{"id":13112,"date":"2026-06-03T23:19:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T03:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-tims-founder-kitchen-from-brainstorm-to-the-presidents-office-in-two-months-featuring-jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics-868\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T23:19:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T03:19:55","slug":"the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-tims-founder-kitchen-from-brainstorm-to-the-presidents-office-in-two-months-featuring-jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics-868","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-tims-founder-kitchen-from-brainstorm-to-the-presidents-office-in-two-months-featuring-jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics-868\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tim\u2019s Founder Kitchen \u2014 From Brainstorm to the President\u2019s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)\u00a0(#868)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/hop.clickbank.net\/?affiliate=infohatch&amp;vendor=J1R2C\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10614 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png\" alt=\"Profit Gen\" width=\"400\" height=\"217\" srcset=\"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png 400w, https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px-300x163.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Please enjoy this transcript of <a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/2026\/06\/02\/jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics\/\">my conversation with Jake Becraft<\/a>, the CEO and co-founder of <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.strandtx.com\/\">Strand Therapeutics<\/a>, a company building one of the most advanced programmable genetic medicine platforms in biotechnology. Under his leadership, Strand is redefining what RNA medicines can do by enabling cell-selective targeting and therapeutic payload delivery inside the body, unlocking a new class of precision genetic therapies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/2026\/06\/02\/jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Jake\u2019s full bio<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/2026\/06\/02\/jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics\/#:~:text=SELECTED%20LINKS%20FROM%20THE%20EPISODE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/2026\/06\/03\/jake-becraft-strand-therapeutics-transcript\/#Jake-Becraft-copyright-and-legal-conditions\">Legal conditions\/copyright information<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"podcast-player\">\n<div class=\"podcast-player-inner-wrap\">\n<p>Tim\u2019s Founder Kitchen \u2014 From Brainstorm to the President\u2019s Office in Two Months (Featuring Jake Becraft, Strand Therapeutics)<\/p>\n<p><noscript><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.art19.com\/shows\/58dacbdc-646e-4585-9914-19c3de11d1ba\/episodes\/51a11020-0802-4eae-8024-7cc2bee2cd77\/embed?type=micro\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 30px; border: 0 none;\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/noscript><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Additional podcast platforms<\/h3>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Listen to this episode on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/868-tims-founder-kitchen-from-brainstorm-to-the\/id863897795?i=1000770838211\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/04EV7D2yhOJtKxuqyoC6TP?si=IoqB_IODQTiss2QuRD-Wtw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/overcast.fm\/+AAKebsHPS00\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Overcast<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcastaddict.com\/podcast\/2031148#\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Podcast Addict<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/pca.st\/timferriss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pocket Casts<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/castbox.fm\/channel\/id1059468?country=us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Castbox<\/a>,\u00a0<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/music.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLuu6fDad2eJyWPm9dQfuorm2uuYHBZDCB\">YouTube Music<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.com\/podcasts\/9814f3cc-1dc5-4003-b816-44a8eb6bf666\/the-tim-ferriss-show\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.audible.com\/podcast\/The-Tim-Ferriss-Show\/B08K58QX5W\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Audible<\/a>, or on your favorite podcast platform.<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>What does Strand do?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>So Strand designs what we call next-generation genetic medicines. You have DNA inside of your cells, the DNA makes RNA copies of itself, and then that RNA makes proteins. And actually life is all proteins. Your skin, your hair, your organs, every cell is basically just proteins stacked together. That is everything that we are. You don\u2019t really see the DNA and the RNA. It\u2019s very small. The protein is what we think of as our being, right? And so the way to actually intervene in disease, the way to get to its core is to create the correct proteins.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you have a deficiency, everything from an enzyme problem, to a rare disease, to cystic fibrosis, it\u2019s usually a problem with a protein that is being incorrectly made by a cell. And so what we have figured out over decades and decades is what\u2019s gone wrong with that protein, and what would need to go right to fix that protein or how you would replace that protein correctly. What we have not figured out is how to make the cells do that, right? And that\u2019s because it\u2019s a very complicated problem to tell certain cells in the body to do various different things. And so what we are really focused on building, we know what proteins need to be made. We know where they need to be made. What we need to do is get the message of what type of protein to the place in your body where they need to be made, and we need to do that effectively and safely.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so what we have essentially figured out a way to do is take that message, which is in the form of a molecule called RNA. A lot of people are familiar with it from the COVID vaccines, but those are very small examples of what RNA could actually be utilized to do. And then we have found a way to send those messages into the body, into diseased areas where they can access the cells and essentially return the cells to a state of homeostasis, which either corrects the problem or in the case of cancer, removes the problem, any of those pieces. And so that\u2019s the base case of what we\u2019re trying to accomplish.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Mm-hmm. So let me back up and give people a little bit of context. So the first time we met was in Boston at a dinner. Do you want to describe, I don\u2019t think they\u2019ll mind, who else was there? Who else was at the dinner?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Another biotech CEO, Phil Strandwitz, and a \u2014 I don\u2019t know how to classify Jamie\u2019s job.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Bit of a polymath.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>\u2014 professor at the MIT. Yeah, polymath, MIT Media Lab, professor, healthcare entrepreneur, advisor to anyone who wants to know fancy things.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Mm-hmm. Great guy. Yeah, so I\u2019m already an investor in Holobiome, Phil\u2019s company, love what Jamie\u2019s up to and very interested in what he\u2019s building as well. We can put that in the show notes. We\u2019ll put all that in the show notes. And then we met and part of the reason I became very interested in Strand, there were a lot of reasons. So one is the technology, the results, the photograph, or I should say, images that you showed me, which we\u2019ll get to in a second. The second is founder, builder who is technical, but for whom also this company, this is going to be a strongly worded statement, but is existential, right? You\u2019re not a hired gun CEO who has been brought in, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is very much entwined with your identity and personal mission, which I find very attractive. And quite interrelated with that is the fact that I found you to be a very good communicator over that dinner, right? I learned a lot. You recommended a number of books to me at the dinner and then afterwards. I\u2019d say chief among which was the Genentech \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Fantastic book.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>\u2014 origin story, which is one of the best, I would say, business books I\u2019ve ever read. Just unbelievably good because it also, and I can\u2019t believe it made it past all the Genentech censors, but it\u2019s actual contracts, screenshots of contracts, negotiations, mistakes, all of the serendipitous, lucky moments and unforced errors by universities and so on, that had to coalesce for Genentech to even survive. It\u2019s just an incredible story. And I also, just again, this is more for people listening than for you, but I\u2019ll continue to fluff a little longer, which is also that you seem to me to be very aggressive without being haphazard, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So you were just furious at this dinner when I started to try to get an idea of the general biotech scene in Boston, and asking questions about various startups, and figures, and companies, at how conservative and dogmatic, maybe would be a very generous way to put it, you view a lot of folks, not all, but the default, right? The status quo. And in contrast how you\u2019re going, you\u2019re taking big swings, right? You are taking big swings. So all of those things were attractive.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When it comes to Strand, let\u2019s talk about the image for a second. What was the image that you showed me, or images?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah, so I happened to show you a photo of one of our patients, one of the very first patients that entered our trial, the way that these early-stage trials work in oncology, so then a patient with stage 4 melanoma, in early-stage trials, you end up with patients who have been through every, exhausted every option by the time they end up in your trial. And they often have pretty progressed disease, right? And so you hope you can offer something to these patients.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They had melanoma, so that\u2019s a skin cancer, but they had not only aggressive, what we call cutaneous metastasis, which is across their surface of their body in the skin, but they had what\u2019s called visceral metastasis. That\u2019s actually what kills you in melanoma is the metastasis to the organs of your body and it was in their lungs. It was in other sorts of areas, so I think muscle deposits and bone deposits. And in addition to that, this patient had had multiple other therapies that historically actually respond very well to, melanoma responds very well to.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What\u2019s unfortunate about the current state of affairs in melanoma and in some cancers is we have these immunotherapy drugs. What the biggest blockbuster of the last few years is a drug called KEYTRUDA from Merck. Incredible miracle drug, won a Nobel Prize a few years ago. In melanoma, if you respond to that drug, a lot of patients do. That\u2019s great. If you don\u2019t, the likelihood of survival begins to diminish very quickly. And this patient had had KEYTRUDA. They had had a whole number of other drugs through many, what they call, lines of therapy. You\u2019d get a drug, your cancer responds or it doesn\u2019t. If it doesn\u2019t respond, you go to the next and the doctor, the oncologist cycles you through a number of drugs. And this patient was at a fairly advanced hospital that not only had given them the, what they call the standard of care and then the second line standard of care, they had given them actually a number of other, just like, maybe this will work, maybe this will work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You\u2019re trying to help the patient stay alive. And the picture that we have, and this is in, if someone, if you Google our ASCO poster, which is a big clinical oncology conference.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Can you spell ASCO?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>A-S-C-O.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>It\u2019s an abbreviation for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. It\u2019s a meeting every summer in Chicago that is the big breakthroughs in clinical medicine for oncology, right? It\u2019s the top of the top in a lot of ways for people. Big results, small results. We had presented this photo there, and I had met you a little bit afterwards to show \u2014 the photo itself is quite striking, and it\u2019s in that poster, right? Which is this \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s basically a body riddled with cancers, right? They\u2019re everywhere.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>You don\u2019t have to be an oncologist to look at that scan and understand the extent of which this patient responded, just riddled and then no more. And one of the things, as a scientist, right, Tim, you mentioned something earlier, which was that this is more than a company for me, and actually a company is only about one third to one half of the time that I\u2019ve spent on this mission to make genetic medicine work correctly for patients. One of the greatest accomplishments in that career that I\u2019ve had thus far is being able to say that you did help a person. If that was just one person, one patient, I\u2019d say, \u201cWow, what a career.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We dream of more. We have big ambitions here at Strand. I have ambitions for what we\u2019re going to, how many people in the scale at which we\u2019re going to be able to help people. However, that was the first time that I really felt like our science went out into the world, and it took someone\u2019s grandmother and not only kept them alive, but we\u2019re a year and a half in, and they still have no detectable lesions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. Yeah, it\u2019s wild. So in the investor deck, right, the pitch deck that I initially read and had, I apologize for that, but 1,500,000 questions about, what, for the non-technical folks, right, the muggles. They can look things up and are curious, what are things that stuck for them? Particular slides or phrases, certainly the images, but is there anything else that comes to mind that really resonated with people from that deck?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft:<\/strong>I think there\u2019s one other bigger generalist investor who had come into the round personally, and I had been having a conversation with them about something in oncology that we call the Kaplan-Meier curve. Kaplan-Meier curve, if you\u2019re looking at oncology results, is a survival graph. So you maybe look at two years, and you look at, from 100 percent where you start the study, and then it looks like a step ladder going down. The standard of care line has some amount of people, steps down, and you want to have your drug be significantly above that, right? Either having more people alive longer or you have, what they call, the long tail where you, everything goes to zero in standard of care at a certain time point, but you have an amount of patients that just look cured. They continue on for many years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In drug development, we get very used to looking at those graphs, and making very statistical calls, and saying, \u201cOh, this doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s active,\u201d or, \u201cThis drug\u2019s there or isn\u2019t that great.\u201d But I think one of the things that I\u2019ve spoken to some generalists, some of our larger investors who maybe aren\u2019t from the biotech world, and I\u2019ve tried to zero in on some of those survival graphs with, is to say, \u201cWhen we look at these steps, these are lives, right?\u201d The lines that go down on this, that the vertical part of the step is someone\u2019s loved one dying. But the ones that go horizontal, and every time you see something go further along, right, that is someone who got to, even if it\u2019s just three months, right, you have no idea what that means within that person\u2019s life.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we take that Kaplan-Meier curve, and those steps, and we zero in on each patient, we start to look at them and we start to say, \u201cThis is a patient that didn\u2019t think they would see Christmas in 2024 and they just celebrated the new year of 2026,\u201d that I think is meaningful in what we\u2019re doing. Now, whether or not that will be a good product, right, there\u2019s a difference between a good drug and a good product, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I\u2019d say the good drug is, can someone take this and it does something. Injecting a therapy into someone in a way that is very hard to replicate but did a great thing for that individual person is a good drug fundamentally. It is a good drug. It helped that person. And a good product is much more \u2014 this is where the idea of how we get medicines to people come into play. I\u2019ll give you a different example. There\u2019s something else that we\u2019re working on called in vivo cell therapy. Essentially, there\u2019s an entire type of science that we have discovered how to take the immune cells out of a patient, take their immune cells out, reprogram them so that they learn how to attack cancerous blood cells, and then put them back into a patient.