The Stanford Doctor Using Magic to Humanize AI

Alison Woo: Hello everyone, welcome to the Zest for More podcast, where we are all about finding joy both within and beyond your job. I'm Gwen Osterman. And I'm Alison Wu. We are two former communications colleagues and friends who found ourselves asking a lot of the same questions. Like, how do you stay on top of the latest and greatest in AI and still have fun while doing it? Gwyn and I have always talked about how to track down engaging speakers. And find people who are leading the way and live at the intersection of these very interesting disciplines. And hey, if they do it in both tech and healthcare, then we are paying extra attention. So Jonathan Chen, our next guest, is someone who brought us to attention. ⁓ I met him a couple of years ago and we're really excited to have you, Jonathan. I'll tell you a little bit about what Jonathan's day job and his side gigs, and then we'll dive right in. Jonathan is a professor at Stanford Medical School. He is exploring the very fast moving frontier of AI and medicine. That's just his day job. Because what grabbed our attention for this podcast is that he's a master at holding other people's attention. Not through cheap scaremongery about what AI is gonna do in hospitals, but through magic, actually. He has cultivated a whole side hustle where he does magic shows. But for us comms geeks, it gets even better because he's integrating magic in communications to help coach other doctors, other tech people, other scientists so they can become better at connecting with audiences, telling stories, and maybe they might even live learn a little magic along the way. Welcome, Jonathan. Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to a fun conversation. Jonathan, that introduction is pretty amazing. It sounds like between teaching medicine and AI at Stanford, it sounds all of it in the magic sounds like three whole jobs. How did you bring this all together? Like let's start with your day job. What is it like teaching Stanford medicine students about AI right now? ⁓ it's it's pretty chaotic. A lot's been coming together. I'm still recovering. Stanford had the health AI week the previous week. Which is great where they convene a lot of these ⁓ events together. I literally did over ten live performances, you could say, within one week. Some of it's teaching a class, some of it's hosting a VIP dinner, some of it's do I did like three magic shows. I also did a piano recital that week. It was just like pandemonium. But it was very fun. Any one of those things would have been great. It was just crazy that they'd all compacted it to one time and try to do good, but also have a good time along the way. ⁓ amongst other things, I am the Stanford Director for Medical Education and AI. This role was created ⁓ just over a year ago, specifically because our deans, our senior associate Rena Thomas, realized like, ⁓ how many lectures do we have on AI? Like, none. How how many like slides do we have in a lecture? Like, like none. We had no formal curriculum to teach our students, our residents, our house staff or full time doctors, let alone scientific staff ⁓ and faculty, like how AI works and what they can and can't be doing with it. And so it's been my charge to kind of put that together. And it's been it's a lot of work because as you know, the field is just moving so fast. Any fixed curriculum is out of date within about six months, actually. ⁓ so a lot of what I try to do while I'm engaging here is like, ⁓ we have to just keep the conversation going, allow people to keep engaging. I have a weekly colloquia series where we have latest things going on and trying to teach the students the foundation. Like there's some really cool stuff. And what I found for really bright students and people in general, you don't really have to teach them anything. Everyone can learn on their own. You just go watch YouTube video for like a hundred hours. Like you learn plenty. What you need to do is you need to inspire them to care, get them motivated, and they will learn plenty on their own. And so for the topic of AI and medicine specifically, I use a little bit of FOMO, fear of missing out. Hey, ⁓ like the world is moving. AI is like a replacement with people who learn how to use it could. So you'd better be one of the people learning it. But also That's the scare, but also the motivation. But if you do it, it's so cool. Look at all this paperwork I don't have to do anymore. I'm having Claude just like answer my messages up in my calendar. Because that that's not the kind of thing I want to spend my time doing. I want to spend time engaging with people. So both fear, but also motivation. And what is it that the students are learning to use AI for? Is it signs and symptoms? Is it, you know, pathology of disease? I'm so sure patients walk in. To their doctors and say, I've already Googled or asked Gemini what they think I have, and Gemini thinks that's my doctor hates that. So what are you teaching medical students? ⁓ gosh, it's it's all of the above. It used to be a mantra doctor's made shows like your Google search is not the same as my medical degree. There's a certain paternalistic aspect to it. And I think there's some push and pull. I've definitely had patients come with Well, I went to ChatGPT and it told me I'm pretty sure I have this rare allergy syndrome. I'm like, really? I did but I didn't dismiss him like, I'm really glad you're able to talk to AI to explain and talk through things that your doctor never had time to do so. But show me like what you found. What did you ask it so I can understand more where it's coming from? Because also I've studied enough to have the familiar. I like, I'm pretty sure AI is smarter than me on certain measures of knowledge, certainly. So we shouldn't dismiss it so cleanly, but realize we have the judgment to know when. ⁓ I can see why it said that. That doesn't quite add up. So it's giving our students that perspective. You better learn how to use these tools to search for stuff and ask questions. It's very powerful if used correctly. But boy, are you gonna hurt yourself and you're gonna hurt other people if you don't understand and misuse it. I'll drop in a little anecdote here, I to say, because