um i try to keep them quarterly and sometimes when things aren't going as well they become monthly i've never had them go weekly but uh there's there's definitely ceos that i know that have um and i would eric i'd just be curious so like your experience from a board level of of managing that when i talk about this it's first off um boards can be phenomenal and and a lot of times they want to help they want you to win right so they're there to support but they can get sometimes a little over eager not fully understand context of things um and that's just that's just the nature of the beast of the board but going into it had you had experience uh board management and um venture-funded startup in terms of just like having those conversations with investors

Yeah, a lot of experience.

I've raised institutional funding before years ago for several different companies.

And even as my role as CEO or president, I've been heavily involved in board discussions and board meetings.

It's a very different thing when you're now responsible for it and you're not just a participant in the process.

Um, not only the weekly check-ins like to your point of, you know, how often are you checking in? How often are you keeping them up to speed? How often you giving them updates as to how you're progressing, but all the decisions that we're taking and we're taking some bold decisions, uh, and, and driving some big change within the company.

Um, There's a certain level of oversight that they like, a certain level of oversight and visibility that you want to provide them, but yet not completely open and transparent where you feel like you have to educate them as if they were another founder.

And I'd be curious as to one culturally, how did the business handle decisions? Was that something you have to you had to change? And are there areas where you look at look at like, OK, I need to come in and make some bolder decisions here?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then even when I graduated, be functional.

I was the guy that planned all the birthday parties and all the hangouts on the weekend.

That ran through me.

I used my money.

I made a ton of money in college in the service industry and hospitality, so...

When does it shift for you and you understand something's got to change? And what precipitates that for you? It

So in that context, why does back pain or neck pain persist despite, you know, conventional treatments that our listeners might be, you know, familiar with like surgery or injections, for example?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I just want to, I just want to caveat this by saying that, you know, there are cases where spine surgery is excellent and is absolutely necessary.

Like if you have a progressive neurologic deficit that continues to get worse, if you have, you know, nerve damage that's causing instability, you know, if you have cauda equina syndrome, all of those things are absolutely indicators for surgery.

But for everyone else, the real answer is that we can only fix what we can find.

And so what we find is usually not what's driving the pain.

how it's caused

That's not true.

Yeah, yeah.

And, um, yeah.

So I, I fell in love with the sales and marketing, and I'm performing, and then I realize at some point in the process, I'm not sure when- As soon as I finished an event, as soon as I finished a show, I was out of business-

Mm-hmm.

We all, you know, talk to people.

But how do you take your story, package it up, put a message around it, and communicate it to an audience? But before you can do that, how do you get somebody to book you to com- to communicate to what, what, what to that audience?

That's not true.

Yeah, yeah.

And, um, yeah, so I, I fell in love with the sales and marketing, and I'm performing.

And then I realized at some point in the process, I'm not sure when, as soon as I finished an event, as soon as I finished a show, I was out of business-

Mm-hmm.

We all, you know, talk to people.

But how do you take your story, package it up, put a message around it, and communicate it to an audience? But before you can do that, how do you get somebody to book you to com- to communicate to what, what, to that audience?

So

step one, you have to tap into it, right? So you have to tap into your passion.

So for me, that was magic, right? Right.

Okay, for you, that was comedy, okay? Yeah.

So step two, you have to translate it into, at the time it was, it was a presentation for me, but you have to translate it into products, services, a presentation.

Okay.

Right.

F-o-r.

How much youth involvement are you seeing coming up in MMA?

Youth involvement is huge.

We never used to do any...

So youth MMA is called pancreation.

It's basically amateur MMA with no head strikes.

And then probably about...

Three years ago, there was just so much interest with the pancreation fights.

What kind of experience do you want to give spectators who go to Three River Throwdown? What should that feel like for your people in the crowd?

So can you talk a little bit about pain in general for us?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, um, one of the most important things to understand about how we understand pain in a very modern way, uh, around neuroscience is shaped by neuroimaging studies that were done.