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They are phenomenal drugs. There are people who are about to die of myeloma and then they get this drug. But the drug costs, not making money, the drug costs $750,000 to make, just to manufacture. It costs three months of time to manufacture. It\u2019s very hard to see a world in which that drug has a large impact on the patient population because of the fundamental cost, the COGS, the cost of goods sold. Not biotech, just straight business. The cost of doing it and the time it takes to get it to people, that\u2019s a bad product.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so if you could, say, instead of taking the cells out of the body, if you could reprogram them while they\u2019re still in the patient, now you have a good product. If you can make the cells recognize the cancer, the immune cells programmed to activate against the cancer in the same way, but make it an outpatient procedure where a patient just gets hooked up to an IV bag for two hours and then goes home, that is a phenomenal product.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>I have to look at this from the perspective of a non-specialist because that\u2019s what I am.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>But if you were giving a TED Talk on this and had to get across at least part of what you\u2019re doing, I feel like what you just said hits the nail on the head within the first few minutes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You\u2019d have to talk about the central dogma, so to speak, of DNA as master copy, so to speak, mRNA, and then protein. But just in brief, could you describe the treatment? What the treatment actually looked like for the patient in those photographs, the before and after? Like dots everywhere representing tumors, and then holy shit. I think everyone, whether they\u2019re technical or not, that looks at that deck, probably had the same response to those images.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft:<\/strong> So in cancer, you have chemotherapy. I think people are fairly familiar with. You also have immunotherapy, which is the ability to activate the immune system to attack the cancer directly. And that\u2019s what some of the biggest blockbuster drugs of all time are currently Merck\u2019s Keytruda, Bristol Myers Squibb\u2019s Opdivo. And then there\u2019s a number of other types of immunotherapies which are classified as checkpoint blockades. So what that is, is your cells essentially have a way to tell the immune system that they are your cells. So you don\u2019t want your immune system to attack your own body, obviously.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so one of the mechanisms that you have is this \u201cI am you\u201d signal that you can send to the immune system, your cells can send to the immune system. Cancers hijack that mechanism to protect themselves from being attacked by the immune system. And what we figured out was a way to block those signals. And that\u2019s the entire field of immunotherapy. Not the entire field, but I would say a vast majority of the field of immunotherapy. And the successes of the last decade of treating cancer and also commercial success for a lot of these companies has been based on further refining better checkpoints.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The problem with that is that they\u2019re all very similar mechanistically. And so if one doesn\u2019t work, if you have cancer and I give you Keytruda and it doesn\u2019t work, the chances that the next types of therapies will work, since all of them are very similar mechanistically, the chances diminish quite drastically. And there\u2019s some nuance here. And I\u2019m sure if there\u2019s oncologists listening to me, they\u2019re like, \u201cNo, but you don\u2019t know. And double negative this cancer if you combine with these.\u201d It doesn\u2019t matter. In general, these mechanisms become degenerative and we don\u2019t have good additional options to excite the immune system.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A second theory for going back to the \u201990s was, if instead of just blocking the cancer\u2019s ability to hide from the immune system, if that\u2019s not enough, what we actually need to do is we need to activate the immune system directly. And it would be best if you could send that activation signal from the tumor itself. So now you have a tumor. Instead of just blocking the tumor\u2019s ability to hide, you actually have a tumor that\u2019s screaming like, \u201cI am a foreign object, please come and eat me.\u201d That\u2019s how immune systems kill things. They eat the other cells.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so the issue. This is not new. This is basic science from immunology from the \u201990s. The problem is, we haven\u2019t had a good way to get the tumors to send those signals. We\u2019ve tried to make the signals in the lab and then inject them into the tumors. And the problem is the signal just goes away immediately and then it\u2019s circulating in the body and the immune system doesn\u2019t know what\u2019s sending the signal. We\u2019ve tried everything we can to make this signal artificial and get it into the tumors. And every single time we do it, it\u2019s either not enough in terms of no efficacy, or it activates the immune system in all sorts of places we don\u2019t want it and it causes all sorts of toxicities.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so what we are doing with our medicine is delivering the instructions into the cancer cells in a way that causes the cancer to basically send its own signal out. So it\u2019s artificial in that we have made it in a lab. But instead of making the signal, we\u2019re making a message that tricks the cancer into sending the signal. And so that is drastically different. It makes a huge difference in both safety and efficacy. Because now you are recapitulating how the signal works naturally. If the cancers weren\u2019t cancerous, if they were just deregulated and cells were starting to grow out of control, your cell would naturally send the signal and be like, \u201cOh no, something\u2019s wrong.\u201d And your body would take care of it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You actually generate cancer all the time in your body in terms of dysregulated cells. Your immune system just comes in and takes care of it before it becomes like a \u2014 when it becomes a real problem, that\u2019s when you get tumors, that\u2019s when you get the disease we call cancer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so what we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re resetting that system. We\u2019re having the tumors resend the signal out. And so what we created in that first drug was a very simple administration procedure. You take our genetic medicine and you inject it into the tumor directly. And what that does is the immune system comes into the tumor and it kills it. But then it gets activated by that killing process and it learns what the tumors look like and it can better identify the other tumors that have been hiding throughout the body.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>That\u2019s the point that I was hoping to get to. It\u2019s basically like, in the case of this patient, not to belabor this point, but it\u2019s like you injected, if I\u2019m remembering correctly, into cutaneous, meaning just under the skin, I\u2019m not sure what the right term is, nodules, like instances of cancer. So my follow-up question is going to be like, well then how do you suddenly get to the visceral instances, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And I think that\u2019s what you\u2019re describing, right? And within the world of oncology, is that a novel observation? Is that something that is new in terms of being able to do that?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>So it\u2019s something called the abscopal response or the abscopal effect, which means that one tumor is what you\u2019ve put the activating drug into, and that\u2019s where the immune system will attack first. But now the immune system is activated and educated to go and kill the other tumors. It\u2019s not new in the fact that I didn\u2019t come up with that name. It has been observed in limited other settings of a few other drugs that people have gone out with. I guess the problem has been that it\u2019s been very, very limited in terms of the abscopal response that other people have seen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So for instance, you would have a patient with a tumor, maybe melanoma patient, so they\u2019d have a cutaneous lesion, a skin lesion on their chest. And then they\u2019d have another one on their shoulder. And you would inject the one on the chest and the shoulder one would also shrink. And they\u2019re in the same region, right? The immune system is fighting the cancer in the same region. But you wouldn\u2019t necessarily see that happen in the lungs. And so, one of the big pushbacks on a drug, like the one that we took to the clinic two years ago was, you don\u2019t die from having tumors all over your skin. You die from when they metastasize into your lungs and into your liver and impact the organ functioning, right? That\u2019s how patients die of melanoma.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if you are only able to address the tumors that you can either inject or that are near the injected tumors, you won\u2019t have an effective drug if a patient already is further along. We are, to my knowledge, one of the first companies, if not the first company, to demonstrate that a direct injectable drug into the tumor in a large number of patients \u2014 this isn\u2019t a one-off. It wasn\u2019t one miracle patient that had\u2026 That is a beautiful photo of that patient. And I\u2019m so happy that they\u2019re still on the trial and still doing great and it\u2019s amazing. But this is about being broadly applicable because that\u2019s how you actually impact population level lives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so we are the first company that I\u2019m aware of to show this extent of abscopal response in visceral, deep organ metastases in a multitude of patients. And really right off the bat. I mean, this is from the very first patients we put on this trial, at the very beginning of it, began responding. That is very uncommon. It\u2019s very uncommon to have patients on a phase one trial on the drug six months later. And of our first three patients that ever entered this trial in the summer of 2024, two of those three are still on the trial 18 months later. That is something that, I think, is fairly shocking.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>And if we were a traditional biotech company, we\u2019d be really happy with all of this data and we\u2019d say, \u201cWow, let\u2019s take this forward.\u201d However,I think the real message of Strand and what we can accomplish in genetic medicine is, we don\u2019t have to stop it just injecting into the tumors. There are a number of concerns with injecting tumors from a product perspective. Not a drug perspective, but a product perspective. The difference between, a drug is all about does this work, and a product is about how will these patients get these drugs? And injecting directly into a tumor is doable and most oncologists can handle it, especially for skin cancer patients. But as you go to rural health communities, it gets harder and harder to have doctors that have that training. And as you get to other sorts of tumors beyond skin cancer patients, some of their skin lesions have been removed by a surgeon. And then you go beyond skin cancer. How are you going to inject a patient with non-small cell lung cancer?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like you start to get this idea of there\u2019s a limited amount of patients you can access, right? And so you have a product, maybe limitation. In cancer, the way that we actually treat cancer patients is that there\u2019s an infusion clinic. You go to the infusion clinic. The oncologists and the nurse practitioners and everyone, technicians hook you up to some sort of an infusion, and then the oncologist can monitor multiple patients at a time. And that\u2019s what our infrastructure looks like right now of how we treat patients. And if you want to have the largest impact in medicine, you need to make medicines that plug into existing infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As much as you want to tell everyone, \u201cHey, change everything about how you think about treating patients,\u201d the way to have a near term impact is to build drug solutions that can plug into existing infrastructures. If we become a giant biotechnology company that has all sorts of resources, maybe we can talk about changing how everyone gives drugs. But for right now, if we want to be able to help the most amount of patients in the near term, we need to plug into that infrastructure. We need to find ways that we can access organs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019d say, in addition, the bloodstream is also a really good way to get around the body, believe it or not. I mean, the bloodstream carries oxygen to everywhere in your body. And so if your drugs can travel through the bloodstream and get where they\u2019re going, very effective. In genetic medicine, I would call it the holy grail. For the last 30 years has been thinking about how do we IV administer intravenous, which means into the bloodstream, administer genetic medicines that can get to places throughout the body. We\u2019ve been trapped in one organ for the past 30 years, and that\u2019s the liver. The liver naturally filters your blood and thus it picks up a lot of these genetic medicines that we put into the bloodstream.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so what we\u2019ve done for the last 30 years is figure out how we can treat diseases in the liver with this old internet meme, which is like, step one, blank. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit. I remember the old days of FRedit. People used to use that structure. Step one, do this. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit. In biotech, in genetic medicine, the joke is like, step one, prove it works in the liver. Step two, question mark. Step three, we\u2019ll treat all these diseases. And after 30 years, we\u2019ve really nailed step one. And step two has remained this big question mark.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so when we started Strand, our number one goal actually was not even to get to this first drug, as amazing as it\u2019s been for these patients and as happy as I am that we have been able to help those people in their lives and as impressive as it is. Our main goal was to solve this step two question mark that\u2019s been sitting there in plain sight. And I guess the big piece here is that everyone who thinks they know what they\u2019re talking about in genetic medicine will say, \u201cWell, the issue is delivery.\u201d And it\u2019s like, you need to be able to deliver. And I\u2019m like, \u201cThat\u2019s a very hand wavy.\u201d Again, it\u2019s just a cheap answer, which is not wrong, but it is incomplete. And I believe that it\u2019s actually three problems at once. It\u2019s three children in their father\u2019s trench coat pretending to be an adult.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s like, \u201cWe\u2019re delivery.\u201d And then you open it up and it\u2019s like potency, specificity, and delivery are all here inside. And no one wants to hear that because people want simple solutions, right? They want like, \u201cOh, it\u2019s delivery, so we\u2019ll just fix delivery.\u201d I mean, just 30 years in, no one has a good idea about this piece, right? And I\u2019d say that the thing at Strand that when I started the company that I just could not understand why everyone didn\u2019t see what I was trying to tell them. And I was very bad at pitching. You think I\u2019m too much of a scientist. Now perhaps. Or maybe your audience does, if they\u2019re listening. But like, man, you should have seen my very technical zero market insight pitch deck of 2018 that is complete dog shit. It is an awful \u2014 I can\u2019t believe someone funded us.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m a huge fan of Elon Musk\u2019s first principles-based thinking. I don\u2019t know if Elon is the one who invented first principles-based thinking, but I think he\u2019s probably the main evangelist and popularizer of this thinking modality, where if you take SpaceX, for example, his idea was, what is the thing preventing commercial space flight? And it\u2019s dollars per kilogram of launch. It\u2019s just like, dollars per kilogram. That\u2019s it. How do you get it down?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And you start to like, \u201cWell, where\u2019s the cost centers in a launch?\u201d And you go, \u201cOkay. Well, the cost center in a launch is in these rockets, these fuselages \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Trashing rockets.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>They were trashing \u2014 we\u2019re trashing 80 percent of it. And you go, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t we just reuse them?\u201d And people are like, \u201cWell, they do this, they do that. They\u2019re hard to retrieve. They\u2019re in the ocean. They\u2019re floating. They can\u2019t\u2026\u201d And he goes, \u201cWhat if they land themselves?\u201d And it\u2019s like, that\u2019s an insane person thing to say.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I want the world to understand is that we are standing right now on the precipice of a revolution in genetic medicine. And that\u2019s important for a number of reasons. One, it\u2019s important because there are near-term diseases that we\u2019re going to be able to solve. We\u2019re going to be able to get to a point in the not-too-distant future where I think a lot of types of cancers are, at the very least, chronic diseases instead of death sentences. We all want to get to cures. I want to get to cures. But we are getting at least to a point where it\u2019s a manageable disease, right? That\u2019s, I think, a near-term piece.