I think it really punctuates this point. So we have a medical reasoning ⁓ class or topic, right? Here's a a patient history. What it what do you think the diagnosis is? What do you think the treatment plan is? Like class what you think a doctor would do, right? And then the previous year's medical students on the homework, on the homework, they're they're killing it. They're killing it. They're acing the homework. But then on the closed book exam, like twice as many students failed the exam compared to normal. What happens? Like it's obvious what happened. The students figure out they can just ask AI to do their homework for them. And and I'm like, you you you foolish students, do you get it like the point of homework is not to get a high score on homework. The point is to struggle through that learning process is actually what makes you actually learn. When I gave this admonition to these students this year, I said, Hey, this is the best tutor, the best tool you've ever used to learn all this medical reasoning, if used correctly. If you abuse it, if you don't use it right, it'll undermine your learning and professionalism worse than anything you've ever imagined. And so this year the students actually did better on that exam. I think they've learned to use it as a tool to help them, not to undermine what they're doing. Well that's fascinating. And Jonathan, I remember ⁓ you published a pretty big study that got a lot of headlines your times among many and it revealed the sort of surprising ability of the chatbot to show more compassion than what we think of as our typical typical fever doctor. Was there anything in that response that surprised you? And what does it say right now about the sort of like readiness of the public at large to embrace this as well? ⁓ you realize we're we're quite in like ⁓ a tech bubble, right? The fact that we're listening to this podcast, we probably are more aware and accepting of AI technology than actually the general populace is when we do like a national survey you realize most people do not like AI. They're very un they do not trust it. They're very uncomfortable with it. I mean not even that long ago, Kaiser, their nurses had a big strike against AI. Trust nurses, not AI. And we if you actually dug in deeper like there's real serious stuff to talk about. Like what is it they're protesting against? It it's not clear at all. It's just this angst. It's just discomfort. People just don't feel good about it because they don't really understand what it is. So there is a lot of tension there. I'll go back to ⁓ the study you put in we've had multiple studies show like A is it's quote unquote smarter than doctors a lot of way, but I mean it's kind of an artificial knowledge exam. We should have some humility about what is the right role of a universe computer. But the real shocking one to me, the one which really changed my mind about how to approach the chatbot AI systems, is like, whoa, this thing seems to have better apathy. It seems to have better counseling than I do. That's very uncomfortable. Is AI smarter than me? I mean, that was gonna happen no matter what, right? There's ⁓ there's no way I'm memorizing every book on the internet, right? That that's the thing a computer can and should do. But whoa, I had to simulate a counseling conversation with a patient. And I had talked to the patient's wife, had Alzheimer's dementia. They're gonna put a feeding tube in his stomach. She wasn't sure what to do. ⁓ was a very difficult, classic, very tense ethical dilemma. And I simulated that conversation with a chatbot, and I was very disturbed by the end. Like, whoa, I think this thing is providing better simulated counseling. And it really gave me some angst that evening. Like, what is the purpose of my existence? Why why did I bother to show up? With some optimism that actually I think that combination is very powerful and I could actually use this tool to improve some of the most human skills we need to kind of ⁓ learn how to communicate and engage with each other. So what are you let's just could dive into that a little bit deeper. Sure. So what are you in your mind, with technology advancing, what is the human doctor or medical professionals optimum role alongside technology in the patient care setting? I I I really am optimistic that there's ⁓ well and role for everybody. ⁓ I just wrote a piece to recently that talks about competence, communication, and character. And these are the things that you actually want to make a professional. A clinician, a doctor is by example, but really like any good professional. Right. And what makes competence? It's knowledge. You actually still need knowledge. ⁓ if you have AI think for you completely, like you're you're not very functional actually. But more than knowledge, you need Judgment, you need judgment. That's what really kind of what it elevates you to. And again, in the medical context, let alone in business technology, ⁓ two things can be true at the same time. And which one do you pick? And so the analogy I give is if somebody has metastatic cancer, chemotherapy could extend their life by two months, but they will suffer terrible side effects during that time. Is it worth it to do that treatment? Worth it is not a question of facts, evidence, or statistics. It is a question of values and preferences. That is a thing that only humans can provide. Communication is essential. Why I'm so glad we're having this conversation and why when I'm so appreciative that you made that connection to the previous event. It's empathy, bedside manner. That that helps. That helps. A lot of doctors, yes, but the the robot doesn't have my bedside manner. I'm like, that is just not the moat that you think it is. It's important, it's good, but a great nurse has great bedside manner, right? A social worker can an actor. can express empathy. A golden retriever is probably nicer to people than half the doctors I know. But you wouldn't say a a golden retriever with an AI talk box attached could be a doctor. So it's it's this way to engage. They have knowledge judgment, but also they have influence. They can like help convince people to take the vaccine, go to the surgery, get the insurance company paid for the procedure. That that's not