremental progress. Can you give some color around what you define a moonshot project to be and how it really differs from other projects? And also how we can use science fiction as a way to kind of get a vision of what the future could be and how science fiction is actually a precursor of what reality is. So I think to some extent the reality is shaped by our imagination. And the science fiction provides us with that imagination. So it really is the only limit to what?

we can achieve is really our imagination. So even my mom, she loved me so much, she will say, you can go do anything you want. Sky is the limit. Without realizing, there is no sky. In fact, sky is nothing but a figment of our imagination, but to our eyes that looks like a barrier that cannot be crossed. And imagine, when you go from here to the moon, you don't call mom and say, hey mom, I just passed sky, right? There is no sky, right? So sky is something, a limit we create, and there are many skies in our life we create.

And these are the barriers that look so physical that we think we can't cross until we get close to them and they look like that was simply a mirage. There was nothing there. There seemed like a hurdle, right? And that's really the way of starting to solve. So to me, a moonshot is something that's audacious enough that to most people it will start to look impossible

and it's only the people who start to see the vision and the imagination of what is possible. So when people would say that Steve Jobs has this distorted field of reality, what actually he had was a very clear imagination, he could see the world that needed to be, and other people have what I would call the distorted field of reality that they can't see that, right?

That is distorted. It's not distorted. to be able to see clearly where the world needs to be. And it's just a matter of thinking about how the world can be changed. And I'm going to give another concrete example of how do we look at a problem. And when you're looking at a problem, are you really looking at the symptom of that problem? Are you looking at the root cause? So now let's take an example of everyone knows that lack of fresh water in many parts of the world

is really one of the biggest problem that we need to solve. And many entrepreneurs say, you know what, if the lack of fresh water is a problem, I'm going to start working on set of technologies that can take the fresh water from the air. And I'm going to start building the nanotechnology that can able to take desalernize the water at a cheap cost using solar energy. Until you start to think about it and saying, why do we actually have shortage of fresh water? And then you realize that majority of the fresh water is actually used in agriculture. And if that's used in agriculture, then we say, oh, maybe I can modify the way we do agriculture, and maybe we can use aeroponic, and maybe we can use aproponic, and maybe we can start to build a way for agriculture so that we can maybe use the lightly salted water.

And now you feel really good that you actually have become solving the root cause. Until you realize that, what is it that's so much agriculture that we need, and we realize the reason we have, so much agriculture is because majority of the agriculture is being used to feed the cattle. And you say, oh, I need to now solve the cattle problem. So what if, instead of raising cattle, what if we can actually create beef just by using a stem cell from a cow, just like what nature does take? So one cell divides, instead of creating all types of tissues, whether it's eyes and the ears that we don't need to eat, then let's just create the muscle tissues. And now suddenly you realize that the problem of fresh water really is a synthetic biology problem

of creating the beef or meat that we need directly using bio factories. A synthetic biology problem is what's going to solve the fresh water problem is going to solve the agriculture problem. And if you don't need all that agriculture, now suddenly we can feed twice as many people. So when people say when you get from $8 billion to $10 billion, how are you going to feed them? by getting from $8 billion to $16 billion by just simply solving the problem of cattle. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence.

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little deeper to find out. So let's talk about why moonshot projects are more achievable today than ever. We've got an influx of entrepreneurs. Growth of technology is going from linear to exponential. Can you just give some color to why now is a good time to try to achieve these out of this world projects? Yeah. So first of all, there are two reasons why the moonshot projects are easier now than ever. And secondly, the moonshot projects have always been easier than a smaller project. Because when you are going out and doing something, that has a potential to fundamentally change the trajectory of how humanity is going to live.

You are attracting the best and the brightest around the world who want to work on something that is meaningful, something when successful can fundamentally change the way people live their life. So for example, when I started my healthcare company, I set the moonshot to say, what if we can create a world where illness was truly optional? What if being sick was a matter of choice, not a matter of bad luck? And with that moonshot, I was able to find the people who said, look, I am the expert in artificial intelligence. And I have done everything in my life that I wanted to do. I want to join you to solve this problem because this problem is worth solving. I got the best people who were understanding the human body at the genetic expression level to say,

I'm going to quit my job and come and join you to help you solve this problem because this problem is worth solving. We found the best scientists who were working on some of the best biodefense technology to say, we have the underlying technology to be able to understand the human body, that we have been working for the defense. Now, we can apply that technology to keep people healthy. That would have never been possible if I had a smaller goal and saying, you know what, I'm going to go out and build an app

that's going to find you a roommate. People are going to say, good luck, have fun. They're going to come and say, I'm going to quit my job and help you solve this problem because that's how the humanity is going to change the way people live. And that is what allows the moon shots to be possible because these big ideas are so big when successful changes the humanity.