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s multiple lines of technology that are coming together that I think people are not fully appreciating what they\u2019re going to mean for the future of medicine. And so, there\u2019s a lot of focus right now on AI-based drug discovery. And people, they\u2019re building proteins and antibodies and all sorts of stuff with AI models that are doing incredible things. We have decades of work on designing exquisite proteins that do all sorts of stuff, from edit genomes, to cure whatever in some sort of mouse model.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What we don\u2019t have is the infrastructure, the biomedicine infrastructure that gets any of these things, these discoveries, whether they\u2019re made by a human with Microsoft Word stitching amino acids together, whether they\u2019re made by an LLM that knows exactly all the pieces that are going to make this, whether it\u2019s made by high-throughput screen of 14 different robots in concert. It doesn\u2019t matter. What matters is how we\u2019re going to get those into patients, how we\u2019re going to get them into the places they need. And I think about this as this infrastructure of medicine comes forward and what this will actually mean for the future of healthcare.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyone in any sort of a place of power throughout the world, I think, needs to understand where, in the next 10 to 20 years, we very well may be headed with medicine. Which is smaller indications, niche indications.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what\u2019s important for folks to understand, and what I want people to see is, we are moving in a way where, I think, medicine becomes, maybe not completely bespoke, but much more refined. And the way that we get there, we\u2019re going to get there technologically and we\u2019re going to get there from a design perspective much quicker than we\u2019re going to have the infrastructure to actually deliver those medicines to people safely, effectively, at scale.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so our goal at Strand, and our challenge, is building drugs today that impact patients\u2019 lives. We\u2019re not a research institute. Our goal is not to do really cool research on mice and join the ranks of people who have cured mice of cancer. There\u2019s millions of them. There could be a Nobel Prize every five minutes for someone who\u2019s cured a mouse of cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being cancer. Our goal is to cure human beings of human-being diseases, and do so in a safe, effective, scalable way that impacts a person\u2019s life as little as possible. And that is what we\u2019re building. We\u2019re building as a commercial organization. We\u2019re building drugs today, but what we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re laying the groundwork for this infrastructure to where when we\u2019re successful in tumors with the new trial that we\u2019re running this year, when we\u2019re successful with being able to IV deliver, infuse a genetic medicine that goes to the tumors, we have an instruction manual, what we call a payload, the protein that we\u2019re tricking the cancer into making. We have one that we\u2019ve chosen. But success there actually means that I could now, in six weeks, design a completely new protein to be delivered to the tumors. And I could just go over and over and over again. I\u2019m only going to be gated by the infrastructure I have to build, like new ones of those, and the FDA\u2019s ability to move quickly with us as we try to test new and newer things, but we know the general high level safety of this.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That\u2019s coming, right? That\u2019s coming in a lot of other areas of the body where we\u2019re designing things to get into T-cells, so we can help temporarily influence the immune system so you could take out things like autoimmune disease and allow patients to revert back to their pretreated state without doing any sort of genetic modification. We\u2019re trying to get all sorts of these therapies forward. And every time we have a success, we lay the groundwork for this infrastructure going forward.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I want people to understand it, one, because we have large ambitions. A lot of people have thought, first, they thought that the first principle-based approach we were taking was incorrect. They\u2019re like, \u201cIt\u2019s a delivery problem. You need to build a better delivery vehicle. Why don\u2019t you focus on that?\u201d And I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, everyone\u2019s done that.\u201d Right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, we\u2019ve shown this complex solution actually fixes this age-old problem and we\u2019re going to be continuing to move that forward. I\u2019d say the biotechnology industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or it will be built up in a new way from new players. For us, I want to find the people throughout the globe who want to partner on these things, the innovators in America, right? And those are all sorts of different sorts of folks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. Let\u2019s dig into that just for a second. For instance, with this podcast, let\u2019s say I was like, \u201cWell, I\u2019ve got good news and I\u2019ve got bad news. The bad news is, I can\u2019t put this out to my whole audience. The good news is you get to tell me which thousand people I send it to, and that gets hand-delivered to a thousand people.\u201d And I mean, a similar way to look at it would be like, \u201cAll right, you\u2019re giving a TED Talk, but it never gets shared online. It is only for the thousand people in that room, but you get to handpick them. Who are those people?\u201d And it could be categories of person, but how would you think about that?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I think there are people, policy leaders not just in the United States, but across the globe that need to think critically around how we are going to both handle, enable, and empower the future of medicine because things, incentives, things are going to look quite differently 10 years from now than they do today, in terms of the scope and the style in which we can build medicines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And the policy leaders are important. Sorry to hop in, but because ultimately, they\u2019re going to determine the rules by which healthcare is played. Is that one way to put it?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah. Healthcare is very similar to the space industry and that policy leaders essentially have two major pieces, is that they are both the arbiters of what is allowed to be done. And they are a major payer, not the only payer, but they are a major payer of the purchasing of that. And so as the fundamentals of medical development change. Now, I\u2019m not making a drug that I hope to give to two million people worldwide. I\u2019m making 100,000 variants of a drug that I\u2019m hoping to give to 10,000 people worldwide, or 10,000 variants of a drug that I hope to give to 100,000 people worldwide. And I get to more people, but there\u2019s more variants. Both the regulatory and the payment systems, I think need to adapt themselves to allow for that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s on us, the medical innovators and the engineers and the entrepreneurs, to build systems that are still good products. You have to think about where you\u2019re going, and then build a system that can still be a good product. If it costs 10,000 times as much, it\u2019s not going to work, right? It just won\u2019t work at scale and you won\u2019t access these patients. But if you can see a path forward and think creatively \u2014 I\u2019m not a politics guy, but I am fascinated by policy and how incentives shape the future of highly regulated industries like biomedicine, like space, like all these things, and that is regulation, plus payment. I think that there\u2019s incredible work to be done.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the last big time of, I think productive collaboration between worldwide policymakers and the United States as a leader, but the last big collaboration of that came in the \u201980s when biotech started to take off. In the \u201990s when it really ripped, right? When we started to harness the power of recombinant proteins, the Genzyme book, you plugged it earlier, that\u2019s phenomenal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Oh, the Genentech. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Genzyme is the Genentech of Boston. I get the two of them were like \u2014 the Genentech book really, studying the history of Genzyme, Genzyme actually had the leader, Henri Termeer, who was the actual quarterback, I\u2019d say, of the policy innovation, worked with government officials to figure out what will this new class of medicines look like that aren\u2019t just small molecules that you can take home. Right? Now, we have antibodies. We have all of these drugs that are amazing because of it. We have the Orphan and Rare Disease Act [Orphan Drug Act], which led to people building these rare disease drugs. I\u2019d say we need to have more productive, collaborative conversations around what the future will look like because things are going to change very fast.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I read the AI report from the White House, for instance, and how the state of AI is. And I looked at, I read through it and I was like, \u201cThey actually need one of these for biotechnology as well, because things are changing as rapidly and it\u2019s going to be further accelerated by AI.\u201d And if we don\u2019t have some productive conversations, we\u2019re going to be stuck in one of two places. One is where only the ultra rich can get the really disruptive drugs because they\u2019re the ones who can pay for it, because we don\u2019t have a system set up to have these new radical changes commercial quick enough or dispersed quick enough. Or the second is the inability to pay, the inability to find ways that support an ecosystem makes an uninvestable thesis for investors. And so all of these great innovations that we have coming out of the lab right now \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Just die on the vine.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>\u2014 get cut off at their knees because, just like space, space industry, it\u2019s a long time cycle to read these things out and you need capital to get there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>So a lot of what I try to do in my own meandering way is kind of answer the thousand people in a room question, right? And then to figure out, it\u2019s like, okay, let\u2019s just say you\u2019re spending time in DC. You sit down, their staffer convinced them to sit down for 30 minutes, right? What do you lead with? And then that can inform potentially the website or appearances on podcasts and stuff. So just in case it\u2019s helpful, I can obviously share this afterwards too, but it\u2019s like, a couple of things come to mind, right? And I think in terms of like, okay, once you identify the people in the room, then it\u2019s like, what does the TED Talk look like if you got 20 minutes on stage? And you\u2019re good at this stuff, but sometimes you\u2019re so close to it that it\u2019s helpful to have a muggle who\u2019s coming at it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>No. I want to hear this, Tim, by the way. This is a free communication lesson from someone much more versed in the area.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Well, yeah, thank God because I can\u2019t do science. So the allocate responsibility as well, I don\u2019t want me in charge of developing immunotherapy. So the Christmas story and the photos, right? So if you started with that, I\u2019m just like, walking through my made up TED Talk, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And then you talked about, let\u2019s just say you went from there like, \u201cOkay, let me take a sidebar for a minute.\u201d And you talked about SpaceX and the reusable rockets, right? And the analogy also of like, once you have this engineering platform developed from first principles, now you have something that is payload agnostic, right?<\/p>\n<p>Once you\u2019ve made it economically feasible and you have this platform, whether you\u2019re launching superconductors into space as an alternative to propellants for a satellite reorientation \u2014 you should check out this company called Zenno. I might have to redact this, but they\u2019re in New\u00a0 Zealand, Z-E-N-N-O. They\u2019re pretty fucking amazing. But whether it\u2019s that, whether it\u2019s something else, is entirely up to you in terms of deliverables because you\u2019ve done the hard work of developing this engineering platform, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then talking about like, \u201cOkay, well, what does that actually mean for biotech?\u201d And you\u2019ve got the holy grail, right? How do you IV administer genetic medicine? And then you could segue and tell people. Because there\u2019s a good drug and there are lots of good drugs that die. Why do they die? Because they\u2019re never going to actually make it into production, so to speak, at scale in healthcare.<\/p>\n<p>And I\u2019ve seen a lot of analogies with this, and I won\u2019t digress too far, but with psychedelic medicine.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And it\u2019s just like, okay, you need, like, an overnight nurse. This is going to be an eight-hour experience or six-hour experience. And sure, you could argue that you might have the rich people pay $10,000 out of pocket and that subsidizes the \u2014 it\u2019s sort of like Uber Black subsidizing UberX. There is an application there, but if it\u2019s fundamentally incompatible with current healthcare, you\u2019re trying to win a race with your ankles tied together, right? It\u2019s probably not going to happen.<\/p>\n<p>And then you have people looking at like, 5-MeO-DMT instead of psilocybin and stuff, and I have my own thoughts on that. But sure, it\u2019s like you look at the failure just real quick, of like, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy when it got in front of the FDA advisory committee, a lot of reasons for that. But then you have people coming out of the gate and they\u2019re like, \u201cOh, we tried to couple\u2026\u201d They tried to couple psychotherapy with it. The FDA does not regulate psychotherapy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It became a huge quagmire of just confusion and therefore, these other people are like, \u201cWell, let\u2019s do methylone and has a much shorter half life, you can actually fit it into like an hour hypothetically.\u201d Right? You can decouple the therapy or just looking at drug effects and lo and behold, it\u2019s making a ton more progress, right? But the point of saying all that is that you\u2019ve got the SpaceX, you segue to the holy grail, and then like, what if you could reprogram cells in the body? What happens? So I do love the fired up, like hand wavy delivery thing, right? Because you\u2019re like, what they\u2019ve missed is \u2014 and again, I\u2019m ad libbing here, so it might be questions like, \u201cThey\u2019re right and they\u2019re wrong. They\u2019re wrong because of reasons X, Y, and Z.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Right? And this is a lot of hand-wavy stuff and we\u2019re still at a point where we\u2019re defining triple negative breast cancer by what it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s like, if you have trouble with your shoulder and you\u2019re like, \u201cWell, good news, it\u2019s not like elephantiasis and it\u2019s not Parkinson\u2019s disease.\u201d And you\u2019re like, \u201cHow does that help me?\u201d It doesn\u2019t really, right?<\/p>\n<p>But then you say, they are right about delivery, in the sense that if you cannot plug this into healthcare and deliver it to end patients, game over. It doesn\u2019t matter how effective it is in an N-of-1 or an N-of-5, or whatever your small clinical is, right? So in the idea, these are not necessarily in the order, but talking about like even though it\u2019s not the end goal, what if we could turn cancer into a chronic disease that can be managed, right? And it\u2019s like back in fill-in-the-blank, 1980x, right? HIV was a death sentence and no longer the case. Now, you look on television and it\u2019s like, you see ad after ad related to some preventative, but also like maintenance drugs that allow people to live with the chronic condition.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So anyway, those are a few things that kind of hop to mind.<\/p>\n<p>I would be curious, for policymakers, what are the things that most catch their attention, whether from experience or hypothetically, right? What is it that actually gets their attention?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I was in DC yesterday, and my overarching message is sort of like, there are two things we need to do better. We have to build regulations that I think are common sense that still allow us to more cheaply test drugs right now for a lot of reasons. We have sort of vestigial over many years, reasons as to why it takes us a lot of money and a lot of time to just get to a simple answer on a medicine, right? And that is creating a world in which the biotechnology industry is incentivized to do very small steps forward because the cost of failure is so high that you\u2019re trying to reduce your risk in a way that is, let\u2019s make a drug that\u2019s 10 percent better, right? Because taking a truly innovative risk would be very difficult, would be very difficult to underwrite for certain investors.