Speaker Series · Ricardo Rosselló

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 We are proud US citizens. We have been for over 126 years. But we are a territory of the United States. And that means that we kind of have a little bit of a second-class citizenship type element.

JP James: I've been doing these amazing interviews for almost 15-plus years, and we get every walk of life, whether it's nonprofits, for-profits. And actually, very recently, one of my friends, who also was a biomedical engineer, who also did their master's — and I don't know if they did their doctorate — ran for governor in the state of Georgia.

And one thing I always communicate is I've always been independent. One of my good friends who's in intel community — he's senior-most ranking person in his department — said, "If you're going to be here for the next 30, 40 years, look down the middle and keep walking." Left becomes right, right becomes left, and everybody gets confused in the middle. But what you end up finding is really amazing, intelligent people as opposed to politics. And whether it's YPO or Hive or any of the other organizations, we're always nonpartisan. And we want to have intelligent conversations.

1:27 But let's start at the very beginning. Pronounce your entire name, just because as a Pittsburgher, I don't usually pronounce names properly.

Ricardo Rosselló: So, well, I have a hard time pronouncing mine as well. So don't worry. It's Ricardo Rosselló Nevares. And we put both last names in honor of our mother as well.

JP James: So, speaking of your mother and your family, tell us a little bit about where you're born and raised and kind of those beginning roots.

Ricardo Rosselló: And I was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My family, my dad was a pediatric surgeon. My mom was a social worker. And our family had always been involved in a mixture of arts, science, and politics. So there was a little bit of everything. Not within one person, but around it. I missed the art gene, but I got a little bit of the other two ones.

JP James: So you're around this ecosystem, and I love Puerto Rico. I am indoctrinating my kids, bringing them almost every single year to come to Puerto Rico. And the history is very rich. It's dynamic. It's controversial. Tell us a little about your family and their history and kind of the evolution of Puerto Rico, because I don't think most people really appreciate its relationship to the United States and its evolution, right?

Ricardo Rosselló: 2:57 Well, I wrote a book that has some of the themes and topics hopefully we'll touch upon today. And one of them was talking about Puerto Rico. I entitled the chapter on Puerto Rico as a geopolitical black hole. The reason being that whatever you think applies to politics and to decision-making that is rational and makes sense, it all kind of goes into a black hole, into the island. And it's basically because of this archaic structure that we have.

We are proud US citizens. We have been for over 126 years. But we are a territory of the United States. And that means that we kind of have a little bit of a second-class citizenship type element. Now, interestingly enough, it's not attached to the individual itself. It's attached to the localization.

So, if I were to move to the United States, let's say to Florida, as many Puerto Ricans have, they would immediately gain all the rights that a Floridian has. Now, if, say, a former president of the United States, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, decides to set up shop on island, they would lose all of their voting rights in the island. So it is a little bit of an archaic and anachronic system.

That's partly what brought me into politics, figuring out how to segue the transition 4:30 from being a territory to being a full state or otherwise. And yeah, that's where we're at. But as you said, JP — and I need to double down on that — it's a magical island. It's a beautiful place, beautiful people, and outstanding opportunities that I know we'll get to when we start having this conversation.

JP James: So, tell us, through a primary grade school, how's the decision-making process? Because if you're on the island — and we have actually some good friends and some of my investors who lived in Hawaii — it's a different mindset, especially because it's tropical, it's bounded. I've done a lot of business in Singapore. It's only 16 miles of walking from end to end. At the same time, it has this relationship. There are dynamics when it comes to logistics and supplies and all the things coming from mainland to Puerto Rico, and its own sustainability, which has its own dynamic, having met the governor of Nevis and many of the other island countries. Walk us through kind of the dynamics that kind of influenced you and the direction beyond just the family.

Ricardo Rosselló: 5:41 Yeah, I mean, it's piggybacking on the previous statement on what it is. Then you start layering all of these challenges and opportunity. And in my view, I always saw Puerto Rico as this canvas that had a whole host of problems, which my role as governor was attempting to solve some of those. But these phenomenal opportunities.

For example, our vision for the island, if you look at it in a map, you see North America, you see South America, and right smack in the middle is the island of Puerto Rico. Now, Puerto Rico, we speak English, we speak Spanish. So, the geography and the culture, having been a territory of Spain for 400 years, and now being a territory of the United States for over a hundred, lends itself to being the connector of the Americas, whether it's business-wise, diplomacy, and so forth. And I saw that unique opportunity.

Of course, whole host of challenges, not the least of which you mentioned. Logistics is an issue. We faced a lot of this when we had not one but two major storms in 2017. I know we'll probably dive in a little bit into the experience with Maria. Everything is harder. Although it is a small island, terrain is complicated. Getting from one side to the other, there's mountainous region, so it's not just straight lines and moving forward.

But ultimately, what compelled me was 7:16 the people. There was such an abundance of creativity, but kind of a lack of a system that would allow them to propel themselves. I saw that the system itself was provoking that people from the island, even though they loved living there, would have to decide to move to the United States in order to get bigger and broader opportunity. So, it's those elements, that delta between what we had and the opportunity, that brought me to politics.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 As a leader, what I wanted to see if I could muster was how can we open up more doors so that a few of these folks can pass through.

JP James: So, just give us a little bit of a flavor of being a kid, because I think, having been born in immigrant family, there's a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. And to some degree, having met other amazing Puerto Ricans, there's a little bit of a chip on the shoulder, and it's not an immigrant. It is the United States, but there's kind of that dynamic a little bit, and I kind of see it with some of the most famous baseball players. You had so many amazing people have come from this really small island. What is it about the food, the culture, where, in a weird way, it's kind of like a state, it's kind of like its own country? Give us kind of that flavor of growing up as a kid. What is it about that that has created that energy?

Ricardo Rosselló: 1:09 There's a few things. It's a great question. One thing is this idea of when you're in a bigger, broader country, some people have naturally been successful just by digits, by numbers. You will see somebody that was a successful business person or somebody that was a gold medal winner at the Olympics or somebody that won in boxing or so forth. On the island, that was not so much the case, right? But what ended up happening, which sort of steered me down this path, is that once somebody achieves something meaningful globally on the island, it opened up the floodgates for others to follow.

I'll give a few examples. I know it's a contest, but the Miss Universe pageant is a global event. Sometime early, a couple decades ago, a Puerto Rican won it. And it was quite unexpected — you know, we were small island — that this would happen.

2:18 But what that did was it showcased other girls that they could do it. And Puerto Rico now has, I want to say, the second or third most Miss Universes in the world. Similarly with boxing, boxing was also kind of — people would do it, but until we have some of the great world champions that open up the floodgates for newer ones. And in baseball, I think there was a point in baseball, in Major League Baseball, where about 60% of the Major League teams had a starting catcher that was a Puerto Rican of origin.

