What we talked about
Mustafa Qutub is the co-founder and CEO of PaloBio, a Silicon Valley startup using AI to unlock human resilience and improve neurological health. In this thought-provoking conversation, Mustafa shares how his journey through law, philosophy, and technology led him to focus on one of humanity’s biggest challenges: helping individuals and organizations thrive in the age of AI.
Show notes
Mustafa Qutub traces the founding of PaloBio back to Thomas Hobbes and Newtonian physics, specifically Hobbes’s model of human will as a deliberative process that responds to sensory inputs and balances emotions into action. If AI can replicate that process, Mustafa asks, what is left that makes us distinctly human? PaloBio’s answer is to build an AI advocate that understands individual resilience better than the person themselves.
What we covered
- Rather than using population-level health models that aggregate data across thousands of people every decade, PaloBio builds a personalized resilience profile for each individual, combining cognitive, biological, psychological, and social-environmental inputs, to give a continuously updated picture of how a specific person navigates life’s challenges.
- Mustafa distinguishes between a coach (who pushes you toward a specific goal) and an advocate (who represents your full narrative and goals to others), and frames PaloBio as the latter, something that can walk into a therapy session, a physical therapy appointment, or a drug trial and say “here is who this person is” without the person having to reconstruct their history from scratch.
- The first commercial use case is family caregivers, people responsible for elderly parents or children, who face relentless coordination, communication, and personal well-being challenges that a resilience-aware AI could meaningfully help manage. A first commercial release is targeted for late 2025 or early 2026.
- Mustafa sees a larger vision where individuals own, license, and monetize their own resilience data, sharing it selectively with pharmaceutical companies, sports coaches, or healthcare providers in a way that makes them economically valuable participants in a data economy rather than passive sources of information extracted without compensation.
- He warns that AI companions delivering constant positive reinforcement risk creating the same dopamine-addictive loops as social media, pointing to user backlash when ChatGPT changed its tone with GPT-5 as early evidence that people were becoming dependent on AI affirmation in ways that could be detrimental.
- Mustafa draws a parallel to the early internet: society got locked into certain ways of using the web that constrained its potential, and he is worried the same will happen with AI if people don’t deliberately think about all the problems it could address rather than defaulting to the patterns that emerge first.
About Mustafa
Mustafa Qutub is the co-founder and CEO of PaloBio, a Silicon Valley startup applying AI to resilience measurement and neurological health. Before founding PaloBio with his sister, he spent over two decades in senior leadership roles scaling high-growth technology companies including Rafay Systems, Arcos Labs, Nexkey, and Akame Technologies.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mustafaqutub
- Website: https://palobio.com
Episode 49 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the Prevared podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world Today I am joined by Mustafa Kutub, he’s the co-founder and CEO of PaloBio PaloBio is a Silicon Valley startup using AI to unlock human resilience and improve neurological health
Mustafa brings together a unique mix of entrepreneurial drive, consumer empowerment and equitable healthcare vision Before launching PaloBio, Mustafa spent over two decades scaling high-growth technology companies, holding senior leadership roles at Rafa’i Systems, Arcos Labs, Nexkey and Akame Technologies His experience span building go-to market strategy, from preview revenue to acquisition
winning top leadership awards and driving enterprise adoption at scale In our conversation today we’re going to explore how Mustafa is applying cutting-edge AI to solve one of the world’s largest health challenges what it takes to lead across different industries and why resilience, both personal and organizational matters, now more than ever So it’s going to be quite a ride So welcome Mustafa, how are you doing today?
Mustafa (01:19) I’m doing wonderfully. a beautiful day here in Palo Alto, California, and I can’t thank you enough for having me on your podcast.
Federico Ramallo (01:28) Yes, I’m honored to have you here, yes. Thank you for joining.
Mustafa (01:32) Well, I’m excited to be
here and to get into our conversation today.
Federico Ramallo (01:37) Great, great. So tell us what inspired you to start PaloBio and why are you focusing on brain health and human resilience?