And that's why the best and the brightest come and join. And the second thing is, for the first time, all the things we need to do these amazing things are becoming possible because the cost of the sensors, the cost of the technology to do these things are coming down so fast. That means we can now sequence every gene in the human body at a cost of under $100. It no longer requires

a billion dollar to do a human genome sequencing. It no longer requires multi supercomputers to go out and analyze that data. You can put that on Amazon Web Service and fire the 20 cores and you can analyze that data. So not

only the artificial intelligence is becoming powerful enough, our sensors are becoming smaller, cheaper and faster for us to be able to get the data that we need to be able to solve that problem. And amazing thing is, this healthcare company called Wyoming that I started, that is exactly what we did. And in two years, now we're starting to see that thousands and thousands of people whose life has fundamentally changed. We never understood

what would this take, but we never stopped from learning. And today we get email every day, people who are telling us, look, their autoimmune disease that from childhood is disappearing. They are no longer have cancer or they're able to fight the things that they bothered us, obesity and diabetes and Alzheimer and depression and anxiety. These were simply the symptoms because the things were going wrong in their body. So as opposed to attacking the symptoms, we attacked the root cause, which was really what was inside their body that was causing inflammation. Because the chronic diseases start with a chronic inflammation and we were able to understand the root cause of chronic inflammation was how your gut, the microbes, the 40 trillion microbes in your gut,

how they were interacting with the human body. But that's for some other day. Just want to give an example of how something so audacious, where we have trillions of dollars we're spending in healthcare alone in the United States. Someone like me who knew nothing about healthcare, I'm not a scientist, I am not AI person, I don't even have a degree in computer science. someone who knew nothing about it took on that this problem can be solved and should be solved. And that means there was nothing special that why me other than why not me? And that was a simple thing, the determination to be able to do that, not because I was the expert or I knew something more than other people did.

So interesting. And you brought up Viome and just as a background for my listeners, basically what this is, it's a testing service that use AI and machine. learning where you provide a sample to Viome and they let you know what types of food you should eat based on your gut health. So very cool stuff. Let's stick on the area of health. You've got one of the biggest imaginations in the world. So what do you think the future of health looks like? Sure. So the future of health is actually going to be very different from what we see today. Today, we, you and I and billions of us, we are actually reliance.

on these experts in the healthcare system to tell us when we are sick what to do. And our healthcare system, as you and I both know, is designed for them to make money when we are sick. That means no one in the healthcare system makes money when we are healthy, and everyone makes money when we are sick. So what do you think is their incentive? Now, imagine, when you have a chronic disease, the pharmaceutical companies consider you a subscriber because their job is not to solve or understand what is causing the chronic disease.

Their job is to simply suppress the symptom because once they suppress the symptom, you have to take their drug for the rest of the life. Knowing not only you have to take a rest of the life, every drug you take is going to cause three more symptoms and they have drug for those three and those three drugs will cause nine more symptoms and then now you're going to have drug for all those nine. And by the time you get old, You're popping more pills than blueberries, and there is a problem with that, right? And that to me is the future of health is going to be where individuals are empowered to take control of their own health. That means every individual becomes a CEO of their own health, and the technology is going to be available to them for them to be able to understand what is going on inside their body,

and AI is going to tell them exactly what to do. That means it's going to be actionable. don't eat apple, don't eat spinach, even though the pap I told you spinach was healthy, it's actually harming you. And we tell you, by the way, not only that don't eat spinach, we tell you why. Like for me, it says don't eat apple. It's because I have an apple virus in my gut that's causing inflammation. It tells me not to eat banana because the chittiness in banana is causing inflammation in my body.

It tells me to not eat lentils. I'm a vegetarian. I used to eat lentils all the time. is because the protein in that is not being digested, in turn is being converted into sulfide and ammonia that's causing inflammation. So the point was that simple thing where individuals now can take control, and suddenly I don't need to go to a doctor. My blood pressure came down, my cholesterol level is better, I lost weight,

and my doctor is wondering, all the drugs that I was taking, why am I not taking them because I don't need them anymore. That is the unbelievable was I was taking these drugs nexium and all those things that was making me sicker than I was. And my doctor said, you know what? I'm so glad I increased the drug for you so that now you're healthier. I told her that I haven't taken them for a year. So my point is the future of health is going to be personalized. It's going to be each individual becoming the CEO of their own health.

