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Each episode of the podcast Personal Kosmology traces one seeker's journey: the beliefs they inherited, the experiences that broke them open, and the questions they're still living.
I'm drawn to people who didn't just change their minds, but rebuilt their lives around what they found.
In their stories, you may recognize your own.
PKS01E05 - Linea Avey - Line Cut
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[00:00:00] Devin Martin: Welcome to "The Personal Cosmology of Linea Avey." I'm your host, Devin Martin, and I'm excited about today. Um, you're a new friend. I think we met about a year and a half ago. And I don't know if you realize, it was, uh, that dinner we met at, at a friend's house, was a, a pivotal moment in my life. It was an inception moment for Austin for me.
[00:00:23] Devin Martin: That dinner had amazing people at it.
[00:00:26] Linea Avey: It did.
[00:00:26] Devin Martin: I was then invited to another couple of events, met more amazing people, and then invited to more events and more dinners. And everywhere I went, people were like, "When are you moving to Austin?" And I was like, "Well, if these are the people who are in Austin, I wanna live there."
[00:00:40] Devin Martin: And you and I spoke briefly, and I think we both decided we should speak again, and we set up a phone call with no real agenda, and I think we talked for, like, two hours And maybe 20 different topics. I feel like everywhere my mind could go, you were right there and pushing me further. And what was fascinating to me was if people know who you are, they probably know you as Linda, the co-founder of 23andMe.
[00:01:05] Devin Martin: But that was 20 years ago.
[00:01:06] Linea Avey: Yep.
[00:01:07] Devin Martin: And we didn't talk about that once. And you are an investor, an advisor, an entrepreneur, and someone I think of as being at the cutting edge of biology and technology, especially AI-driven technology. Um, and, and so I really wanna explore what you're up to now. But my inspiration for this podcast was to trace the transformative arc of amazing people.
[00:01:34] Linea Avey: Okay.
[00:01:34] Devin Martin: So I'm gonna ask you to slow way down and go way back, and set it up for us. Help me understand where were you born? What was the culture you were born into? What was the worldview you had? And then what were the moments in your life when that was changed or altered or transformed? And what's the reason why I'm fascinated by you is 'cause I feel like a lot of people have their mind blown, but very few people have the courage to then change their whole life around it.
[00:02:02] Devin Martin: And I feel like you have just followed your curiosity to amazing places, and so I want to help people understand how such a thing is possible by tracing the arc of your life. Sound like fun?
[00:02:11] Linea Avey: Yeah. I'm in.
[00:02:12] Devin Martin: Okay, cool. So take us back. Literally, where were you born?
[00:02:15] Linea Avey: So I was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
[00:02:18] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:02:19] Linea Avey: Um, you know, middle of the upper Midwest, and, um, my family, all of my ancestors came from northern Europe, settled in Iowa, northwest Iowa, and were farmers. All of them.
[00:02:30] Devin Martin: Oh, wow.
[00:02:30] Linea Avey: And they came in the 1800s during the Homestead Act. They got their 160 acres, and that was the genesis of my family in America.
[00:02:39] Linea Avey: And, and so, you know, coming from those farming roots, and, and then my dad was one, I think one of the first people in his family to actually go to college.
[00:02:50] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:02:50] Linea Avey: And his father had left the farm. You know, they talk about the people leaving the farm, and he had moved into town and ran the local gas station.
[00:02:58] Linea Avey: And so my dad didn't really grow up on the farm. My mom did. Um, but they were of that culture. But that was sort of the jumping out point for my dad. And then he ended up playing, um, professional baseball in the minor leagues and- Mm ... and then was in the Navy. So he got out of Iowa, and I think that's really what, where some of the change started happening for him.
[00:03:20] Linea Avey: And, and then, you know, he ended up deciding to go into the ministry, so he went to the seminary in Minneapolis for Lutheran, the Lutheran Church, became a Lutheran minister. And so I was raised, you know, kind of in that kind of culture. And I've, I've actually gone back to read more about Martin Luther- Mm
[00:03:39] Linea Avey: and what his writings were and what he was seeing back in those days in Europe, and it's fascinating to understand the history of how that arose, of how Lutheranism arose, and I'm, I'm becoming a student of it. Even though I grew up in the culture, you just took it for granted. Like, yeah, I'm Lutheran. But it-
[00:03:56] Devin Martin: And do you remember how you felt about it at the time?
[00:03:59] Devin Martin: Did you feel connected to the church and to the Bible and to the practices? No,
[00:04:05] Linea Avey: not really. That was what's, was so interesting. Like, I've told the story, like, I would, as a little girl, like, in second or third grade, I'd go over and play at a friend's, and maybe we'd st- I'd stay for dinner, and they'd say, "Linda, would you like to say grace?"
[00:04:16] Linea Avey: And I'd be like, "Oh, shit." We didn't say grace in my house before we- Really? No. We were... I mean, we lived a pretty areligious life at home, which was really odd, you know, 'cause here was my dad, and my dad was a very, uh, I mean, very dynamic. It, every time we moved into a community, he would become a leader in the community.
[00:04:36] Linea Avey: Everybody looked up to him. He was just, he had so much charisma, and he could have done anything. Mm. He was a super smart man, and he chose, though, to go into the Lutheran ministry, and it was- But
[00:04:48] Devin Martin: he wasn't preaching at home. Nope. He wasn't talking the-
[00:04:51] Linea Avey: None of that ...
[00:04:51] Devin Martin: you should follow.
[00:04:52] Linea Avey: No, no, no. Not at all.
[00:04:53] Linea Avey: And so by the time I graduated high school, I pretty much considered myself an atheist. And- Mm ... and then got into college, and I was-
[00:05:01] Devin Martin: Wait, and tell me that moment. I'm, I'm always w- when I work with people as a executive coach, that is always a pivotal moment, and the question is n- now is not what did you choose to do with your life, it's did you make a choice, or did you just fall into the slipstream?
[00:05:15] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[00:05:16] Devin Martin: Like, what were you led to believe happens after high school? What was your future supposed to be?
[00:05:20] Linea Avey: Well, it, it was interesting because I knew where I was gonna go to college with- it, I d- I only applied to one school, which was the school- Mm ... my dad went to. It was a Lutheran Norwegian college in Sioux Falls.
[00:05:31] Linea Avey: And I was like, "I'm going to Augustana, Augie." That's, that's, that was path was kinda written for me. We didn't have a lot of money or resources, so I couldn't even consider where else I might go, and, and so that was my path. And so going into it, you know, I was kinda like I, you know, I wasn't preached to at home, and then I'm going to this Lutheran college, and they had, like, chapel you had to go to-
[00:05:54] Linea Avey: a couple times a week, and I was, like, chafing already at that. I was like... And finally they kind of less- they, they, you know, removed that, you know, you have to go to chapel, and it, it, you know, it lightened up a little bit. And, but I have to say, most of the kids I went to school with, they were not Bible pounding.
[00:06:12] Linea Avey: You know? Yeah. We were just sort of, kind of your average Midwestern school, and it didn't feel like it had this religious overlay as much as... But it was just part of the culture I grew up in, though. You know? Yeah. It was, most people were Lutheran. We did have Catholics. Um, but, you know, it was but- Not a
[00:06:28] Devin Martin: lot of Jews or Muslims or-
[00:06:29] Linea Avey: Oh, gosh no.
[00:06:31] Linea Avey: No. Mm-hmm. I don't think I met someone who was Jewish until I moved to California after college.
[00:06:37] Devin Martin: I w- I once met somebody w- and, uh, yeah,
[00:06:38] Linea Avey: go ahead. Oh, I take that back. So I took the Judaism class in college at Augustana, and the teacher was Murray Harr, and he was this Jewish man who decided to become a Lutheran minister.
[00:06:54] Devin Martin: Oh, wow.
[00:06:54] Linea Avey: It was real, and I loved Murray. He was the best professor. And I found out later that he converted back to Judaism. Which I b- I sat down to write him an email the other day, just 'cause I'm so curious, like, what was his path, right? What drove him to make these big decisions in his life? So, so yes, I did meet Murray, and he was our professor, and he was lovely.
[00:07:17] Devin Martin: I, I moved maybe when I was 30, maybe a little earlier, from Boston to North Carolina, and- I was in South Carolina a good amount w- for work, and there were a lot of people there who would s- snap back when I said I was Jewish.
[00:07:31] Linea Avey: Really?
[00:07:32] Devin Martin: And one person walked up to me, and they started putting their fingers on my head.
[00:07:35] Devin Martin: And I'm like, "What are you doing?" He went, "Checking for horns."
[00:07:38] Linea Avey: No.
[00:07:39] Devin Martin: And I- I- I- Obviously joking ... I- a- and, and he goes, "I- I'm joking, but I was actually told to look when I was younger, that I was raised to look for horns on Jewish people's heads."
[00:07:48] Linea Avey: Oh,
[00:07:48] Devin Martin: no way. And he was a great guy. It was, it was, it was kinda funny, but-
[00:07:51] Linea Avey: Wow
[00:07:51] Devin Martin: I, it didn't occur to me at that point that people would have never met one.
[00:07:55] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[00:07:55] Devin Martin: They would just have, I guess-
[00:07:56] Linea Avey: Yeah, it's still, and to this day, you know, I- it'd be interesting to know how many Jewish people live in the upper Midwest. It's probably not that much. It's still pretty isolated in that way.
[00:08:07] Devin Martin: And what were your thoughts about career at this point?
[00:08:09] Devin Martin: Did you pick a major? Did you have a vision for the life you wanted to live?
[00:08:13] Linea Avey: Well, so when I started my freshman year, my brother was a senior, and he was an accounting major. And my summer job growing up and through high school was doing, I worked at a gas station, pumped gas, did all that. We had tourists who came through, 'cause I was in the Black Hills in South Dakota.
[00:08:27] Linea Avey: That's where I grew up. And so we had the, all the tourists on their way to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, and so it was a really fun summer job because I got to be outside. But then in the winters, I did the books, and so I was the bookkeeper.
[00:08:40] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:08:40] Linea Avey: And so my brother's a senior in college where I'm going, and he's an accounting major, so I, I declared accounting as my major.
[00:08:47] Linea Avey: And after the first semester, I said to Paul, my brother, like, "You actually like this stuff?" I found it extremely dry and boring. And, and but luckily I had taken the non-major biology, 'cause I went to a liberal ar- it was a liberal arts school, and so I took the non-majors biology class, and I loved it. And I went to the professor and I said, "Did you make this fun for us non-majors?"
[00:09:11] Linea Avey: And he's like, "Linda, I think you like science." And that's ... I, I switched gears, and I- Hmm ... changed majors to biology at that point. And so that, I mean, talk about life shifting. Yeah. 'Cause now I got to study ... I, it was so fun to me that I almost felt guilty. Like-
[00:09:27] Devin Martin: Was this, was this like a moment, like, where your mind turned on when you realized academics were not what you thought?
[00:09:32] Linea Avey: Yes. Yeah, totally. Like, and, and the, the critical importance of the decision you make-
[00:09:38] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[00:09:38] Linea Avey: which could affect your, the rest of your life. And, and, it, I just thank that professor in that biology class that it just opened this world to me. 'Cause I, you know, in high school we didn't ... I went to a very small high school.
[00:09:50] Linea Avey: We didn't even have a physics class. Hmm. Nothing in physics. In fact, my chemistry teacher in high school gave me a physics books t- book to look at, 'cause he just could tell that I kind of had a bent for, for science. Um, and so sure enough, that's what I discovered freshman year in college, and, and then I was on my path.
[00:10:08] Linea Avey: And luckily, my sophomore year was the genetics course.
[00:10:12] Devin Martin: Hmm.
[00:10:12] Linea Avey: And I loved it. I just ... There was something so beautiful about the DNA molecule and how, how it does these ... It, 'cause biology can feel kinda squishy. Like, you know, you've got these things going on, and if you study biology at a macro scale, it doesn't have this real specific sort
[00:10:31] Devin Martin: of- It's not algorithmic.
[00:10:31] Devin Martin: It's-
[00:10:32] Linea Avey: Exactly. It's not formula driven. And so it w- to me, DNA was the perfect sort of chemistry of life.
[00:10:37] Devin Martin: And at that moment, where were we in the understanding of DNA? We hadn't fully sequenced the genome.
[00:10:43] Linea Avey: Oh, heck no. No. I mean, you know, the, the molecule, the structure was identified in the '50s. And so, you know, we were
[00:10:51] Linea Avey: Some work was, you know, interesting work was happening, and a lot of people were will- winning Nobel Prizes around it. Mm-hmm. But, um, but it was really that first draft of the human genome where we ... That just opened the f- flood gates to all kinds of research.
[00:11:07] Devin Martin: All right, so then what happened next? Did, did, did you see a career path?
[00:11:12] Devin Martin: Did you think what... Did you have any idea what a job could be in-
[00:11:14] Linea Avey: Well, so most of the bio majors in my school were either pre-med or they were gonna go to med school or get their PhD. So in my head, that was, like, the only two options I had, is you either were gonna go to medical school or you're gonna get a PhD.