Mustafa (01:47) Well, for me, it’s been a history of what’s interested me educationally and kind of the challenges that I’m seeing with society and governance and where humanity may be facing some of the challenges in the long term. When I started in undergrad, I focused a bit on
the philosophy of politics. And one of the philosophers I was most interested in was ⁓ Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan.
So what he postulated there was that human will is this, he looked at Newtonian physics and he said, all right, human will is this process of deliberation where there’s a catalyst, it could be a sensory input that leads to a balancing of emotions that then yields the will, which is the action that we think or take after that subconscious process of deliberation.
I think about that a lot today and when I founded the company, PaloBio, with my sister, we were thinking about that a lot as well. What enables somebody to be able to have that type of…
relevance in the coming economy and how do you survive in a world where you have artificial intelligence that is clearly going to be
impacting the economy, the roles that are available, and could possibly achieve what Hobbes just outlined there when it comes to independence of will or that type of thinking that we characterize as human. And in fact, I think a lot of…
neurologists and some philosophers are trying to postulate is what really Solves that hard problem of consciousness what makes us human at the core and I think a lot of the ideas kind of go back to what Hobbes was talking about 400 years ago and that is the reason we have sentience consciousness is to make sense of all that sensory input that we have
And that yields, of course, creativity, which I know is ⁓ a topic that’s very passionate and that you’re passionate about and ⁓ close to your heart. It yields innovation. It changes paradigms. If technology is able to replicate that. So it is no longer just a tool, but it is a creator of innovation. It is a shaper of society. It’s a shaper of how we as humanity live.
what is going to distinguish us, what is going to allow us to thrive in modern society and given the limitations of human nature. And so thinking about this, we looked at a challenge that’s very close to our hearts and that is…
the ability to control one’s information that is intrinsically yours or mine. In this case, it’s not so much our browsing habits, it’s more of our health and wellness data.
And we were thinking about all the different ways in which that store today, it’s collected today and the value that that represents from a drug development perspective, from a consumption and a consumer economy perspective, but mostly from an individual perspective, understanding how
we’re able to intervene in certain health trajectories and live healthier, more impactful lives, how we’re able to realize our potential as individuals. And that brought us to the concept of resilience, which is a, I view it as the ability to navigate life’s challenges. So given my co-founder’s experience when it comes to
large language and big data sets and making sense of that, we kind of took that and said, how do we apply it?
to the individual who wants to be able to have better health outcomes, who wants to be able to navigate day-to-day scenarios in a more meaningful way. And what we realize is that while the concept of resilience and the idea that there are these universal drivers that allow us as humans to overcome obstacles in our lives, there has not been a very
personalized approach to it and recognizing that the things that allow us as individuals to navigate life’s challenges are unique to us. Bringing AI to data sets that are
only ours and looking at how we handle these things throughout life gives you a much better predictor than large scale population models that say, hey, we’ve looked at this population set every 10 years and this is what resilience means and this is how it’s going to predict health outcomes. If you actually know a person inside and out, you can truly be their advocate. And that is what we’re trying to do with PaloBios, truly create an advocate that
understands who you are even better than you are. It has a persistent memory, has an understanding of how all these different factors, the cognitive, the biological, the psychological, the social and environmental, how all those factors come together to shape resilience and how they apply to you individually. And so that’s how we’re differentiating ourselves. And we’re hoping to bring that to a number of different populations early.
One of the first that we’re looking at is family caregivers, those who are responsible for taking care of perhaps elderly parents or other family members as well as children and some of the challenges that they need to overcome and how they can harness resilience and apply it to settings like that.
Federico Ramallo (07:52) Wow, that’s amazing. I mean, it’s a very difficult problem to tackle. And on the other hand, it’s something that it’s under the radar of most people. They don’t think about resilience as an important skill to develop.
Mustafa (08:11) I think it’s often abstracted and not well understood. And there’s been a few efforts in recent decades to try to quantify it. I think we’re starting to get to the point where we have the capability. We just haven’t done it yet.