And I really believe the future of health is going to be not only preventing the diseases, and if ever we happen to have a disease, to be able to use a food as a drug, to be able to reverse it. It sounds so futuristic until you go back and realize that 2,500 years ago, a Greek doctor named Hippocrates, he said, all diseases begin in the gut. And he knew there is no healthy food. He said, one man's food is another man. poison. And then he says, let the food be thy medicine. Let thy medicine be the food. I may have just called my own hypocritees because that's exactly what we're doing. That's amazing. And what about

artificial intelligence? How do you think we'll interface with AI in the future? Well, I think we will not be interfacing with AI because AI will be part of everything that we interface with. So it's not going to be a separate thing called AI. I mean, today, imagine, we put the dishes in the dishwasher. We don't think of a dishwasher as a robot and AI, right? But we interface it with every day. When we are flying in the plane, do we ever say we are interfacing with AI? Because most planes are autonomous fly. They fly autonomously, right?

And suddenly, we are essentially in a robot that's being flown with AI, but we're not interfacing with AI. Our cars are becoming smarter every day, and it's using AI. So whether it is giving you a warning when you're changing the lane, it is doing the helping you with the braking and soon it tells you when you're too close to a car. What is all that? That's all AI. But we never think of as AI.

The beauty of the AI is once it becomes part of our AI is no longer that mythical, mystical AI, it just becomes that. In your book, you mentioned something called connectomes, I think they're called. So the connectome is really a name for how our neurons are actually synaptically connected inside our human brain, right? So the connect arm is to understand that connection, the neural network and how our neurons

connect with each other to create the memories and they create the experiences that we are having. The interesting thing is now with underlying technology from many, many different ways, we are able to understand how the neurons in our brain are connected. In fact, what we're

finding is that our gut and brain are tightly connected through this Vegas nerve. And in fact, now they're able to find that through the vagus nerve, nine signals go from gut to the brain and one signal goes from brain to the gut. That means there's nine times more traffic going up than the traffic coming down. And that means to large extent, it's not the brain may not be the control center. It may be a gut that's a control center.

In fact, most people used to think the gut is our secondary brain. What people don't realize is that as we evolved, the digestive system evolved, before we even had a brain. So if you look at some of the animals and mammals and original sea animals, they don't have the brain. They actually have the neurons in their gut just like we do. So point I'm trying to make here is that we find that the synaptic connections are there actually may be possible across our body. And I wouldn't be surprised if we realize that brain just may have a higher concentration of these neurons, but our whole body is actually a one big network. and every time we disrupt one network, it changes everything else.

So this whole idea of our healthcare system where we look at a body as a subsystem, so we have a kidney doctor, we have a heart doctor, we have a GI doctor, and we have a brain doctors. And they don't realize that all these things are really connected. You can't just change one thing. When you change one thing, it changes everything else. So I really believe that the idea of this connectome, which is starting out as the connections in the brain is going to actually become the connectome of the human body, that how our human bodies really is superorganism, in that not only it is connected internally

to us, it also connects the 40 trillion organisms in our gut to our humans. That means all of these are one single network. And when you take antibiotics or you take the food that are actually changing these organisms, it fundamentally changes these connectome. And that's why we start to see the health and our disease are all connected together. I mean, if you look at the disease, is really a word at body not being at ease. When something is not at ease, it's called dis-ease, and we call the disease. Yeah, that totally makes sense. I can't wait to see how far you go with Viome and how much that catches on. It sounds like such an innovative idea and you're really just trying to improve the health of the world. So everything you're doing is so noble. It is clear

that you have out of this world imagination. You're able to see the future. You're able to look beyond just what's in front of you and reality. So how can we as individuals become more imaginative like you? Well, actually, it's not just imaginative like me. You need to be the best version of yourself. And the best way to really start thinking about is what is it that you care about enough? What is your true obsession? Almost everyone will tell you to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to have a passion. And I really believe the passion is for losers. The winners have obsession. They don't have passion.