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019d say at the other side, the thing that catches folks\u2019 attention is to talk about how medicine is fundamentally changing. And we all can see that AI is changing how business is done, how people build things, how people read things, how people parse through information. It\u2019s making highly motivated people 10X better, if not more. And it\u2019s not just AI and biomedicine, it\u2019s sort of multiple threads coming together of novel technologies of how we build medicines, genetic medicines, and their sort of advancements, things like what we\u2019re bringing forward. Our ability to diagnose diseases and subcategorize diseases and change the way in which we interpret how this disease is, the sequencing technologies which allow us to do that and other sorts of computation and AI that plugs into those pieces, all of that\u2019s going to fundamentally change medicine, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Because if I can\u2019t just make a decision around the drug that every breast cancer patient gets, and then I agree on the cost that that drug is, and I pay for it a number of years, and then the drug goes to generic and someone brings the next drug forward that\u2019s 25 percent better and blah, blah, blah, and we just continue along that, that\u2019s the non-innovative way in which we\u2019ve been developing medicines for the past number of years. And every once in a while, we have a breakthrough. I\u2019d say, policymakers tend to like that because it comes down to like, numbers, right? And medicine is a very interesting piece in policy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>What do they like? Could you just say that again? They like the idea of breakthrough versus incremental.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>They like trying to learn about it. When you start to talk about medicine, it\u2019s very interesting, because medicine, like, you think about paying for medicine, like the government or health insurer, but the government, paying for medicine is a near term cost center that should long-term reduce a larger cost center, right? Brand name medicines are eight percent of US healthcare spending, but hospitals are 26 percent, something like that, in the high 20s, I believe. And so you imagine that for eight percent of your dollar in healthcare spending, you are pulling down the amount of people that are now hospitalized. You are increasing people\u2019s life. You\u2019re keeping people in the workforce, you\u2019re keeping people in their homes. You\u2019re keeping people out of a system that both no one wants to go to the hospital and the government that pays for a lot of people\u2019s hospitalization in the form of Medicare and Medicaid, doesn\u2019t want to pay for people to go to the hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so you begin to talk about that system and you say, preventative healthcare, but all medicine to a certain extent, it can be thought of as preventative if it\u2019s able to stave off hospitalization. It\u2019s at least, at the very least hopefully, preventing you from being in the hospital. And so policymakers like those conversations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>I\u2019m going to try to keep this from sounding too conspiracy theory, but what I\u2019d love to know is what\u2019s in it for policymakers to help you? And that might sound strange, right? Because I\u2019m not saying these are bad people and we could talk about the kind of industrial regulatory exchange programs another time, but like, that\u2019s a thing, right? So I guess what I\u2019m wondering is, how do you align incentives with policymakers so that they feel compelled and interested in being helpful? That\u2019s the big question that comes to mind.<\/p>\n<p>So let\u2019s just say there are a thousand policy makers listening right now or if you\u2019re in the room, but like what is your ask? If they\u2019re like, \u201cHey, look.\u201d Again, good news, bad news. \u201cBad news is I can\u2019t meet again. I\u2019m just too busy. Good news is, if you have a reasonable ask, I can greenlight it right now,\u201d right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>But you need to do it. What is the ask?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>My first ask right now is we need to streamline how we test new medicines in humans, in clinical trials. In fact, maybe if this ever sees the light of day, hopefully the op-ed that I wrote on accelerating first-in-human trials and becoming a more innovative powerhouse as a country comes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Oh, where\u2019s that?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I just wrote it a couple of weeks ago and submitted it to a handful of places in the last couple of days. I think that it\u2019s the single greatest advancement in biomedicine that we\u2019re going to be able to make. And then of course, it opens a lot of doors for us at Strand, because we have way more ideas than we have the resources, time, and money to take forward at $50 million a try. But if you start to make it more simple, and a lot of these things are common sense regulations, we\u2019re spending way too much time and way too much money doing things that I think are quite antiquated and vestigial in our regulatory process. And so if you can reduce that time and reduce the amount of money, then you can change the economics and the incentives around building new drugs. And you can begin to generate more diverse data that allows you to train things like AI models on what actually makes a difference in a drug and a human.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We just don\u2019t have enough data and we don\u2019t have enough diversity of data to be able to train them nearly to the level that we want right now. And a lot of it, just at the end of the day, it comes down to like, does this do something in a human? You could do all you want in the lab, you can do all you want in mice, you can do all you want in primate studies. Whatever it is that you do, it just doesn\u2019t matter to nearly the same level until you do it with a human. And when Genentech and Genzyme were coming up in the \u201980s and \u201990s, it was a comically fraction of the cost and time that it takes to bring new medicines forward today. This isn\u2019t an impossible thing. We\u2019ve just created a lot of weird barriers and we need to get back to a first principles way of thinking within government as well.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m not the only person preaching that, and I\u2019m certainly not the only one in policy that thinks about it. I\u2019d say in America, we want to be the headquarters of innovation, but a lot of other countries want to be innovative too, right? In Asia and in the Middle East, there are countries that are like, \u201cWe can do this. We have the technology. We can make investments into the space. We can make investments into companies earlier that we think have a high leverage point in the future health and we want to go in those directions.\u201d The United States is able to do it too, but that\u2019s it, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>If you did an 80\/20 analysis on the impediments and someone is like, \u201cOkay, we want to streamline, but if there are 10 items on your wishlist, let\u2019s pick two or three,\u201d what are those two or three?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>One, I think is that we should remove the FDA from a direct permission-based oversight organization on the beginning of first-in-human trials. So let me just explain this for a different sort of audience, right? Right now, in order to do a clinical trial of what we call a first-in-human, the first time you give a drug to a human, a new drug, so a phase one, in order to do that in the United States right now, you need to write an IND, which is called an initial new drug application to the FDA. It\u2019s very long. I think ours for our first trial was 22,000 pages long. You have to have professional writers, professionalized system, all sorts of very expensive things. Just to write it, it\u2019s millions of dollars.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Wow.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>The studies that need to go into it are millions of dollars. The manufacturing of your drug and the associated analytics of your drug in order to be correct in the document costs millions of dollars. And this tax up and up and up and up and up. And all of a sudden this application costs you $25 million and it takes 18 months to put together. Now, in China and in Australia, two of the countries that do much faster first-in-human trials than the United States, they have a system where you go to something the hospitals called the IRB, the Investigational Review Board. In Australia, they have a lot of professional centralized IRBs that manage multiple hospitals and they work in a for-profit system to help companies get their procedures like figure out whether or not they\u2019re going to be a fit for the hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You still have to do that in the United States. After you get the IND approved by the FDA, you then have to go to the IRBs. Right now, since it costs so much money and takes so much time to get an IND from the FDA, if you have decided to do that instead of go to Australia and go directly to the IRBs in Australia or go to China, your board wants you to essentially go to the top hospitals, \u201cHey, if we\u2019re spending 25 million on an IND, I want you to go to MD Anderson. I want you to go to Sloan Kettering. I don\u2019t want you to go to pick a great but random hospital in the Midwest.\u201d So now we have a lot of hospitals in the United States not running first-in-human clinical trials, which means we have a lot of Americans who exhaust their standard of care and can\u2019t get the access to drugs maybe before they are fully approved and they\u2019re just out of options unless they want to fly to Houston or New York or Philly or something like that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And a lot of people don\u2019t if they\u2019re facing the end of life, or for all sorts of reasons, people don\u2019t want to do that. So you have Americans not having access to drugs. You have companies shoved into clinical trial sites that are already overburdened. You have IRBs at those hospitals which are difficult to deal with and also overburdened in trying to process all the people who are trying to come through their site\u2019s doors. And all of this is taking place after you\u2019ve spent way too much money and way too much time submitting a safety document to the FDA in order for them to approve it when the FDA actually has a lot better things to do as well. So all of that reeks of an inefficient system.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>So if they said, \u201cGot it, problem sounds terrible. You can author the solution.\u201d What is the alternative?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>The alternative is to allow the hospitals and their IRBs to make the \u2014 they already make the decision on whether or not to run a trial and they\u2019re assessing the data that you have on your safety, as well as your efficacy and the patients you want to go after. The IRB is going to assess that and make a call after you get the IND done. I think the transition system to transition to, Australia calls it a CTN. It\u2019s a clinical trial notification system. You notify the regulators, \u201cHey, we\u2019re going to run a trial.\u201d It\u2019s not a path system. There are exceptions, certain types of drugs still need to go through them for formal approval, but for the most part, you can notify them, go to the IRB, the IRB can say, \u201cYeah, we think this is safe enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the reason that is still a very safe option because patient safety, from a drug company perspective, from everyone\u2019s perspective, is number one. There is nothing that will kill your company faster. There is nothing that will make me never be able to sleep again. It would be harming patients, especially harming patients because you are being sloppy. And the group that obviously cares just as much if not more than everyone else, is the hospital\u2019s review board because the hospital does not want patients harmed or dying, God forbid, in their trials, right? The FDA isn\u2019t magical in their oversight of safety, but you distribute this workload across the IRBs that exist throughout the United States and they get certified with the FDA to be able to approve this. You can centralize the IRB so that individual hospitals don\u2019t have to have their own IRB.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can have all of these systems. All of a sudden you have hospitals that have the ability to attract biotechnology companies for drug trials. It takes infrastructure to run clinical trials. So the free market sort of picks up there and builds a system that I think can accelerate clinical trial management. And you free the FDA to focus on the things that matter, which is approving drugs based on efficacy and safety, that\u2019s how drugs get approved.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>I know you\u2019ve got to run in a bit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>We can try to get through. This is fun. We don\u2019t talk about it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, this is a juicy piece, so I want to chew on it a little bit more. I\u2019ve funded a bunch of science in mostly New Zealand, but also in a few other countries, simply because the speed of putting through red tape and the sheer amount of red tape is much less. So that\u2019s why I would choose New Zealand and some of these very credible universities over doing research, no offense to Jamaica, but there\u2019s psychedelic stuff going on in Jamaica, but nobody in the US gives a shit, right? They\u2019re not going to listen. It\u2019s not going to hold anyone\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I guess what I\u2019m wondering is, simultaneously, I can look at New Zealand and say, \u201cOkay, it\u2019s mostly sheep. Yeah, you have some people, but it\u2019s a lot easier to run New Zealand than it is to run the United States.\u201d So I can\u2019t just say this works in New Zealand, copy and paste into the United States. Australia is substantially larger, right? So I guess two questions. The first is, zero to 10 confidence, what is your confidence level that if policymakers got behind it, that something could be done along those lines? Not necessarily even at the federal level, maybe at a state level.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s all sorts of complexity there, but what\u2019s your confidence level that something like that could be implemented in the US within the, I don\u2019t know what the timeframe would be, the next five years, let\u2019s just say, five to 10 years, if policymakers got behind it? And then the corollary to that is, is there any competition for scientific innovation that is attractive to a company like Strand, much like companies are moving from, say, California to Texas, right, because there are certain incentives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is there a competition for talent globally through which, if the UAE wants to greenlight something incredibly quickly and fund it, that Strand would be interested or is it live or die, ride or die in the United States for any host of different reasons? I know some companies who have tried to tackle the FDA first because they\u2019re like, \u201cHey, once we have this data, we can copy and paste a lot of it into the EMA in Europe,\u201d which is the sort of equivalent. I know that\u2019s a lot that I just threw out there, but what are your thoughts?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>To answer the first question, there is a global competition for running clinical trials like this and actually, what we are in the midst of right now is the United States massively losing to China. China has built an industrialized version of clinical trial infrastructure for first-in-human trials that is so efficient and massively quick that they\u2019re just able to go faster and cheaper into the thing that matters most, which is first-in-human trials. So the United States is actually in the process of very rapidly, as a country, falling behind China because what started as a place for American companies to come run clinical trials to get data and then take it to the FDA and then do larger trials in the United States has now created a flywheel structure within China where now just Chinese companies run their clinical trials faster than the American companies and then bring their Chinese-discovered drugs to the United States.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And what happens is the risk capital then says, \u201cOh, these companies are more efficient, I will fund these sorts of aspects.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s always state by state like, \u201cWe want to have biotechnology here.\u201d Every state\u2019s always tried to have it. The best technologies remain in Boston and San Francisco, just similar to like \u2014 tech companies might have left for Miami and Texas, but where\u2019s OpenAI in San Francisco? All due respect to Austin and Miami, I love those cities, but San Francisco, it\u2019s hard to replicate those pieces. And biotechnology, Boston\u2019s really dominated a lot of it for the past 30 years, though in this new age of medicine, I\u2019d say San Francisco is really rivaling Boston because the risk capital and the openness to radical new ideas is much higher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think that also attracts a healthy amount of hype-no-substance companies and hype-no-substance founders and technologies. But I think that\u2019s a low price to pay to take some big swings at what could be transformational technologies. Even though I run a company in Boston, I love Massachusetts, I personally identify with that ethos a little bit more of like, \u201cIf some bullshit hype filters into this, it\u2019s worth it in order to take the correct swings at the truly big ideas, because one out of 10 transformations is better than seven out of 10 logical steps forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>So CTN in the US, some version of that, as you described in Australia, if you were a betting man, if you were like, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m going to go on Polymarket and I\u2019m going to put half my net worth on a bet,\u201d I guess I\u2019m asking you, how possible or impossible is the task of retrofitting the FDA and approval processes?