And then you can kind of trace that back to the — there is like a hurdle to climb about "Can I do it? Am I good enough?" I've always been told I was the little brother. I am the little brother in my house. But once it happens, it opens up that flare of magic. And again, as a leader, what I wanted to see if I could muster was how can we open up more doors so that a few of these folks can pass through. And then the message gets by that we're able to do that as well.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 But it is low-wage servitude when you're doing a PhD, and you're kind of at the mercy of it. The experience more than justifies it in the long run, but it's rougher than I thought it was going to be in the beginning.

JP James: We went to school around the exact same time. And I also applied to MIT. But I went to — here in Atlanta we fondly call it North Avenue Trade School, otherwise known as Georgia Tech. And coincidentally, so I studied computer science, but I also studied biomedical engineering. Walk us through the mindset.

So, the only reason why I liken it into an immigrant family is that there's one side of my family where there's 21 cardiologists, one family. And there's a lot of pressure, and those of you who are in the Indian community or some of the immigrant communities, it's like — so I'm the black sheep failure. I am the only non-doctor in the family, and everybody's also a doctor, married to doctors, and I'm sure their kids are going to be doctors. So, walk us through the MIT journey and how that evolution happened, and into biomedical engineering, and that path.

Ricardo Rosselló: 1:19 Yeah, so I wasn't a great student when I was in elementary school. I would venture to say I was —

JP James: Sure, everybody we folks forgiving you in elementary school for not being a —

Ricardo Rosselló: Well, you'd be surprised. Some teachers still stop me and kind of remind me of how bad of a student I was. And then at one point — I want to share the story because it's important — I somehow stumbled into the advanced group for high school. Our school was all together: elementary, middle and high school.

And we had one class with a math teacher that, coincidentally, my two brothers, who were straight-A perfect student type, they hadn't had a good time with him. But he was a famous kind of math teacher. I was deathly afraid of him. So I figured — I didn't know how I fell into the advanced group. I said, "Well, I'm just going to sit in the back, shut up, mind my business." But, you know, because of politics — and we can dive in — he didn't have the same political views that my family had, my teacher, let's say that.

2:30 And he was kind of waiting at one moment to catch me. And one day I spoke to somebody next to me, I can't really remember, and he turns back and says, "Rosselló, come over here." And he puts this math problem on the board, and I don't know what I'm doing, and he says to solve it. And I go ahead and go through it, solve it. And then class ends, and he tells me, "I want you to stay with me till the afternoon."

I thought he was going to tell me that, "You're no longer in advanced. We clearly saw it, everybody saw it." But what he did instead was that he told me, "Look, what you solved there was an International Mathematical Olympiad problem. I put it there purposefully to, like, shame you in front of your — but you solved it, and I would like for you to stay in the afternoons with me." I asked my parents. My parents were all surprised because they didn't see eye to eye with this gentleman.

3:34 And long story short, I mean, I can talk about it for — but that moment in ninth grade — I wasn't very good at math — led me to become a mathlete. I went and participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad, and then I went on to go to MIT. And that always stuck with me because it was that one sliding doors moment where, had he not put the problem, or had I missed class, or — I could have just had a completely different life. But it was that moment, and it stressed on me the importance of education.

Now, MIT — when I got there, I thought I was hot stuff. You know, I had gone to these competitions and so forth. Take the first test. I do very well on the calculus test. I'm like, "I'm going to zoom through this." And then I go to a physics class, and the physics instructor tells us that when he was six, he derived the general formula for a pendulum.

4:40 At that point, I didn't even understand the string of sentences and words that he was saying. But then I decided to do an exercise, and I started looking at everybody in the room. Through the whole class, I was like, "She looks smarter than me. He looks smarter than me." And by the end of the class, I was severely depressed.

And then, last thing I'll say — I know I can go — you give a recovering politician a microphone, and this is what happens. Last thing I'll say is I went to a chemistry test, and it was 17 pages. I remember, for 55 minutes, as today. Sat on the desk, hit it. Started solving it. I handed it in.

When I handed it in, I say, "I couldn't have done very well. I probably got a B-minus, B or so." When they give me the test back, it said 34. I assumed it was 34 out of 50. But no, I had scored a 34 out of 100. So, I was failing significantly there.

And that was a little bit of a wake-up call that told me all this is another level — if I really want to compete, I need to carry on. And my experience in MIT was outstanding because of that. I always had peers that were friendly but challenged me. 5:57 And I truly enjoyed it and made me who I am today.

JP James: I love that. I think that all of us need to go through, especially in those phases. The reason why I always ask about origin stories and growing up, because even today you can clearly see those moments and how they link you through today — because my Georgia Tech experience was very, very similar. It was brutal.

And yeah, I felt like I was intelligent coming from high school. Every exam was an F. But it was a curve program, for any of you guys have heard me talk about this. So you're in the final exam, you walk out, you're like, "Okay, well, I failed that one again." And then you get your curved score, and you're like, "Okay, I got an A. How did that happen?" Like 2 weeks after, and you're back at home, you're like, "What the heck just happened there? I don't understand." But I think that defines your resilience to keep problem-solving, keep working through all these types of things.

Coincidentally went to where my brother also works, at University of Michigan. 7:00 And he actually runs all the sports medicine program and everything over there. And it was actually on my list as well. It's an amazing computer science program over there.

So you ended up doing your master's and your PhD in biomedical engineering. Typically, though, master's I get. A lot of our team members have done their master's. You're like, "Okay, I'll go into the workforce." But for a PhD, you have to have a mindset like, "I'm all in," because it's not a casual activity.

Walk us through the dimension of, like, "I'm going to go all the way and get a PhD in biomedical engineering," at that time in history, which was this huge explosion all across the world, biomedical engineering. And I got to see it firsthand at Georgia Tech. So, tell us, why go down the path of getting your doctorate?

Ricardo Rosselló: I mean, I think the short answer is I was ignorant. And I thought, at the beginning, it was like, "Well, I can do this. I'm doing well in the master's program." And they offered me to stay for the PhD. And at that point, I just wanted the "Dr." in front of my —

JP James: Were there any familial pressures on getting that doctorate, or was it more self-driven?

Ricardo Rosselló: 8:12 You know, I think at that point, one of the key figures in my life is both my parents, my father and mother. And looking back now, obviously when you're a child, you always complain and criticize them, but they did one thing that I value and that I try to imitate now with my kids, which is they didn't tell me how to live. But they were strong examples, and they showed me how they would do it. So, I would go my own path. They were fine with it. There was not that pressure.

I'm remembering it, and there were a lot of interesting things happening at that point. And once I was done with the master's, I wanted to engage. You know, back — the moment that I think really crystallized it was actually in MIT. I met — you probably heard Robert Langer speak over here. Robert Langer has more patents to his name than almost all but, like, 10 countries.