knowledge. That requires a different ⁓ skill set. And then characters like not more not just liability. You can sue me if it goes wrong. It's I am taking responsibility for your life, for your care, for your ⁓ interaction. That's a different level of expectation that a computer just cannot provide. Definitely. I'm very encouraged that this explosion of technology is actually helping us be more human because the prompt is only as good as what you tell it. And a physician can actually recognize and see in patient care setting the things that maybe you didn't mention, right? And so that we will still absolutely need humans. You know, it's interesting because a decade ago when I entered into the healthcare space and there was a big thing about the cliff of digitally native doctors versus not. And I'm just curious, given the spectrum of who's practicing right now, how are you seeing the adoption or the welcoming of some of these tools, given some of the generational thing? There definitely is a skew towards ⁓ younger people and trainees are more likely to take it on first because they need it for help more. ⁓ right. If you're a s a senior practitioner professional in any profession or any of you like, well, I've been doing this for twenty years. I don't need help. I know how to do it. ⁓ but but it's not that sharp a divide as we imagine. I think it's it's I liken to like the internet being invented three years ago, eventually just becomes a part of your everyday life. I don't even know if you need to teach people it specifically in a few years. It'll just be ingrained into that. But there have been surveys in Nature, the publishing journal Nature, they did a survey of their researchers and it said, Are you using AI to just write your papers? One interesting finding was extremely split opinion. And in Stanford, too, we have extremely split. There's no consensus. There's some who say absolutely not, you should never use AI to do learning or writing. And others, like, you totally should. You would be a fool not to do it. And it's extremely ⁓ opposed. And then if you survey them by like their age group or their level of training, ⁓ the very senior people are much less likely to abuse this and the junior people, especially the trainees, a lot more of them. They're not even asking for permission, they're already doing it. And so we better figure out how to adapt our systems 'cause our current conventions of education, training, practice, ⁓ they they just don't make sense in in a world where chatbots can easily write documents and do counseling out. So maybe just another C word in here. I loved your three C's. ⁓ and the other one I throw in because it goes back to what you were reflecting about when you ⁓ saw how that chat was better at compassion as a coaching. I'm wondering if do you play this interlocutor as a kind of diplomat of sorts internally to help bridge that divide? And then what do you learn about yourself, like your own persona? Are you inherently a kind of middle ground person? What kind of reflections have you had about who you are as you've gone through this process of helping other people confront you know what their humanity is versus what they're going to rely on tech for? Sure, sure. ⁓ it it's it's a tricky one. I've tried very hard actually not to be an educator, but I've been told by people it's like you can't help it. That's just what I got when I started my faculty job, which I really didn't want, by the way, a year ago. I got a fortune cookie, the fortune cookie said, You could succeed in the field of education. I'm like, No. I was trying really not to do it. The right was I actually I love education, I love teaching, I love ⁓ it conversing and knowledge and expertise are are kind of my foundational just kind of nerd type interests. And then with the latest bat of AI, like holy crap, like clearly knowledge is not the bottleneck anymore or information is not the bottleneck anymore. But I realize there's a difference between like a teacher and an educator or a coach or a mentor or a role model. And those are very much things that we need people to interact with other people for. If the teacher is just someone's like, I know the answers on the tests and so I can tell them to you, you know what, that that probably could be replaced by a book or a computer or an AI. But a your really best teachers, the ones who inspired you, motivated you, and coached you, mentored you, like those the ones who really kind of shaped the way you think and behave that I think that's something very different. So let's just shift gears a little bit and talk about magic. So apparently during COVID, while others were baking bread and doing yoga, you decided this is a great time for an entirely learn an entirely new discipline. Can you like walk us through how you got involved with magic? And ⁓ I mean a little bit of random, but we're just gonna spice things up. So other people were learning how to bake sourdough bread for three months during ⁓ the COVID lockdown. I was learning how to solve Rubik's Cube much more rapidly than you might expect. You know, I you might have missed that. I know it's video, I'm not an AI generated avatar, I'm a chill live human being. This could work in real life. But I when I saw somebody this, this has got to be like a trick Rubik's Cube or something, right? Just complex problem mode. I bet this thing has like a reset button where you like click the side, it just solves itself. That that's not what's happening. That's not what's happening. It's like, wait, is this just an illusion? Was this thing actually mixed up in all six sides? Absolutely. It's not like it has a switch when go solved to unsolved, solved to unsolved. ⁓ The other possibility you had to consider in the AI age is is this just an illusion? Was this thing actually mixed up in all six sides? It actually was. You can inspect anything you want. But again, Arthur C. Clark's that any technology is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. But of course, it's not magic. In this case, it's just algorithms. It's very specific algorithms applied to a complex problem in a deliberate way. So have to talk a lot more on this thread. Just you figure out which where where do you want to go with it and where do you want