[00:11:27] Linea Avey: And so fortunately, right out of school, I got a job at UC Irvine in, in a research lab. Mm-hmm. And it was through kind of family connections. And, and so I go into that job just like, "I'm gonna figure this out." And there were med students coming in and out of our building, and the, the anatomy lab was on the lower floor, and so I was hearing the med students.
[00:11:47] Linea Avey: And, and then doing the, the research work in the lab was super interesting, and I worked for the most wonderful man. Alan Buckbitt was the, the PhD kinda running the research lab, and so supportive. I learned a ton from him. But he spent most of his time on his computer in his office writing grants, just to keep the money- Yeah
[00:12:06] Linea Avey: flowing and to keep our work going. And then every now and then, he'd kind of jokingly come in the lab and it's like, "Can I, can I come in and kill a rabbit or kill some mice or something, do something fun?" And I thought, "Oh my God, if he's coming into the lab to do, you know, fun things," I would... That was kinda when I made the decision I, I'm not good on that track, going down the track of getting my PhD, because I kinda saw what that looked like.
[00:12:29] Linea Avey: Mm-hmm. And, and then luckily I got a job in San Francisco then. He, Alan helped me get a job with a company that sold technology into the research world And it was called Waters Chromo- Chromatography, and it was HPLC systems that you use to separate out different molecules and, and mi- You take a mixture and you put it into an HPLC and it separates out all the different components.
[00:12:55] Devin Martin: Hmm.
[00:12:55] Linea Avey: It's a very powerful technology, but that was my first job out of the lab to
[00:13:00] Devin Martin: go to work. Is this like enzymes and centrifuges and things like that or?
[00:13:02] Linea Avey: Um, no. I mean, it's just, it's a pumping system basically, and then you have columns that are designed in a specific way with chemistry inside them that help you separate out mixtures.
[00:13:11] Linea Avey: Hmm. And so you're able to see ... And then you see peaks coming off on the detector that's detecting, okay, now I've got this component of the mixture coming out, and it's how they kind of adhere to what's in the column. And so those column chemistries then can help you separate out what's in a mixture. And so it's a, it's pretty simple idea, but the complexity of the packing material in those columns was really important.
[00:13:36] Linea Avey: And you'd pick the, the column based on what you were trying to separate. And then the pump would just pump the solute through the column, and then you'd inject your mixture, and then you'd see these peaks coming off. And then you could actually collect each peak as it came out of the column- Hmm ... and then analyze that, like through mass spec or, you know, what other technologies would come from that.
[00:13:57] Linea Avey: So it was a ... And I learned how to run an HPLC in the lab, and that's why I was able to get this job.
[00:14:02] Devin Martin: And were you starting to see business as interesting as well? Was ... I'm curious where the entrepreneurial itch started to come in.
[00:14:10] Linea Avey: Um, I think it was more just practicality that I saw a path to working in an industry I found super interesting without having to be the person sitting at the lab bench- Mm-hmm
[00:14:22] Linea Avey: and not doing the drudgery of the lab work. And, uh, you know, I, I didn't, I may not have given research enough chance to, like, go into a different field that I might find more interesting, but I just saw it as, wow, I get to go and meet with all these scientists, talk about the technology that I'm, of the company I'm working for, but then I get to walk out and I don't have to stay there- Right
[00:14:45] Linea Avey: day after day. And that's kind of where I realized I'm not cut out for sort of run-of-the-mill, stick to something, and stay with it for years over time. It was more like I got to go... And fortunately, when I moved to San Francisco to take this new job, it was right when biotech was really coming out of its gates.
[00:15:05] Linea Avey: And, like, Genentech was my customer- Oh, yeah ... and Cetus, and Chiron, and the academic labs at UCSF and Berkeley. And I, you know, I was a ki- like a kid in a candy store, 'cause I'd go and meet with these top s- sometimes Nobel-winning scientists, and be able to go in and talk about what I was bringing to the table in terms of technology, and I loved it.
[00:15:27] Linea Avey: It was, I was learning so much about what each lab was working on, 'cause you kinda had to understand the science-
[00:15:34] Devin Martin: Right ...
[00:15:34] Linea Avey: to be able to be collaborative with them and what they needed technology-wise. And you're
[00:15:37] Devin Martin: getting this bird's-eye view of the industry- Yes ... sampling in all the different companies and laboratories.
[00:15:42] Linea Avey: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:15:43] Devin Martin: And I'd have to think that's great for seeing what the cutting edge i- is, for understanding what's emerging or what's not getting done yet.
[00:15:50] Linea Avey: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then so I moved to San Francisco and I'm doing this job, and then I meet my Who was the guy who was to become my husband for 34 years.
[00:16:00] Linea Avey: Mm. And as it turned out, he worked at Merrill Lynch, and he was working in San Francisco, and then he got promoted and moved six times. So after we got married, um, we were in the Bay Area, and we got relocated to Boston, which was really... I mean, that, other than San Francisco- That's
[00:16:18] Devin Martin: the epicenter of
[00:16:19] Linea Avey: biotech
[00:16:19] Linea Avey: of biotech. Yeah. And so I was so fortunate to land in Boston and get another job working for a technology company. And then I was at Harvard and, you know, and, and all the companies in, in Boston doing very, you know, kind of, and kind of had this competitive angle with the Bay Area. Yeah. And so I got to meet all these personalities and all these, these scientists who were just, you know, some of the best in the world.
[00:16:44] Linea Avey: And so I- it was really such an education.
[00:16:48] Devin Martin: And I think of you from meeting you and spending time with you as a deeply spiritual person.
[00:16:53] Linea Avey: Interesting.
[00:16:54] Devin Martin: I mean, your interests go all over the map, and I, you know, we've talked about consciousness-
[00:17:00] Linea Avey: Yes ...
[00:17:00] Devin Martin: and, you know, fringy things and, you know, like your, that dinner we were at was full of people who were into psychedelics and- Mm-hmm
[00:17:06] Devin Martin: aliens and, you know, really exploring, like, w- what is the mind? Is it an antenna? And I'm curious, like, you, you went from Lutheran to atheist. Were you thinking about the world in those ways then, or were you really focused on biology and science and-
[00:17:23] Linea Avey: Yeah, I think, and it was interesting. So my senior year in college, you know, I'm at this Lutheran college.
[00:17:28] Linea Avey: They had this thing called Senior Seminar And basically, they, in, in the field of biology or the study of biology, they were like, "This is all great. We've taught you all this great science, and now we're gonna bring you back." And it was sort of like they were pulling us back into the faith.
[00:17:44] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:17:44] Linea Avey: And I felt like it was wrong.
[00:17:48] Linea Avey: It just didn't feel right to me, 'cause I felt like they were trying to gloss over all this amazing science we'd learned, and try to put it back in the context of Christianity, and I wasn't buying it.
[00:17:58] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:17:58] Linea Avey: Absolutely was not buying it. So that's ki- really when the door kinda slammed for me. Exactly. Because I was like, "I'm in science, and I don't see any room for spirituality."
[00:18:09] Linea Avey: That's, you know ... And, and it's really interesting how my thinking has changed on this.
[00:18:14] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:18:14] Linea Avey: And my husband, Anil, has really been bringing me into his way of thinking around this, which is, it's just been beautiful to, to really s- expand my thinking beyond this. And, and as you know, Anil has a PhD in cell biology/biochemistry.
[00:18:31] Linea Avey: He was also just hardcore- Hyper,
[00:18:33] Devin Martin: hyper intellectual, but also exploring-
[00:18:35] Linea Avey: Well, and he's a polymath, for sure. Yeah. But he was the same, in the same boat I was, and that was how science worked. Up until very recently, it's, you know, it's the duality, and it came from Descartes, and it was real- And, you know, I'm, I'm repeating a lot of what Anil has taught me.
[00:18:51] Linea Avey: But, you know, they decided that it's, it's material science that we need to study, and this was the start of the Enlightenment. But now we're realizing it was kind of the Dark Ages, right?
[00:19:03] Devin Martin: And the word metaphysics somehow became a dirty word as opp-
[00:19:06] Linea Avey: Exactly ...
[00:19:07] Devin Martin: as opposed to a placeholder for the things that physics c- can't yet explain.
[00:19:11] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:19:11] Devin Martin: But it's worth pointing physics towards them, and if your mind can't hold the mysteries, how do you actually innovate?
[00:19:17] Linea Avey: Right. But we see the same pattern repeating over and over, and we think, "Oh, we don't do what they did in the past." You know, like Copernicus and, you know, Ptolemy, and, and, you know, all the s- scientists who came forward with new theories of things and got completely canceled, the new word for it.
[00:19:33] Linea Avey: But that is still going on, and w- we're humans, and it's human nature to reject new things, I think. And there are, but there are some people who are like, "Wait." This doesn't seem right. We need to think more broadly or think in a different direction, and that's where advances are made. Yeah. And now we believe we're on this cusp of saying materialist science has gotten us as far as it can.
[00:19:58] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:19:58] Linea Avey: But now we gotta open up our vision and our minds to what else is out there, and that's super exciting. And a lot of that talk we find going on here in Austin.
[00:20:08] Devin Martin: So much. But at that time, would you have called yourself a material reductionist? Like, the way you were thinking about genetics- Oh- ... and chemistry
[00:20:15] Linea Avey: absolutely ...
[00:20:16] Devin Martin: you were looking for material, mathematical proofs of function in the body.
[00:20:22] Linea Avey: Totally. I mean, that was really ... And, and with such blinders on. So, you know, I ... So with my career, we kind of bounced back and forth from Boston, then we moved to San Diego, and then we were at DC for six years, and then finally moved back to the Bay Area.
[00:20:37] Linea Avey: And then this was, like, 2004, so the human genome had been sequenced in- Mm ... around 2000, 2001, and now all these companies were cropping up to do the next level of genetics research. And I landed in one of them, company called Perlegen Sciences, and we were arguably doing, I think, some of the first what they call the genome-wide association studies, because we now had access to the f- the full, it was kind of a draft sequence.
[00:21:04] Linea Avey: But that just opened up powerful capability to start studying. And I was on this track of, we need to learn the genetics of all these diseases. Like, that was, like, the singular focus. Mm. And in some ways that's good, because you isolate down to something that is arguably very important in the study of human disease.
[00:21:24] Linea Avey: And so I was working on that and going around trying to find DNA samples from repositories that we could study and do- '
[00:21:32] Devin Martin: Cause there wasn't a lot of data back then, right?
[00:21:34] Linea Avey: Oh, there wasn't, there weren't a lot
[00:21:35] Devin Martin: of samples. I mean, the, the first genome cost-
[00:21:38] Linea Avey: Oh, that- ... some,
[00:21:38] Devin Martin: some insane amount to sequence.
[00:21:40] Linea Avey: Yeah, like, I hear, you hear numbers anywhere from 300 million to 3 billion or 2 billion or whatever.
[00:21:44] Linea Avey: It was a lot of money for one human sequence. Yeah. And so, but what that c- that draft created was now the ability to go in and say, "Okay, we know what the human genome structure looks like, and because we have that sequence now," the first thing we did was- Because e- every, I think most people are aware now that humans are, like, 99.5% the same genetically, right?
[00:22:06] Linea Avey: Yeah. And it w- from the germline DNA. And what we needed to know is where we're different, because that's the interesting stuff that we can look at. And so the first thing that was done, uh, we mapped sort of those variations across populations, and that was a, a global project called the HapMap project.
[00:22:24] Linea Avey: And what we were then able to find are where are humans different, and especially from one sort of ethnic group to another- Hmm ... and map that. And that HapMap became the basis then for creating now arrays of, of just those differences in the human genome that we could look at, because it was sort of the idea was, if it's a common disease, there's probably a common genetic element to it.
[00:22:48] Linea Avey: And we found what those common markers were, and we mapped them. I'm not saying we, me, but, you know, the scientific community did all this amazing work, very rapid fire. So when I joined Perlegen in, I think it was 2003, two years after the human genome- Hmm ... it- we were able to start building these chips now and take DNA from patients with a disease and healthy controls, and then look at those genetic variations and see where are we different.
[00:23:17] Linea Avey: Amazing. And that, the, the supposition was we will start to find the genetic underpinnings of common disease.
[00:23:23] Devin Martin: It, it must have felt, I'm guessing, like working in AI feels now. Like, you're on the cutting edge of something that's about to transform humanity.
[00:23:32] Linea Avey: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And, you know, I have to hand it to the guys who started Perlegen.
[00:23:37] Linea Avey: Um, they raised $100 million, and r- we call it resequencing 'cause they used that draft of the human genome to kind of go in and resequence 50 individuals. So, but now it was- Hmm ... $2 million-
[00:23:50] Devin Martin: Each ...
[00:23:51] Linea Avey: uh, per genome.
[00:23:52] Devin Martin: Wow.
[00:23:53] Linea Avey: And for $100 million, we got 50 genomes done. So- ... you know, that was the progress that was being made in the field after the Human Genome Project was insane.
[00:24:03] Devin Martin: And then tell me the genesis of 23andMe. Did the technology change? Did you see that the sequencing was getting cheaper? Was that what sparked it?