9:16 And the model that he used in MIT, which was very compelling to me at that point, and novel, was you could be an academic force, and you could still produce companies. Right? That now seems like the commonplace, but back then, it was a little bit rare, right? When all of these offices were saying place. And he gave a class where he talked about stem cells, which became my sweet spot.

And he said, "Imagine a resource biologically that you could grow indefinitely and that you can turn into any tissue that you want. Imagine all the disease that you can study. Imagine all of the tissues that you could recreate and engineer." And at that moment, I was sold. It was the first moment where — I mean, I think my struggle throughout MIT, for most of the part, was I liked a lot of things, but I didn't love anything. That was the one moment where it crystallized it, and it drove me all the way to doing the PhD, even though — I mean, if somebody's doing their PhD right now here, I exhort them to put plugs on their ears, but it is low-wage servitude when you're doing a PhD, and you're kind of at the mercy of it. 10:34 The experience more than justifies it in the long run, but it's rougher than I thought it was going to be in the beginning.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 …taught me the value of execution over ideas. And then I saw other companies just take the idea, run with it, and make a lot of money.

JP James: But you end up doing your postdoc at Duke and in, was it, neuroscience and neurobiology? It's more than a decade now that you have invested your life in this science and research. And no offense to both of us, I remember a lot of my classmates that if you got your PhD, even in biomedical engineering, at the top schools in the world, you're still the floor-cleaning person because the field has — now it's just gigantic, but at that time there's just explosive growth. And Dr. Robert Langer and — so, there's another Dr. Robert Lanza, who's also a stem cell — one of the godfathers.

1:05 You have so many cross-disciplinary fields that are coming in and defining what this is, because if you remember back then, there was the biomechanics side, there was the tissue engineering side, there's the neuroscience side, there's all these different components of it. You go through this educational experience, you go through this postdoc. Walk us through kind of a mindset, because now there's choices that are in front of you. And you've also, even though you may have visited family during that decade, there's also the, you know, Puerto Rico component in there. So, walk us through kind of that whole transition, because it's pretty dramatic in a very different way.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah, it is. I mean, I was finishing up my PhD, and this is a little bit of an internal story. I saw how sometimes a 4-year, 5-year PhD could turn into a 6-7 year PhD really quickly. I didn't want to fall in that trap. So, I went to my advising committee and I said, "I'm going to be out by this date, whether I have the PhD or not." So, I kind of reverse-engineered my path towards getting it.

2:22 And it was because I was starting to observe these systemic realities that you pointed out, right? What was 4 years in my case ended up being 4 years, but could have turned out to be 7 years. And after you're done with 7 years, then you have a low-level job, and then you're kind of jockeying for position for academia, and that's not the path I wanted to go. I knew from the get-go my heart was more in an entrepreneurial setting.

And so, I did naturally what any bioengineer PhD would do after I finished, and that was I opened up a startup company on something completely different than bioengineering. It was a polling company prior to the data analytics influx of Facebook and so forth, and we created a framework to extract data from the users. And just talking to my father about it the other days, he was thinking that this was an idea that was, you know, a little bit ahead of the time.

3:33 But the company was a failure. And that was another hard hit to my ego. I thought we had something really good. We had built it. I couldn't execute. That taught me the value of execution over ideas. And then I saw other companies just take the idea, run with it, and make a lot of money.

So, after that, again, as any bioengineer postdoc would do — well, actually, after that, I had to lick my wounds, and that's when I went to the postdoc. I said, "Look, I need to figure something out here." Went to Duke. It was a great, great experience.

And in there, I met a biostatistician. And while I was doing the postdoc, we started a company, which is my qualifying company, Prosperous Biopharm, where we were designing small molecules and peptides at that moment. I was the wet lab guy, pipetting stuff into stem cells, and he was the bioinformatic guy, kind of a couple of eras before AI came in. And that was a success, but it was only a success because I've had that failure before.

So, rounding up, I think, you know, I saw the path where it was going. I saw where the signal was leading with bioengineers and postdocs and docs. And I didn't want that life for myself.

5:02 And it was a hard decision to make, a hard realization, hard to explain to anybody. "Why did you spend, you know, 10 years of your life doing this, and then you're going the other way?" But it's given me a few perspectives right now that I think have been valuable for myself.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 We say we want honest politicians. We say we want action over words. We say we want to, you know, grow and change things and so forth. Yet the signal rewards the total opposite.

JP James: You were also on the side starting to support on the political standpoint. And you were involved with Hillary's campaign and Barack's, you know, presidency. So walk us through — because for people who know me, this is never surprising, because I always do, like, a million different things. But walk us through, because — and ironically, a lot of bioengineers and biomedical engineers, I would actually agree with you. In fact, one of my best friends, who also did his second postdoc at Harvard-MIT, is not doing anything related to biomedical engineering. But the problem-solving skills, how you think about problems — and when you look at government, it's not about government, it's about the people.

Ricardo Rosselló: 1:13 That's right.

JP James: And you're not trying to focus on how can I be in the government system, because in some ways biomedical engineering, once you go down that, there's a rabbit hole, and you're in the academia world, and you didn't want to choose that path. Walk us through kind of this semi-parallel path into politics as you're going through that.

Ricardo Rosselló: Okay, so I will try to condense. I hated politics. All right. I love bioengineering, spent the 10 years, then took a hard right into politics, which I was trying to run away from most of my life. And here's why.

You know, my father, who I have great admiration for, worked in politics, successful executive. And I would see him every day working tirelessly, with objectives, with energy. And then I would see on the media side how he got crushed, right? To the end that, you know, there were words like corruption, which are antithetical to what he is, in my view. So, at one point I said, "Look, I'm going to do anything that's 180° from politics," and so I went into science. That was a little bit of the reframing.

2:32 But I remember the day that changed. I was — picture a town hall — I was 24 years old. Had long hair. Thought I was a rock star. And a friend of mine that was a politician told me, "Hey, come to this town hall. I want you to come there. It's in the middle of the mountains in Puerto Rico." I said, "Fine, I'll go. I'll sit down." Just sat down in the corner. And they're having their whole traditional political talk.

And at one point, when the people are talking, this one gentleman comes up. His name was Tatito. I remember it as clear as day. And he stands up. And the politicians are there. He turns and looks to me. He has a shirt like this one, unbuttons it, and says, "I want to tell a statement to that young gentleman over there. I want you to tell your father that I am only here today because of his health care reform." And he shows me a scar in his heart. Buttons it back up. And, you know, at that moment I didn't realize it, but I think of the movie Inception — like somebody put a little idea over it.

I still hated politics, but the idea was flourishing at that moment, where the thought eventually became: look, politics is dirty — and today more so than before, right? We can — I'm sure we'll get to that — but there's a famous quote from a literary figure 4:08 in the Caribbean, his name is José Martí, that said, like, the worker or the mason, when we come home — in parallel, in analogy to the politicians — when we come back home, our clothes are filled with dirt, mud and blood, but like the worker or the mason, at the end of the day, we can say we have constructed.