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Earlier, you were touching on the fact that you've spent your life in a whole range of industries. So that's telecom, tech, health, space. And most entrepreneurs really focus on one industry and they take a vertical approach. But you really take a lateral approach. You take knowledge from industry to industry

and you apply it and innovate that way. So can you kind of walk through a scenario of whether it's yourself or someone else who has taken knowledge from one industry to disrupt another? I mean, almost everyone, I mean, if you look at the successful entrepreneurs, they go across industries because being a novice or non-expert is what allows them to rethink that new industry. So look at Elon Musk. What is he doing? He's doing it digging the boarding company that's digging tunnel or hyperloop, looking at the space exploration, building the cars.

I mean, what is the common between them, right? It is really three different industries, and he's attacking them by understanding the fundamental principles of block and tackling as an entrepreneur. You look at Jeff Bezos, doing the space exploration, doing e-commerce, looking at fundamentally now in the healthcare. So it means people are going out and attacking the different problems, understanding that almost all of the problems, you need to start thinking about what is possible and how do you take those imagination and start to break down into smaller chunks of pieces that you can start executing and completely disrupt. That means you take a very large problem and you start to take slices of them, start to solve them, and suddenly you know you solve the whole pie. Can you elaborate on why it's better to be a no voice as opposed to an expert? Well, as I was describing, is that once you become an expert, by definition, that means you now have a lot of fundamental knowledge about that subject. And that becomes the anchor and that becomes your baggage.

And when you are a non-expert, you are going to able to challenge that foundation. So for example, if I was a doctor, I would have, by the time I graduated from the medical school, I would, I would have been taught the only way to solve the disease, there is a pill for every ill. And I would have become the salesperson for a pharmaceutical company. That means all I do is prescribe and essentially sell the pharmaceutical drug. Because as a MD, I'm never taught about nutrition. I'm not thought about holistic health. I'm simply taught about I graduate.

I know how to prescribe a drug. And then I become an expert. and all I know is a lot about that kidney and I know maybe I'm a diabetic doctor that means all I care about is reducing your glucose. I don't really care what else happens in your body. So for example, if I'm a diabetic doctor, all I care is you're not building enough glucose in your body.

There is no glycemic response. So I can tell you, only eat butter. If you eat a bucket of butter every day, you will have no glycemic response and you will be totally fine with diabetes. Now, it's pretty likely you're going to die from heart disease, but that's your heart doctor to figure out not my problem. And that to me is really the problem we face is that as an expert, I would have never thought, why can't the food be personalized medicine? We talked about personalized medicine.

What if the personalized medicine is something we take every day? We just need to know which of these drugs I need to take. Is that spinach my right drug or is it apple my right drug? or it's really the maybe the tomato is my right drug. What is it that's the right drug for me and if that can be done? That would have never come

from somebody who's a doctor. It will just never, because they're not taught beyond what they are expert at, which is how do I prescribe the right drug to this person. And so you can either take that example, same thing in space.

Every space company, if you go back and look at, what did they do? To go to the moon or beyond, they build the mass, massive biggest possible rocket. They can because they knew that's the only way they knew how to do it.

When we came into the space industry, you look at the Elon. If you look at Elon, why is it? NASA has burned through hundreds of billions of dollars, never thought about reusing the rocket. They never thought they can save the face, one, bring it back and reuse it.

They rebuild the whole thing. So think about it. It's like flying a plane and throwing it away and getting a new plane again. That is something only the entrepreneurs and innovators do because Elon did not come from the aerospace industry. When we started Moon Express, we didn't build a big rocket. We say, what if we can take the smallest, cheapest rocket

that can take us to the low Earth orbit? And what if our lander itself has a small rocket, now that we have gotten out of most of the Earth atmosphere, can we just take our own small rocket and go to the moon? That simple change brought the cost down from a billion dollar to go to the moon to under $10 million. And that would have never been possible if I was a rocket scientist thinking about how to solve that problem. I was thinking more like a software person thinking, why can't we build multiple modules

that actually build on top of each other and they call each other's expertise rather than one big monolithic code that everybody in the software hates. Another good example you talked about in your book was about the oil spill with the tattoo artists, the mechanic and the dentist, can you give us that example? Yes, that's actually came out of the XPRIZE. So when the oil spill happened, and here is British Petroleum, spending billions of dollars trying to clean up that oil. And they were using exactly the same technology that Exxon used it when the Exxon Waldee's spill

happened in Alaska. And at XPRIZE, I'm on the board of XPRIZE, we thought this got to be a better way of doing it. So we put a $1.4 million prize, Wendy Schmidt put that money, and saying, someone develop a technology that will be twice as good as something we are using today. And some of the finalists were people who have never really thought about this problem. And the example you're talking about, one of the finalists was actually a team that consisted of a tattoo artist, a mechanic, and a dentist. And it sounds like it started of a really bad joke here, right?