to start in? It's a very weird thing. I adopted this hobby kind of recently, and then the very weird thing is I've kind of incorporated it into my day job in a surprising, but I think very effective way. Tell us about that. Sure, sure. I could do a 30, 40 minute like stage show and magic, like and it would be really pretty good. I won multiple awards and competitions. But this wasn't like a lifelong thing. I played with a magic kit when I was 12 years old, as many young boys and children often do. But I stopped playing with it after a couple months because I had nobody to perform for, right? I performed for my sister and my cousins, and no one will look at a magic twice in general, right? It's it's the fun is part of the surprise. So I just abandoned it. And then six ish years ago, a bit before the COVID pandemic, my my oldest son, who was maybe eight or nine years old at the time, we saw a street magician who like pulled a rabbit out of a box and his face lit up. Wow, ⁓ my gosh. And I don't know if you've ever seen that. If you see like a child really experience magic, it is actually magical. It's a just a very neat thing to see observe. I thought, ⁓ my kid is old enough to appreciate magic. Right? A very young kid, a four-year-old, actually doesn't understand what magic is. So I bought him a little kid's magic set. I I was showing him how to do the basic stuff, hit my my child and also my colleague's ⁓ child. I was just showing them kid stuff. And then my colleague, my friend, he looks over at me with a side eye. Jonathan should work on his sleight of hand. I said, What what? What? Didn't you just say to me? How dare you? How dare you? I won't go learn some slide of hand magic. And so I learn a few effects. Change ⁓ the a hundred dollar bills, I get ⁓ do the street card Monty. And I start doing it actually from like my graduate students, ⁓ other colleagues. In the nature of work, there's always some cocktail party, there's always some holiday department event, and I'm actually very introverted nerd. ⁓ I actually am very uncomfortable with ⁓ small talk and engaging people. But ⁓ now here's like an artifact. Here's a thing I can do as an icebreaker, and that really facilitates a lot. And it maybe show that I'm approachable to the students. Hey, I'm not just An uptight, very intense professor, although I can be too. ⁓ I'm also a human, I can be approachable, and that was a great way to start with that. And then that seemed kind of fun. People kind of seemed to like it. Although I totally messed up the first few times, by the way. I totally messed up. And these students had like no compassion. They were ripping me down and pulling cards in my hand. Like, I saw you do that. Like, geez, geez, people. Trying to share some joy and wonder in the world, and this is what you get. But Started with that and then ⁓ people kinda seem to like it. I'll do a little bit more, I'll do a little bit more. And I was really I get I'm kind of really getting better at this. That's also a rewarding feeling. I s I took a piano again six years ago too, because as a junior faculty and science is really freaking hard. I'm sure technology and business is too, right? You can feel like you're toiling away for something on six months. You don't even know if you're making progress, you don't know if anybody cares, you know what's gonna happen. And this is it can be very discouraging. When it finally pays off, it's great, but in the meantime, it can be quite a grind versus Playing the piano, very difficult pieces that were inappropriately hard for me. Learning these magic tricks is actually very difficult to do. But hey, I can tell I'm better than yesterday. I can tell I'm better than yesterday. I'm still not great, but that that sense of progression, like some people do sports or exercise, is the same thing. That was actually very motivating that I could see I'm making progress on a difficult skill and a cool one that I could share with other people. I can say a lot more about upgrade first thing because I know that was quite a quite a rant already. I just love the story that how it Brought into like ability of making mistakes, like that your first audiences were tough on you. You're ⁓ yeah. And that like one of the kind of rules in coaching is like being able to laugh at yourself. And they even call it rule number six. There's no other rules, but this is like so you remember how ridiculous it was and that you really should laugh at yourself when I was doing my coaching program. And I was wondering like, how have you learned about taking yourself less seriously, how do you help other people take themselves less seriously? We were talking about how you did this keynote at the biotech I I used to work at and you had a standing ovation. You also had a CEO of a major tech company. You were the one with the standing ovation. That group was like ecstatic when you were done with your talk. In part because they were just couldn't believe you kept rolling out new magic tricks that they probably had never seen. But also you were secretly teaching them how to be better communicators. Can you talk about the importance of taking yourself less seriously? Feeling willing to make mistakes and then how you connect with audiences and how you teach that? ⁓ gosh. ⁓ I'm trying to figure how deep to go there, right? I I was totally the the the the computer nerd child, right? Mo mostly straight A student. That's how like conceptualized myself. My first job out college, I was a software engineer, so good. And then I got laid off in the dot com bubble. And that was devastating to me. I mean, in real life, objectively, like it was fine. I was 19, 20 year olds. Like I rebounded, it was like totally fine. But from like for my psyche, ⁓ I felt like that was one of the first failures in my life and I did not know how to cope with it. And it was very damaging to me. I mean for decades after it really shaped my like risk aversion and how I approach life. Doing a magic trick for somebody, especially when I tend to work with like engineers, data scientists, doctors, they're very analytical. They they it immediately feels like a challenge to them and it feels immediately adversarial. They think the point of the magic trick is I'm trying to like show something fun