And that always stuck with me, because that's through the hard times in politics — and there were many, I'm sure we'll share some — that was one of the driving forces. I know there was going to be storms, literal and figurative, but if we can say at the end that we built, that is the legacy. That's the objective of moving these things forward.

JP James: So, Puerto Rican politics, I think, is dramatically different in the history than the domestic front, you know, the continental United States. And I look at that whole time frame, and also there's an age function to it, where there is a dynamic nature. And there ain't — as much as there may have been in the '90s, it's nothing. And even in the early 2000s, it's nothing, relatively speaking. You could still have intelligent conversations that were respectful on both sides, in both parties. I mean, there'll be some crazy people here and there, but we didn't have the extremism on the edges and stuff like 5:41 that.

You make certain decisions to support, you know, through the DNC and that whole process. How do you go through that? Because, you know, as a scientist, and as myself as an engineer, I've always looked at the individual's values, kind of like you said about your father. And actually, since 2016, I no longer watch traditional television, and I'm not on any social media — or in those, there's some people who manage it for me — because there's so much influence of thought and perspective.

Walk us through kind of your journey from those early days — obviously, transition for a time being an entrepreneur — into politics from that. Walk us kind of through that whole transition, because you're still true to your roots. You're still an engineer, a scientist, a PhD. 6:42 And you have to have this balance of reasoning in a very unreasonable world of politics. Walk us through kind of how you approach it, because I think it's dramatically different from anybody else out there. I don't know too many people who are hanging out with Peter Diamandis, who's also in politics at the same time. So walk us through kind of that mindset and that transition.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah. You know, I exhibited an enormous amount of restraint at the beginning when you started talking about the extremes and the middle, because that's my sweet spot. If you guys want to talk about that, I can talk your ears off. But the premise is, that's what's happening, and there's many reasons why, and I look at it through the different lenses, is that there are certain aggravators in the environment that have provoked extremism to flourish.

But when you see the data — and I know you're very data-oriented — only about 15%, let's take the United States in general, are either extreme, considered extreme left or extreme right. 7:47 85% of us are somewhere in the middle.

JP James: In fact, that's grown to one of the highest percentages historically today, which is very confusing if you were to watch TV.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah, absolutely. And because — and it goes to what we're going to talk later, which is we say we want something, but we're signaling and we're responding to a signal for something else, right? We say we want honest politicians. We say we want action over words. We say we want to, you know, grow and change things and so forth. Yet the signal rewards the total opposite. And it's grown in magnificent ways.

I mean, if you look at media, for example, there was always issues with media. I mean, there always will be. But now — when the signal before was getting eyeballs to three channels, and those channels would police each other, it was a little bit more tame. Now the only signal is how many eyeballs can you get? 8:55 When the days of seeing media that was not correct — and the punishment for coming out with incorrect media was pretty severe — when that ended, then all bets were off. Because all you wanted to do was get the most eyeballs, and then you oversimplify that into headlines, right?

And here's an interesting side story I'd like to share. One of the experiences that I had was I was able to interact with President Trump in his first term several times. I will forewarn you: you expect me to ingratiate Trump, you'll be disappointed. If you expect me to destroy him, you'll be disappointed. And this is a very middle way to go. I see him as what I think he is, which is a political phenomenon that has incredible virtues and incredible flaws. And not what's producing the system, but kind of a byproduct of the system, right?

And you can — so, anyways, in several interactions we had with the president, at every one of those interactions, several things happened. One, he would bring the media in, right? To anything. 10:15 And then two, when the media left, he would ask us, everybody in the room, he would say, "What do you think the headline's going to be?"

JP James: Mhm.

Ricardo Rosselló: Then he would go around, and, you know, he would, like, smirk in disapproval of many of the responses, because they were wrong. You know who wasn't wrong? He wasn't wrong. At the end, he said, "The headline's going to be this." And more often than not, in all of the seven or eight experiences that I had in this nation, he was clear on what it was. It was the media.

So, that is an extreme case of demonstrating that we had probably conversations that were very profound, very nuanced. There was a lot there. But the signal was not the conversation or the content or the action. The signal was what's the headline going to be. And, you know, I think that's one of the questions that we need to ask ourselves again as a society and looking at a little bit of this.

I believe that, going back, you know, one of the problems with the middle is that it is unsexy. It is undefined a little bit. But I will urge all of you to examine how this country started. 11:31 It started with people that thought very differently. But they have to come together into a table and reach consensus. And that is the superpower, in my view, of the United States, and what's being challenged right now is precisely that superpower. We don't have — we have competing worldviews, too many competing worldviews. Some of them are created. And I believe that our superpower as humanity is shared intent.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 Extreme cases allow you to see, you know, allow you to strip some of the layers that we have when things are going well.

JP James: And a lot of people don't know there's certain industries like pharmaceutical —

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah.

JP James: — that had a lot of incentives to come to Puerto Rico and helped invest a lot, and a lot left. There's still a lot of manufacturing that's being done, but I love how you painted the picture, because, I mean, for those of us, we watch on TV what happened on Maria, but we don't really have any clue unless we're actually studying. And again, we're watching on TV at that time, which isn't as psychotic as it is today, but it was reasonably insane, and we had already gone through our Katrina stateside, and nobody wanted to have another experience like that. And we've seen other islands and other island countries like Haiti have catastrophic disasters consistently, unfortunately, for a very, very long time. So you got still enthusiasm, you've got the energy, you still have the mindset, regardless of what the other side — whatever opposition.

1:26 And Maria happens, and I know we're running out of time, but we don't need to relive through everything Maria and everything that went on from that standpoint. But you're a leader, you're an entrepreneur, and one of the things I keep taking away is there's an enormous amount of leadership takeaways through this whole process, both the humility of what you learn and had to experience, and then what were the wins. Because I think when you're hearing it in stereo or surround sound, a lot of pointing fingers and negativity, is impossible to sometimes hear, "Hey, we're all trying to do the best we can, regardless of —" and at the end of the day, you love the people, and that is the number one priority from that standpoint. And a lot of my friends actually left Puerto Rico during that time, but guess what? A lot of people have come back from that standpoint. So walk us through kind of the leadership lessons, things that we can take away from that experience, more than just snapshot of the hurricane.

Ricardo Rosselló: I think a few of the leadership lessons — the first one was, in crisis, leadership comes from places you don't expect and sometimes falters from places you would expect have been strength. So that's to say, when — and I brought it to our business and what we're doing with longevity is, you know, there's a certain type of 2:59 leader for steady boating and moving along, and you can read that very easily. But when crisis hits, something else hits. There were some people that were average employees or agency heads, and they became superstars because they responded. There were some people that were superstar, and they disappeared. How to tell that and how to anticipate that, I think stress testing some of these folks will give you a little bit of an insight.