And that also involves defining resilience in very specific terms. What is it that makes us resilient? Part of it, and we’re going in with a very broad definition, I think you can probably tell from my overview, it’s any of those factors. And it could be outside environmental factors. It could be the impact of a fire in your area that maybe doesn’t even affect you personally, but it affects the community. How do you respond as an
individual. That is a contributing factor to resilience. AI and tracking that will allow us to make some of these associations that we’ve never been able to really do in the past. And I think a lot of people, when they think about resilience, they think about what a Jobs might have said, Steve Jobs, he talks about perseverance being the most important thing a person can have to thrive in business or in life.
And I think that that is a, a beautiful sentiment, but what allows you to persevere. And I think that is at the heart of what we’re getting at with resilience. Is that important to you? If not, how do you navigate these challenges knowing who you are as a human? And it’s often very hard for us to capture that in the moment. We lose sight of that. become every moment we might feel slightly differently and that
narrative of who we are evolves. But if you have something that’s always there, that always sees that, that narrative can be preserved and articulated in a way that represents who you are in the moment, but doesn’t forget about who you were 10 minutes ago or decades ago. And all that compiled allows you to take actions or think about challenges in a way that is hopefully empowering to individuals.
particularly as it relates to health decisions and how one navigates some of those challenges.
Federico Ramallo (10:27) Right, so what would be a more complete definition of resilience? Because I understand resilience as the perseverance to overcome difficult obstacles, challenging situations, right? I mean, there has to be a level of difficulty but also a level of risk, right? If you’re doing something that is risky, right? Risky means that it could go bad.
And then that becomes two part, right? If you fell off the horse, are you climbing back up? And are you, you know, here we have a horse, who is brave enough to get into it? And then that’s fully knowing that you could fell off and hurt, right? Who is willing to, right?
I think those are the two parts for me of that I see as resilience, right? I’m going sideways here, but I mentioned I did an off-road trip recently, right? And one of my teammates, she’s a woman, she’s ⁓ an entrepreneur, and she’s afraid. Most of the time she’s afraid. We go through difficult obstacles. We went through a…
a so we have the edge of the mountain that we cannot see the bottom and then we have a a vertical rock, you know, and then we’re driving in that little space that can barely fit the car and then we find that there was a big rock that a lot of rocks that basically blocks the way so now we have to drive over that
tilted like 30 degrees, right? And you can see the bottomless, it’s not bottomless, right? But you can see the bottomless pit, right? And we’ve done that. So she’s always afraid, those type of things. She screams, but she does it anyways, right? So I tell her.
Mustafa (12:15) Almost worse that there is a bottom at that point, right?
Federico Ramallo (12:26) It’s not about not being afraid. It’s about the actual heroes are the ones that are or the braves are the ones that are afraid but still do it. Right. So because you always apologize. Sorry, I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m sorry. Saying don’t apologize. You you’re doing it right. You’re here. You decide to come here even though your threshold threshold for risk is much lower than everybody.
in the group, right? So she’s willing and she’s doing it, right? And at the end of the journey, we’re all together, right? So that speaks very highly of her, right? So anyway, that’s the other component for me of resilience, right? Voluntarily going into uncomfortable situations, risky situations and overcome the obstacles, right?
Mustafa (13:20) And I think one, I absolutely agree and I commend her for that and something that’s very relatable to me. When I was in undergrad, I spent some time in Australia and I, in the southwestern part of Australia, they have these, these kare trees, which are very, very tall. They’re like the redwoods out here in the Bay area. And there was a fire post in one of these forests and there was a ladder that went up and it was just.
You know, was one I imagined it was a couple hundred feet in the air and anyone could climb up it. I got up about five, 10 feet and I just froze. My hands, my palms were sweaty because I am not good with heights. You know, through a little exejeolation of some of the folks who were there with me, I ended up doing it and it was incredible. It transformed my life. It’s one of those things that had I not taken that risk.
Federico Ramallo (14:00) you
Mustafa (14:14) I probably would have had a fair amount of regret, but having taken it, I realized things about myself that I never would have otherwise. Of course, there’s that balance. Why do we have these fears to start out with? And what is the difference between risk and recklessness? I think…
Federico Ramallo (14:30) Right.
Mustafa (14:31) And a lot of that is we don’t know necessarily intuitively because our bodies and our brains are telling us one thing and the reality might be a little different. So.