and share some joy. They say you're challenged me, I'm gonna catch you. And it's like, ⁓ okay, so it's that dynamic, it becomes very tense very quickly. But I've learned like, wait a minute, but that's part of the play. Just try to catch me if you do, ha ha ha, what a fun experience. And then let's just play to the next thing. Here you caught me at that one, let me do five more. And that was also a big thing I had to withstand to get into science. ⁓ Because the norm in science is you face negative feedback and rejection all the time. That is the norm. People criticize you everything you're doing. Because that's how a scientist shows you they're interested. If they didn't care, they would just not say anything. But when they care, they say, I don't think you did this right. You should have done this. What about this other thing? Right. It's all very negative criticism. ⁓ and I realized I had to have a little bit of a thick skin. I have I have some ego to spare, but still it's it's pretty hard to kind of withstand that. But when you can, that's how you can really emerge in a much stronger way that is compelling. And then let alone I've been trying to do with this communication workshop, this teaching workshop, which is meant to be fun. Like we're having a good time, but it that's also a trick. That that's actually the technique to get you to pay attention. But if you're actually realizing I'm trying to teach techniques that boy do I wish somebody had taught me. So I didn't have to learn it the hard way. And I and people try to teach me something a long way. I don't think this is actually taught very deliberately very well. Deliberate scientific, complex technical communication, especially for those personalities that I totally understand. The introverted nerd who that feels very unnatural. Yeah. Incredible. So let's just go back. You talked about being 12 and learning magic and for me for your sister and cousins. But you were, I hear, a very good student. Can you talk to us about like what your path was? I hear you had some very interesting early education experiences. Sure. I went to public school. I I I was a smart kid ⁓ in in the scheme of things probably too smart for my own good some teachers had to check me because I was becoming the obnoxious smart aleck kid too and so I had to calibrate how to behave let alone it it wasn't just being smart is the way to succeed in life. ⁓ but then there's a program at Cal State LA called the early entrance program. It started as a psychology experiment, an experiment of the psychology department, but then they kept it going. What it basically allowed was young kids, middle school age kids, ⁓ they can take a test. They come in for a summer quarter And then they can just take college classes while being a part of this program. And if they do well, not just academically, but like emotionally, like they can handle it. They allow them to start just college full time. And so I'm technically a high school dropout. I never went to high school. I didn't even tell them. And I started this program when I was 13 years old and basically attended college full time with this cohort of students. So that was very cool, very unique. It worked very well for me. I was with this cohort of like a few dozen other similar kids my age that I could hang out with. I transferred to UCLA two years later when I was fifteen years old. ⁓ a much bigger school, bigger opportunity. That seemed good. That was very challenging. I'm a fifteen year old kid. I'm living in the dorms. I have no friends. I just go to eat dinner by myself there. I I feel very isolated. You have thirty thousand kids like students there. Nobody cares about you. ⁓ that kind of also forced me to grow up much faster than ⁓ than I was expecting. Wow, it's very rare I meet other people who have started college as early. I also interestingly in New York there was a school at Hunter College in the sixth grade that offered that and my mom refused to allow me to go to that program. But I ended up starting college at fourteen. Nice and went to NYU, but I lived at home. I'm gonna ask you the question people always ask me. Do you ever feel like you lost out on anything? Or what was the trade-off for you to be advanced academically? But yet socially be in a different place. Like for me, I think it worked very well. I don't know that I would have gotten that much out of the high school experience. But of course, you my wife would who she was a valid Victorian for high school. She was like, You idiot, you never went to high school. What the heck do you know about it? So ⁓ you know, realizing I don't actually have that direct experience. You know, academically good, creating opportunities, ⁓ letting me kind of expand my mind in terms of what's possible, all very good. But there's a lot of actually what high school is actually more like social behavioral becoming an adult kind of a situation. Yeah. ⁓ UCLA because what I was just throwing in there and like no one was gonna pay attention to me unless I figured it out. Probably could have happened a little bit more gracefully, proper social dynamics with other people that I think I've gotten okay by now, but it took twenty years. Maybe it would've happened faster if I went the conventional track. Same here. I feel the same. But then how did you get to medicine? You talked about being a software engineer being laid off. Where do the pivots in medicine come in? ⁓ well I I was heading towards medical school during college because my my mom wanted me to be a doctor, basically. Look, be the first doctor in the family. This is a classic, you ⁓ i imm immigrant dream kind of a thing. You're a good Chinese son. B basically, yes. I was a very good Chinese son in many ways. But as a thirteen year old, I don't know I don't know A Allison, like did you know what you wanted to be when you were thirteen years old? I wanted to be a doctor, but I was scared of the blood and the cutting. So when I was in junior high, I refused to cut the frog or the pig. ⁓ that was that right. Could have been a radiologist or something. That the man wouldn't have worked out. ⁓ so the here's the back to kind of the theme here. If you asked me when I was a child what I want to be when I want to grow up, I never said