My wife, for example, she was 8 months pregnant, Beatriz, and she — you know, the storm came. We had no light, no electricity, roads were blocked, no water, people were dying because they couldn't get their medical needs. She could have easily just stayed home, and what she did was she went and opened up 46 places — she called them "emergency stop and go" — where the communities could go and get water, food. And she would go there with huge belly.

4:05 Right? In that, we'll tell her, like, "No, it's fine, you know, good, you can stop now," and so forth, but there was something driving her that she had to do. And like her, there were other folks.

I think number two is that extreme cases allow you to see, you know, allow you to strip some of the layers that we have when things are going well, and you can see kind of the functioning piece of it. That's where I've really harped on this signaling element, because a lot of these signals are so interwoven that only until it breaks open, you're not able to see them. I also — you know, something that was very valuable lesson for me was seeing how non-for-profits would come to the rescue and how fast they could do it, beyond the government or even the private sector. Right? So linking private sector, non-for-profits helped us significantly, and there's a whole host of lessons that I learned the hard way.

5:14 A lot of people passed away, died after the storm. We didn't have the correct measuring way of seeing who had, let's say, diabetes, for example, so they could get their medicine and so forth, and a lot of the casualties from the storm came from people that couldn't get their medicine. So having to learn that the hard way was very rough as well.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 Sometimes we're doing things with the right intent, but we're being rewarded for the wrong things.

JP James: Puerto Rican politics is very different from continental United States. And having worked and known both on the Senate and other governors, both Democrats and Republicans, and like zero independents. End of the day, you are focused on your constituents, and you need to whatever is necessary not only to listen to them, but in the governor's position, you have a little bit of time to actually effect change. It's not like 2 years. It's a longer term from that standpoint.

Walk us through getting into and running for and the mental game, because having known many people who've run for governor in the current race in Georgia, it's like you have to be like a marathon runner, a sprinter. You have to do mental gymnastics. You have to be adaptive. You have to know who you are, and you have to be very transparent to the truth that anything that is there is going to be found out. And whatever side you're on, it doesn't matter what you believe and what you think is right, there's always going to be not just an opposing, but an extremely opposing perspective that will paint you, 1:33 potentially your family, your friends, and everything around you in a light that is not going to be favorable.

So, you said your father was in politics, so there is some kind of contextual understanding, maybe a coach or mentor through the process. Walk us through, were you eyes wide open on understanding what you were to have to go through then? And then walk us till before Maria.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah. So, I think the first point, again, I'm claiming this too often, but a lot of it spawned from an area of ignorance. And perhaps hope and energy. I was very young as a governor. I was the youngest governor.

JP James: Youngest in history?

Ricardo Rosselló: In Puerto Rico, that's right. And at that point the youngest in the United States.

JP James: Oh, wow.

Ricardo Rosselló: And so I had this fervor. I had this experience being an executive, being a scientist, and I wanted to leverage it. There's a lot to unravel there, but one of the first things I did that was very important was I did a opposition study on myself. 2:49 Right? I took 2 days. I left to the wilderness and I started writing everything average, below average, or bad that I had done in my life. And I wrote it out. Anything that I could remember.

And then, you know, once I did that, I went to my family, and just to my family, and I showed them, and I said, "Are you okay if any of this comes out?" Right? That's because I think the worst feeling probably is thinking that nobody's going to find something out, and then it just unravels, and then, unfortunately, as I've seen with some politicians, then it becomes a "No, I didn't do this," and then it becomes a covering up the fact, and it gets worse than what it is. So that was one thing I did that I thought was positive.

3:51 Did many of mistakes, and I'll talk about those, too. I think another thing that put me in a position to be successful, and that I saw the breadth of being successful at reforming and making change after my term had ended and after I resigned, was that we prepared. I know, to some of the executives here, it might seem super intuitive. But we actually created a business plan for the island.

JP James: Mhm.

Ricardo Rosselló: Four years in the making before I was elected to office. And so people, for the most part, I think, saw it as like, "Oh, look at this young kid doing his little plan for Puerto Rico." It was mockingly used against me, like they would say, "Plan, plan, plan," and make fun of it. But what it did was that once I got elected, I was able to spearhead reform from day one. I asked the Supreme Court justice that swears us in. I asked her to swear me in at 12:01 midnight.

4:54 And the reason was that I wanted to sign six executive orders right then and there, so that when people woke up the next day, they were expecting to see me swear in, but I had already sworn in and the game had already changed. I wanted to set a signal that "new sheriff in town, new rules." Secondly, when I swore in, you know, sort of for the pageantry, my message was to the legislators. We had won with both majorities, and I told them, "Look, you swore that you were going to pass these bills, now you're going to pass them," and we had already written them. So the first, let's call it first 90 days, we were able to pass more reform in Puerto Rico than the previous 20 years, because nobody was expecting it.

And later on I figured out that the key point here, particularly in a politician's life, is that your strongest moment of influence is likely going to be your first day. After that, it's diminishing returns. And so, if that's true, and you're not ready on day one, and you use those first 3 to 6 months to get ready and to execute, you've already lost most of your leverage by that point. So, my lesson from that is be prepared. Again, I did it. I didn't plan to do it. It just ended up happening that way.

And so, we were on that stream, but again, to your point, we had fiscal challenges. We had to reduce the budget by 20-some percent. We had a fiscal oversight board. A lot 6:26 of challenges. And then, in September —

JP James: Oh, and a caveat, you can't file for bankruptcy. Right? And I think that's unique because also Puerto Rico itself has to reside in a bubble outside of the US in terms of being able to manage a lot of what you inherit. You can't just change everything because you have the federal government without having the same types of structure and stuff like that, which doesn't necessarily make it easier. And having a level of austerity that's required to get back on the feet is not a casual activity before Maria.

Ricardo Rosselló: Right, right. Well, and it goes back to what I think one of the central themes that motivates me right now, which is what signals our system sending that are being rewarded. Because I saw it from the politician's standpoint, we had several systems on the island that seemed to be phenomenal. I'll name a few, just for the benefit of the audience. One was our bonds. When we emitted bonds on the island, they were triple tax exempt.

7:35 So, if I were competing with bonds from the power authority in Georgia versus the ones in Puerto Rico, you would go for the Puerto Rico ones because they were triple tax exempt. So, that gave us a lot of influx of cash. But the downside was that people weren't investing in what they needed to do, and that aggregated and added, and the debt rose to significant levels. So, identifying that signal when I was there was already broken. But identifying that signal and where it leads can save us from a lot of problems. Sometimes we're doing things with the right intent, but we're being rewarded for the wrong thing.