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>This is not a comment on politics and this is also not a comment on a lot of different things that are happening at the FDA right now, but I would say in terms of the last 10 years of the FDA, the time to which they would be open to such a radical transformation, and radical in government bureaucracy\u2019s terms, the thing about government bureaucracies is they very rarely seed their oversight. They will take new things to be oversight of, but in general, regulatory anything takes us\u2026 This is the problem with nuclear energy in America for the past 30 years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We just tack on one more thing and one more thing and one more thing and one more thing and these cottage industries emerge to support the giant regulatory machinery. And we don\u2019t take a step back to be like, \u201cWhy are we doing this? \u201d At the same time, I\u2019d say to look at the FDA right now. This is probably the most open I\u2019ve seen people to the idea of like, \u201cWe want the FDA to be an exceptional regulatory body. We want them to build regulatory sciences to give us ultimate confidence in the drugs that we build, but there are new technologies that we\u2019ve been slow to implement.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There have been markets that haven\u2019t been able to be fully created with technology for things like clinical trial analysis because no one was sure if the FDA would embrace them. And there are things such as early-stage safety, which are already handled by hospitals themselves where it will take some time to make. But if I was a betting man, I\u2019d give it a 50 percent likelihood that in the next two years we can get to this. And I wouldn\u2019t be spending my time talking to policymakers about an idea. This isn\u2019t about me just trying to have something to complain about to a senator. I believe that this is possible. I believe that we can do this.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I believe if we don\u2019t do this, it is actually existential, we will lose a lot of our ability to develop drugs in America over the next few years to China if we don\u2019t do it because capital has no allegiance, right? I also believe that like there\u2019s other countries, and especially the UAE, for example, are ones that are watching it carefully and going, \u201cHey, we have great technology. We have a great landing place for a lot of Western values and Western companies. We have great quality of life here. We could attract folks to come do innovative work here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So when I hear various different leaders of countries in the Middle East talk about it, I certainly think it\u2019s possible because they are countries at least over the last 10 years where you\u2019ve seen be able to make aggressive bets in certain directions in order to attract innovation. So if they were able to do that, then yeah, these sorts of things could radically transform how people think about developing medicines. And at the end of the day, if we are able to develop better medicines quicker, faster, cheaper, more ambitiously, everyone wins.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. I\u2019ve been so impressed with the speed at which the Department of Health in, say, Abu Dhabi or the UAE, even more broadly speaking, but it\u2019s incredible how ambitious they are, but in addition to that, how willing they are to take big swings and accelerate things unbelievably.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>That\u2019s the country we\u2019ve spoken to the least in the Middle East. It\u2019s connections and it\u2019s spending the time trying to decide what people want to do. I\u2019m a believer in allied countries coming together. We run our trials in the United States and Australia. I think countries that share very similar values on the future of the world need to come together to build innovative solutions to the massive problems facing us as a human species. TBD, it\u2019s not every country though.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>No, it\u2019s not every country.<\/p>\n<p>Anything you want to talk about just in the last however many minutes we have?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft:<\/strong> I\u2019ve actually taken a lot away of, I don\u2019t know, responding to how you\u2019re responding to different pieces of the story, right? I view it as important to tell the world about this innovation and whether that means finding the large sovereign wealths of the world that are going to help us. Right now, as a company, everything is working within our technology stack. We sit here and look at these problems. To use a bad analogy, it feels like <em>Sophie\u2019s Choice<\/em> sometimes around how we\u2019re going to prioritize what we\u2019re going to work on. We can\u2019t work on everything.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other overused analogy is robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? I wish this wasn\u2019t zero-sum, but if we look at what our technology can do today, I look across and I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, we want to work on cancer. We want to work on autoimmune disease.\u201d But also kidney is really interesting and oh my God, we could do so much good if we applied this in the CRISPR space and all of these things. What I\u2019ve been trying to spend the last six months of my time thinking about is like, \u201cWhat is the correct model for us to make sure we are doing our diligence of advancing medicine at the fastest rate we possibly can?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are so many different things that we, Strand, can work on. We need to find various different partners. Sometimes that\u2019s pharma partners that are like, \u201cWe\u2019re interested in this disease area.\u201d And it\u2019s very simple because the biotech and pharma companies work together all the time on partnerships. But I\u2019d say what\u2019s really interesting is this global opportunity and this broader opportunity to say like, \u201cWe could do all of these different diseases. We\u2019re fighting a resource constraint at all times. So how do we find other people who want to participate with us both intellectually and capitally with capital that can help us build various different solutions, whether that\u2019s for diabetes, whether that\u2019s for polycystic kidney disease, whether that\u2019s for all sorts of other indications throughout the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019ll take novel scientific models because what we are doing is scientifically novel. So we\u2019ll need different sorts of business models to think about this.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u00a0You said something earlier about my frustration with biotech\u2019s ambitions sometimes. God, the Genentech and Genzyme people used to do insane things. Genzyme used to drive around Boston collecting placentas from the hospitals. They had a van called the Placentamobile. They would pick up placentas and then use them to purify a protein that they were turning into a drug for a rare disease. It was the ultimate founder mode of like, \u201cHow do we stop this disease?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And somehow we\u2019re now like, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know. What would that look like from a TPP? And if the FDA won\u2019t think about a proven mechanism\u2026\u201d It is just fucking exhausting. We\u2019ve got to just get our entrepreneurial pants back on and try to fix disease. I\u2019ve just taken the few minutes you gave me and diatribed in six different directions. There is so much cool stuff to do. There\u2019s so many more interesting conversations for us to have on and off a recording. Tim, I love talking to you. You\u2019re just fun, man.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>We\u2019ll do more work. We didn\u2019t even really get into the platform aspect of things. I used the SpaceX analogy of the first principles engineering payload agnostic platform, right? We didn\u2019t even really get into the platform. Are you leaning away or leaning into the kind of programming, reprogrammable language around Strand?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I\u2019m leaning away from the words programmable or programming within there because they get people confused about what a platform is. In my new deck, it ends actually with this piece of what Strand is. Strand is a flywheel of various technologies, just AI models, manufacturing expertise, like talent that we have, trade secrets, all of these pieces that create a flywheel of how we build platforms for areas of the body that we want to access. That\u2019s the platforms, right? So tumor delivery is a platform. T-cell delivery is a platform. We want to build more of those platforms over time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We build them as drugs, like the STX-003 that\u2019s coming to the clinic this year, six months ahead of schedule, that is a drug, but it is a platform for tumors. It\u2019s not a platform for everything you want to do throughout the body, and that\u2019s where people got lost. I think that\u2019s where Moderna got lost. They thought, \u201cYour tumor platform also worked for your liver, worked for the kidney, we could do everything with one platform.\u201d It\u2019s just not true. So what I\u2019ve been trying to do is help people understand. And the SpaceX analogy kind of works well within this because SpaceX, over time, built different platforms for different use cases that were more and more complex and took more and more time and knowledge and they used the learning.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Falcon 1 was able to get single satellites up. It took them a while to figure it out, but they were able to perfect the landing and the recovery and the reusability of a rocket that was useful, but it wasn\u2019t super useful. Then they had Falcon Heavy, right? They were like, \u201cNow we can take multiple things up or we can take large payloads up, we can take astronauts up to the space station, we could do all of these things.\u201d Then they have Starship, right? You can\u2019t start with Starship. Even Elon, 20 years ago, being one of the greatest fundraisers and visionaries, couldn\u2019t go, \u201cWe\u2019re going to build Starship. That\u2019s our first product.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You\u2019ve got to build the Tesla Roadster to get to the Model 3. You\u2019ve got to find the first minimal viable product that does matter and helps you get your feet under yourself. And that\u2019s what our first drug was. And now we\u2019re building more and more ambitious things. I don\u2019t mind talking about a platform because I can scientifically prove we have a tumor platform. I can show you the data, right? We have a T cell platform. I can show you the data of how we can swap things in for the T cell. Whatever you want to put in a T cell, we\u2019ll put into a T cell. It doesn\u2019t matter, but it\u2019s for a T cell, right? And we want to build more platforms over time. That\u2019s where I think we need the most help of finding novel business models, partners throughout the globe who are interested. I don\u2019t mind it. I don\u2019t mind it anymore because we can defend it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, totally. Getting satellites into orbit is different from getting to the moon, which is different from getting to Mars, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah. And injecting things into tumors is different than getting things to deliver to tumors autonomously through the bloodstream, which is different than getting to T cells, which is different than getting to your kidney, which is different than getting to your brain. Those are all different things and they will be bigger and bigger opportunities for us.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>[END OF ROUND 1 CONVERSATION]<\/strong><strong><br \/><\/strong><strong><br \/><\/strong><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>And now we get to part two. This is the second conversation with Jake. This is roughly two months later and a lot happened between the first and second recordings. Jake\u2019s op ed ran, we did a ton of split testing and behind the scenes work; the conversation around clinical trials in U.S. competitiveness reached new levels of traction, got in front of new audiences, and ultimately made its way\u2014let\u2019s just call it metaphorically\u2014to the Oval Office, and we will get into all of it. So this next section is a follow up. What happened after the first conversation, what Jake learned from the response, and how he was thinking about the bigger story of Strand and the future of medicine. We get into a lot of fun stuff in this section. Please enjoy\u2026<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026So Jake, We first recorded brainstorming and you had a lot of well-formed different approaches to messaging, and then we stopped recording, but at that point you had a pending or hopefully pending op-ed. Could you just walk us through what transpired after that?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah. So we\u2019re working on the message, of course, and how to frame this so that people could digest what needs to happen and sort of both what needs to happen fundamentally, but also the urgency of it. So after that, <em>The Washington Post<\/em> actually placed it in their op-ed column, and it really, I think, went viral, at least through a lot of biotech and medical policy communities. I sort of saw it spread its way across as a number of people thought either, \u201cI never heard this idea, it\u2019s a fantastic idea to start,\u201d or, \u201cI never heard that there was this sort of pressing risk to our biomedical industrial base going overseas to China, and the US is sort of contributing to it by getting in our own way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After that, you and I really sat down and thought about what\u2019s working with the piece. The piece was pretty fully baked, and when you put something in <em>The Washington Post<\/em>, you don\u2019t have all the control over the full message. There are many other professional publicists and folks involved in that endeavor, which is totally fine. I\u2019m just a lowly scientist, but at the end of the day, you and I started sitting and talking about like, \u201cOkay, but what grabs people\u2019s attention? How do we drive people into the bulk of the message? How do we make people care so that they\u2019ll pick up the message?\u201d And that was really helpful because about a day after the op-ed ran, a member of a congressional staff had reached out and said, \u201cWe\u2019re putting together a hearing on the Hill around the risk to the biomedical industrial supply chain and biomedical industry in the United States in relation to what\u2019s going overseas to China and how competition is shaping up and sort of degrading our ability to develop medicines here in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so as we sort of talked through that idea, it really helped because we saw what was working with the piece, we saw what was confusing about the piece and we saw maybe what was maybe not bad, but what was helpful or better or caused more engagement or ABC testing and all of a sudden A is 90 percent of the click-through options. And so once we sort of saw that, and I think one of the things that surprised me the most about it was that the opportunity \u2014 maybe it shouldn\u2019t be surprising, but the opportunistic tone of like, \u201cThis is the problem, but we can fix it.\u201d Maybe it should be obvious, but that\u2019s the one that sort of got us going. And so when I went down to the Hill about a week and a half after the piece ran, that\u2019s how we reframed the whole story, which is a much more productive way to get politicians to care about something.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you come to them and you say, \u201cEverything\u2019s bad and it\u2019s burning and we\u2019re done,\u201d I mean, honestly, what is anyone going to do? But coming with reframing it and being upfront about bad things are happening, but we can fix them. It\u2019s in your power, let\u2019s go, was taken up very well. And so between the testimony and a number of meetings after that, that day around D.C., we really started to form a sort of fervor. And fast-forward to about two weeks ago, the President put out his policy objectives, his legislative objectives, and in those legislative objectives \u2014 in fact, sort of the President recommends what he thinks the budget should look like, and then Congress takes it up and then actually bakes it into it just for policy sequencing, but in the President\u2019s recommendations, there is this exact idea of removing barriers to getting early stage experimental medicines to American patients in America through FDA reform. And that\u2019s an incredibly quick turnaround for Washington D.C., which I think should inspire all of us to get more involved.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>All right, so let me add to the recap. Thank you for that. So we got on the phone, I was in Utah at the time, I remember a very different background. Had our first recording talking about the message, spitballing stuff around. Then you published the op-ed in <em>The Washington Post<\/em> afterwards, came out, and the piece, I pulled it up, very well baked, edited piece. The headline was \u201cThe US Can\u2019t Afford to Offshore Clinical Trials to China: A Burdensome Regulatory Environment is Pushing Clinical Trials Overseas.\u201d And when I saw that, I was like, \u201cOkay, this may be the best of all possible options, but let\u2019s test that.\u201d And to your point, right, there are a lot of stakeholders, a lot of people involved, and also people are busy. So if they\u2019ve got 50 stories to put out, once they\u2019ve done the work on one, they don\u2019t necessarily want to go back and have to fiddle and fuss with every headline that they\u2019ve put out.