doctor. I never said scientist, I never said teacher. I I would have said I wanted to be a a comedian because I like because I think it's so fun to watch and see make people laugh. That's what I would have said as a child. But of course I grew up in that stupid thing. Like it need get serious, right? When I was 13, wait, it's not a hypothetical question. I'm in college now. I actually have to pick a major. I have to start planning a career track. I don't know. My mom says I should be a doctor, and that's a hard thing to do. And that's what like a smart student would do. Like, okay, I sort of headed down that track. And I I took the MCAT, I did very well on it. I was at a pre officer in a pre-med club. And then I kept hearing about how you have to have a passion to be a healer, this is like your life's mission. And at the time, I'm like 18 years old, right? I'm about to graduate or about to apply for medical school. I'm like a I'm 18. I don't feel anything. You know, I'm like, I'm not ready to commit my life down this path. I gotta do something else. And so kind of very last minute I I suddenly pivoted and my my mom was very upset about it. I was like, I I'm not going to medical school. I'm not even gonna apply. I'm gonna I'm very computer nerd. I'm very good at that. I'm gonna do something else. I'm gonna be a software engineer. For a year or two and ⁓ I got completely pivoted. Actually with no intention of coming back, with no intention of coming back. And then when I first got my first six figure salary when I was nineteen years old, the reality is my mom suddenly said, Maybe you don't need to be a doctor. But to tie it back, but when I got laid off from that job a year ago, ⁓ a year after, I got another like IT job. was totally fine. I had a very comfortable life. I was very good at it. I could have just lived that life and it would have been perfectly good. ⁓ but it did give me some perspective, this feeling of like, whoa, my first failure in life or why was I working so hard at this company that just laid me off anyway? You know? ⁓ did did the mission matter? And I'm being overly hard on myself and I I I I kind of hope other people can relate to some of this too. That I was trying to do some good work. Maybe I helped a business, but I didn't know like the Why why didn't it matter in a different way? And I could see some perspective. My colleague, my old friend who went to medical school, says, Why don't you apply for medical school again? I'm like, no way. I left that behind. But maybe the purpose of an MD PhD program, ⁓ a PhD in computer science, because I have this nerd interest in that, but then an MD, so it's actually applied to real problems about people's health, that I'll feel good about what I'm doing. And I think that's been a major driver for my me currently today, my joy in work is I work to death. I'm so stressed. I've been stressed out for twenty years. It has never stopped. Every single day I've been stressed out. But if I were to die tomorrow, if I were to be laid off tomorrow, I'd be upset. I'd be annoyed. But I would not feel bad. I would not regret how I've been spending my time. Because I know I've been trying to do something important and good. And I don't know that I felt that way back when I was in industry. The particular company I was with was very tech pro mercenary for profit. Screw the customer, let's squeeze as much money out of them. Like it I I I did not feel good about the culture I was part of. Okay. Jonathan, I wanna jump back in to how this affects your other not real job as a parent. ⁓ okay. How does that affect the way you work with your kids and how old are they? And are they in college yet? Please tell me no. No, it it's it's a very different dynamics. I I mean this is the thing certainly the I know how to study a book. I I do not know how to ⁓ be a parent. I'm trying my best to be a decent one, but I I don't even know what that means. I'm a fifteen year old and eleven-year-old boys. ⁓ and the the eleven-year-old's probably more like me. I can kind of recognize myself ⁓ a little bit more. Kind of awkward, introverted, nerd kid, but very smart at math type of stuff. It's like, ⁓ I kind of know how to help him because I I suffered a lot of that myself. ⁓ my my older one is a different personality. He's more into art. He's a very kind and like conscientious person. but you know, school isn't as easy for him and ⁓ th I don't know, this is a different topic, but I struggle more though because I I I don't recognize as much. It's hard for me to know how to help him, even though I'm doing my best to do so. ⁓ no, nothing is easy about parenting and there's no AI for that either. But I was just curious whether your own experiences like have shaped you how you think about helping your kids see what's out there and I mean my my control come up. But I I don't know, Alison, I'm sure if if you had children and they had the opportunity to start college at fourteen, thirteen, would you let them, ⁓ my my wife would be like, no, what a terrible thing. I senior classmates, a bunch of weirdos. Very individual. I think it's very individual. I think you have to d it depends on the person and what they want. You some of the things you do are delayed, right? The things that you would do. I didn't go to my high school prom, so don't worry about it. You didn't miss anything. I didn't either and I felt a little bit funny about it, but I eventually got over it like ten years later. ⁓ my God, you weren't missing anything at all. It was like the most overrated event ever. Let me drop in one of the anecdotes that closes part of that story about why would I go back to medical school? That's crazy. I'm like, I'm not gonna do that. I have to go back to my old professors and like beg for a letter of recommendation now after having ⁓ I'm gonna look at an idiot. No, I have a perfectly fine, comfortable life right now. And then it was my old colleagues like, ⁓ no, your your MCAT that you took and you did really good on the the test again in medical school. It will expire after three years. So you have to apply this year, or you will have to take that test again. I'm like, ⁓ well, there's no way I'm taking that test again. So if I'm ever gonna do it, I gotta do this year. I still struggle. My girlfriend at the time, when I talked about it, she's the really one who convinced me and she had this this phrase I really just like twisted the knife here. I mean in a good way. So Jonathan, you should totally apply. You should totally apply. Because in life you will regret what you didn't try, not what you did try. ⁓ my man. That that really hit me like a ton of bricks and I like, all right, fine. I'll find I'll do I don't know if I'll actually go, but I have to at least apply and see what's possible. Well, it's so interesting how those things really, you know, we can see our lives perfectly, right? 