Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah. This episode is all about how artificial intelligence

is coming to the doctor's office, how it will impact the nature of doctor-patient interactions,

diagnosis, prevention, prediction, and everything in between. The conversation between A16Z's

general partner Vijay Ponday and Dr. Eric Topal, cardiologist and chair of innovative medicine at

Scripps Research, is based on Topal's book, Deep Medicine, and touches on everything from how

AI's deep phenotyping can shift our thinking from population health to understanding the medical

health essence of you, how the industry might respond, the challenges in integrating and introducing the technology

into today's system, what the doctor's visit of the future might really look like and ultimately

how AI can make health care more human. Before we talk about technology and we talk about all the

things that are changing the world or making huge impacts, it's interesting to think like,

what should a doctor be doing?

I know, how do you see that?

Yeah, that's really what I was pondering and I really did this deep look into AI.

I actually didn't expect it to be this back to the future story.

Yeah.

But in many ways, I think it turns out that as we go forward, particularly in a longer term view,

the ability to outsource so many things with help from AI and machines, I think is going

to get us back. It could. It could. That's a big if to where we were back in the 70s and before.

What was better then was that doctors were spending much more time with us,

right? Exactly. That gift of time, the human side, which is the center of medicine, that's been

lost. The big business of health care and all of its components like electronic records and

relative value units and all this stuff basically has sucked out any sense of intimacy

...