So, in Puerto Rico, making those changes, it was not only hard. I had to work with an oversight board, which, you know, was challenging, but at the same time, people knew that there was a fiscal entity that was going to be making some of these changes. And I had to make some cuts. And, you know, talking about reform.

8:39 One of the biggest challenges — and this wasn't a fiscal decision — one of the biggest challenges I had to do as governor was look at our education system. Our education system was losing 40% of the student body. They had lost it in the last 10 years, and it was in that continuum process. We had a lot of schools because they were generated early on, and everybody wanted a school in their backyard. So, politicians favor, "We'll put a school here, put a school there," and so forth. By the time I got there, about 60-some percent of the schools never had full faculties. They never had full resources.

And so, I came to the conclusion that these weren't schools, they were high-grade daycare centers, right? Because you couldn't — And so, at that moment, I said, "What will it take for us to have full faculties and for people to be able to get there?" And the hard answer was we had to close down 365 schools. Okay?

9:41 Why do I remember the number? Because it's one school per day, essentially, on a calendar year. And it was tough.

You know, my advisers at the beginning, again, the signal and what was rewarded is like, "Let's not ruffle the feathers. You're the politician. Let's close down 12 schools." Why 12 schools, you ask? Well, because my predecessors had closed down 12 schools before them. And then 12 schools before them. And that's where they stopped.

But the problem was not going to get fixed if we were doing 12 schools at a time. So, I said, "All right. Let's pull the band-aid. Let's go outside and let's do it." And, you know, I had the full force of believing what I was doing was right. I had a lot of hubris. That's one of the challenges that I had to face.

But one of the hardest things was trying to go to a community where they had their school, even if it wasn't working, and telling them that I had to close down their school. I went there. I felt the pain. Those schools had become something more than just a building. It was something important.

So it is really hard, I think, particularly in this day and age, and I think it's gotten complicated and over here in the States as well, to try to do one right thing, even if you're convinced of it, even if all the data points to it, because the signal on the other side was that, "If Rosselló does this, we can paint them as the guy that's against schools, and he's cutting 11:15 down schools because of fiscal considerations, and he's selling the schools to his friends, and yada yada yada." Right? So, how do you balance that in this day and age? And unfortunately, my conclusion is that there has to be some sort of catharsis, right? Because right now it's so polarized that if you're not in one side or in the other, you get ostracized from it. And that's the type of decision-making that led to a lot of the challenges that I had on island. Of course, those pale in comparison to when the hurricane came.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 Alpha allows our kids to flourish. I think that's the main point.

JP James: Before I forget, and as we're wrapping up, I forgot about one of the coolest new things that you're involved with, which is Alpha School. And I teach at all these different universities, and it's kind of depressing because nobody's learning anything anymore. Everybody's just cheating. The average grades are — everybody's a genius now. Somehow, magically, everybody's getting straight A's in everything, in every school. In fact, there's that big controversy that Harvard's having. They're going to start actually having a curve where people can not get an A. That's a whole 'nother conversation.

Alpha School takes a completely different approach, which I really, really appreciate. And I don't know if almost anybody knows about it. So, tell us really quickly, what's the thesis and why you've taken another major leap to put your family in a new way, shape, and form of education.

Ricardo Rosselló: 1:15 Alpha allows our kids to flourish. I think that's the main point. There's three main things that they do that's phenomenal. Number one, they're committed to 2-hour learning, and in that 2-hour period, they're going to learn twice as much as a regular kids, right? So, that's commitment number one.

How do they do it? They use AI. But it's not an AI bot. They use real-time information so that kids can achieve mastery. Not pass tests, but achieve mastery. And when they achieve it, they move on to the next level.

Number two, what do they do after the 2 hours of study? They learn life skills, right? What are life skills? Anywhere from starting a business to speaking in a TED Talk, to building a boat and going to the Bahamas, to climbing a mountain, to doing all of these things. Our kids are learning that in the rest of the day, and whatever things are not mastered are sort of filtered in through the guides that are teaching them.

And number three, which I think is fundamental. It's "Do your kids love school?" And their commitment in Alpha is that they will love school. And they ask two questions to figure this out. Number one, the direct question: "Do you love school?" You know, you can fudge that a little bit, right? But 90-some percent of the kids love the school.

2:31 Second question is more interesting, and they ask the kid, "If you had to choose between going on a vacation and staying in school, which one would you choose?" And somewhere around 50 to 60% of those kids select staying in school. So, spoiler alert, my kids are not yet in that group, but they are in the group that loves it, and they have progressed significantly. So, it's something new.

JP James: In fact, how many years typically ahead of their average age peer group are Alpha School students versus —

Ricardo Rosselló: Well, you know that they score on the 99th percentile on average on all of the MAP tests going up. My son, who was in second grade, is now in fifth grade level, just being a semester in it. I mean, he's progressed that much. And my daughter had some severe gaps from her other — because she's older — and she's been able to remedy those. So, it depends on the student, but clearly the environment is there for them to flourish, for them to see it.

3:36 You see data every day. Every day I see how my kids did. After I leave over here, I'm going to check my application, see if they scored well or not. Then we can have conversations. But it's a different type of conversation.

No homework. So, this is very important, particularly for my — my wife always reminds me to say it. So, if you're seeing this, honey, there you go. When our kids left school, and probably you're having the same thing, they would go home and then you have to fight with them for 10 assignments that you don't know where they're at, where they're organized. At least that's my experience. You know, some might be more organized.

But it was still taking away from family time, whether it was broad or short. It's like giving school and then giving more school after school. And my son, even in first grade, he was like, "Why are we doing more school after school and then going back to school?" It didn't register with him.

So, that's another positive plus that Alpha studying a little bit more, because that time with the family, that connects us to longevity, right? The community aspect building of it. Our children are not just some machines doing homework. We're actually being able to interact with them.

4:46 Now that signal has turned in a way that is beneficial for them, and I'm happy to talk to anybody about why I strongly recommend Alpha.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 If you have the adequate nutrition and caloric control, you extend life by 16 years.

JP James: I mean, no one can ever put themselves from your perspective. Health, and we talked about this a little bit. When you're crisis mode and everybody went through COVID, we respond very differently. And I've always said, no matter what the stress is, no matter how up or down life is, there are some basic fundamentals. And it sounds stupid, and we'll talk about it in our workshop. Sleep.

Ricardo Rosselló: Mhm.

JP James: It sounds so simple and we take it for granted, but in crisis mode, typically we're like, we'll throw that out the window and start focusing on everything else. What ends up happening is you put yourself and your health and your well-being in second or third place. It's a classic in the airplane: put the mask on yourself first so you can take care of the people around you.

1:10 Walk us through some of those lessons, maybe hard lessons that we just — stress management, lack of sleep, lot of negativity potentially around you, hearing it, but you still have to keep your ears open to everything that's going on. Walk us through if you're going to — you've learned these lessons, and we're going to go through a similar experience, because we all are going to go through a crisis.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah.