2020. But your degree and your training perfectly prepared you for this moment where we are at this incredible convergence of healthcare plus technology. So I don't know if there would have been ⁓ any other better path to prepare. So just as a question of as you're talking with other medical students and preparing them and thinking about this very multifaceted kind of way of thinking, multi-dimensional way of thinking. You've talked a little bit about how you find the joy in your job now. Can you talk a little bit about how you're encouraging the students, right, who are coming up? How to think multi-functionally, multidimensionally, and not just about the work at hand, but also about incorporating joy and a and more balanced life as well. I was surprised that I completed medical training and like ended up trying to be at ⁓ crashing as a doctor. I thought I was just getting the medical degree and I was gonna go off and do industry work research, go work to a pharma company to inventing drugs or something. ⁓ but then I did the clinical clerkships, seeing real patients. It surprised me that I liked it a lot better than I expected it would be. I'm I'm the the book nerd, right? I'm just gonna study. There's actually very advanced expert decision making that's necessary in that practice. So I'm utilizing all those skills I trained on, but it's a way that's very engaging with other people. I really liked I was working in a team, like you're dropping a medical team and you really have a common goal. You're not competing with each other. Who gets the better paper? The test scores like, no, there's there's like a patient in front of We're gonna work together, figure out to help them. That was a very motivating and then I realized I had much better stories to tell when you come home from the hospital. When you come home from the hospital from the the research lab. And then reviewer number two wrote this thing on the paper and then had to file this form. It was so obnoxious. It was just like, you know, there's office stories and it's it's fine. But then, ⁓ at the hospital, this woman, it turns out she was pregnant, but also had a tumor in her stomach. They have to decide whether they even do a CT scan. Like, what are you gonna do next? ⁓ my gosh, tell me more. Right? It's very different kind of dynamic story. So there's one thread about the meaning of the work ⁓ has has really shaped what I do. And then I'll tie it back to a little bit of fun. ⁓ to this ⁓ other thread. A lot of my work now is science. I do do experiments, I supervise a team, and that's fun to see young people and help cultivate them and you know, teach them the mistakes that I made so they don't have to make them. And I give a lot of talks and presentations. ⁓ do hardcore work, they have communicate it too. And so I've already was trying hard going to do that just as a good presenter. No tricks, just engaging story, compelling presentation, using cadence of speech, all these different techniques. It was a few years ago I incorporated magic into my actual science presentations. That's a very weird thing. I think it still is, but like a maybe a weird cool thing. Three years ago, I was invited to give a keynote presentation to Stanford University Medical Partners. It's kind of their group of doctors. They have a retreat. They want to hear about the latest technology advances. Okay, it's a retreat, man. Like don't make it a lecture. We want something a little bit more fun and engaging. ⁓ and the theme is the magic of medicine. We heard you're also a magician. If you'd like to also do a magic show afterwards. You can do that. So I thought what I was gonna do was my hour long like lecture keynote, which is which is really good, is my wife's idea. So I I both blame and credit her. She's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if you actually incorporated some magic into the science talk? I'm like, what? ⁓ that's crazy. I would look like an idiot. Like, I can't do that. It'll laugh me off the stage. But I'm like, well, but wait a minute. I don't know. That maybe that could be really interesting, compelling. 'Cause it's really hard to listen to an hour long like lecture, right? So you spice it up every ten, fifteen minutes with a little bit of a a different flavor, a different icebreaker, but it also is thematically relevant. I I have some magic resources, it's only random magic. I a dollar bill up here in an egg or something like this. That's just random. But then also this you know, Rubik's Cube, right? It's about algorithms and what's believable or not. ⁓ I I do a bit where I have a medical reference book and I show that as a human being, I memorize the whole thing. Is that real or is that not? Or is this a magic trick? And it's just really gets you uncomfortable with what you're seeing. Just like AI is like very bizarre. It seems to do everything, but not everything is what it appears to be. And that's becomes very compelling through line. That was a crazy experiment for fun. That's become kind of a signature bit for me, where again it's on the one hand, it's a fun thing, but if you're paying attention, there's an allegory. And if you're really paying attention, it's actually a trick to actually let me get the actual information, the teaching through. That would just be hard to absorb without it. ⁓ my gosh. I wonder. Go ahead. And and you know what? This is the closest way I can sublimate to like I'm getting to be a comedian on stage, just like I I said. Well, that that is definitely what you and I know you like the the letter C because you you did it for the talk that ⁓ we worked on together and you're doing it in this this paper, and you're very Quick to credit your wife, which is wonderful. Fine. ⁓ I would say it was a genius idea. Is she a communications person? 