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But internally grabbed it and had someone on my team go to a site called PickFu. We\u2019re not going to get into the branding of PickFu, but pickfu.com, which is sort of human plus AI helping you to split test. It could be an image, it could be the cover of a board game in my case, or a card game, it could also be a headline. And the purpose for doing that, since people listening might think, \u201cWell, if there\u2019s so many stakeholders, you know they\u2019re not going to change it. Why even bother?\u201d It\u2019s because we got five different options and you and I were texting. I was like, \u201cWhat do you think of these six options?\u201d And you\u2019re like, \u201cThese are the two of the things that internally would come up with that you liked.\u201d It\u2019s like, okay, well let\u2019s only split test those because otherwise what\u2019s the point?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because the intention behind it is not to change the headline, but to then take messaging and emphasis that you can use in-person or otherwise or on stage in terms of framing. So the fact that you had everything lined up to then have the refined story for congressional testimony and then to ultimately get to the big office, it\u2019s pretty fun. It\u2019s a really fun compression of things.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I should also, I suppose, just as a recap for folks, highlight that what we ended up talking about a lot towards the end of the conversation was just not simplifying the message for people, but how do you simplify it and make it appealing for policymakers specifically, and that\u2019s how the text conversation unfolded around \u2014 and this is also for those people who are writing nonfiction books, whenever there\u2019s a book that\u2019s like, why kids are all depressed and it\u2019s only getting worse, you\u2019re kind of like, \u201cDo I really want to spend 200 pages reading about that problem?\u201d But if it\u2019s like why kids are all depressed and it\u2019s not the only way, then you\u2019re like, \u201cOh, okay.\u201d There\u2019s actually potentially not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but some type of prescription or recommendation for fixing the situation, then the response rate tends to be a lot higher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So where do things stand now? How do you feel about the messaging? And you know me, I\u2019m like the person who likes to think of himself as smart, but nonetheless ends up asking dumb questions over and over and over again. But in terms of messaging, like how happy are you with the messaging? And we can obviously bat things around. And then are the policymakers still the sort of primary target for your personal external comms because the regulatory hurdles and the molasses on the ground when you\u2019re trying to push things through is so slow still compared to China or Australia, let\u2019s say?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah. So the idea itself. I mean, from our first conversation that was only, I don\u2019t know, two months ago, not even.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, not even.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>We sort of had this conversation, this is important. Fast-forward two months, the President puts out legislative priorities to Congress that has the message inside of it. I\u2019d say I\u2019m pretty happy with that sort of timeline of movement. And I think that what we successfully did with the story was the bad part of it that is like, \u201cThis is happening, this is bad,\u201d and driving urgency of this isn\u2019t a \u201cLet\u2019s have 12 more hearings,\u201d this is a, \u201cWe either fix this today or we get comfortable with only getting all of our medicines developed in China or discovered in China, and then the United States will just pay the bill.\u201d So two months is an incredibly quick time for really any amount of legislative progress. I mean, it\u2019s still not done, it\u2019s still not baked, it still needs \u2014 these things need to be codified. The FDA needs to actually adapt them, but I\u2019d say that\u2019s a lot of positive forward progress.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And shaping the story around \u201cHere is the solution up front,\u201d I think, helped us really tie folks in. One of the things I learned in trips to D.C. Over the past year is a lot of people go down and are complaining. And it\u2019s very hard. People will hear you out because that\u2019s what you do to a constituent if you\u2019re in public office, you\u2019re like, \u201cThis is okay, I\u2019m sorry that that happened.\u201d But it\u2019s really more like being a policy shoulder to cry on than getting anything done. And so going with, this is a problem, this is the urgency, it needs your attention, and here is a solution or part of the solution was really \u2014 and moving our narrative \u2014 between hacking it out with you, moving the narrative to bring the solution up front, I think helps people not tune out immediately from \u2014 to understand what someone\u2019s bringing you a story with.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We\u2019ve talked about this in\u00a0 stories, which is how do you bring your focus and your hook upfront. To me, as a scientist, I like to drill down to the whole piece and explain all the details to people and all the reasons why something is maybe fucked, and instead, I think it\u2019s better to just start with like, \u201cHey, things aren\u2019t going great, but there is a solution. And then if you want, now that you care a little bit and you see a light at the end of the tunnel, now we can go through the whole process. You can understand the nuance of both what\u2019s happening, what we can do, and how we get to the other side.\u201d It\u2019s almost like when I talk to technologists who are building other companies like mine and try to help scientists understand how to pitch even to other technical investors, the thing I always come back to is no one will learn until they care. So your first goal is to make someone care about what you\u2019re doing, then they\u2019ll learn.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Scientists are very spoiled because when you sit around with a bunch of scientists and talk science, they all care. It\u2019s a science thing. Scientists just, they\u2019re implicitly like, \u201cOh, wow. You study black holes and the gravity at the center of them? That\u2019s so interesting.\u201d You don\u2019t have to motivate it and there doesn\u2019t have to be a reason, there\u2019s just the reason is, wow, cool. And at MIT when I was there for six years, it was very spoiled environment because I\u2019d be like, \u201cWell, I\u2019m working on the future of RNA medicine and how RNAs are programmable,\u201d and they\u2019d go, \u201cWow. Tell me more.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then you go out to an investor, have dinner with Tim Ferriss and you\u2019ve got to wheel it back and be like, \u201cWhy does this even matter besides being a footnote on genetics?\u201d And I think that\u2019s always a good learning, and it\u2019s something I\u2019ve gotten used to with talking about my company and talking about what we\u2019re doing, but then coming back to policy, it just helped drive it back to me that this is a fundamental truth of storytelling. If you\u2019re trying to get something done, make someone care, explain the problem, illustrate a solution, and then help them. Then they can go a level deeper, we could talk about the specifics and the pathway there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, for sure. And the storytelling word, and this is important because if you\u2019re proselytizing, if you\u2019re persuading, in almost every instance, it\u2019s going to be some form of storytelling. So after the op-ed came out, after you were giving your congressional testimony, et cetera, et cetera, you also sent me a few different docs. There was the investor update doc, which we may not get into great detail on depending on how much needs to be redacted, but we can, we can always bleep it out or cut it. The second was sort of a primer on mRNA and programmable medicine, if that\u2019s fair to describe it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And one of the edit notes, which is a suggestion, I mean, I\u2019m not right about everything, but I was like, \u201cYou know what? In the second piece, there\u2019s this story of AlphaFold,\u201d and I was like, \u201cThat\u2019s a great place to start because sometimes if you begin with high concept or you begin with things that are a little abstract, it\u2019s easy for people to get lost, even if they understand it, for it to cause them to drift.\u201d And so it\u2019s like, okay, maybe start with story, point, story, or sure you could start with a shocking stat and then lead into like, \u201cHere\u2019s the problem, here\u2019s the solution.\u201d There are a lot of ways to do it, but the storytelling piece, it\u2019s easy for people to forget that selling, pitching, board meeting, you name it, a lot of it is going to revolve around your ability to tell compelling stories.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So where would you like to go next? I mean, I grabbed, of course, a whole bunch of things and before this call sent you my kind of edit notes as images that I scanned, but also as a Loom where I kind of walked through my thinking behind some of those edit notes. I wanted to actually, before we move to that, make a quick note for people mentioning PickFu. I don\u2019t have any equity in PickFu, I just like saying it actually, which is like I could make fun of the name, but it\u2019s like the fact of the matter is I just think it\u2019s hilarious to say.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the other application or value of the split testing is not just having maybe a better idea of one-liners or framing that you could use in person because even though the headline of the op-ed couldn\u2019t be changed, when I then shared that article, I was able to use the same link, sure, but I was able to use a different headline based on the split testing and it was unambiguous. It was like one or two of the headlines tested were by far and away the winners, statistically speaking. And so it\u2019s like, all right, just grab that because ultimately top of the funnel, you need click-through rate before people are ever going to read the piece, so let\u2019s optimize for that. But coming back to, I guess, where to go next, you tell me, man. This is in service of whatever you think might be worthwhile to go over. So what are your thoughts?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>So when we move back to the longer piece that I\u2019ve been just trying to organize some of my thoughts around where I think at least a piece of the future of medicine is heading.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>The working headline is \u201cRNA Medicine and the Rise of Platform Therapeutics.\u201d Okay.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Go ahead. Just wanted to give people something to hang their hat on.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>So \u201cRNA Medicine and the Rise of Platform Therapeutics,\u201d and thinking about even introducing to the world what a platform therapy or a therapeutic platform could be, why it changes medicine, why it changes how we think about developing medicines, deploying medicines in the near term, the medium term and the long term. Where are we going? What could be in the clinic next year because of this technology? What could be possible with medicine in five years? And then where are we on a 10 to 15 year time curve in terms of what will be possible? And I\u2019ve been trying to organize some thoughts around this, the way that I see the future. The policy piece of this story over the top is an important aspect of it because biotechnology and space, rocket companies, I think are actually two of the most similar industries out there. You have an incredibly long time horizon in on investment, you have an incredibly high upfront investment cost and you have essentially binary outcomes. The drug works or it doesn\u2019t, you get to orbit or you don\u2019t, you blow up on takeoff or you fail some early stage safety readout.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Those are all very similar. What I think the rocket industry got out in front of them and Elon as sort of the flag bearer of commercial space industry going back to the early 2000s, got out in front of this message with was how to engage policymakers to enable innovation to feedback on itself in a rapid context. And so in the 2000s, it actually was just like it is today with medicine, it was very hard to rapidly launch rockets. It was very hard to fail multiple times \u2014 fail or not completely succeed or just be given the privilege to take shots. Now, I want to say, putting a medicine into a human is not the same as launching a rocket that is available to blow up over the Gulf of Mexico, and we can salvage that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We don\u2019t want to put people\u2019s lives in danger, but we do need common sense regulatory reform to enable this future of medicine, and as I sort of got to the end of that story with you and got that in front of Congress and got it into the President\u2019s legislative priorities, it turned back to this piece of where do I see medicine going? Where do I see platform therapeutics? And your feedback on what I had put together is actually helpful because one of the questions I saw in your loom was, what do you mean by platform? What do you mean by infrastructure? Are these the same things or are these different? And so maybe it\u2019s more helpful to talk about what a platform therapeutic is to start, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>So a therapeutic platform, people have been claiming medicines are platforms for 20 years in the biotech industry and they\u2019ve almost always been wrong.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>It sounds good.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Well, the reason people like it is that theoretically, if you have a platform that can be multiple drugs, then someone will give you a premium over the \u2014 it\u2019s like when Sweet Green went public and they were like, \u201cWe\u2019re a tech company, not a salad company. We deserve a markup in our market cap,\u201d and you\u2019re like, \u201cOkay. Well, I mean, prove it, maybe. I don\u2019t know. Domino\u2019s is a tech company and an infrastructure company.\u201d So it is possible.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>This is like a caffeine ketone-induced interjection, but people should go back and check out the stock charts on Domino\u2019s Pizza compared to all the fancy tech companies and everything. It\u2019ll blow your mind. So just put that aside.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>So I think that this doesn\u2019t happen in biotechnology enough for the record, but I try to be a student of business and innovation broadly and study how Elon has built SpaceX, how Domino\u2019s has built Domino\u2019s, and that also shapes my global worldview on, hey, biotechnology is having a rare earth metals moment, a rare earth minerals moment with China right now that was 10, 15 years ago for the electric vehicle industry. On the Domino\u2019s side, you look at that and you go, \u201cWow, this is an incredible infrastructure tech story of pizza that\u2019s like fine. It\u2019s fine.\u201d I\u2019m from Illinois near Chicago, so their pizza is fine to me. That\u2019s the official talking point. But to wheel it back, what is a platform in business, but I guess what is a platform therapeutic? So in medicine, going back 50 years to the beginning of biotechnology, you started with let\u2019s design this drug and it\u2019s a molecule, it needs to be put together in a certain way.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We do that in the lab and then we take it forward, we put it in a patient, we see how it works and we move it through clinical trials. If it\u2019s successful, then it gets approved and then we can sell it in the marketplace and then the company finally makes some amount of money. And the problem with that, just in terms of IRR or verticalization story is that the company itself gets value because it learns how to do the process, but the technology doesn\u2019t build on itself. So you build one drug and you get that drug approved.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next time you start back at square one for either a different medicine or a different type. Maybe you take some learnings that you have about that medicine, but everyone has the learnings because we do science in the open. Everyone sees a lot of your FDA documents, they see your medicine that you\u2019re bringing forward. You have to publish your clinical trial results in certain forums. So you\u2019re not gaining any sort of peace by developing it, though as a business, you\u2019re flexing that muscle, which is helpful, and it\u2019s helpful to have that experience as an organization, but you\u2019re not decreasing the risk of future medicines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So a platform therapeutic seeks to build a common technological infrastructure that you can build multiple different medicines off of. So an example of a platform would actually be Moderna\u2019s RNA vaccine platform. So people like to say this thing about the COVID vaccine, about how Moderna built a COVID vaccine in 62 days and got it into clinical trials, and that\u2019s not exact \u2014 sure, that\u2019s true. 62 days from the identification of the COVID antigen, the COVID sequence that they wanted to use, and then 62 days to create a vaccine for testing. But they spent 12 years before that developing this sort of technology, baseline technology, particles, RNA sequences, all these pieces to build a lot of other types of vaccines and therapeutics.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so when COVID came around, they had flu vaccine and all of these different types of other vaccines that they knew how they worked and they were able to kind of plug and play in a COVID sequence where a flu sequence used to be and use that in that setting. And that\u2019s very powerful in terms of speed. Sort of mRNA vaccines aside and what everyone\u2019s piece on them is, I just think that\u2019s \u2014 the story of speed and the story of rollout is really important.