JP James: Whether it's long or short, whether it's family-related or business or life-related. What are the things that you would do going back through it?

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah.

JP James: From that perspective.

Ricardo Rosselló: So picture this: May 2019, the polls come out in Puerto Rico, and typically governors on the island don't get reelected. By the midterm polls, they're down by 20, 25 points. They become lame ducks. It's unfortunate. May 3rd, those polls come out, and I'm winning by 17 points against my nearest competitor. So, I'm feeling good about myself. Couple days after, my internal poll shows the same, but they also show a focus group that is not quite as positive, right?

2:17 Same poll, same pollster, different signals. And I asked my pollster, "How can this be?" And they gave me some action. But at that point, I'm not listening. I'm focusing on what I want to do. I slept very little. I've got short temper. And I just go, "Look, what matters here is that people will reelect me moving forward."

Month after, I announced the first year of economic growth in the island in 20 years, I announced the lowest unemployment rates in the history of Puerto Rico, lowest crime rates, and certain victories. A month later, I'm sitting in my office pondering if I have to resign to the office that I have worked so hard to build. And what happened was that a confluence of events — happy to talk to them if you have questions, but two things. One: two of my former executives were arrested for corruption. And then immediately after that, a private chat conversation that ended up being edited and manipulated, but at the moment we didn't know, came out of me and my close circle that had some, you know, unfortunate and awful language in it, mostly against media and so forth.

3:34 And those two things kind of came to a head. And at the beginning I thought I could battle it, but it really, really bubbled into something farther, and this — I had marches, first of 10,000 people, then 50,000, then 100,000, and so forth. And then looking back, I connect to the signal that was being sent on the focus group that was very bad. But it wasn't being measured qualitatively. It was there quantitatively. It was there to be looked at. I just chose not to see it.

And how did it get to that point? How were we able to achieve so many things and then all of the sudden crash, collapse in such a way where I had to resign my position and even leave the island? A lot of things aggregated, but after the storm I stopped — I reasoned didn't sleep very well before, but after the storm I was, like, sleeping 2 hours a day. Two. I thought I was showcasing that I was working hard. What I was really doing was aggravating myself. I wasn't eating right. I was doing some exercise, but not the ones that I was doing.

4:48 Things a 10-year longevity PhD scientist should know. But even knowing and even having the knowledge, I wouldn't execute on them. Why? Because the signal was so strong that I needed to do something else.

And here's the point. Some of the lessons. Number one, be careful with your hubris. If you have a few wins, it can feed the monster quickly. It fed it to me.

Number two, take care of your basic needs. If not, you will turn into something that you're not accustomed to doing. Your decision-making will falter, as mine did. Your clarity of thought, your temperament, will be affected, and your foresight will be as well.

And so I think, broadly speaking, those two elements, I would say that are — a lot of executives in this room and outwards, don't minimize the small things that aggregates in the long term, because they will have an effect. And although some of these things, like hard work, sleepless nights and so forth, might seem like the right solution for that moment, in the aggregate, in the long term, you got to ask yourself, where does a signal lead and how much is it going to cost me?

JP James: 6:16 I think that's a perfect final segue to longevity, because I think that there's every phase of life. And it's not necessarily age, right? There's stages, whether it's if you have kids, don't have kids, dating, married, whatever it is. But I do know that when it comes to health and longevity, there's this dumb analysis. You look at people who are centenarians. They have Blue Zones, which is an amazing book if you haven't had a chance to look at.

But ultimately there's one factor that keeps people alive into their hundreds or late 90s. It's actually stress. Stress is almost everything. And everything then builds from that component. And we look at these cool, sexy things like stem cells or peptides or the latest sauna or the latest cold plunge or the latest whatever. And we think these edge, cool, fun things that we see on TV ends the reason why we're going to live forever, minus who knows what's going to happen in 5 years, let alone 2 years, with AI technology, nanotechnology, quantum, and everything else in between.

7:27 But walk us through this — you've always had the passion. Actually, the only reason why love studying bioengineering was actually longevity. And even today, even being in financial services and all these other components, whether we're in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, whatever, the body actually has this amazing ability to heal.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah.

JP James: So, even in that extreme stress, even with 2 hours, 3 hours of sleep, everybody in the entire world in your ear with so much pressure from that standpoint, you can transform and actually heal your body, and this desire for longevity, and your relationship with RMI and your own companies from that standpoint. Walk us through not only that story, but why, and what are some of the key fundamental things that everybody can leave with, that, yes, we need to prioritize our health. What does that really mean, and how is that taking shape as, like, where you are today in your life?

Ricardo Rosselló: It's a great — look, I'll start with a story. When I was doing my PhD, we went to the NIH and we brought some signs. It was a small group. Not a big protest. Just a couple of us. But the signs said, "If you cure all cancer in the world right now, you extend longevity by 6 and a half years." 8:53 "If you cure all heart disease in the world, you extend longevity by 7 years." And then we had another sign that said, "If you have the adequate nutrition and caloric control, you extend life by 16 years," right?

And so, the point was to superimpose that to what the NIH was actually spending, which was 30-some percent on cancer, 40-some percent on heart disease, and half of a percent on aging and longevity, right? That goes again to this signal, and why was that happening? Because cancer seems like the hard problem. Heart disease seems like the hard problem, the one — but there are some things that are basic that, as we move forward, we sometimes need to make them second nature so that we can operate. One was that nutrition, the other one is sleeping.

And as you said, what we've learned recently is that the body itself — we don't need to recreate regenerative methods. We just need to mimic those of the body and see how we can implement or we need to intervene with those so that we keep those procedures healthy. So that's been the tying line to all of this.

Stem cells, of course, add a ton of value. We're opening up a new clinic in Cabo at the beginning of next year, and we're 10:27 going to have all of these processes, but not just the stem cells and science part. We're going to do it as a community so that everything gets integrated, because if you think you're just going to go for stem cells and be in a longevity state of mind, you're mistaken. If you're going to go out and not sleep, smoke, and eat cheeseburgers after that, right? So that's kind of the path that has led me. The way that I see it is longevity is — sure, we can talk about this.

And one last thing I want to say: my dad used to tell me that there're always going to be problems. Our goal is to solve today's problem so that the next generation has other problems. And it's kind of the same with longevity, right? The problem 50 years ago, 60 years ago, was people were dying young. Right? They were getting infected, they were getting a virus, they were getting something early on, and a lot of the average age went down because people died very young. Now, vaccines come in and new medicine and so forth have extended our life significantly.

11:42 The downside to that is that now our new problem is not young age disease, it's old age disease, right? Which is a direct byproduct of some of the signals that we're sending out now, which are things that we're doing, stress included, that provoke inflammation. And inflammation, I know, has become buzzword, but inflammation is not a bad thing. Chronic inflammation is. So, how do we steer that? How do we tackle that? How do we control it? I think that's the next way forward.