I think one of the things that we’re trying to solve is to give people a better understanding of who they are through all of the different inputs from the biological. anything you can imagine, and this is just to start out with, but anything you can imagine from say a wearable device, all of that, and that tells you, you can correlate that with different experiences that you’re having, a diary that you’re taking, you can say, all right, clearly,
these situations which I perceive as stressful are also understood by the the AI to be stressful events.
It’s connecting all of those things, the biological, the social and environmental, the psychological, all of these different capacities and the cognitive, of course, our ability to reason and think and saying, okay, we know all of these different things about you. You’re scoring very highly on certain cognitive tests or…
inputs that we’re receiving. You have certain psychological profiles or triggers to certain stimulus or certain events. You have this current
social and environmental framework in which you’re operating and it may differ from where you were in the past and this is how you’re functioning your body from a physiological perspective. Well, you’re telling us that you’re about to go on a trip and you’re about to go into the mountains and you’re going to be going to a mine and you know what?
chances are you’re going to have to overcome this challenge. Well, depending on a person’s goal,
what we would be able to do in a situation like that is help them really think about how they can harness their strengths and their goals from a very empirical perspective and apply it to a journey like that. while it may, for me, I wouldn’t have climbed that tree without the encouragement of the people around us. What we’re thinking about this is what if you had an AI advocate that could do that for you in that situation, but also say represent you to a
care provider or another service provider and say, hey, this is who this person is. They’re not going to understand, they’re not going able articulate all this narrative in a single pass, but I know this person and they want me to share this with you. You should know this about them before you say start a therapy session or before you start an advisory session or before you start a write a prescription for them.
Federico Ramallo (17:25) interesting. So you will be able to integrate with medical agents and provide more context and guidance. Wow.
Mustafa (17:33) That’s absolutely our intent. It’s to be part of a much broader ecosystem, whether it’s at some point an epic type of…
Federico Ramallo (17:36) That’s amazing.
Right.
Mustafa (17:43) infrastructure where you have your health care records that we don’t, we’re not starting with that. We’re looking much more at the types of experiences and inputs that an individual can do without harnessing health records. But I certainly see a point in the future where they’re able to bring this profile and incorporate all of these different elements, control that data and share it in a way that is most impactful for that individual.
Federico Ramallo (18:11) Right, right. So I remember seeing one time a, I think it was a little box, but now they call it companions, know, the AI companions, right? Which basically, you know, they have the, you know, the sensual or sexual component, right? But this box that I was talking about basically will give you positive reinforcements to everything you would do, right?
So, I don’t remember how they call it, but it was basically this idea of if you have an agent that is always giving you compliments, that is going to help you. And when I was reading that, I was thinking that is a very dangerous path to go, now you… Reminds me of this TV show called You, that…
falls in love of this, you know, her, her, sorry, yeah, You is another, is another one, yeah. But he’s the same actor, that’s why I confused him. ⁓ So anyway, and that becomes pathological, right? That’s a pathological path, right? So I don’t think that positive reinforcement just for the sake of it is good, right?
Mustafa (19:11) Yep. Or her. Is that? Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Okay, so got it.
Federico Ramallo (19:31) I’m just a software engineer, so what do I know? But that’s what I believe. But having an agent that can support you on improving your mental health, because what you’re describing is more of a coach. That it’s kind of pushing you to do something that is outside of your comfort zone.
if you’re within the box of what the agent can do, then great. then when the agent, I’m calling agent, but when you find that you need external help, you go and find it to the special agents, medical agents, and provide the required context to move that forward. So I think that’s a much philosophically and practically better approach.
Mustafa (20:17) I couldn’t agree more. think we just saw what happened with ChatGBT with the 5.0 or the 5 release and everyone who was becoming very familiar with 4 who were missing a lot of the affirmations that they got with that iteration.
It can be addictive. I’m sure there’s a dopamine response that people get when it’s, I did something good, I get a reward for it. And we know how detrimental that can be and how addictive that can be. mean, we’re again, know, the EO Wilson, have paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions and God-like technology. How do we navigate that?