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Just for folks who, like me, are like, oh, God, I\u2019m getting maybe not lost, but I\u2019m like, oof, this is biotech, I don\u2019t know very much about.<strong> <\/strong>To come back to the Domino\u2019s, or let\u2019s say Uber, or SpaceX, but it\u2019s like if Uber has built the infrastructure and everything necessary with Uber Eats to deliver hamburgers and then it\u2019s like, can you deliver these vaccines? It\u2019s not the best example because you\u2019re not going to be shipping these to people\u2019s homes necessarily. And they\u2019re like, sure. And then the story is, in 60 days, Uber developed an entire system for delivering vaccines. It\u2019s like, well, kind of, but they had everything else already built that enabled them to do that, which then for each additional \u201claunch,\u201d not to mix the SpaceX, but they are de-risking the entire endeavor and speeding it up by effectively skipping all of those steps that are already established, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I would say biotechnology is like, I think, incredibly antiquated when it comes to involvement of advanced technologies that are not biological. So when I think about what we need to realize the future of medicine, there\u2019s two different buckets. One of them are new drug technologies. So these are programmable medicines. These are different sorts of ways to think about the drug that gets injected into the person. How is that going to be more advanced, safer, more controllable, more adaptable, more personalizable?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second piece is physical deployment infrastructure. How do we build small scale manufacturing and clinical supply chains that can deploy nationally and globally to make sure that in your neighborhood, you\u2019re able to get this advanced medicine? And those are two different and important pieces to what I see the future of medicine becoming.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so on the therapeutic platform side, these are new technologies. This is what we\u2019re developing at Strand. We\u2019re developing various different, to use a SpaceX analogy, various different types of rockets.<\/p>\n<p>And so the way we\u2019re thinking about this is, you have payloads similar to satellites that SpaceX is trying to get more and more fancy payloads, satellites, astronauts, eventually entire data centers or entire moon-based cruise into orbit in an efficient manner that\u2019s scalable for medicine. And in the same way, what we\u2019re trying to solve is doing that with build the technological solutions to get these different proteins into the different areas of the body, and the reason that is such a pressing problem is that right now we have a lot of low-hanging fruit that is diseases we know how to treat, proteins that we know could do something about it, but the inability to sort of get the protein to where it needs to go.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But we are accelerating our knowledge with AI. You have DeepMind and AlphaFold creating the ability to design almost any protein you can imagine to do anything. You have new AI research tools that are helping us understand disease at a higher level of complexity. We\u2019re very soon going to reach a massive bottleneck of all of these different solutions that we know exist, like what to do, and we can\u2019t get them where they need to go. We\u2019re going to have a backlog of satellites and no ability to get them to orbit in a scalable manner. And so it\u2019s great to have AI tools. It\u2019s great to build all this new technology, but we\u2019ve now taken the bottleneck that used to be discovery and we\u2019re shifting it over into deployment and testing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>What I\u2019d love to just come back to in case it has changed, what are the blockers in the way of your most important responsibilities as CEO? Because it\u2019s like I want to make sure that what we\u2019re talking about is kind of in service of that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>I think that\u2019s a fantastic question actually, because I guess what I\u2019m saying about what medicine needs to have a SpaceX moment, for instance, I don\u2019t think at least that it\u2019s a non-obvious thing to realize. The problem is how do you actually execute it? And the reality of medicine development in the United States and how biotech companies work in the United States and the capital formation ecosystem that exists to create medicine in the United States is incredibly swung to the incentivization of making minor steps forward and of doing single things at a time. And so biotechnology actually in the US is not set up from a venture capital standpoint in a lot of ways like technology is. And in tech, you have people constantly being like, \u201cI\u2019m going to build a generational company.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In biotechnology, 90-plus percent of companies go, \u201cHere\u2019s an idea, I\u2019m going to take it from point A to point B, which is not \u2014 point B is not commercial. It is, point A is this is the idea and I think it could work and point B is here\u2019s some evidence that it works and at point B, I\u2019m going to sell the asset.\u201d It\u2019s very similar to how people think about like real estate development, for instance. And so it\u2019s attracted almost like a private equity asset development sort of mindset \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Sorry to interrupt, but I try to be the muggle who\u2019s like, \u201cOoh, that\u2019s interesting, that\u2019s very memorable,\u201d but just current state of biotech comparable to real estate development for these following reasons, but what would it look like for us to have our SpaceX moment and why is that even relevant? That contrast is super interesting. It\u2019s the first time I\u2019ve heard you say that and immediately I\u2019m like, \u201cOh, yeah. Okay, got it.\u201d Yeah.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Well, I really think it\u2019s a capital markets problem. Let\u2019s go back to SpaceX again because I just love talking about SpaceX. No one would debate in 2004 maybe that if you radically decreased the cost to orbit per kilogram, that would not be an incredible business. I think that\u2019s very obvious. The question was both technologically and how could we possibly get there, and luckily we had someone who was both already extremely wealthy, he wasn\u2019t a billionaire yet at that point, I don\u2019t think.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Which is fucking crazy to think about.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah, Elon being a lowly 130 millionaire in the 2000s and who then just put it all on black and was like, \u201cSpin the wheel, Johnny. Let\u2019s go,\u201d and then just shot rocket, shot rocket, shot rocket, I\u2019m going to go bankrupt, whatever. He\u2019s like, \u201cI\u2019ll just go back and make another Zip2 and I\u2019ll do another PayPal if this doesn\u2019t work out.\u201d By the way, I was a huge space nerd at the time and in high school following this story and listening to all of the establishment voices being like, \u201cThis guy is an idiot. He doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s doing.\u201d But he had both his own capital. But the other thing about Elon that I think everyone should be able to tell at this point is he\u2019s an incredible capital formation genius. He\u2019s an incredible storyteller, which was one of the core keys of capital formation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>For people listening, are we talking about fundraising? Is that what that means?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Oh, yes. Fundraising. Yeah, it\u2019s about getting money around the idea. The ability to pull tons of dollars together around a core, insane long-term mission is an incredible skillset that deep technology, which is sort of the umbrella that has space and quantum computing and biotechnology, anything that is a long R&amp;D time horizon, requires. And so the capital pools, the fundraising environment that is traditional biotech, really deeply struggles with the idea of long-term bold idea investment. We have very few shots that are even allowed to be taken on goal. And so when I think about, back to your original question, what is my goal as CEO who wants to not just build a better biotech widget? I don\u2019t want to build a better mousetrap to catch more mice for this one person and exit out of the company. We want to fundamentally change how we\u2019re able to build medicines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is a long and expensive road. And even as you unlock \u2014 if we get drugs approved and we are able to get revenues, by the time we\u2019re there, ideally our research engine is humming so much that even those drug revenues don\u2019t pay for all of our \u2014 it\u2019s a constant feed forward until you break through to the other side and all of a sudden you\u2019re staring at a trillion dollar IPO. And so you have to kind of catch that. As CEO, I think about how do we find globally the people who are aligned with that idea, and that\u2019s collaborators, it\u2019s financial support, it\u2019s people who want to think about \u2014 if you\u2019re trying to get the best IRR on your dollar between here and next year, I might not be your best bet. I\u2019m sorry, we might not be your best bet. We hope to be. We always hope to drive that original piece, but we want to be the 10, 20, 30 year time horizon massive return that people are going to see while we push medicine forward.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so those capital partners, they exist, they exist in the United States, they exist outside the United States. We want to be able to reach those folks and tell them these stories. When I think about my role as CEO, as we try to actually build the future, I think about how do I get our story in a way that is digestible because the people who think about these things \u2014 everyone wants to cure cancer. I don\u2019t need a story behind curing cancer. I just need a story about like how we\u2019re going to get there and how curing cancer is actually going to be one step on the road to solving disease writ large.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>I\u2019m just kind of looking through some of the summaries of the last stuff that we talked about. These are the things that really stick out to me, and then it\u2019s like, okay, when I think of aerospace and I\u2019m not educated, I was not tracking it in t\u00a0 he way that you were, or Steve Jurvetson, who\u2019s been just fascinated by this stuff since day zero. But when I think of, say, NASA, and again, not to \u2014 I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m talking about. But I think about NASA and the government is incredibly slow moving and resistant to change because there are going to be a million different reasons. So it\u2019s like, okay, how did not to designate Elon Musk as the paragon of all great things and archangel with capitalism, but he\u2019s done some pretty amazing stuff. Flaws and warts aside right for now.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>He\u2019s the greatest currently living American industrialist. I don\u2019t know how anyone could possibly disagree with at least that piece.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. Yeah, with that piece. So with you and unlocking capital markets, capital formation to support this long-term vision, there are people who have seemingly done this kind of stuff, meaning patient capital, long-term capital, vast quantities of money who have done this before. SpaceX I don\u2019t think would be the only example, at least in terms of training Wall Street to be like, \u201cIt\u2019s fine. Jeff is going to figure it out. He told us what he\u2019s going to do.\u201d Amazon is also a pretty fascinating example of sort of disciplining Wall Street to be like, \u201cOh, we\u2019re the only company that analysts are going to give a pass on not being profitable for a hundred years.\u201d And by the way, if you break even exactly every year, that\u2019s not an accident, but pretty amazing financial planning.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what do you feel like you most need to do? Is it getting on the road and delivering a concise message to sovereign wealth funds? In your mind, are you like, \u201cWithin three years, five years, we outgrow the vast majority of venture capital firms, and okay, maybe we step up and we get some PE firms\u201d? I mean, you already have some patient capital on the cap table. So what do you view as the main dominoes that you need to tip over or at least conditions you need to set so that you can execute on what you\u2019re describing?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Let\u2019s wheel it back to one of the other great capitalists and industrialists of the 20th and 21st century, Jeff Bezos, because he actually did things very differently than how Elon approached SpaceX in terms of building a company that is incredibly complex, incredibly long-term-minded, but he did it in the public market. And you could argue that Tesla has done that as well, and I think that there\u2019s an argument to be had there, but looking at what Amazon did, the thing I think every entrepreneur in the world should read is the correlated first public year to last year of Bezos\u2019 reign over Amazon investor letters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s a Google Doc link online that someone just put them all into 178 page PDF and I think everyone should sit down and spend an afternoon drinking coffee and reading them, knowing what happens with Amazon, reading 1998 through the dotcom bubble burst, through the e-commerce generation, through social media, through everyone coming online in our online world today and watching how Jeff puts forward his vision of the future is that it both gives you a lot of respect, of course, the things he saw coming, but the thing that I respect about it as being a public company or going about building capital in that sort of a way is you need to say what you\u2019re doing in a way that makes sense for your investors. And I think for Amazon, they were incredibly undervalued until they weren\u2019t. For a very long time, Amazon was trading at a pretty low PD ratio and then all of a sudden people were like, \u201cWhat is AWS, by the way?\u201d And it was an explosion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>It\u2019s our side hustle, little side hustle.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>It\u2019s 2017 or 2018, I feel like they went from $120 a share to over $1,500 a share in what seemed no amount of time as all of a sudden people were like, \u201cHold on. Wait. Maybe owning all levels of the infrastructure and deployment ecosystem plus the brand, plus then building your brands on top, plus also kind of owning the internet in a way, because what is AWS, by the way?\u201d It\u2019s a $25 billion behemoth stuck inside this company and they rocketed from like a \u2014 I don\u2019t remember what their market cap was before that, but then to one of the largest companies in the world and that is like everything that\u2019s great, an overnight success 20 years in the making. But if you read the letters and you see it over time, you see them making bets. Not every bet paid off because not every bet should, but I believe it\u2019s very important \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m saying this, Tim, because you asked, what do I think I need to do? I think we need to say what we\u2019re doing and we need to say it publicly. We need to say it because it will attract partners. We need to say it because it will remind people who are on this mission with us about what we are building to. I think that obviously if you invested in Amazon\u2019s IPO, you would\u2019ve been very happy in 2014 with the performance of your investment from then to then. But then if you invested in Amazon in 2014, you\u2019d be very happy with the last 12 years of performance of that stock as well because they continued to make those investments. But you have to have people understanding your message and you need to say it. You say it every day. You say it like a mantra, \u201cWe are changing the pace of medicine,\u201d because what happens is the exit ramp comes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you\u2019re doing things great, the exit ramp will always come. You need to ask yourself if you should get off the highway. And understanding and reminding yourself about what you\u2019re building every single day helps you understand whether or not you need to get off the highway. And I\u2019m not saying every single person should keep their head down and try to build a generational company when someone comes out and offers you an outsized amount of return on your dollar. You have stakeholders, you have shareholders, you have people you have promised a piece to, and you need to be a diligent steward of their capital and be able to create value in that way, but I do think that it helps frame what is our current value that is different than our market cap, whether we\u2019re private or public.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s a story about Amazon, I think, during the dotcom boom, I think this is about Bezos, where he wrote something like, \u201cWe are not our market cap across every board,\u201d every chalkboard or whiteboard in the Amazon headquarters during the dotcom bubble burst, because obviously the tide went out on everyone who operated through the internet because no one could discern the difference between a zero revenue, let\u2019s get the most people on our website company, and an Amazon who is actually building something real. And so it\u2019s very important to understand your value in order to understand what would be an outsized near term value if an acquirer comes along or just how we\u2019re going to build things because it\u2019s not about near term perception, it\u2019s about long term goal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I like to think about this investment philosophy. When I look at someone like Josh Kushner and how he\u2019s made just like this incredible run at Thrive Capital. I think when I look at some of those great investors who have made these high conviction bets, it seems like they\u2019re able to identify this moment in time for companies that is post-conviction, pre-consensus. The ones who know, know we\u2019re post-conviction. We\u2019re no longer saying, \u201cCan we do this?