[00:24:11] Linea Avey: Yeah. So, so after Perlegen, and Perlegen was a spin-out of this company called Affymetrix. And Affymetrix is, was the leading sort of gene chip company. And sort of those projects, those, you know, those genome-wide association studies were built on Affymetrix technology.
[00:24:27] Linea Avey: Mm. So I went to work there in the translational medicine group, and I, you know, I was trying, and we were trying to find studies where our technology was being used, and it could result maybe in a diagnostic. So some researcher is doing a study in epilepsy, and if we give him better price technology, maybe we can negotiate an agreement that whatever he discovers, we could jointly develop a diagnostic tool.
[00:24:52] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:24:52] Linea Avey: So that was my job, and I was out, you know, meeting with all these groups. It was a really interesting job. Um, but it was kinda coming up dry. Like, we weren't finding the projects.
[00:25:03] Devin Martin: Was there still the belief that there were single gene associations, or you were looking for complex-
[00:25:08] Linea Avey: Oh, yeah ... associations?
[00:25:09] Linea Avey: It was multigenic- Yeah, okay ... for sure. Yeah, I mean, we, most of the single gene disorders we had found- Okay ... the underlying gene for that, and those are the ones where it's just like you get an impact, and it's kinda game over genetically.
[00:25:21] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:25:21] Linea Avey: Whereas the common disease, like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, we understood that it was multigenic.
[00:25:26] Linea Avey: There were gonna be many genes involved, and so they were complex studies but still worth doing. Um, and then it was funny. I was actually still at Perlegen, and I went to this little trade show, and like the scientific trade shows are, you know, kind of mom and pop companies. And, and there was this little company with a table that said, "Get DNA from saliva," and I was like, "What?"
[00:25:48] Linea Avey: Mm. "That, that can't work." And so they had free tubes to take, so I took, picked up a tube, took it back to the lab at Perlegen, and I was like, "Guys, wouldn't this be crazy if we could get DNA from saliva?" And they're like, "Well, probably won't work, but Linda, why don't you do it?" And I was like, "All right." So I spit in the tube, and about a week later I went down into the lab, and I'm like, "Guys, did it work?"
[00:26:09] Linea Avey: And they're like, "Yeah, it worked great." And then, and then it's like, "Well, what did you do with my s- my DNA?" And they were of course, "Well, we ran it against one of the chips." And I'm like Bingo, my DNA is sitting on a server in the company, and I can't wait to get my hands on it. Mm. It was like that curiosity just went boom.
[00:26:26] Linea Avey: And, and I, you know, I asked, and one of the scientists was like, "Sure, I'll put it on." You know, it was a pretty big file at the time, but they're like, "Yeah, we'll give you it, that data set." And, and then I got it, and I'm like, "I have no idea what to do with this." There's
[00:26:39] Devin Martin: not a lot of normative data to compare it against.
[00:26:41] Linea Avey: No, no. And there were, you know, you have to have an interface to go in, 'cause I could have gone in and, you know, I know ab- you can look up certain genes, and a certain mutation in a gene might mean you're at higher risk for something, right? We had-
[00:26:52] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[00:26:52] Linea Avey: some of that knowledge. And, and but then that's kinda what triggered it.
[00:26:57] Linea Avey: It's like we can get it out of saliva, DNA, and if we can start building an interface, I think people are gonna be curious like I am. Like, they're gonna wanna know what's in, what's living in their genes, right? Mm. And that's really what triggered it. And it was like, it took me talking to various people, both at Perlegen, then when I went to Affymetrix, and fortunately one of my higher-ups at Affymetrix was like, "You've gotta go talk to the CEO about this com- this company idea you have."
[00:27:25] Linea Avey: So I'd kind of formed ... 'Cause I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur.
[00:27:28] Devin Martin: I was gonna say, was, was it in your imagination that you could just have an idea and start a company?
[00:27:32] Linea Avey: Not really, but it kinda hit me that, you know, this is something I wanted to do.
[00:27:39] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:27:39] Linea Avey: I wanted to be the person to bring genetics to the, to consumers and to the population.
[00:27:45] Linea Avey: And, and it's funny 'cause I was reading a book about Google called The Google Story, and the guy who wrote it was, I think, a journalist at Washington Post. And it just kind of ... 'Cause a lot of people back then were like, "How does Google make money again?" You know, the whole AdWords and all that stuff just wasn't abundantly clear to people.
[00:28:04] Linea Avey: So this guy, David Bice, wrote this book about the Google story. And I'm reading it and learning a ton, and then the last chapter was Google Your Genes. Mm. And I was like Oh, you gotta be kidding me. If the Google people are interested in genetics, I'm in there. I'm gonna get in in front of those guys. And so fortunately, at Pearlegen, I met Sergey Brin-
[00:28:25] Devin Martin: Mm
[00:28:25] Linea Avey: co- you know, co-founder of Google, and he and I met at a meeting that was going on in the Bay Area about a d- study we were doing at Pearlegen in Parkinson's, and his-- He was very open about the fact that his mom had Parkinson's. And so he was really curious about what was this genetic study we were doing.
[00:28:42] Linea Avey: And, and so he kind of cornered me at a meeting, um, that we were gi- doing where we were presenting this study, and was just grilling me on what are the P values. He went right into statistics. Yeah. Super smart questions. Yeah. And nailed it. I mean, he knew exactly the right questions to ask. And so that's what kind of started my conversation with Sergey around genetics.
[00:29:04] Linea Avey: And then, then when I had this idea for this crazy startup company, um, that's when I started having more conversations with the Google guys. And I mean, I just feel so lucky that I happened to be living in the Bay Area. Pearlegen was like- Two blocks from Google. We were all in Mountain View. And so everything was in proximity and, and it was that time.
[00:29:25] Linea Avey: You know, we were just living in this heyday, in this go-go, you know, all these crazy startups cropping up, doing all these wild things. And- And
[00:29:33] Devin Martin: did you put together a deck and- Yep. Yep ... raise capital in a tr- in, like, what we think of as a traditional VC way?
[00:29:38] Linea Avey: Yeah, I mean, yeah. And so, you know, the sto- as the story goes, I met Anne Wojcicki, Sergey's girlfriend at the time.
[00:29:46] Linea Avey: Mm. And she also had a biology background, and she'd been investing in hedge funds and in the life science space. And, and she came to one of the meetings that we were having at Google, and it was a little bit before the whole 23andMe idea was percolating, but it was to talk about genetics with the Google guys to see would they...
[00:30:05] Linea Avey: could they come in and fund some research? You know, what, where could that go? And then I remember asking Anne, like, I'd heard about this TED Conference, and I was like... And there was also PC Forum, who, which was run by Esther Dyson, right? And I was like, "Anne, should I go to TED or PC Forum?" And she's like, "Oh, TED, for sure."
[00:30:23] Linea Avey: And as it turned out, there was a famous scientist from Stanford who was giving a talk that year in 2006. And so and it's, back then it was really expensive to go to TED, and so I convinced my, like, two bosses at, at Affymetrix to pay f- my admission to go. Mm. But they saw, you know, that they've got this famous Nobel-winning scientist from Stanford giving a talk.
[00:30:48] Linea Avey: There is something interesting that we should be tracking at this conference. And so I go to TED, it was still in Monterey, and kept bumping into Anne, and she kept grilling me about this startup idea I had. And, you know, at, at the end of the meeting she was like, "I think I wanna do this with you." Mm. Which was really, I...
[00:31:07] Linea Avey: At first I thought she meant she wanted to invest in the company. I didn't think she wanted to come and do it. Um, and that's how we came together and how we were co-founders. And, and then we had a, a third cou- co-founder that I had brought on before Anne, who lived in Washington, a, a dear friend of mine, but he, he just could not move his family from Washington to, um, California, and so he decided to, to kinda opt out at that point.
[00:31:33] Linea Avey: But, um, yeah, so, so it was pretty much Anne and me taking off and doing this crazy thing.
[00:31:40] Devin Martin: And what did you learn- From this. Like if you look back and, and look at that whole experience running this company, what did you learn about humanity? What did you learn about the human body? What did you learn about yourself?
[00:31:52] Linea Avey: Oh gosh. Well, I mean, it was so exciting. Mm-hmm. 'Cause we, we were doing something that a lot of people thought was crazy. And Anne and I were both, we were so united in our belief that this was an important thing we were doing, and we took the science very seriously. I mean, a lot of ... And there was a competitive company that came out a, a little bit after us that we found was actually our ideas were kind of taken to- Really?
[00:32:19] Linea Avey: Yeah. I mean, it was a little bit underhanded how that company started, but you know, it actually worked out great to have another company sort of coming in the space. To
[00:32:27] Devin Martin: normalize
[00:32:28] Linea Avey: the effort? To normalize the idea and, um, but we were, you know, we were just On a tear and, but then the, we came up with the name and 23andMe, and it was...
[00:32:40] Linea Avey: Anne really was very light-hearted about how she positioned things, and she's super fun, super charming woman. And but people started getting the impression like, "Oh, the girls, Anne and Linda are starting this company, and they're, they're silly." 'Cause she would, she would talk about, you know, why can you smell asparagus when you pee after you eat it, you know?
[00:32:59] Linea Avey: And she even made funny buttons of two asparagus heads talking to each other and, you know, trying to make it more approachable, you know? Yeah. And, and making it fun. And so then we kind of got branded as being the fun, not serious company. And yet our first two hires out of Stanford were PhD scientists who came in, and we were just like, "We have to be as true to the science as we possibly can because we're informing the public about what their genes are telling us, and we cannot falter on our commitment to the real science."
[00:33:32] Linea Avey: And so that was a bit of a thing, a challenge for us, is to get over this not being taken seriously. And it, that was kind of challenging, but- Hmm ... I think we, I think we were able to do that because then, you know, we, we also, the thing about our customer base that was so compelling was that... 'Cause in my mind, you don't really learn much when you learn about person's genetics.
[00:33:55] Linea Avey: We know a little bit about the genome. We can tell you a little bit about your risk for disease. But if you're gonna do research, you need to get all the other data. The phenotypic data- Right ... is super important to gather, right? And so we designed surveys to go out and ask our customers, like, "Have you been diagnosed with this disease, that disease?
[00:34:13] Linea Avey: Tell us about yourselves." And upwards of 80% of our customers were responding to those surveys.
[00:34:18] Devin Martin: Wow.
[00:34:19] Linea Avey: Which was phenomenal.
[00:34:21] Devin Martin: It, it, it feels like you're contributing to a project. The- Totally ... in my experience, when, when you get those surveys, you're like- Yeah ... "Oh, this is actually going to be useful if I take part."
[00:34:29] Linea Avey: Yeah. Yeah. And it's still satisfying to say, "No, I haven't been diagnosed with some rare disease," but you're still providing that information. And when combined with your genetics, it's super powerful and useful. And, and actually in these study designs, if you've got the cases which are the people with the disease, if you have twice as many healthy controls, three times as many healthy controls, it just adds to your statistical power.
[00:34:52] Linea Avey: Hmm. And so we were like, "Bring it on. We want as many people answering these surveys as c- as we can get."
[00:34:59] Devin Martin: And so you started to build a community-
[00:35:01] Linea Avey: Yes ...
[00:35:02] Devin Martin: of, I don't know, citizen scientists who wanted to know about themselves, but also wanted to see scientific understanding move forward.
[00:35:09] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:35:10] Devin Martin: Which must have felt amazing.
[00:35:11] Linea Avey: Oh, and it was, you know ... And one of the things I felt very strongly was about was that we build a, a forum for our customers to start sharing with each other. And so we created sort of the beginnings of threads on different reports. Like a research report would come out, and people would learn, "Oh, I have a higher risk for X, Y, or Z disease."
[00:35:29] Linea Avey: And the one that I found most interesting was around Alzheimer's. Mm. And, and it wasn't right away that we started telling people that they were at higher risk, but just people talking about that, and it just created this rich thread of people sharing kinda what they were doing. You know, they have this knowledge now, and what are they doing to try to combat getting Alzheimer's in the future?
[00:35:51] Linea Avey: So a lot of our customers were kind of citizen scientists. They were reading the literature and trying to stay on top of what they were doing to try to avoid ending up with Alzheimer's in their, at, in a later age. And I loved how people were so open and, and sharing all this information. And I, I monitored the communities a lot, just because I thought that's, there's so many rich nuggets in here.
[00:36:14] Devin Martin: Were you starting to see through some of the ideas about just how much you were going to learn from genetics? 'Cause in my experience, a lot of, especially things like the cancer industry right now, like there's genetic capture. There, there, there's a lot of people who believe we're, we're gonna understand the full picture, or at least we should drive treatment primarily through a genetic lens-
[00:36:37] Linea Avey: Yeah
[00:36:38] Devin Martin: as opposed to a both and. Like this is amazing, and there's metabolic, there's environmental, there's consciousness, there's all these other factors.
[00:36:45] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:36:45] Devin Martin: We- were you starting to see the limitations at this point?
[00:36:48] Linea Avey: Well, yes, and in a very specific example. Mm. So early on at Pearligen, I met a woman who is, lives in the Bay Area and has become a crusader for autism.
[00:37:00] Devin Martin: Oh.