Ricardo Rosselló · opening clip: 0:00 All we have to do is go 250 years back. That's what our founding fathers did. They were with an imminent threat that they were creating this new country. They were at odds with Great Britain, and they had to make a choice.

JP James: We'll open up to questions if you guys have any. Here we scan the topics of the entire universe, so you pretty much ask any question on the planet, and I'm sure Ricky will have an answer on it.

Audience member: One of the things that I am curious about — I'm a Gen Z, I'm in the young generation. One of the things that I think there's a lot of just generalizing anxiety around is the concept of this ideological political divide. And I always wonder, and I'm curious to hear your take on this, whether you think that — I am an optimist, and I think that we will figure it out and we will be stronger for it.

But I'm just curious to see where does this go, right? This political divide that's creating this massive segregation, communities are being isolated, people are in pods and they don't communicate, there's less share of ideas. What do you think that this goes? Are we stronger for it looking back 50 years, or is there some sort of divide that's irreparable? 1:24 Where do you think this goes for the younger generation as we interface with politics?

Ricardo Rosselló: It's a good question. It's an exercise of foresight and scenario planning, and here are the two scenarios that I see.

Scenario number one, the gap is so wide — and I'll explain why. The gap is so wide that we're unable to breach it, right? And that stems from what we've been calling the complexity gap. I think our systems are getting much more complex than what our complexity is going. So if you look at a curve, you see system complexity going up, society and systems and so forth, and then you see our human mental complexity sort of stay the course. Is that gap going to breach too far?

But I also tend to be an optimist, and I lean to this. That doesn't mean we don't have to do a lot of work for it. And here's what I think is likely to happen. I think the pendulum is going to swing back and forth a couple more times. I think in that swing of the pendulum, things are going to get unfortunately much worse.

2:30 I think humanity has taught us, whether it's in South Africa or in other parts of the world where you're at the brink, that shared intent comes back, right? And then a new generation, a group of people, leadership figures out a way to say, "All right, I know we have all these differences, but this is our shared intent right now," right? And that's where I'm hopeful that we can go. Just seeing what's going on — I'm not going to dive too deep into it — but seeing what's going on in the media and in the election cycles, I just think the pendulum is still going to be swinging. There has to be some sort of an event where people get it's more than just a narrative that we're saying right now.

Like I said, 85% of us, guys — 85% of them believe that the solution is some sort of compromise. Not all compromise, some sort of compromise, right? Some sort of "Let's go kind of this way together. 3:34 Let's build on these three things that we agree on." That's where the vast majority of — yet we are impotent against that 15% of the extreme because all of the signals are —

So, what's going to be the moment that that changes? I think environment plays a role, and I think leadership plays a role. When the right leadership, when the right circumstances happen that can corral that instance, it will happen.

And again, look, all we have to do is go 250 years back. That's what our founding fathers did. They were with an imminent threat that they were creating this new country. They were at odds with Great Britain, and they had to make a choice. Jefferson, Adams, "We don't like each other. We're going to be competing. But we have to agree on our path forward," because their alternative was that if not, they would be hung for treason, right? So, that's a stark alternative.

What's going to be our alternative in the future? I believe there's a lot of hyper-converging things with AI and biotech and so forth that makes the emergent properties unclear. 4:52 But what is clear to me is that probably somebody in your generation is going to have to take that baton and kind of hit everybody in the right moment with the common-sense argument that our superpower is shared intent. And if we don't bind together now, civilization could collapse, right? I hate to put it that way, but it's that dire.

Audience member: So, I'm interested in your latest research. And so, I was wondering what advances have happened recently to help control tumor formation — induced pluripotent stem cells.

Ricardo Rosselló: Tumor formation for?

Audience member: There, with the stem cells that you use for —

Ricardo Rosselló: Right, right. So, good question. Let me say that the stem cells that we use are not pluripotent stem cells, right? I'll take 30 seconds to explain this.

The most powerful stem cells are embryonic pluripotent stem cells. These cells can turn into any tissue in the body. That's great, super powerful. Two issues. One has moral considerations. 6:00 And two, they're very hard to control. So at one point in the early 2000s, people started injecting these, and bone grew where skin should have grown, right? You don't want that.

So what we're doing is we're using what are called adult stem cells. Or umbilical cord stem cells. So they are some sort of adult stem cells. They are more directed towards a particular set of tissues, so that, let's say, if you put it in your body, they either work to target injury or to create a specific set of tissues.

There's a lot that has been done in order to control embryonic stem cells now. And particularly with another advent that's called induced pluripotent stem cells. That's essentially reprogramming all cells into new stem cells. But I think it's still not anywhere near, in my view, for clinical use, right? That's my personal observation.

On the cancer-fighting front, I think there's a lot of exciting things happening. 7:09 The technology basis for the COVID vaccine, which is mRNA, I know has controversial personal setup. I'll tell you the scientific part of it. If we're able to create vaccines that create RNA — it's a messenger. It's a temporary messenger that can tackle certain things, whether it's disease, cancer, and so forth. That's a promising line of work.

There's this therapy called CAR-T therapy. Our immune system is designed to target anything that's bad, even cancer in our body. It's just that some of these cancers escape it. CAR-T therapy is a way of reprogramming that immune system to go and attack that specific type of cancer.

And on top of all of that, it's a black box for me that maybe this is a question for JP, but you superimpose AI and where it is right now, where the fidelity of modeling proteins is better than any human right now. 8:11 And then, now it's not a scientific problem if you can mimic it — it's an engineering problem. Because now it becomes, "All right, I have the protein." What's the cascade is the next step. What are the set of proteins that it's going to affect, and actions? What's the effect on the cell? And then, what's the effect on the human?

And I foresee at some point — right, this is little galaxy brain — but at some point we're going to be able to have identical copies, virtual copies of ourselves, that instead of having to do a clinical trial, for example, 10 years, couple billion dollars, and kind of reach a — you will be able to tailor therapies specifically for JP, for what JP needs.

JP James: Right, that's already happening, which is why the FDA is having a trouble time, because that's not how it's been structured, where you're having custom therapeutics, where it's based on your personal genome, not only sequencing it, but being able to see how the effect of the different therapy — this is why I think it is a tragedy. We'll see what the heck Google does with DeepMind. They basically ripped it apart. 9:24 And a lot of the team members have now left, and hopefully they're going to start some of these other companies, because AlphaFold, which is basically what you're alluding to, is been on track to solve the most impossible problem, which is N of 1.

Ricardo Rosselló: Yeah.

JP James: How can I build therapies for me and the individual? And we'll see what happens. I hope it doesn't go into a winter, as even AI has gone and quantum has gone. But thanks, everybody, for coming out. Really appreciate the time.