And I think that’s a big problem. Technology is so far beyond what we evolved to be right now. And I’m sure that we will start playing with who we are as a species soon enough. I think we’re already doing that in some cases. But prior to that, how do we learn how to operate in this modern world in a way that is still healthy?
because there’s so much access to that quick fix. We see it with social media, we see it with all of these things that can suck people in online and keep them there. that can be very much, I mean, imagine if we were all stuck with our own little AI and we kept getting positive reinforcement and we never wanted to interact with anyone else ever again.
It’s a very real possibility, I think. And if we as a people, as a species, as a society want to avoid that, then we have to think about what it is that would be impactful and would motivate and incentivize different types of behavior. So what I go back to is knowledge is not a bad thing.
understanding is not a bad thing. And that is really the goal of understanding the data that PaloBio is approaching is that what you’re seeing here is a composite picture. It’s not good, it’s not bad. We don’t like to think about it in those terms. It just is. This is you, this is your journey as represented through the framework of resilience.
Now, what do you want to do with that? I think one of the big things that people think about is, all right, well, I want to be happy. understanding what that means to an individual is so important because, you know, happiness in the moment can, if you if you keep pursuing that, can lead to.
an unfulfilling life in many cases. And I think a lot of people have experienced that where, know, pursuits of short-term happiness and consistent pursuit of that can distract from broader senses of purpose. So maybe having an advocate, and I think of it even different than a coach, but an advocate, someone who can represent you, but also represent your goals to you.
is the best approach to that. So it is not necessarily your companion. is not necessary. Maybe in some ways resembles a coach, but it’s also someone who says, all right, I can I have kind of an objective picture of you that I can I can share with you and I can help you navigate some of these things that you’re trying to navigate. I can also take that. I can share it with others where it can be really impactful in a way that, you
When I think about when I go to the doctor’s office and I have to fill out the form for the millionth time and there’s half the things I’m like, I don’t remember or I’m sure I have it somewhere else. And then I talk to a provider and they don’t, they haven’t looked at my records yet. They don’t have a sense of who I am. And we kind of go through that again. And then they have to talk to someone else and they have to talk to someone else and it gets lost. And then we’re treated as this
You know, uniform, again, a commodity almost, and it’s not to fault the provider. It is this abstraction, the view of a person and best practices as being applied to broad populations made sense a decade ago. It doesn’t make sense anymore.
Federico Ramallo (24:52) Mm-hmm.
Mustafa (24:57) and I think we’re starting to realize that possibility. Again, the things that you’re talking about are some of the big dangers that we need to avoid. We could really reinforce some of the problems that we’re already seeing manifest. So avoiding those and being aware of them are going to be critical.
Federico Ramallo (25:15) Yes, I can see how if you’re doing a report every 10 years, whereas with AI that knows you much better, an AI agent, then you can have a much fresh and precise picture of what’s going on with you as a patient. I can see how that’s a big improvement to the system that we have now, paper-based system, or even if they’re electronic, they basically translate the paper into
document, of sorts, right, or a form but the mechanism still remains of the gathering information is through the doctor, right and what you’re proposing is the agent can know you better and then it can provide more context to both the patient and the provider, right
Mustafa (26:07) and it can provide it in a very unique and tailored way. If you’re going in for physical therapy for an injury that you sustained, what’s relevant about you might be very different if you’re going in for psychological counseling or if you’re going to, if you are a caregiver whose responsibilities are for someone else.
how that manifests and how that’s articulated can be very challenging for an individual. But for an AI advocate that looks at you from this resilience framework, it’s something that should be, it’s not going to lose sight of that bigger picture, that narrative, and know how to tailor it for the audience. And I think that is the power that we’re starting to realize with the technology that’s available.