[00:37:01] Linea Avey: And so we were, we were wanting to do a, a genome-wide association study in autism, and there was actually a, a, a repository of DNA samples that we could tap into. And then I met Eli- my friend, my now dear friend, Elizabeth Horn, and she was just like, "You know, I gotta say, genetics doesn't explain this."
[00:37:19] Linea Avey: And everybody in the a- the research community was like, "Genetics, genetics, genetics." And- She was just like, "Nope, that's not it." That, and, and we're seeing this rise in the numbers, and even, even the press was coming out like, "Oh, we're just diagnosing more people with autism," making up all of these reasons why the numbers were shooting up.
[00:37:36] Linea Avey: And, you know, I spent a lot of time with her, and she has a daughter who's, um, autistic, and I got a full-blown education from that community. And, and in fact, I went to a fundraiser they were doing at Crissy Field in San Francisco, and I get there, and it's for autism, and yet I'm seeing some k- kids running circles around their parents and some kids in wheelchairs.
[00:38:00] Linea Avey: And it's like ... And that, from a scientific perspective, when you're trying to do a genetics study and your phenotype is all over the map like that-
[00:38:09] Devin Martin: Right ...
[00:38:09] Linea Avey: you're, it's gonna be a gemish. You're not gonna discover anything.
[00:38:13] Devin Martin: You have savants, you have
[00:38:14] Linea Avey: non-verbal
[00:38:15] Devin Martin: people. Yes. You have this-
[00:38:15] Linea Avey: Yes, and it is this spectrum disorder, and that's where I really started to get an education from the community of families- Mm
[00:38:23] Linea Avey: that this is not genetic. There might be subsets where it is. Right. But when you're looking at a broad spectrum, what else is involved? And now I think we're realizing environment is a huge player in it, you know, and there are all kinds of theories around I don't wanna get branded an anti-vaxxer. But, you know, there are now scientists who are, and a lot of doctors, who are on board with, you know, vaccines aren't 100% safe.
[00:38:48] Linea Avey: They just aren't. They're good for a bulk of people. That's my belief, that, you know, I got my kids vaccinated, I, I took the COVID vaccine, I did all of that. But for some people, it's unfortunate that they have a bad reaction.
[00:39:04] Devin Martin: And for me, it's like a lot of the pharmaceutical industry, we do studies on individual treatments.
[00:39:11] Devin Martin: We never do a study on five-
[00:39:13] Linea Avey: Yeah ...
[00:39:14] Devin Martin: six drugs- Right ... or 20 vaccine exposures.
[00:39:17] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:39:17] Devin Martin: It's way too complex. But this is the new- And it is possible something is safe in s- Yeah ... in one dose-
[00:39:21] Linea Avey: Right ...
[00:39:22] Devin Martin: and toxic in a higher dose combined with other things.
[00:39:24] Linea Avey: Yes. It, totally, 100%.
[00:39:26] Devin Martin: And it's like the, it's almost too nuance, nuanced of a conversation for the public to engage in these days.
[00:39:31] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:39:31] Devin Martin: I, my belief is that RFK is encouraging this. He's not an anti-vaxxer, that he's actually saying we need more science.
[00:39:37] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:39:37] Devin Martin: But I think that possibility of taking away vaccines is so triggering- Abso- ... that people can't hear it ...
[00:39:42] Linea Avey: 100%. Yeah. It's, it's such a fraught topic, and it's become, it has become political.
[00:39:48] Linea Avey: But when, you know, and I see my friends on that side of it who are just wanna brand people immediately as being anti-vaxxer, and they just put them- Yeah ... down like, "You don't know what you're talking about," and I'm like, "Have you spent any time with these parents? Do you know what they're going through with their children?"
[00:40:02] Linea Avey: And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna put a label on anyone because we simply don't know yet. I mean, people will be out, "Oh, we've done the studies. We've looked at the data. There's no correlation." I don't believe that. I just, I think we have to keep asking the questions. We have to keep looking. We can't just say, science is never done.
[00:40:21] Linea Avey: It's, it's always a work in progress. And I just think we should gather more data and, and support people, you know? And, and be willing to listen to them. It's so important to listen.
[00:40:31] Devin Martin: And this is my fascination, is people who don't collapse into premature certainty.
[00:40:35] Linea Avey: Yes.
[00:40:36] Devin Martin: I mean, in my experience, if you look at the founders of quantum physics, a guy, Ken Wilber, wrote a book called Quantum Questions where he collected Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, all their writings.
[00:40:47] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[00:40:47] Devin Martin: And they largely said there are certain aspects of reality physics we'll never touch. Yes, I'm obsessed with science. I wanna do more science, and there's something else going on in the universe. And they, they were mystics. Yeah. And it was fascinating to me that they, they could hold the paradox of like, I really wanna understand everything, and also life will always be m- a mystery, and that's humbling.
[00:41:09] Devin Martin: And so I will never be certain about my theories. I will always look for my theories to break down later.
[00:41:13] Linea Avey: Right. Right.
[00:41:14] Devin Martin: And I love that.
[00:41:14] Linea Avey: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, going back to Descartes, he wasn't saying that we shouldn't It was just sort of like a separation in that dualistic view, but it didn't mean it wasn't there.
[00:41:25] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:41:26] Linea Avey: It didn't negate it. It's like, but we're just, we're gonna put the blinders on to that for now, and we're gonna go hardcore materialist, but that's always been there, and we, now I think is the time. It's gonna start opening up.
[00:41:38] Devin Martin: Yeah. So tell me about the transition out of 23andMe, and like what you were thinking would be next for yourself.
[00:41:45] Linea Avey: So it, you know, it was a tough transition, and I, I didn't feel like my work there was done. Mm-hmm. And had a lot of ideas for where I thought the company should go, but that's all behind me, and but when I left, this notion of collecting the phenotypic data I thought was really important. And so I wanted to create a way for people to gather their own personal data together, and it was right when the whole wearable space was taking off.
[00:42:12] Linea Avey: Mm. And- I
[00:42:13] Devin Martin: just noticed your-
[00:42:14] Linea Avey: I have an Oura. Yeah, I have an Oura, yeah. And the Apple Watch, and I have a whole bin full. A suite
[00:42:18] Devin Martin: of things you've tested?
[00:42:19] Linea Avey: Oh, yeah. It's pretty funny. I'm keeping it just for historic reasons- ... because of all the companies that failed, but I went to all the quantified self meetings, and I was just really thinking about how can we passively collect all the data coming off our bodies?
[00:42:32] Devin Martin: Mm. '
[00:42:32] Linea Avey: Cause the genetics is super easy. Somebody spits in a tube, and you're done.
[00:42:36] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:42:36] Linea Avey: But the phenotypic is that's, that's where you want time course. You want to collect over time where people are doing different things or eating different foods, and, and, and so we had a company called Curious where we were building that.
[00:42:50] Linea Avey: And, um, it was really interesting. We got in kind of with a group of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome-
[00:42:57] Devin Martin: Mm ...
[00:42:57] Linea Avey: who felt very, um, sort of left out of the medical realm because the doctors did not know what to do with them. They didn't know what to tell them, and so they kinda took it on themselves like, "Well, I'm gonna just have to track..."
[00:43:10] Linea Avey: 'Cause they just felt like they were on a roller coaster.
[00:43:12] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:43:13] Linea Avey: And they'd be in a position and then feeling better, and then suddenly they'd have a crash. And they're like, "Was it my sleep? Was it my environment? Was it what I ate? Was it I didn't m- you know, I was too active." And so we kind of built this a- with that community in mind.
[00:43:25] Linea Avey: Mm. And it was an app that you could track anything you wanted. You create a tag, and you track it. And, and then people started kind of running their own experiments, like, "I'm only gonna eat these foods for the next two weeks, and I'm gonna track my symptoms, and I'm gonna see, did I learn anything from that?"
[00:43:41] Linea Avey: So we created a whole app around that. And we started getting traction in chronic fatigue, some people with Lyme, and-
[00:43:48] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[00:43:48] Linea Avey: and, you know-
[00:43:49] Devin Martin: There's a whole world which I'm now very familiar with, I spent years in it, um, of just mysterious illnesses. Yes. Doctors-
[00:43:54] Linea Avey: Yeah, that are
[00:43:55] Devin Martin: left
[00:43:55] Linea Avey: out ... depending,
[00:43:56] Devin Martin: doctors are left, and you know, I, I spent years doing all this tracking on my own.
[00:44:00] Devin Martin: Thought I had Lyme. Definitely had some- Oh, wow ... definitely had some form of long COVID, but ultimately I found black mold in my house. And the COVID was like, I had a little fire burning, and the COVID was like gasoline dumped on the fire.
[00:44:12] Linea Avey: Oh, wow.
[00:44:13] Devin Martin: And then it was mast cell activation syndrome, and you know, and so it's my sleep, my diet, my exercise, my stress levels.
[00:44:19] Devin Martin: Ultimately, food became a major trigger. Mm-hmm. Saunas, sweating. It's, it's like a full-time job, and it's incredibly complex- Yes ... to understand. And when you're not feeling well- And if your, and if your brain f- is fogged- Yes ... your memory is corrupt.
[00:44:31] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[00:44:32] Devin Martin: I mean, I, it, my heart goes out to everybody who's ever f- and, and I've, I have so many clients who have talked to the world's leading experts in this, this, and this, and this, and none of them agree.
[00:44:39] Linea Avey: Right.
[00:44:39] Devin Martin: And so I'm, I love that you built that.
[00:44:41] Linea Avey: Well, and it, you know, and it was really, uh, 'cause, because I had two other co-founders of Curious, and one of them had chronic fatigue syndrome- Mm ... our designer. And, and she's super smart, and insightful, and intuitive, and she just knew, like if we, if we could build this ability for people to track all these things, but the problem was having the energy to manually track a bunch of things.
[00:45:04] Linea Avey: Yeah. And that's, so that's why we were like, okay, wearables. D- passively track by just wearing something.
[00:45:09] Devin Martin: And were you looking at HRV back then?
[00:45:11] Linea Avey: Um, it hadn't come out on the Oura Ring yet. I knew, we knew the importance of it, especially going back to my friend Elizabeth. She stayed on top of the literature, and monitoring HRV in autistic kids was really important.
[00:45:22] Linea Avey: Oh,
[00:45:23] Devin Martin: interesting.
[00:45:23] Linea Avey: Yeah. And so it's funny because autism is kind of at the other end of the spectrum from chronic fatigue syndrome. It's kind of crazy how... You know, and that's what we started to look at these threads of these connections between these various things. And the bottom line, though, is that no VC would fund it.
[00:45:40] Linea Avey: I, I- Really? Yeah. I pounded on doors and tried to get funding for it, and we just, we'd just have enough to keep us kind of eking along, but-
[00:45:48] Devin Martin: This was before, who was, was it Whoop? Who was the first wearable that really changed the public's mind that this is a-
[00:45:54] Linea Avey: Uh, probably Fitbit.
[00:45:55] Devin Martin: Oh, Fitbit.
[00:45:56] Linea Avey: That's right. Yes.
[00:45:56] Linea Avey: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was, I had the Basis watch, which was this huge, ugly wrist-based thing, and it was funny 'cause going back to the Parkinson's thing, I was somehow randomly like had a meeting with a Parkinson's group, and Andy Grove showed up, the founder of Intel, or well, CEO of, of Intel.
[00:46:14] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:46:14] Linea Avey: And he had Parkinson's. He's now passed away.
[00:46:17] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:46:17] Linea Avey: And we're sitting in this meeting, and we're talking with the Michael J. Fox Foundation people, and anyway, and then he, he looks over at me and he's like, "Linda, what's that ugly thing on your wrist?" And I told Andy a little bit about it, and interestingly, Intel bought Basis like three months later.
[00:46:32] Devin Martin: Really?
[00:46:33] Linea Avey: Yeah. So I don't know if, if that conversation had anything to do with it, but-
[00:46:37] Devin Martin: And, and it's shocking that being the co-founder of 23andMe, people weren't just throwing money at you
[00:46:43] Linea Avey: Yeah, one would think.
[00:46:44] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:46:44] Linea Avey: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:46:45] Devin Martin: And so was, how was that? Was that, that must have been demoralizing to have a great idea and-
[00:46:50] Linea Avey: Yeah
[00:46:50] Linea Avey: feel like the world didn't get it. I just, you know, and I think just, you know, looking at the company now and kind of what our, the business model wasn't... But a lot of business models weren't really figured out in the early days back then. But-
[00:47:03] Devin Martin: Sub- subscription models weren't ubiquitous then.
[00:47:05] Linea Avey: No. It was, it was kinda early, and the whole quantified self thing was kind of a niche sort of effort and weirdos in that space- Yeah
[00:47:14] Linea Avey: that I loved, and I was part of that. But yeah, I think we were probably, if anything, just too early. And I think, you know, now there, I think things have come along, and I hear people pitch this now a lot, and I'm just like, "Yep." 'Cause, like, when, when we were getting it going, and we, we found the ring. So Oura was one of the co- Mm
[00:47:33] Linea Avey: companies that I finally got wind of. So a, a Finnish investor who had had put money into Curious had also invested in Oura. And so I was on the phone with, with Timo, and I'm like, "Ah, you know, I, we're just trying out this wearables," 'cause we knew we had to get to passive data collection. And God, the, the wear- the wearables all really suck.