So functional MRIs are done to show where activity lights up in the brain.

And so when they did studies looking at acute pain, you'll see that the somatosensory cortex or areas associated with sensation light up.

But As pain becomes chronic and it becomes persistent, and we image those people, we find that where the area of the brain that lights up, uh, tends to migrate more towards the limbic system, which is associated with contextual drivers and emotion and memory and things like that.

So I think that to understand the fundamentals of pain neuroscience, you have to understand where that pain lives in the brain.

Mm-hmm

This is crazy because I didn't realize that scientists had, had this, had made, you know, sort of connected these dots between the lakes while the rest of us were, I mean, Eric, are we actually, are we actually lying to our kids in the schools or when we tell our audience that there are five great lakes instead of four?

Well, I think it depends on your perspective.

So if you are thinking about, you know, just like the straight hydrologic framework in terms of the inputs and outputs, then calling them one lake from that kind of narrow definition makes sense.

And we do.

So sometimes when I'm talking about the lakes from that standpoint, that's the terminology I use.

I'll say Lake Michigan-Huron, which is kind of cool because that makes it the biggest lake by surface area in the world.

So it's an interesting way to think about it.

Do you think that the way we interact with the lakes would change if we stopped talking about them as separate bodies?

That's

unfair, because already by the 1930s, it was proving its value.

for export of BC resources, not only in forestry, but in the mining sector, the gold sector.

So during the dirty 30s, the gold mining sector was very important and quite active.

All of that gold bullion from the Caribou, from the Bridge River Valley, and here locally was shipped through Squamish, and Squamish was the busiest gold ore port in the world at that time.

So we have to go back to envision that the Squamish was the port, the terminus of the railway for its first 40-plus years.

And its port facilities, there are a variety of them over time.

It's

people live their fake lives, right?

The theater of AI.

The theater, right.

And LinkedIn is too.

So let's call it what it is.

People are afraid for their job security and their relevance, whether that means something as drastic as a layoff, or does it mean that I sort of become a BA for an agent or something, right? Like, Any number of those fears are there.

What we're seeing is, especially for folks who are willing to just dive into the pool and take that chance and get out of their comfort zone is, you know, that climbing up and down the ladder we talked about, the removal of the scaffolding that we talked about is really empowering.

It's use cases for how

That's

unfair, because already by the 1930s, it was proving its value.

for export of BC resources, not only in forestry, but in the mining sector, the gold sector.

So during the dirty 30s, the gold mining sector was very important and quite active.

All of that gold bullion from the Caribou, from the Bridge River Valley, and here locally was shipped through Squamish, and Squamish was the busiest gold ore port in the world at that time.

So we have to go back to envision that the Squamish was the port, the terminus of the railway for its first 40-plus years.

And its port facilities, there are a variety of them over time.

It's

Oh, wow.

It was very life-altering at the time, not as a budding cinephile, but as a person that could become so wholly terrified in a way that I could never have even imagined.

I couldn't go even into a swimming pool that summer.

Yeah.

Where you can see the bottom of the pool and everything around it.

Absolutely no chance whatsoever.

So that experience was very... foundational to me kind of being able to immerse myself in a movie obviously even at a very young age and then E.T. in 82 was the second movie that I ever cried at in a theater and it was like uncontrollable sobbing and then that kind of really opened me up to how how emotions outside of fear could be things that I could participate in, in watching a movie.

Great pick.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Like where pain

lives? Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And so I think this is important because, you know, neuroimaging and neuroscience over the past several decades has, has redefined exactly how we, um, understand and address pain so i think one of the things that is worth mentioning is that in the neuroimaging work you know functional mri studies of people who have undergone acute injury and are experiencing acute pain we will see that the somatosensory cortex or areas associated with sensation um light up and are active but as pain becomes more chronic meaning that it's been persistent over uh several months weeks months and longer um when we look at fMRI data on those people, that the areas of the brain that light up are more in the limbic system, which means that this has become more of a type of sensation that is actually associated with contextual drivers like stress, emotion, trauma, et cetera.