'Cause sounds kinda like what we might have thought of. She's my partner for years and that's been the best thing that's ⁓ she's also an MD PhD. That's how we met. We met we students on the same program. ⁓ she's a director of laboratory, she's very accomplished herself, but that's great. We can always bounce off crazy ideas off each other and we really understand what each other are talking about in a lot of ways. That's been very helpful to have that kind of dialogue partner. I love it. And I think that your story of how you were forced out of your comfort zone as a young person at the right age of thirteen to be in college is just shaped how you think about everything, including technology and helping other people think about how to get the out of their comfort zone and to encourage us to laugh a little bit and embrace comedy. Thank you so much. ⁓ is there anything we didn't touch on that Allison and I should have asked you that you would have loved to chat about in terms of joy. Wherever it fits, but I remember having this anecdote. ⁓ so I I've competed in magic competitions. I've been paid a few times not to do like a science talk with magic like like just just can you just perform magic for us? And one time I got recruited to do that, I used to do like holiday parties reflect by my my colleagues. It's very fun. It's great I Gwen and Alice, I'd love to perform for you because we're already talking anyway. I did this bit where I was just doing a professional gig at a company that had no relation to anything I do. One of their holiday parties strolling around doing magic with people. And it was interesting because afterwards, like, ⁓ that felt like work. That did not feel like fun. It was a very different dynamic to do this fun thing that was very just a spontaneous thing for life to now like just be doing it as a job. It was not fun the same way. So I think there's pointed perspectives about Doing what gives you intrinsic meaning, working harder stuff because it matters, and that will give you the reward. And incorporating fun elements and joy. ⁓ but don't expect that I don't know, the grass is green on the other side. I'm just gonna quit my job and I'll just ⁓ d do fun stuff all the time. It's it may not be the same fun that you thought it was. So true. So tell Jonathan, tell people where people can catch up with you and w and watch your incredible magic on YouTube. If if you like to, I have a YouTube and a little Instagram and TikTok. I I don't heavily promote those. Most of my work is ⁓ at at s at Stanford Base. I've got a lab I call the Health Rex lab website. There's a lot of Chen labs out there. ⁓ I'm part of a I'm part of a broader research network, more just like collaboration that's got a lot of attention, the Arise network. But if you look me up, Jonathan Chen, Stanford, Google, you you'll find me and I'm glad to connect. Wonderful. Thank you so much for and we will ⁓ put on the on the screen. your YouTube channel. I just became a subscriber and have enjoyed watching especially the newspaper rip up. That's the newspaper is awesome. It's sort of meta about communications as well. But Jonathan, we so appreciate you joining us today. And ⁓ can't wait to hear and watch what you do next. Thanks so much. This has been great. Looking forward to connecting you. Love that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye. One what a conversation. What an interesting person. ⁓ I know. Very, very unusual combination of ⁓ skill sets for sure. And when my colleague at the time had heard him give a talk about it was like a really small kind of community group about women and science in the Bay Area, and it was like, hey, we've got a guy who's gonna teach us how to do magic and be better communicators. And I was like, wow, that sounds interesting. And then I watched the playback and I was like, this person would be a great speaker at our event. And ⁓ we just connected really seamlessly and loved hearing his backstory. And then I started doing research about him and I learned that he was also a piano player and then he was like actually incorporates magic. And it was like, who is this person? What did you think is your first time meeting him? Well it's so interesting. When you see people who are totally committed and passionate about the work they do, it just transmits, right? And when you think about how important healthcare is and you know patients, people seeing working with their physicians and their healthcare teams to really, you know, solve all the health problems of today and the tomorrow. It's wonderful to know that people are thinking about like what's the right place for technology in that conversation. And so it's very exciting. I mean, I remember growing up with the movie The Doctor with William Hurt, where they were still trying to teach doctors to be compassionate, just pre-technology, just human beings. And it wasn't until that specific doctor got cancer that he started thinking, ⁓ my gosh, there's a whole other way to train doctors. So it's wonderful to see this evolution in so short a time, really. ⁓ about, you know, how to really think about the caring and the commitment and the science and how the technology can be an enabler to better healthcare. Yeah, I certainly feel a lot better as as we've talked about in our other AI chats, but like I've been a gradual adopter, knowing that people like Jonathan are really wrestling with these questions and he is so human first. He is not like a tech ab at all costs. Like just that makes me feel like the field is gonna keep evolving in a way that will help us be both I'd say realistic, pragmatic, and if we can become better at caring and thinking about what compassion really looks like, because a chat bot helps show us a different way to ask a question. Like that, I'm all I'm all in. Well, that is it for our episode today. You can actually find us also on YouTube at youtube.com slash at zest for more, or you can listen to this episode wherever pod you listen to podcasts on Apple or Spotify, or you can go to zestformore.com. Thanks very much, Coin. Have a great week. You too. Thanks, Alison. Bye. Bye.