[00:47:55] Linea Avey: Like, I forget who called, some pe- some person in the research world called it the shitbit 'cause the data were so bad coming off of it. And it was like, yeah, and the Basis watch, no. And, and he's like, Timo said, "I think I got a company for you." So he introduced me to the original founders of Oura.
[00:48:11] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:48:12] Linea Avey: And they were just coming over from Finland to the US to raise money.
[00:48:15] Linea Avey: So I, I think I was one of the first people they met And I met with them in Woodside at Buck's. We had breakfast and, you know, and I was like, "Oh, I'll introduce you to investors. I think they're gonna love this." And I got one of the earliest rings from them.
[00:48:27] Devin Martin: And were you c- thinking of yourself as an investor then?
[00:48:29] Linea Avey: No. No, and I didn't invest. You didn't? I didn't have, I didn't have money to invest. Yeah. No, I was, like, just excited about the technology. And, and so I helped them. They did a, a, a fundraising, you know, I forget which platform they used, and so it was early on with them. And then we realized, I don't think they were reporting the HRV data yet, but the chronic fatigue syndrome community really wanted that data.
[00:48:53] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:48:53] Linea Avey: Um, and s-
[00:48:53] Devin Martin: For a long time, you had to wear a chest strap- Yes ... which had, like, a four to five-hour battery life.
[00:48:57] Linea Avey: Right, yeah.
[00:48:58] Devin Martin: I was obsessed with the idea that if we had real-time HRV feedback, like, you eat food, and your HRV changes- Right ... or somebody walks in the room, and you have an emotional response, and then you can start to- See
[00:49:09] Devin Martin: manage your nervous system and, but I think you need the real-time feedback. It doesn't help necessarily at the end of the day.
[00:49:14] Linea Avey: Yeah, and the problem with reading HRV, and this is what the Oura people... I mean, I really respect their original team. They were scientifically so spot on and, and but they did not over-exaggerate the, what their technology could measure.
[00:49:28] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:49:29] Linea Avey: And it's really hard to measure HRV when you're moving. You have to be sitting still, and that's why they only give you a readout overnight.
[00:49:35] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:49:36] Linea Avey: They don't read it during the day-
[00:49:37] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[00:49:37] Linea Avey: because it's gonna be probably bad data. And so, but that, you know, that was the first wearable where I was like, "This is gonna be the thing," and got super excited about that.
[00:49:48] Linea Avey: They got... I introduced them to a lot of my angel friends who invested, who are still to this day like, "Thank you for that." Yeah. "That was a great investment." You
[00:49:55] Devin Martin: should've gotten some advisor shares.
[00:49:56] Linea Avey: Well, that was in the works, and then they had a CEO change.
[00:50:00] Devin Martin: Oh.
[00:50:01] Linea Avey: Yeah, so the original C- CEO, he, he said, "I'll get that worked out for you."
[00:50:06] Linea Avey: And then he unexpectedly got pushed aside, and he went to the new CEO and said, "You know, we've got this woman in California who's been very helpful." And the guy was like, "Nope." So anyway, I have no regrets. I, I love that, those guys, and, and I've been wearing a ring pretty much ever since. Yeah. I love it. I just love the ring.
[00:50:22] Linea Avey: Yeah, I'm... Whatever it is
[00:50:23] Devin Martin: six years in.
[00:50:24] Linea Avey: Yeah. I think I've had it now 12 or, yeah, something like that. So, you know, I was just really excited about that data collection world. And, and yeah, so we tried, we tried our hardest at, at Curious, and then I decided to switch gears back into genetics- Mm ... and kinda go back to my original, my roots.
[00:50:44] Linea Avey: And, um, I, you know, we were kind of exploring different things, and then I met Anil, um, who was my... I brought him on as my CTO for this new thing. And, um, and we were meeting with a friend who was also a VC, and he's like, "Why are you guys thinking so small? Why don't you go off and try to do 23andMe in another country?"
[00:51:04] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:51:05] Linea Avey: And we were like, "Oh, that's interesting." And we were like, and Anil has an Indian background, and we were like, "Why don't we try India?" Which was really an interesting excursion, to go over to India. And we went seven times, and were just exploring and meeting with a ton of people, and just having a conversation around could we do a 23andMe-like company for India.
[00:51:26] Linea Avey: And we found out nope. Nope. They weren't
[00:51:29] Devin Martin: interested. Was that regulations or culture
[00:51:30] Linea Avey: or- Culture. I would say number one was culture.
[00:51:33] Devin Martin: It felt invasive-
[00:51:34] Linea Avey: Yeah ... and unsafe? It kind of would expose things that they might not want exposed.
[00:51:38] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:51:39] Linea Avey: When you think about the, you know, the caste system and-
[00:51:42] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[00:51:43] Linea Avey: you know, it just, it probably raised a lot more issues than they were willing to deal with, I guess, maybe.
[00:51:49] Linea Avey: And, and, you know, just the family structure there is super, super important. And, you know, like we find out here in the US, like I found out my dad's not my dad, and-
[00:52:02] Devin Martin: Right ...
[00:52:02] Linea Avey: all these kind of things that start to jump out, and over there it would just be, it would be a disaster.
[00:52:08] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:52:09] Linea Avey: That's kinda what, I mean, at least that's the impression we came away with.
[00:52:12] Linea Avey: But then we switched gears, and then we're working with the private hospitals to develop out a preventive health platform. So we, we pivoted, and things were just starting to pick up, and then COVID hit. Mm. And we were, we just couldn't get back to India, which was really unfortunate.
[00:52:28] Devin Martin: Or maybe sa- saved you from wasting more time Or, or this other thing was taking off?
[00:52:34] Linea Avey: Yeah. Or it was. Okay, yeah. Yeah, we had, we had f- um, formed partnerships with the two largest private hospital networks there. Mm. And it was gonna be very much in the medical system. And, and India has reached a point where their middle class is pretty much the size of the US, like arguably like 2 to 300 million people.
[00:52:51] Linea Avey: And so now their medical system is starting to look at prevention, and it's just, it's, it's modernizing, you know- Yeah ... how they look at health. And we just thought, gosh, if there's some way we could avoid, they could avoid the mistakes that are being made in the US with our health system, we would be all in to do that.
[00:53:09] Devin Martin: And wait, were you divorced at this time?
[00:53:11] Linea Avey: Um, in the middle of it, yeah.
[00:53:13] Devin Martin: And explain to me, uh, I'm guessing Anil is slightly different than your first husband. What, what was... I, I mean, he's, he's a strong personality. He's got a huge mind.
[00:53:25] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[00:53:25] Devin Martin: Pa- very passionate about very, a, a lot of different topics.
[00:53:28] Linea Avey: Yes, indeed.
[00:53:28] Devin Martin: What was it like? He, he must have had an influence on you. You were saying he's-
[00:53:32] Linea Avey: Oh ...
[00:53:32] Devin Martin: opened you up to a bunch of things.
[00:53:33] Linea Avey: Without a doubt. Without a doubt. Yeah. No, and I, you know, I have no regrets. My, my first husband was, he's an amazing man. He's an amazing dad, and he's, yeah, he's a character. I mean, he's really a funny guy and I, you know.
[00:53:47] Linea Avey: It was, again, I don't regret any of that, but, um, Anil is much more like my dad.
[00:53:53] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:53:54] Linea Avey: That was the thing that I realized that they... I wish they could have met. Mm. They never got the chance to meet, but yeah, it's, it's opened up, as you know, it's brought a lot of interesting things into my life that I would've never expected.
[00:54:10] Linea Avey: So it's like- Any
[00:54:11] Devin Martin: you wanna share? What...
[00:54:13] Linea Avey: Yeah, sure.
[00:54:14] Devin Martin: Yeah. Tell me. Um,
[00:54:15] Linea Avey: well, you know, the, on the consciousness front, you know- Yeah ... Anil is really- Just, I mean, he's a student of every field he goes into, and he just learns deeply about a field. But, you know, he, he started to hear the, the comments coming out of the AI world like, "Yes, these things will be conscious and-
[00:54:34] Devin Martin: Yeah
[00:54:35] Linea Avey: and computers can be conscious at some level." And he was just like, "Are these people idiots?" And it was out of annoyance that he really went into, like, "Okay, I need to clear this all out. This, this is just wrong." And, and so we went to the Science of Consciousness Conference last year in Barcelona, and, you know, I was just kind of...
[00:54:54] Linea Avey: I'm, I'm like a fly on the wall. I haven't studied this field at all. And Anil had gone to that same meeting 30 years prior.
[00:55:02] Devin Martin: Oh, wow.
[00:55:02] Linea Avey: And he was like, "Nothing has changed. If anything, it's gotten way worse. There are over 300 theories of consciousness now, and it's a, it's a train wreck." And, and so he ha- kind of has come at it through this feeling and sense that this, we're going down a really bad track if we're gonna start thinking about rights for AIs.
[00:55:24] Linea Avey: You know, Anthropic hired, uh, somebody to think about the welfare for AI, and it's dangerous. It's actually, we're at a critical time that if we allow these companies to start setting these things up as if they're gonna be conscious, it's gonna be Terrible for humans I
[00:55:42] Devin Martin: mean, we're repeating what we did with capitalism, with, which is we gave- Corporations
[00:55:46] Devin Martin: companies rights- Yes ... as if they were human beings.
[00:55:49] Linea Avey: Citizens United. And you know that that came out of a case that was with one of the railway companies, where it had something to do with property rights and the, the track, tracks going through property or something. And it ended up being actually a clerical sort of change that led to that being in favor of the railway, the railway company, the railroad company.
[00:56:13] Linea Avey: Really? Yes. I mean, it's pretty... You can Google that or put it on ChatGPT, like, how did we get here? And, and I may not have the story totally straight, so, you know, research it yourself, but the guy who was the cler- the cl- the guy documenting everything in the court worked for the railroad company. That makes sense.
[00:56:32] Linea Avey: And so it's like, "Let's just make this little shift and, and we're... You know, Bob's your uncle, and we're good to go."
[00:56:38] Devin Martin: And, and now we're setting up, you know, banking for agents and- Yes ... you know, they're, they're getting all kinds of-
[00:56:43] Linea Avey: Pay. Are they gonna have time off? And what helps their mental state. And this is where Anil is up in arms, and he's been working on a publication that hopefully will be coming out soon that lays this to rest.
[00:56:56] Devin Martin: He has a great metaphor, uh, using a Turing machine, an actual mechanical computing device, and he asks you, "At which t- turn of the machine does this thing become conscious?" Yeah. And it doesn't matter if it's five computations or 50 trillion, we think at some point cumulatively that equals consciousness.
[00:57:14] Linea Avey: Yes.
[00:57:15] Devin Martin: And it's like- And, and it's just, it's so... He, he can explain it better than I can, but it's so elegant. Oh,
[00:57:18] Linea Avey: I hope you have him on the
[00:57:19] Devin Martin: podcast
[00:57:21] Linea Avey: so you can talk about that. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Because that, that's where he, I think, is coming to a place where people can understand it when you break it down to something that simple.
[00:57:28] Linea Avey: But computers, just because they're big and powerful, they're still like that Turing machine, where you're turning a crank, and they're no different. And this whole idea that consciousness somehow emerges from these processes is ludicrous. It's absolute hogwash.
[00:57:46] Devin Martin: We sat outside around the fire at your house, I think, for one, for an hour and a half one night, Anil and I arguing about, or discussing, but really we were exploring our beliefs about consciousness, and it was fascinating.
[00:57:55] Devin Martin: Um, but I'm, I'm asking in part because I feel like two... I, I want... Tell me if I'm wrong. I think of the two of you, of you as collaborators in a lot of things now. Yes. And I'm curious how that has altered the course of what you're doing in terms of you, you co-run an investment fund.
[00:58:10] Linea Avey: Yep.
[00:58:10] Devin Martin: But you're also now, I think, advising some very interesting things together and going on these experiences together.
[00:58:15] Devin Martin: So tell me, like how your career has been shifting and, and what you're interested in has been shifting. Like, what are you up to now?
[00:58:22] Linea Avey: Yeah. So as you mentioned, we have our fund, and we started out the fund with the thesis that we're gonna invest in AI and life science, which was still pretty materialist.
[00:58:31] Linea Avey: You know, it was kind of this narrow track. And, and it's super exciting what AI is doing in life science, and we're seeing it. We invested in a few companies that are, you know, so far look great.
[00:58:43] Devin Martin: Mm-hmm.
[00:58:44] Linea Avey: Um, AI is gonna completely change how we think about biology, and it's gonna become engineerable- Yeah ... in really interesting ways.
[00:58:51] Linea Avey: So that, you know, we were going down that track, but then, um, going back to my friend Elizabeth in, in California, she convened a group for us to start thinking about the healthcare system and how broken it is, and what we can do to fix it.
[00:59:04] Devin Martin: Hmm.
[00:59:04] Linea Avey: And so that was really the start of what now has become our Lifespan Project, which is crazy.