Federico Ramallo (26:56) Right, I like the use of advocate instead of coach because it has a much broader scope The reason I was thinking about coach is because the coach is the one that pushes you further and it’s a one on one relationship because it’s going to push one person different to the other depending on how
it feels that it goes and because they know your history they can support you in a much more particular way but the word advocate also it’s also because the coach is mostly to push you mostly for ⁓ sports but there are other coaches but an advocate is helping you fulfill your goals
Mustafa (27:44) And I think it’s assuming that most people would say that their overall objective, life objective is to thrive. And I’m just kind of throwing that as a placeholder because it could be lots of different things. But if that is the goal.
then that is something that an advocate would ceaselessly work for in a variety of different scenarios, including in how it engaged with you. There’s obviously elements of coaching there, but I do think that, as you said, a coach is for specific purposes and, you know, helps, it does see you in a certain lane, helps you, you know, elevate yourself, but they’re not necessarily
trying to look at you objectively and share that information or present you in a certain way that it views as particularly relevant and perhaps different than you see yourself to others. And I think that is, but with your interests in mind, there’s a whole lot that we can cover in terms of, you know, the…
the ethics behind that and how one navigates some of the challenges. But I do think that we have to also acknowledge that we’re not always the most objective representatives of ourselves, sometimes to our detriment and having an advocate.
on our behalf. The reason why you often get a lawyer or a financial advisor is because, you know, we may think we have a good sense of what’s right or wrong or how to do things, but there are others who can think about these things in ways that we can’t and are more effective advocates for us than we would be ourselves.
Federico Ramallo (29:33) Yes, because we’re judge and party, right? We are involved in the situation, right? If it happens to somebody else, we might be able to be more objective, but if it happens to us the level of feelings go, you know, skyrocket and then we don’t think straight, right? We think we do, but we’re not objective, right?
Mustafa (29:35) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (29:54) Very interesting and what what stage of development are you with the advocate?
Mustafa (30:00) So we have a prototype and right now we are tailoring it to folks who are interested particularly in navigating some of the challenges that come with being a familial caregiver. And this is something that is very close to the hearts of my co-founder and myself where we’ve…
had responsibility for family members. And we know the challenges that come with that. So it is very much a application of, we have the model that we’ve built out on resilience and that takes into account the general four categories that I kind of laid out. Previously the cognitive, the emotional, the biological, and then what I consider the social slash environmental.
and the different attributes and factors that we put into each bucket. Obviously, this is something that we believe is going to become much bigger as we evolve the solution, but it gets a baseline picture of someone today.
What we want to do is then help that caregiver understand both the family member for whom they’re caring for, as well as be able to manage some of the challenges from a coordination, communication, personal well-being perspective that come along with…
with caregiving. And so hopefully we’ll have a first commercial release end of this year early next year.
Federico Ramallo (31:37) very nice. the caregiving, know, both kids, know, younglings, if you like, and, and, and, and, you know, older folks, even though they have different challenges, it’s overwhelming, right? Because it’s a never ending task that, you know, requires your attention all the time, right? And that can be overwhelming for
Mustafa (31:44) Ha
Federico Ramallo (32:02) for the caregivers, right? So having a tool that can help them build more resilience, I think that’s great first step, yeah.
Mustafa (32:12) We’re certainly hoping that we can accomplish that. think one of the things that I’ve heard echoed a lot these days is that we’re in a world without a ceiling right now. Everything seems possible. That’s exciting. Actually, I was listening to one of your podcasts the other day and then the question was around…
do you think that AI is going to get us into ⁓ certain patterns and paradigms that lock out creativity? And you had a very interesting response to that, where you talked about how you think that it is actually that, it be that catalyst that allows for…
creativity and I had been thinking about it more the other way. Pre-success, like yeah you know what because that is a danger that we’re going to need to avoid. We’re going to need to avoid getting into a certain mindset when it comes to this is what AI can do. We have to find, we have to take advantage of the situation in front of us and say let’s think about everything and so I do believe in serendipity. Every day starts out
with me thinking about something and then I’m thinking about something else the next day and I think for me it’s and as a CEO it’s important to do something and then see what what happens because you never know where you’re gonna end up but at the same time recognizing being comfortable with the idea that you should be
thinking about everything and nothing should be constraining your possibilities at this point. It is good to think big if we’re gonna take the Apple tagline and I look back at the possibility that we all thought about in the mid 90s with the internet coming to the fore and I really think, I think we missed out on a lot.
because we took certain paths and we got into certain modes of working with it that were constrained and became the de facto way in which we worked with that medium. I hope the same doesn’t happen with AI. think that could be disastrous for humanity. So I’m hoping that everyone right now is just as excited as I
am and thinking, man, let’s look at all the problems that we’ve ever wanted to overcome and let’s think about what we want the world to look like and let’s just go at it with that kind of mindset.