\u201d We\u2019re like, \u201cOh my God, this is going to work.\u201d But it\u2019s pre-consensus because not everyone has caught on yet or not everyone is convinced. There\u2019s a data set that insiders and technologists or whoever sit there and they go, \u201cOh my God, I think we\u2019re there.\u201d There\u2019s a moment, if you go back and look at OpenAI or Anthropic, or any of these companies, there\u2019s a moment probably in the late 2010s when OpenAI was running where folks internally telling the story, if you listen to them are like, \u201cOh my God, this is accelerating.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before we got DALL-E, before we got ChatGPT, before we had these tools, there was an internal post-conviction moment. And then of course there\u2019s the, \u201cOh, wow. I think this beats the Turing test. We\u2019re post-consensus. No one is, I think, going to be able to debate that AI is going to just completely upend the way that everyone lives their life going forward.\u201d And that\u2019s the consensus moment. That\u2019s the 500 billion-plus market cap moment for all of these companies. And so we need to understand where our post-conviction moment is, and then we need to build to bring folks around to the post-consensus moment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>One question popped into my head earlier that I wanted to ensure I didn\u2019t forget, which is \u2014 and I don\u2019t have a strong feeling one way or the other, but the Moderna story is so apt in so many ways and yet there\u2019s a fly in the ointment, which is broadly speaking, but even more specifically, COVID vaccine has become so politicized that despite what any one individual might think, they may just need to fall in line with kind of party templates or whatever you might talk about, depending on who you\u2019re talking to, and I\u2019m wondering if that has presented any problem or if it is behind closed doors and closed session, it doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Thinking about that analogy, there\u2019s probably better, or maybe not better, but different sorts of analogies you could use there that are just less politically-charged because there\u2019s no reason to wade into politically charged waters to explain these sorts of things.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another great example could just be the original biotech story around people using technology to make insulin. We used to use pig pancreases, harvest them, grind them up, isolate the insulin, put it out, and the birth of biotechnology was around people taking the insulin gene, putting it into bacteria and getting the bacteria to actually make the insulin protein and then isolating the protein from there. But that actually became a platform because then what did people do? They created Herceptin and other sorts of medicines by taking other proteins and dropping it in.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Growth hormone.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Growth hormone, exactly. Right. And that\u2019s the basis of the genesis of biotechnology. That\u2019s a Genentech story. That is also what Genzyme did when \u2014 the sort of bicoastal war between San Francisco and Boston that\u2019s always existed in biotechnology, which I absolutely love. I think it makes things a lot more interesting and just sort of gives a good view on the cultures that set 50 years before any of us were here. That I think is actually maybe even a more powerful story, and we built those platforms and those companies built incredible value and then we got away from it. Then we got more to like, \u201cOkay, now biotechnology is a tool. Let\u2019s get back to drug development.\u201d And capital markets skated \u2014 in the \u201990s when pharma companies began verticalizing and consolidating, they began pulling in even the big guys themselves, Bristol Myers Squibb, BMS, that\u2019s a big pharma company.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why does it have that name? Because it used to be three companies. You talk to people who worked in the \u201980s and the \u201990s, they\u2019re like, \u201cWell, I used to work for Bristol. I used to work for Myers. I worked for Myers Squibb.\u201d They started pulling in and then once they pulled in, they realized they were so large that they couldn\u2019t do research anymore. So they started buying small companies. And so what did our capital markets do? They started building for that acquisition.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The problem that becomes on a timeline like that though, is the whole industry begins to skate where the capital at the other end of the market is pulling. And if that capital is M&amp;A, mergers and acquisitions, buy ups from big pharma, then everyone in the innovation industry is focusing on what pharma wants to buy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>What kind of shoes pharma wants to wear, right?<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah. Well, what\u2019s pharma doing today? What\u2019s the M&amp;A situation look like today? To the point where this is an actual saying in biotechnology investing circles, it\u2019s called \u201cshort the launch.\u201d It means that when a biotech company like mine has gotten a drug approved and is going to launch it themselves, like actually take it commercial themselves, investors in the public market on the whole will short that because they think a biotech company will mess it up because the muscle doesn\u2019t exist anymore because so few companies do it that they\u2019re like, \u201cShort it. No, they\u2019re going to mess it up. They\u2019re going to miss their projection and their stock\u2019s going to dip and we\u2019re going to win.\u201d And that\u2019s just the market reacting to reality. I don\u2019t know, it\u2019s not nefarious necessarily, but that sort of gives you a picture of how biotechnology has basically succumbed itself to be a little brother to the pharmaceutical industry, a pool of drugs that they can buy, which that\u2019s wonderful.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Google buying your startup in the tech industry is a great exit for everyone involved. However, if the entire tech industry was reliant on Meta, Google, Netflix, whoever buying your company, then you would see a lot weirder and less ambitious dynamics at the entrepreneurial side because you\u2019d just be trying to figure out what is Sundar going to do a year from now. You can\u2019t build for a select group of people\u2019s tastes, and that\u2019s the risk I think biotechnology has found itself in.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. Are there any more examples \u2014 they don\u2019t have to be biotech, but outside of SpaceX, outside of Amazon, not going as far back as Genzyme and Genentech, although it is fun to look back at that, particularly when you read some of these books on the birth of, say, Genentech and you realize it\u2019s like, yeah, it\u2019s top of mind, so I\u2019ll mention it, but it was kind of like Apple. This ragtag group of renegades in a garage really flying by the seat of their pants and doing some wild shit, and as you said, decades later, when everyone is contorting themselves into their probably inaccurate prediction of what the heads of corp dev or the CEO of big companies one, two, and three are thinking, the dynamic is just completely different. The incentives are very different. The timelines are very different.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How you think about building on success, I mean, to get back to the platform. It\u2019s like if every drug has to individually go from A to Z, you don\u2019t have a platform. It\u2019s like if you\u2019re kind of skipping A to M and you\u2019re starting at M, okay, maybe you have a platform. I\u2019m wondering if there are any other sort of entrepreneurs or companies that stand out to you as having parallels to what you\u2019re trying to do.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Before I get to that, just because you just compared Genentech and Apple, and I want to point something out to you, I don\u2019t know if you know this. I don\u2019t know if anyone knows this. So Art Levinson, who was the CEO of Genentech from 1995 to 2000-something, was also on the Apple board of directors and became the chairman replacing Steve Jobs in, I don\u2019t know, 2011 or something.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> I did not know that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know, there\u2019s a wonderful story about the read through and Art Levinson and his partnership and friendship with Steve Jobs, but between the two of them, they are highly, highly related companies. And I think that is actually why I spend time studying technology and why you see an increased interest, especially in the last five to 10 years among traditional tech and deep tech Silicon Valley investors like Andreessen Horowitz or Playground Global, one of my investors, moving into biotechnology, seeing a resurgence of this both technological and cultural outlook towards building big ideas around what we can do with technology applied to biology and human health. And that I think is really exciting.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, there\u2019s all sorts of examples of companies that have built things like this. I think that Tesla\u2019s a great example. Well, maybe we should move away from an Elon analogy. I don\u2019t mean to ride on Elon. I have spent a lot of time studying him.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But Apple is a great example of a company that sort of built a core platform that solved a delivery problem. Not looking at the early Steve Jobs first tenure at the company, but when he re-came back to the company, cut 80 \u2014 I don\u2019t remember what year that was, \u201998 maybe or something. He came back to the company, cut 80 percent of their product offerings, refined it, and then moved them, created the smartphone era, upended Blackberry in a way that was so \u2014 I mean, they were hated on. But he created the \u2014 that\u2019s a delivery system. That\u2019s what a smartphone is. Apple and the iPhone and the iPad, they\u2019re delivery systems of all of the technology workplace that can work within them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And by creating that delivery system, your iPhone and you are going to work within our ecosystem and attacking that market by partnering with Jony Ive and creating a culture around it, but also creating an ease of operability, created an ability for other companies to deliver their products to consumers, So many companies don\u2019t build smartphones, but they build on smartphones. That\u2019s a delivery platform that also is constantly getting better. The iPhone 1 \u2014 I actually just saw an iPhone 1 recently at a friend\u2019s house. He still has his original iPhone 1. I was like, \u201cGod, your dad must have been rich.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>No copy-paste.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Yeah, no copy-paste. This thick, man. It\u2019s this thick. It\u2019s this thick, but it\u2019s also the screen is so \u2014 I thought it was so big. It\u2019s so small. But each successive one increased its capabilities, increased its form factor, increased what it could do, became a better delivery system, eventually supplanted. Over time you stopped using the earlier versions, but each one, of course, had a ton of value and Apple delivered things to you. They had the iTunes store, they sold you music, they used it to deliver their own products. They were also a platform for other people to deliver their products and that created one of the most valuable companies in the entire world, and that is \u2014 you think about what creates the most value and what changes the way that we interact with the world around us, it is delivery solutions. It is being able to launch enough satellites to put internet anywhere in the world and do that on an economical basis.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is a place where you could design any sort of software and get it into the hands of almost every single person on this planet or at least every single person in the developed world. And I think for medicine, it is being able to reach any cell in the body and get the exact type of protein that we want there. And in the near term, it\u2019ll be more traditional medicines. It\u2019ll be, we need to design them and then we need to create them and then we need to test them and we need to get them to patients and you need to develop for larger patient populations, but if you want to see what that sort of technology enables on a 10 to 20 year timeline, it\u2019s personalization, because once you have a good view or a great understanding of how these delivery solutions work, and you have the infrastructure, manufacturing, clinical, deployment, getting to patients both across the country, across the world, then you can start to be like, \u201cWell, why aren\u2019t we just building bespoke therapies?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right now, the economics don\u2019t work, but the economics of Spotify didn\u2019t work in 2001. If Spotify\u2019s entire market was through your desktop computer, you could have never built Spotify, but you can when they\u2019re smartphones, you can when people always have it in their car. And so in 2011, that\u2019s a much better time for Spotify to exist as a company and really take off. Now, that is, I think, where the future of medicine sort of goes towards, a hyper-personalization and an ability to directly \u2014 we\u2019re starting to see people trying to build personalized medicine right now.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s a story, Baby KJ, that came out last year in the <em>New York Times<\/em>. Jennifer Doudna was involved, a number of hospitals, they corrected a baby, but the reality of that baby\u2019s genetic problem was that the change needed to be made in the liver, and that\u2019s great for that baby.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And there\u2019s other diseases that we could do that for in the liver, but we\u2019re going to run out. Kidney disease is not going to be solved in the liver, neurodegeneration is not going to be solved in the liver. And so we have to find the other solutions and then build infrastructure that creates an economically viable path forward to where bespoke medicines are possible.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah. We\u2019ll put in a link to Baby KJ and \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Sorry, I just threw in \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>No, it was great. Which I hadn\u2019t actually \u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>Threw in a whole new idea. My larger piece of where I think the future of medicine is going.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss: <\/strong>Yeah, which I guess we\u2019re not going to get into today, but you and I have texted on why has CRISPR not delivered on the expectations that had everybody euphoric in X years in the past, right? But in this particular case, yeah, KJ became the first patient to receive a personalized systemic CRISPR-based editing therapy, saving him from a fatal liver condition so people can read more about that.<\/p>\n<p>Well, this was super fun. Nice to see you, man.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft:<\/strong> Good to see you.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Happy to try to be helpful anytime. You know how to find me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob Becraft: <\/strong>It\u2019s always fun to talk to you, Tim. All right, man. Take care, all right? We\u2019ll talk soon.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Yeah, take care, buddy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Jacob:<\/strong> Later, man. Bye.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tim Ferriss:<\/strong> Bye.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n<h3 id=\"Jake-Becraft-copyright-and-legal-conditions\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:<\/h3>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>WHAT YOU\u2019RE WELCOME TO DO:<\/em>\u00a0<em>You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g.,\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times<em>,\u00a0<\/em>LA Times<em>,\u00a0<\/em>The Guardian<em>), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and\/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to \u201cThe Tim Ferriss Show\u201d and link back to the tim.blog\/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED:<\/em>\u00a0<em>No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss\u2019 name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another\u2019s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/tim.blog\/media\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>the media room on tim.blog<\/em><\/a><em>\u00a0or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hop.clickbank.net\/?affiliate=infohatch&amp;vendor=J1R2C\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10614 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png\" alt=\"Profit Gen\" width=\"400\" height=\"217\" srcset=\"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px.png 400w, https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/profit-gen400px-300x163.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Jake Becraft, the CEO and co-founder of Strand Therapeutics, a company building one of the most advanced [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}