[00:59:12] Linea Avey: It sounds crazy, but we're building a whole new track for medical that's parallel to the sick care system.
[00:59:17] Devin Martin: Explain that, yeah.
[00:59:18] Linea Avey: So think of sick care as our only system we have right now.
[00:59:21] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:59:21] Linea Avey: It treats us when we get sick. Preventive health is like a, a small component of sick care.
[00:59:28] Devin Martin: And the sick care system is full of perverse incentives where- It's all-
[00:59:32] Devin Martin: we need you to get sick so we can treat you.
[00:59:33] Linea Avey: And we kinda want you to get sick,
[00:59:35] Devin Martin: and then- And kind of want you to stay on these medications for life. Exactly. And we don't wanna look at the food system too closely, and things like that.
[00:59:39] Linea Avey: Yeah, exactly. You nailed it. And so how can we build a system that runs parallel to that that keeps you out of sick care?
[00:59:46] Devin Martin: Hmm.
[00:59:47] Linea Avey: And that's what Lifespan Project began. And it's, it's all about aligned incentives. That's, that is the primary thing that is broken in the current system. Yeah. So how can we make all of the different components of lifespan incentivize to keep you healthy? And that's really, and this is a- another Anil brainchild, where if we can have, like, an insurance model or a payment model that actually will pay out to you if you stay healthy.
[01:00:14] Linea Avey: Hmm. So it's kind of li- life insurance policy that the healthier you stay, the more money you get at the end of the policy. Yeah. But then also, we've never had a fiduciary to really be overseeing our health, right?
[01:00:26] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:00:26] Linea Avey: And now with AI and with data We believe that we can have an agent component to look at all of our data constantly and just be looking at it and seeing what's happening and what's going on, and then recommend the things that it believes will make us healthier.
[01:00:42] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:00:42] Linea Avey: And so because it has a share, the fiduciary has a share in the value of your account that is building up value because you're staying healthier, it is incentivized to keep that money in that account. But if it doesn't spend the money, then you get sick. So it's right on that edge of- Mm ... I, I think this food would be, make you healthier.
[01:01:03] Linea Avey: I think you should take this supplement. I think you should, you know, get that Oura Ring because maybe that'll help you stop drinking. And, you know, all of these things that, that we think it will take an agentic mind to be able to sift through all of the data. But the thing is, the data belongs to you as the consumer.
[01:01:21] Linea Avey: You own and control all your data. All you do is give the agent access to it. But it builds up value by keeping you healthy.
[01:01:28] Devin Martin: And where does the money in the system come from?
[01:01:30] Linea Avey: So it can come from HSA dollars. It could be funded by employers. It could come from paying premiums. We're still working out the fi- kind of this financial structure of it, but there could be a number of sources for the funding.
[01:01:42] Linea Avey: Is the
[01:01:42] Devin Martin: idea that it would be so compelling that insurance companies would wanna put their dollars into it to save money on the back end from having to do sick care?
[01:01:51] Linea Avey: I mean, it, I, uh, we, as we know now, the insurance companies are struggling to keep up with how expensive healthcare has become.
[01:01:58] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:01:58] Linea Avey: And pre- our own premiums are going up.
[01:02:01] Linea Avey: Their margins are dropping. I mean, it's... And that's why we, when we look at sick care, it's like there's no way we're gonna fix that. We gotta start with something new, and s- over time, build up how many people are having to go or are, are staying out of sick care. Like, can we keep them healthy to a point where they don't need it?
[01:02:20] Devin Martin: Is this a company you're incubating or you're-
[01:02:21] Linea Avey: It's a, it's actually a model. Oh. It's a con- it's an idea.
[01:02:25] Devin Martin: Hmm.
[01:02:25] Linea Avey: And we are, we are talking, 'cause it's gonna take a ton of companies. So there are three components. It's the, your account, where your data go into, that the agent has access to, and then there's the agent, and then the third component are all the service providers-
[01:02:39] Devin Martin: Hmm
[01:02:39] Linea Avey: that are already out there, like Function Health, like Aura, like, you know, all of these direct to consumers- Both data
[01:02:45] Devin Martin: collection and treatment.
[01:02:47] Linea Avey: Yeah, yeah. But the thing is that these companies will have to agree that your data goes into your account. They can keep a copy, of course, at their company, but this has been one of the problems with this digital health era-
[01:02:59] Devin Martin: Yeah
[01:02:59] Linea Avey: is it all, it's still being siloed in all the companies. And it only makes sense when it all comes together, and so that is the fundamental component of Lifespan, is that you as a provider of the service have, have got to allow that person to get the data into their account.
[01:03:15] Devin Martin: And, and watching people I love go through the medical system now, it is so infuriating.
[01:03:20] Devin Martin: They go to one doctor. They get a scan or some other blood work, and then they bring it over to another specialist-
[01:03:27] Linea Avey: And
[01:03:27] Devin Martin: they're like, "Oh, yeah" ... and they have no access.
[01:03:28] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:03:29] Devin Martin: And the number of times we've had to, like, get a CD shipped in the mail. Yeah. And you can't, there's no functional way to keep a copy for yourself and build up your own database and- Right, yeah
[01:03:39] Linea Avey: it- But, you know, by law now, we have the ability as, as citizens to request our data.
[01:03:46] Devin Martin: Right, but it do- it does feel onerous. It does feel like there are- Oh,
[01:03:48] Linea Avey: if they'd make
[01:03:49] Devin Martin: it as difficult ... like the IRS, there are fax machines and CDs and-
[01:03:51] Linea Avey: Yes, yeah. No, it's such a wreck. And, and so, you know, we're kind of thinking realistically that getting Lifespan started, we should probably start in the younger population, like the Gen Z- Hmm
[01:04:02] Linea Avey: the millennial populations, who- Depending on the person hasn't interacted that much with the sick care system. We wanna catch them before they end up in that rut. And so there isn't a whole lot of EMR data for them. Yeah. It's all gonna be generated out of things they choose to do.
[01:04:18] Devin Martin: And, and my clients- And so we're
[01:04:19] Linea Avey: starting fresh
[01:04:20] Devin Martin: who t- who tend to be executives and entrepreneurs and quite sophisticated people are all cobbling together their own data and throwing it into ChatGPT-
[01:04:29] Linea Avey: Yes ...
[01:04:30] Devin Martin: and getting amazing insights, but it's also kind of a mess and the data integrity's not strong. You're not quite sure where you're losing fidelity.
[01:04:37] Devin Martin: Right. And so it feels like we need a really robust backend that we can trust but also own. Exactly. The data sovereignty is huge.
[01:04:43] Linea Avey: Yeah. And that's what, that's the concept behind Lifespan. Mm. So, so it's, you know, it's fairly early days, and we're talking to a lot of service provider companies. We're, you know, the fiduciary, fiduciary role is kind of a new thing, but people are getting excited about it.
[01:04:58] Linea Avey: Like, if I could build, uh, one of these agents, and we kind of imagine, and we may be wrong, but agents might be specialized to, like, if you've got type 2 diabetes, here's the best agent for you. Yeah. Or if you're going through menopause, here's a better agent that's really focused on where you are in life, and you might move from one agent to another.
[01:05:17] Linea Avey: So the whole liquidity part of it, like, how does an agent get compensated? Like, they're not gonna wait until you die to get value out of your account, right? There's, there's that liquidity question that we're working through.
[01:05:28] Devin Martin: And you're really wading into what is one of the most challenging and exciting things today for me, which is that- You can't just create a company sometimes.
[01:05:38] Devin Martin: You have to create a system, or you have to alter the existing system. And so the coordination is extreme, but if you succeed, it's a phase shift- Yeah ... that has a massive ripple effect.
[01:05:49] Linea Avey: Yeah. Absolutely. And I, uh, you know, I use the analogy of, of mobile versus landlines. You know, we... They didn't... Mobile phones just didn't come up, come and swamp landlines.
[01:05:58] Linea Avey: It took a... And I remember when the wire cutters were, you know, they, people were talking about they cut the, their landlines and they're only on mobile. That seemed a little scary. Yeah. But it's gonna... I think it's gonna be a shift like that, where- Mm ... the sick care... But the thing is, with sick care, we're always gonna need it.
[01:06:13] Linea Avey: People are always gonna get cancer. We're, unfortunately have car accidents, even though those are gonna go down, too, with self, you know- Yeah ... auto driving and, I mean, you know, full self-driving. Um, but it's, you know, it's gotta be there, but it's only when we need it. It's, it's not the right place to, for preventive health.
[01:06:29] Linea Avey: And so I think the two will coexist, but we just will have a better option for prevention and wellness, living our longest, healthiest lives, and we feel like that is important enough. So this has become now a mission for us. We're thinking about the fund in terms of how we can invest in companies that actually support this vision.
[01:06:50] Linea Avey: Mm. Um, and so they, they're very complementary.
[01:06:53] Devin Martin: And there's a... I mean, I started out my coaching journey going to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition- Mm-hmm ... to be a holistic health coach because it was very clear that, you know, doctors may have 10 minutes to spend with somebody, and you need a lot more care.
[01:07:06] Devin Martin: You need a lot more attention, accountability, insights, and so weekly check-ins. But even that, you know, we just don't have enough people. It's expensive. It's hard. I feel like the agentic solution can carry some of that load. And I, you know, I know it's Human connection matters immensely. We can't replace it.
[01:07:25] Linea Avey: Sure.
[01:07:26] Devin Martin: But I do think there's this support where even if I was like somebody's coach and I had this interface, like I got set up with Oura Ring for a while where I could see my client's sleep data.
[01:07:35] Linea Avey: Oh, wow.
[01:07:36] Devin Martin: And so I'd get on the call and for the week, and I could see what had happened during the week, and I'd say, "Okay, what happened on Tuesday?"
[01:07:42] Linea Avey: Mm-hmm.
[01:07:42] Devin Martin: You know, "How's your stress? You were drinking maybe?" You know. And so, like, I think it's going to make us more human in certain ways if, if we have more insights. Well,
[01:07:49] Linea Avey: it, yes, it allows us to do the things that only humans can do in such an important way, and yeah, I think these tools are just gonna free us up to be able- Mm-hmm
[01:07:58] Linea Avey: to be more human and expand our consciousness and connect with people on different levels we've never done before. I mean, that, that gets me so excited about- Mm-hmm ... just having the time and the space to start exploring that world.
[01:08:12] Devin Martin: Yeah. And so I know you're also an advisor to a number of companies. Is this the main thing you're focused on?
[01:08:18] Devin Martin: Are there other things that are tapering off, or are other things you're very excited about still? Uh,
[01:08:22] Linea Avey: yeah, well, I'm... And so one of my other projects, I'm on the board of the Human Immunome Project.
[01:08:27] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:08:28] Linea Avey: And it's a not-for-profit organization with a, an audacious, ambitious goal to map the human immune system globally.
[01:08:37] Devin Martin: Oh, wow.
[01:08:38] Linea Avey: And my dear friend Jane Metcalf is the chair of the board, and she brought me onto the board a couple years ago now. And it's like the Human Genome Projects times a thousand, because you think about our immune systems, they're pretty much involved in every disease, in aging, you know, longevity, all these things, and yet we don't really understand how our immune systems operate.
[01:09:01] Linea Avey: So when I, I was brought onto this project, it was like Uh, h- we, and it's a, you know, we're trying to raise, um, ultimately it's like a $3 billion project 'cause, and now we have labs in 10, we have 10 labs on five continents that are set up and ready to go, and we've got a great team of scientists who are working on it, but we're w- uh, frankly having a hard time raising funding for it.
[01:09:24] Devin Martin: Really?
[01:09:25] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:09:26] Devin Martin: It's hard to wrap your head around 'cause I feel like the genome is bounded. It's a-
[01:09:29] Linea Avey: Yes ... clear
[01:09:29] Devin Martin: what we're looking at.
[01:09:30] Linea Avey: Yeah. It's pretty
[01:09:30] Devin Martin: simplistic. It's like we don't even know what the immune system is.
[01:09:33] Linea Avey: Yeah, and that's the problem. And, you know, we have two chief scientists, one at Yale and one in Israel, and they're the, some of the best, and, you know, it's just that we've, we've really tried to get this wheel going of, of looking at all these immune systems.
[01:09:47] Linea Avey: So that one is, you know, another project I'm on. And, um, I'm an advisor to Colossal Bioscience, which-
[01:09:54] Devin Martin: Which is bringing back the woolly
[01:09:56] Linea Avey: mammoth ... de-extinction. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of their tagline, you know. And they brought back the, the, you know, the dire wolf and-
[01:10:02] Devin Martin: Oh, right. They did that actually, right?
[01:10:03] Linea Avey: Yeah. That was their project. Yeah. And, and, you know, Ben Lamm, the CEO, is just a dynamo, and I think they're doing great work. Um, yeah, that's, that's an exciting one. Uh, what am I forgetting?
[01:10:15] Devin Martin: There was Verily.
[01:10:16] Linea Avey: Oh, Verily, I was on their advisory board for five years. Mm. But they were, they were the life science sort of offshoot of Google.