Federico Ramallo (34:51) yes, yes, I agree, I mean the… if we think that the possibilities are endless then the war becomes unbearing, right? because there’s so many things to do that there’s not enough time, there’s, you know yeah, that’s a rabbit hole, right? that’s… yeah
Mustafa (35:11) Too many possibilities can be challenging. And so
I think that’s what I’m trying to articulate is that for myself, I know that I have to make those steps, but I also want to approach each day and with the mindset that, know what, it is okay for…
Federico Ramallo (35:17) You
Mustafa (35:29) to flexible, it’s okay to think about things differently. It is okay to start something and have a vision for where it’s going to go and where it’s going to be and how applicable it’s going to be. And then in a year’s time, recognize that its value is something entirely different. And I think that’s the key to innovation. And I hope that’s the mindset a lot of people are thinking about right now. Because I do think that we could get ourselves stuck in just a new paradigm.
and we could stagnate as a species if we don’t think about things that way. I think there’s a lot that’s on the table right now and I hope we’re able to find ways to navigate it.
Federico Ramallo (36:09) Right, right. I think that…
The AI is going to change, I mean we’re going through a revolution that AI is changing a lot of how we’ve been used to do things, right? But in every revolution, as humans, we have the capacity to adapt to the new environment, right? So I don’t know what…
what that’s going to look like in the future, right? I don’t think anybody does, right? Because we’re still, I think we’re looking at the tip of the iceberg on what AI could be, right? And it’s evolving very quickly. So, but on the other hand, I think that the criteria, the capability to analyze information make…
decisions based ⁓ on values, the personal relationships, those things are going to become much more important because what is happening right now with AI is that it’s an average of everything master of none, right? you see that, know, brilliance is not going to come up for AI, right? Maybe it is, but I don’t think so, right? So people that have
⁓ the ability to build this brilliance, that’s going to become much more valuable. So I don’t know how that’s going to happen or even if that’s going to happen, but I feel that that’s where we could be going. And ⁓ that’s a much more reassuring future at least.
Mustafa (37:34) And I’m hopeful, though I do have concerns that, know, with the way that we’re, the current trajectories that we’re on, that so much of modern life is based around certain economic systems that we have in place and that absent a new way of empowering individuals to
leverage what makes them unique and the technology at their disposal, we could really see a bifurcation and growing disparity between those who have power and influence and benefit from technology and those who don’t. And I do think that that is the course we are currently on. I think we could probably deliberately find ways to work around that and
But again, when I say we, we are a collective of individuals. And at the end of the day, our entire realities are inside our own heads and finding ways to collaborate and coordinate and work towards bigger goals. It gets down to some of the fundamental.
reasons for why we have, why as a social animal we have government, why we have society, how we work as a species. And I think that where we are in technology right now is at a very, very pivotal point when it comes to what that’s going to look like.
not even in 100 years or 200 years, but in 10 years. So I hope we’re all being very deliberate and thinking about things like that as we jump in and explore the possibility of AI.
Federico Ramallo (39:20) That’s amazing. What is the future that you’re planning for Palo Bio? Can you us a little bit more of what you’re planning to take it further down the road?
Mustafa (39:34) So when we think about, and we’re having conversations on a number of different fronts around what resilience represents, and I gave you a very broad definition of resilience, which means it’s applicable to a lot of different things. One of the core reasons why we’re looking at it as such a big picture is because there’s so much about an individual that…
creates this portrait of resilience. But one of the core reasons I think it’s important to get that composite is that we as individuals
There’s only a few things that are intrinsically of value that we present and those things that can inherently not be taken from us. And that is all the information, all the thoughts that make us who we are. And so I thought about that from a data perspective and we go online and certainly our browsing habits are available to everyone. Every site we go to, wave away all our rights. You can think about GDPR and all of that.