But this is literally what happened. A mechanic is getting a tattoo in his arm. and he tells it that you artist is asking. You said, you know, you heard of this $1.4 million price. You're a mechanic. Why can't you build something that will collect this oil? All has to be just twice as good. And the mechanic says, you know what?

I think the oil spill happens when people are drilling a lot of oil. My dentist does a lot of drilling. I got to ask him. And they came together and built this thing. There was four times better. Obviously, they didn't win because somebody built that was eight times better. But imagine, these three people, when you need, nothing about it, built a device that cost less than a million dollars and they were able to

make it four times better versus British petroleum that spent billions of dollars trying to solve this problem. They could do themselves because they were expert in that field. It's almost like when you're an expert, you have tunnel vision and you can't see the easy solutions that might solve a problem or you just can't see out of the box. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to your childhood a bit. We won't talk specifically about your childhood. worry. You grew up in a caste system and you were told that you couldn't achieve your dreams. I remember that your father actually told you that you wouldn't amount to anything better than an accountant. You obviously

didn't listen to that. Why is being an independent thinker or a rebel something important to consider as a young adult? So I think, you know, in this country is really amazing. If you have imagination and you're constantly reinventing or reimagining what is possible, we are diagnosed with ADHD. You know, every one of our children that I mentioned, when they were young, they were told the teacher would say, I think your kids have ADHD. They cannot focus. They're constantly being distracted by everything else that could be done. And they wanted to put them on a drug. And I said, listen, they are just more creative and more imaginative than the average person. And I'm not going to put them on any drug. And those three kids are now changing the way people are going to live. their life. So my point is, when we, the innovation and the changes happen on the edges,

it is those crazy people, as Steve Jobs says, who believe it can be done are the ones who get it done. If you are part of the bell curve and right in the middle, you're always going to be that average person. So be the rebel that you always want it to be. And that rebellious person is going to be the next innovator. He's got the next Steve Jobs, the next Jeff Bezos, the next Elon Musk. It happens because you believe something that no one else believe is possible. Got it. And if you had one piece of advice to give a millennial today, what would it be?

I think I would tell them, dream big. Dream so big that people think you are absolutely crazy. Never be afraid to fail because you only fail when you give up. Every idea that works or does not work is simply a stepping stone to a different idea and a bigger idea. In life of an entrepreneur, just remember, it is always going to be ups and downs. So I always explain to every young entrepreneur that think of being an entrepreneur as your heartbeat. It is always going to be up and down. When it is smooth, you are already dead.

You don't want the smooth heartline. You want the ups and downs. When you are down, all you have to do is hunker down and know the next beat is going to be up. But most importantly, when you are on the top of that beat, never get too cocky. Keep your friends close and just remember the winter is coming. And that to me is really the way to think about it. When you are successful and a leader, always remember that your success will never be measured by how much money you have in the bank. it will always be measured by how many people's life you have changed.

You will only know you're successful when you have become humble. If you don't have humility and you still have arrogance, that means you're still trying to prove something to someone else or yourself. So be humble, dream big, never be afraid to fail and just know they're going to be ups and downs. And my last advice really would be that when you are a leader, don't get people to start thinking like you. Allow them to dream their own imagination. And those imagination are the ones that are going to help you propel your ideas forward. Awesome. Well, thank you. That was such great advice. I'm honestly going to have to listen to this interview three times to absorb all the different insights that you gave us. So thank you so much. Where can our listeners go to find more about you

and everything that you do? Of course, you can find me on social media, on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and you can also email it to me. My email is my first name, Navine, N-A-V-E-E-N-A-N. My last name, J-A-I-N at gmail.com. So feel free to send me an email or find me on a social network and hope to continue our conversation. Awesome. Thanks so much, Navine. It was so nice to talk to you. Thank you, Hala. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Follow YAP on Instagram at Young and Profiting and check us out at Young and Profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on YAP Society on Slack. Check out our show notes or young and profiting.com for the

registration link. You can find me on Instagram at Yop with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks to the YAP team for another successful episode. This week, I'd like to give a shout out to our marketing manager, Steve's, for all her dedication to growing our Instagram community. Make her day and follow us at Young and Profiting. Parth, who has been heads down helping to relaunch our YouTube channel. This is Hala, signing off.