[01:10:24] Linea Avey: And, um, Andy Conrad was the CEO at the time, and he built up an advisory board, and I was on that for I think five years. And then- And
[01:10:30] Devin Martin: were they, were they a fund primarily? Were they-
[01:10:32] Linea Avey: No, no ... spinning up their, they were their own- No, a research company.
[01:10:34] Devin Martin: Research, okay.
[01:10:35] Linea Avey: Life science research. They were the life science kind of division of Google.
[01:10:38] Linea Avey: Mm. That came out of Google X. Oh, okay. So that was a Google X project that spun out, and they were doing phenomenal work. Um, but that, you know, changed gears. They got a new CEO. He moved to Dallas, and it's a different company now.
[01:10:50] Devin Martin: So tell me how you're thinking about, I mean, being with Anil and being involved in all these things, how are you thinking about the role of consciousness in all of this related to genetics, related to the immune system, and quantification?
[01:11:01] Devin Martin: Like, how do we fit quantification? Like, how do we understand the subjective, the emotional? It, it, does that have to be part of these systems?
[01:11:08] Linea Avey: I believe, absolutely. Yeah. And so I feel like there's gonna be- And, you know, I'm very proud of my husband who's coming up with kind of a new view of how we research consciousness.
[01:11:20] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:11:20] Linea Avey: In very scientific ways, very grounded in science, but how do we open up how we're looking at it and how we can measure it? And then, um, I'm- we met a guy at Google X, Dave Andre. He's the CSO, I think, at Google X. I hope he doesn't mind me mentioning this. But he did a panel in San Francisco, and he and a, a couple of other researchers have come up with a way they believe to quantify your con- consciousness.
[01:11:46] Linea Avey: Hmm. Super interesting. Like-
[01:11:48] Devin Martin: I think this is the one point where Neil and I start to split apart, and I'm fascinated by this idea. Like, what can you, can you quantify qualia? What about subjectivity? Yes. Donald Hoffman is convinced, you know, you can make algorithms out of your subjective experience and determine all kinds of things, and to me it's very slippery.
[01:12:06] Linea Avey: Yeah. It is, and that's, that's what is this dividing? I mean, it, it's gonna be kind of a gray area where materialist drops off and this kind of new way of thinking about human experience kind of picks up. But yeah, I, uh... Anyway, I'm really intrigued with what these researchers are doing with, you know, Dave Andre involved and...
[01:12:27] Linea Avey: 'Cause if, if we can start to quantify what our own consciousness level is, and then how do we expand that? How do we grow that? And they kind of have a, a grade that you can, that you go through, and they're training an AI to be able to have this. You have this conversation with this AI, and then it kind of pegs you.
[01:12:46] Linea Avey: Like, you're here.
[01:12:48] Devin Martin: Is this like developmental psychology? Like how- I- ... evolved you are through certain- Yeah, I mean, you have- Because there's, there's a whole map of different lines of development, different stages within the lines. There's been many researchers over the past 50, 60 years-
[01:12:59] Linea Avey: Yeah, and I think they've-
[01:13:00] Linea Avey: doing that ... compiled a lot of all of that, and, and then they kind of came up with what they thought was a quantitative measure. Hmm. And I'm, again, I went to one panel, and I haven't spent as much time in this, but I was intrigued because then, you know, there are all these- practical things that can come out of this.
[01:13:17] Linea Avey: Like, even in dating, like, if you're here on the, the consciousness scale, and this person's here, probably not gonna be a good match, right?
[01:13:26] Devin Martin: I got trained, I don't know, it must've been 15 years ago, t- in integral relationship coach, and they'd come up with a psychograph, which is let's look at three, four, five, 10 lines of development.
[01:13:37] Devin Martin: Let's get your altitude in each one of those lines. Now let's look at your partner.
[01:13:41] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:13:42] Devin Martin: And, you know, it's interesting because you, you tend to naturally be drawn to people who connect with a lot of you.
[01:13:48] Linea Avey: Yes.
[01:13:49] Devin Martin: If you feel like you're up here and this person's down here, you don't feel seen, you don't feel heard.
[01:13:52] Linea Avey: Right.
[01:13:53] Devin Martin: Um, and, and so it's fascinating, but you know, it's highly controversial, of course. Of course. 'Cause people feel judged and, you know, positioned, but it can also open up what your next stage of development is.
[01:14:05] Linea Avey: Absolutely.
[01:14:06] Devin Martin: And so I'm, I'm, I'm in love with all of that. I also don't think it's actually quantifying your subjective experience.
[01:14:11] Devin Martin: You know, I, I'm also, I'm an advisor to a company called Evolve here in Austin, which is creating a biofeedback headset.
[01:14:17] Linea Avey: Yes.
[01:14:18] Devin Martin: Which has really advanced EEG. That's John,
[01:14:20] Linea Avey: right?
[01:14:20] Devin Martin: Yeah, John and Lauren. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're amazing.
[01:14:22] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:14:23] Devin Martin: And, you know, pupil dilation and galvanic skin response and HRV. And so that's another form of quantifying consciousness.
[01:14:30] Devin Martin: But I still th- I, which I think is gonna be very important in the health space, because- Totally. Yeah ... they're realizing that for everything from, you know, Formula One peak performance drivers to PTSD nervous system regulation, there are ways that we can help people tap into what's going on inside their body and have conscious control of things that were previously unconscious.
[01:14:49] Linea Avey: Yes.
[01:14:49] Devin Martin: Right. And so I think that's unbelievably im- important in the health space.
[01:14:52] Linea Avey: Right.
[01:14:52] Devin Martin: Which is why I want that 24-hour HRV thing.
[01:14:54] Linea Avey: Exactly. Yeah. And it's, and it's, you know, and that's this sort of thing we, this fine line that we, we have to be careful that it's staying grounded in good science. Yeah. But opening up what we're looking at, and that's, that's kind of the, the challenge, but the opportunity to really f- see where can this new research take us in our understanding of human consciousness and, uh, it's, I mean, it's just gon- I think it's just gonna be wide open, and I can't wait to see where it goes, and I think it's gonna go pretty quickly.
[01:15:27] Devin Martin: It does seem to be accelerating, right?
[01:15:28] Linea Avey: Yep. It totally does. But yeah. And then add on top of that the UAP space we haven't really touched on yet.
[01:15:34] Devin Martin: Yeah. Tell me, tell me how, when, how did that enter your life? 'Cause this has been a fascinating new introduction to my life. I, I, I had Ryan Graves on the podcast recently.
[01:15:41] Devin Martin: Oh,
[01:15:42] Linea Avey: I love Ryan.
[01:15:42] Devin Martin: And I love him because he's such a, like, normal, grounded, sane, sober human being. He's, he's amazing ... who has experienced anomalous events and, like I'm talking about, he takes them seriously. He's like-
[01:15:52] Linea Avey: Yeah ... "
[01:15:52] Devin Martin: This doesn't fit in my worldview, so I have to expand my worldview. I'm not gonna collapse into certainty.
[01:15:57] Devin Martin: I'm just gonna stay open."
[01:15:58] Linea Avey: Yep.
[01:15:58] Devin Martin: So how did you get introduced to this space?
[01:16:00] Linea Avey: Of course, through my husband, Anil. So, so Anil kind of, he thought this whole space was just- For entertainment, not even, like, possibly real. He was just like, "This is a joke." And then our, our friend Mitsu told him about a friend of his who'd had the experience in Upstate New York, I think it was in Hudson Valley, where there was a big sighting.
[01:16:20] Devin Martin: Oh, where I'm from.
[01:16:21] Linea Avey: Yeah, where a bunch... I forget what year it was, but... And Anil was like, "Huh, Mitsu, you know, he's a, he's a serious guy. He wouldn't make this up, and he speaks very highly of his friend." And so as Anil does, he did a deep dive. He just went in and started researching what is known, what's been talked about, what's been covered up, you know, and just really got a full understanding of where we currently are, as much as he could.
[01:16:46] Linea Avey: And then he found out about the SOL Foundation.
[01:16:48] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:16:48] Linea Avey: And SOL is, you know, it started by Garry Nolan out of Stanford. Peter Scaffish is a PhD anthropologist.
[01:16:55] Devin Martin: Extremely impressive people.
[01:16:56] Linea Avey: Uh, very impressive people, and Anil was like, "Wow, s- it's out of Stanford. That kind of ticks it."
[01:17:03] Devin Martin: E- explain to people what the SOL Foundation is.
[01:17:04] Linea Avey: So SOL was started by Garry and Peter, and I think there were other people involved early on, about how do we deal with this impending release and disclosure of the reality of non-human intelligence, and, and how is the human population gonna cope and grapple with this? I mean, that's really kind of what their, what their goal is, is to be able to set up an infrastructure and a, a communication tool to really be at the interface between this crazy world and humans.
[01:17:38] Linea Avey: Like, how do we deal with this?
[01:17:40] Devin Martin: And this is everything from defense to religion that's gonna be impacted. Yeah. I mean, it, it, it affects everything.
[01:17:47] Linea Avey: Totally, totally. So I guess it was three years ago they decided to have a conference. Right. And it was gonna be at Stanford, and Anil, this was right when he started exploring the space, and he's like, "Oh, my God, I wanna go to this conference.
[01:18:00] Linea Avey: Wonder if I can get in." 'Cause they were very strict. They did vetting of every single attendee.
[01:18:04] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:18:05] Linea Avey: And so Anil got on the... I don't remember who he had the call with, but he was so ecstatic that he actually got in, and now he's on their board. 'Cause he-
[01:18:15] Devin Martin: And, and what was your first thought when he was into this?
[01:18:16] Devin Martin: Were you... I mean, you trust his mind, but he also- Oh, totally ... thought this might've been a weird,
[01:18:20] Linea Avey: crazy thing. Yeah, but the more he started telling me about what he was learning, I was getting kind of intrigued. But- I'm more of a practical person, I would say, than he is, and I just was like, "God, do we have time for this?"
[01:18:32] Linea Avey: You know, we have a lot of things going on in our lives. But no, I mean, I've always been a huge fan of Star Trek and Star Wars- Mm ... and all of this stuff. I'm, you know, I'm very much into sci-fi, and I, I'm excited to think that it might be real, but I had no investment in it whatsoever. But then the second year, they had the, that same SOL conference in San Francisco, and I went, and I started meeting all these people who were experiencers.
[01:18:57] Linea Avey: Mm. You know, they've had some kind of what they claim is a, an experience with non-human intelligence, and it's fascinating and can be scary as all get-out. Um, and just being around a lot more of these people and hearing their stories, and they're totally serious. There's no... You, you can tell that it really affected them.
[01:19:19] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:19:20] Linea Avey: And, and so the more of those stories I started hearing, it was like, wow. Now I'm like, "I wanna have an experience." Come on, God. Like- I
[01:19:26] Devin Martin: was gonna say, I mean, there, there's so many things, psychic phenomenon, where I, I can start to wrap my head around the possibility. I can see how it could be real. Mm-hmm.
[01:19:33] Devin Martin: But I needed to have first-person experiences to truly in my heart believe it.
[01:19:37] Linea Avey: Yes, exactly, and I think that's how most humans are, right? Ha-
[01:19:40] Devin Martin: haven't you gone out seeking experiences? Didn't you go on an expedition?
[01:19:43] Linea Avey: I did. Well, I was at, um, I was at an event where we did a CE5, which is a close encounter of the fifth kind, and There's, there are some pictures of things that happened.
[01:19:56] Devin Martin: Explain the fifth kind. What does that mean?
[01:19:58] Linea Avey: Um, I forget what the different categories. First is you see something off. Second, you might... I don't know. I don't know the scale. I'm not an expert. But I just know that it's more the intention of, of calling them in, is what a CE5 is. And so went through the whole process with a group of people, and I saw something weird in the sky for sure.
[01:20:23] Linea Avey: I don't know if it was my imagination or what was-
[01:20:25] Devin Martin: Was it off in the distance?
[01:20:26] Linea Avey: Way off in the distance. Yeah.
[01:20:27] Devin Martin: And was it like a, an orb or a light or a
[01:20:29] Linea Avey: object or? It was kind of like, it looked like three stars sort of circling around each other, like chasing each other almost playfully. S- And then all of a sudden there'd be a big burst of light.
[01:20:39] Devin Martin: Really?
[01:20:39] Linea Avey: And then it would come back, and then they'd start doing it. So it kind of kept repeating. And for whatever... 'Cause we're laying out on this grassy hill, and we're l- all listening to the same, um, uh, playlist. '
[01:20:52] Devin Martin: Cause the idea here is that somehow consciousness is related. There's some kind of connection between our minds and whatever is happening.
[01:20:59] Linea Avey: Yes, exactly. And so it's a very- Besides
[01:21:00] Devin Martin: hallucination where we're- Yeah ... actually communicating with something.
[01:21:02] Linea Avey: Yeah. And it's very intentional, and there's a whole process that's sort of been developed, and we were with a guy who has done it before. And yeah, I mean, it was kind of unexplainable to me. And we're supposed to be laying there with our eyes shut, and all of a sudden I just felt compelled, and I looked up right at that point in the sky where this was going on.