And so that's why you'll often find that when people have chronic pain, they will identify triggers or areas.

And it's not even just like a physical trigger.

Sometimes it's just the stress or the emotion of being around certain people or family members or other types of situations where their pain gets amplified and and and becomes more than than it otherwise is.

Well, maybe go over a couple more of the other ones if you don't mind.

And does that just go back to experimentation, not so much just in code, but in processes? And how do you get other stakeholders and other departments in line with that?

I, I'll say at, at, at Intuit, w- you know, we have a very collaborative culture, and, and teams really come together with their own points of view from their areas of expertise, design, product, data science, applied science, and software engineering, et cetera, and bring the, you know, really work backwards to solve customer problems.

I've had many, many people come into my office over the last couple of months and, um, you know, we rolled out Claude Code to the entire organization.

You know, I had one of our designers come in and say, "Well, I set up Claude Code.

Where do I check in the code now?" And I said, "Okay, like, what, what problem are we trying to solve?" And they're like, "I, I, I, I don't know.

I just need to know where to put the code now that I have the Claude Code thing to do the..." You know, and so I, I think in many ways it's really s- you know, clarifying expectations around this is where we think some of these processes can be changed fundamentally.

So we have PMs now producing PRs that go into our code base and get reviewed by an engineer, and they go out as an experiment.

What are the traits that I could really focus on to, to set me apart from other engineers?

What is behavioral treatment, and how does it differ from traditional pain management approaches?

Yeah.

So, um, at L- at Lin Health, you know, what we, you know, w- what we're doing is we're providing what we call brain first care, and I think that type of framing kind of gets to the heart of the distinction pretty quickly.

So behavioral treatment for chronic pain works on the premise that pain experience is largely generated and maintained by the brain and the nervous system, not just by tissue or structural damage.

So the treatments we use, which are like pain reprocessing therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy adapted for pain, and emotional awareness and expression therapy, are all designed to retrain the neural pathways that have learned to produce and amplify pain signals.

So, uh, when you think about traditional pain management, uh, which is the kind that most people have encountered, that tends to be oriented around, uh, finding a physical lesion and then doing something to it or fixing it.

So people typically get imaging, maybe an injection, maybe surgery, and if medication is involved, it's usually aimed at just kind of dulling the signals that are generated by the nervous system.

Can you explain how the brain and the nervous system contribute to long-term pain?

Right

... a little sideways with the US.

We never thought that would happen, but, you know.

So all of a sudden you start realize, okay, we need to take care of ourselves.

But we also asked to be included in the conversation, which has been happening.

I mean, by the fact that...

Like, this is the beginning of a, of an emergency debate, and we're called in first day, which was huge.

Right.

Can you tell me a little bit about the Organization of Exonerees and what your organization does to help exonerees?

Yes.

So the Organization of Exonerees is an organization that was founded by exonerees here in the state of Michigan.

The organization started as a support network for those coming out of prison.

We didn't have a system on the government level to help those that was wrongfully convicted.

It's a system to help those that's on probation and parole.

So we had to create one for ourselves.

Tell me a little bit about your story.

Uh, first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company a bit.

I'm Eric Anderson.

I'm the CEO and the founder of Alloy Therapeutics.

Mm-hmm.

We're a biotech infrastructure company that works with a bunch of companies all over the world-

I think it would show the public and lawmakers the significant steps we're willing to make to keep US user data private.

Well, I'm not sure it's a good idea to go public with something that's still in flux.

We haven't even reached agreement on what constitutes sensitive data or who exactly will be allowed to access that data.

I'm asking you to help stabilize it.

We're on track to submit our final plan for Q3 2022.

Obviously, it'll take time for the committee to review and approve it, but there's no reason to believe there will be any surprises.

We just need to stay the course, and you need to keep electeds at bay for just a little longer, and this will all be behind us soon enough.