frankly these days, know, what was I remember in the late 90s, everyone was worried about putting their credit card information out. Now everyone assumes their social security number, all their personal information is out there and we get 18 different vouchers for different data breaches and so people don’t treat that data as valuable and yet it absolutely is. It is the heart of
of commerce today. is what allows drug development to understand everything about an individual and be able to model it based off of individuals and understand how they’re going to respond to say, know, different drug trials and whether they’re a good candidate. So from talking to pharmaceutical companies to
folks who are looking at space exploration to
athletes and associated trainers, coaches. We’re having a lot of interesting conversations that tap into that data and that portrait of resilience that comes from that data. What I would ultimately like to see is a way for the individual to be able to control that data, to license that data, and to be able to decide when and how they can share that data in a really meaningful way that allows them
as an individual to be more impactful but also to be economically viable because I do think that we are entering a world where
depending on what we do with AI and automation, so much of what has traditionally fallen to humans can and will be automated. So what is the value of an individual in an economic system that requires contribution? And I think that comes down to that data, that picture of what makes us unique.
and being able to have control over that, I think is critical. And ultimately, I’m hoping that we become part of a system that embraces that, that we wouldn’t necessarily be the only player in that space, but we would have a component of that. We would enable an individual to say, this is my resilience profile. It has value. I am going to share it here. I’m going to share it here. I’m going to share it here and here. And I’m going to be compensated for it. I can also decide
decide how I’m going to remove it. And so that is the larger vision for where we think we might be going. But as I said, serendipity, we don’t know if that’s going to be the ultimate destination for us.
Federico Ramallo (43:23) Amazing amazing. Yeah Very inspiring. I mean very interesting future. We don’t know what is going to happen, but I can see how Protecting that data that make us unique. It’s going to be very important in the future. Yeah, we we try an experiment asking Asking so I am writing I’m writing this translating this book about creativity so I was talking with my co-writer and
I asked the LLM a very specific question about his coaching style and his practice and the response was very accurate and he was surprised because now the AI would be able to answer as him, right? It was not impersonating him, but he had the knowledge, it had the knowledge, right? Somehow, right? And he felt vulnerable, right?
I didn’t know that my information was accessible in that way, right?
Mustafa (44:19) Well, mean, again, you know, we’re we’re seeing the possibilities of technology to that end, going beyond the predictive modeling based on whatever inputs that your friend put in to the AI to the ability to actually read one’s inner monologue.
And if we’re able to do that, obviously it’s probably a more invasive thing than it will be in 10, 20, 30 years. But if technology can actually read our thoughts and understand perhaps even beyond that what is happening from a biochemical perspective and neurological perspective within our minds and looking into our subconscious, it could very much be a minority report type of future.
you’re going to do this almost inevitably given certain inputs in your environment. That will really… I mean, the human… the person will… I think we’ll all struggle with that. That’s a very natural thing to say, wow, this technology knows me better than I know myself. And what do we do with that?
Federico Ramallo (45:25) Right.
Mustafa (45:28) I don’t know, but I’m sure there are a lot of people thinking about it. But I’m guessing that it’ll be something we all have to deal with before we have the tools in which to deal with it.
Federico Ramallo (45:40) Right.
so we’re running out of time, would you like to give a final remark before we wrap it up?
Mustafa (45:48) I just really appreciate the opportunity and the conversation we had. This is very stimulating. I hope that the folks that are listening today are equally inspired to think about some of these things that we’re talking about because what Palo Bial is going to be doing is going to be part of a much broader ecosystem and having other
entities, other platforms in which to share this type of information, build on it, that’s what’s going to really drive the future civilization, humanity, and we’re very excited about that. So thank you very much again, and I’ll hopefully be able to listen in on the next conversation and see what folks are thinking about next.
Federico Ramallo (46:35) Great, yeah, I’m very grateful for you to be here today I didn’t know much about what you were doing at Palo Bio before I read some of the website but couldn’t understand the bigger picture that you described so thank you for that, that’s amazing and I’m looking forward to see where you take Palo Bio next and how you’re going to be able to help caregivers and other
other folks as well. So thank you.
Mustafa (47:01) Well, thank you so much. Take care.