[01:21:20] Linea Avey: And I'm like, "Guys?" But I didn't wanna disturb the other people, so I just sat there and looked at it. And w- what it was, I have no idea. No idea.
[01:21:29] Devin Martin: Ryan said this is an incredibly common feature, is that people will be inside the house, say, and they will all of a sudden just feel, "I have to go outside right now and look in this one direction in the sky."
[01:21:39] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:21:39] Devin Martin: And then they will see something.
[01:21:40] Linea Avey: Yeah. Yeah. So I don't put a lot of weight on that. Um, there were some other pictures that were taking, taken during this event that are weird. That I, nobody can really explain, uh, that were pretty close to where we were. It was like this blue multi-orb structure that was just hanging outside a cliff over the ocean that it, I don't think it could've been a drone.
[01:22:04] Linea Avey: Very, very odd. Um, so you know, I'm, I'm kind of on the fringes of this world with Anil. He's obviously deep in it now that he's- Yeah ... on the board of SOL, and but he's, he just admires Garry and Peter so much of what they're, why they're doing this. Why are they committing so much of their time and energy to this organization?
[01:22:25] Linea Avey: Because there's got to be a responsible group that can kinda be the interplay between the government and, and- Yeah ... the population and whatever's coming at us. And you know, 'cause we want this to be a positive for humanity, as much as we have any control over it. And that's why, what can we do with our conscious state?
[01:22:46] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:22:46] Linea Avey: To maybe start connecting and, and start starting that- That communication, right? That would be phenomenal. And we wanna represent our we wanna represent humanity as a positive thing.
[01:23:02] Devin Martin: So are you still an atheist?
[01:23:05] Linea Avey: Um, I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm a sort of a Christian. I would say that I'm exploring spirituality now- Mm
[01:23:14] Linea Avey: in ways that before... But I'm also fascinated by Lutheranism, but more about what, what was going through Martin Luther's head when he wrote what he wrote. Yeah.
[01:23:22] Devin Martin: And
[01:23:22] Linea Avey: so I'm looking at it from a historical perspective, from the, through the c- Christianity lens, but I'm kinda coming back to the Vedic stuff.
[01:23:31] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:23:32] Linea Avey: You know, that I find super fascinating. I'm reading a book called The Golden Road, which is all about the history of India and all the incredible intelligence and knowledge that has come from that, from that culture.
[01:23:45] Devin Martin: From our oldest spiritual tradition.
[01:23:48] Linea Avey: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I think, and you know, in, in living with Anil and this, you know, paper he's been writing that he just finished, it's, he kind of now brings it back to Vedic.
[01:24:01] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:24:01] Linea Avey: Which I find so cool that he's sort of gone the full circle through the whole materialist education and training and all of that in through this consciousness kind of, again, kind of like a very research focus on what, how do we clear up the field now back into quantum and Vedic. And it's, it's fa- I, I'm just, I'm so in love with him and what he's doing.
[01:24:26] Linea Avey: It's amazing.
[01:24:27] Devin Martin: I'm, I'm just about finished writing a memoir called After Atheism.
[01:24:30] Linea Avey: Oh, really?
[01:24:31] Devin Martin: And what I, what I often say is I still don't believe in the God my parents don't believe in, 'cause they were the atheists who trained me to be. Ah. But the word has become unbelievably useful to me.
[01:24:40] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:24:41] Devin Martin: I don't know what else, how else to talk about unity consciousness, about this feeling of not being separate from anything and this- Right
[01:24:50] Devin Martin: consciousness that pervades all things. And so, um, God, I hated that word for so long, and I really didn't want to find myself using it and believing in it.
[01:25:00] Linea Avey: Right.
[01:25:01] Devin Martin: But I, I think it's, it's just useful and, yeah, we, we have to be willing to, I think, revisit our beliefs over and over and over again.
[01:25:09] Linea Avey: Absolutely.
[01:25:10] Linea Avey: But I think we are coming to this new age of, you know, whether you wanna call it Christianity or Judaism or whatever, whatever label you put on it, but it is about how we all connect.
[01:25:20] Devin Martin: And, and there is, people talk about the perennial philosophy, which is this thread that weaves through all the world's wisdom traditions, which is some- the universal mystical- Mm-hmm
[01:25:28] Devin Martin: underpinnings. And then, you know, we get layers of ritual and myth layered on top of it. But there is a core truth that they all seem to share.
[01:25:34] Linea Avey: Yeah, indeed.
[01:25:35] Devin Martin: Um, can we talk briefly about your name?
[01:25:38] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:25:40] Devin Martin: You changed, uh, I mean, the smallest change possible from a- Yeah ... D to an E.
[01:25:44] Linea Avey: Yes.
[01:25:45] Devin Martin: But your name also became, uh, what is it, an anagram, uh, of Anil's?
[01:25:48] Linea Avey: Anil. That was not thought out at all. The whole change was not thought out. I mean, it's just so crazy how I was on a boat in the Caribbean with a bunch of friends, and we were doing a breathwork session, and I've tried breathwork in the past and I actually found it- stressful.
[01:26:05] Devin Martin: Can be, yeah. '
[01:26:06] Linea Avey: Cause I would get off the, the breathing pattern, and then I, I was taking a breath in, breath in when people, when she was saying, "Breathe out," and you'd just like you're trying to catch up.
[01:26:14] Linea Avey: And this woman teacher we had on the boat was amazing, and I had an, a beautiful experience. And then afterwards, we all stood up in a circle holding hands, and kind of went around the group like, "What'd you get out of it?" And I just blurted out, "I'm changing my name to Linea." And then- And
[01:26:27] Devin Martin: that had never occurred to you before?
[01:26:30] Linea Avey: I mean, I always liked... I never liked my name, Linda, and I always thought Linea was a beautiful name, that, uh, one girl in high school I went to had that name.
[01:26:39] Devin Martin: Hmm.
[01:26:39] Linea Avey: And I just always thought, "Oh, that's really pretty." And Linda was just, to me was like... And I got teased in high school, 'cause I was, I was, you know, valedictorian and they, "Lin-duh."
[01:26:52] Linea Avey: In fact, I went and looked back at my old high school yearbook, and another Linda in my class, she was like, "Well, at least we're done getting called Lin-duh." So it, it was a combination of a bunch of different things, and it just, but it just literally came to me.
[01:27:06] Devin Martin: And it just, in that moment- Popped ... felt-
[01:27:09] Linea Avey: Yeah
[01:27:09] Devin Martin: true-
[01:27:10] Linea Avey: Yes ...
[01:27:10] Devin Martin: and necessary.
[01:27:11] Linea Avey: And I was just, I had this conviction that that's what I was gonna do.
[01:27:14] Devin Martin: That's fascinating. And if, I, I expected a much deeper, longer, drawn-out process. It was just a pure insight- Yeah ... and you decided yes. And you, I, I asked you the other day, you said you're actually now legally changed your name.
[01:27:28] Devin Martin: I'm,
[01:27:28] Linea Avey: and I'm starting, yeah, I, I did it through the court system here in Austin, and now it's just the, the pain of going, getting my new S- Social Security card and my new driver's license and my new passport, and it's a lot of work. Did,
[01:27:39] Devin Martin: did you fear people were gonna look at you like, "Okay, she lost something.
[01:27:42] Devin Martin: She's..."
[01:27:43] Linea Avey: No. And, and I can't tell you how many people that I just introduce myself as Linea, and they're like, "Oh, that's such a pretty name." And I've, nobody ever said that to me when I was Linda.
[01:27:52] Devin Martin: And so you're not trying to cut ties with some old version
[01:27:54] Linea Avey: of yourself? No. None of that. No, no. It's just a beautiful name.
[01:27:55] Linea Avey: Well, I do feel like I've moved on, and I'm in a whole new world now. Um, you know, it's just, life is so beautiful. And, and both my parents had passed on, so I don't feel like I'm-
[01:28:06] Devin Martin: Hmm ...
[01:28:06] Linea Avey: you know, I, I, I lived Linda, the name they gave me, and now I'm just, I am onto a new... Not that I have any problems with my past, but it's just this new future and this new world we're entering that is endlessly fascinating.
[01:28:20] Devin Martin: I love that. I, I feel like the, the theme of this conversation is just this willingness to move forward and let go of the past and-
[01:28:27] Linea Avey: Yeah ...
[01:28:27] Devin Martin: step into new things. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that would be exciting to share? Or maybe tell us how people can get involved and support you in any of these things.
[01:28:37] Linea Avey: Oh, I mean, if any of this that I've talked about resonates, like the Human Immunome Project is so valuable and important, and we are... We're getting some people coming on board to help with the fundraising on that. But it's, you know, that's been a huge challenge of something that we, we just need to do it.
[01:28:53] Linea Avey: And it's not a project that any one company can do.
[01:28:56] Devin Martin: Right.
[01:28:57] Linea Avey: This one is gonna take a village of people, and pe- you know, just everyone getting involved. Public, private. Absolutely. All wrapped up. But the value of it will be so much bigger than the Human Genome Project, and that's, that's the promise-
[01:29:09] Devin Martin: Mm ...
[01:29:10] Linea Avey: for getting that funded.
[01:29:11] Linea Avey: And so if people have ideas about organizations that might be interested, we're, we are going all out on that. Um, and then, you know, we're also just on Lifespan. We're just looking for founders who think they have a company that could plug into this idea. Um, it's just been amazing. I've actually been working with Boardy.
[01:29:28] Linea Avey: Have you heard about the AI Boardy?
[01:29:30] Devin Martin: No.
[01:29:31] Linea Avey: Oh, my gosh. It's such a powerful tool. It's just a, you know, it's just an AI that you sign up with. And it, the goal is to help do outreach and look for a certain archetype of person. And so you sign up with boardy.ai, B-O-A-R-D-Y.A-I, and he calls you on WhatsApp, and he's got this beautiful Australian accent, and he's like, "So, Linea, what are you doing?
[01:29:53] Linea Avey: What do you need?" And I just went through rapid fire, like what we're looking for in terms of companies for Lifespan and, and also LPs for our fund because we're still closing that, and he just regurgitated back what I'd told him. Like, like you don't have to pause. You just go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[01:30:08] Linea Avey: And he came back and he's like, "Is this it?" And I'm like, "Yep," and he's like, "On it." And then he goes out and combs the web, LinkedIn, and finds people of the archetype I described. And then he'll set up meetings. It's, and-
[01:30:19] Devin Martin: So it's like a new AI-driven expert network.
[01:30:21] Linea Avey: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. And, but then the, it's a company out of Toronto, and he's, his functionality has been broadening.
[01:30:29] Linea Avey: Like, I gave him access to my calendar. Now he's my assistant for setting up the meetings. He takes all the meeting notes and delivers them. I mean, it's just like, it's growing in functionality. So he actually
[01:30:40] Devin Martin: does the cold outreach to people- Yeah ... and gets them on the hook?
[01:30:43] Linea Avey: Yeah.
[01:30:43] Devin Martin: Yeah. Wow.
[01:30:44] Linea Avey: And, and sets up the meeting, and now the- I said
[01:30:46] Devin Martin: he.
[01:30:46] Devin Martin: It.
[01:30:47] Linea Avey: It, it's... Well, it's a male persona, Australian accent- ... very delightful. And it's funny 'cause now he's in on the calls that he helps arrange, and he'll, he wants to make the introduction like, "Hey, I'm Boardy," and, "Linea, this is so-and-so." And I'm like, "You can s- you can stop talking." "We don't need you right now, Boardy."
[01:31:05] Linea Avey: And that's what I love. You can insult it. Right. And it just, like, shuts down and waits for you to command it again, and- Right ... uh, it's, it's a super valuable tool. So I've been using that a lot very successfully. And it's fun when the other... 'Cause then we'll get on a call with a person I met through Boardy, and then we laugh like, "Thanks, Boardy."
[01:31:22] Devin Martin: How weird is this? Yeah.
[01:31:22] Linea Avey: Yeah. How weird is this? But, you know, you're kind of meeting up with other people who are- Exploring the edges of what AI can do for us, so
[01:31:30] Devin Martin: That's fascinating. So I think we should all just kind of like look out for calls from Bordie. It might be somebody interesting on the other side.
[01:31:35] Linea Avey: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yep. Yep. And he does it... I think mostly he uses LinkedIn, and he'll just... But now he's got a, he's got an X account, so now he's posting on X. He goes to conf- he goes to conferences and interfaces pe- with people who are at a conference- Oh, that's hilarious ... 'cause he's like a virtual attendee.
[01:31:54] Linea Avey: Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's so fun. It's so exciting. I love this stuff.
[01:31:59] Devin Martin: Well, Linea, you are fun and exciting. This has been so much fun to talk. I feel like we could always just keep talking for another hour or two, but I, I- Well,
[01:32:06] Linea Avey: that's why you're in Houston now. It's so great
[01:32:08] Devin Martin: It's amazing. I am so happy to be here.
[01:32:10] Devin Martin: And, uh, thank you for being on.
[01:32:12] Linea Avey: Thank you so much, Devin. Appreciate it.
[01:32:15] Devin Martin: Wonderful.
[01:32:16] Linea Avey: Okay. Oh my gosh, we went two hours.