Mona Jhaveri:
Music and charity has always been aligned, right? I mean, there's so many problems in the world that have been sort of captured and supported by musicians, and awareness has been raised by musicians. And so, I knew that musicians play an important role in society. In fact, they're very powerful. And in fact, for the ones out there that aren't aligned, they need to be aligned because you've got a power and you can use that.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. But I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate sustainable income with your music.

Michael Walker:
We're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media, recruiting a revolution in today's music industry. And this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker. All right. I'm excited to be here today with Mona Jhaveri.

Michael Walker:
Mona is the founder, executive director and chairman of the board at Music Beats Cancer. Which is a funding platform that leverages the power and passion of people and music to be able to help race funds and awareness for promising cancer innovations. She has a doctorate in biochemistry from Wake Forest University, trained as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute.

Michael Walker:
She has actually granted the Spore Fellowship Award for breast cancer research at the Lombardi Cancer Center of Georgetown University. So, I'm super excited to talk with her today about how as a musician, you can use your music to be able to align and connect with different missions and different purposes that really kind of transcend even the music itself.

Michael Walker:
Being able to align with those purpose to be able to promote social change and impact is something that is super interesting. So, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and have a discussion.

Mona Jhaveri:
Oh, thank you for having me. I appreciate that introduction.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. So, to start out with, I would love to hear just a little bit about your story and how you got started founding Music Beats Cancer.

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah, so I think it's important to at least start off to say, I'm not a musician and nor am I sort of this big music fan or anything. I mean, yeah, I like music, just like the next person, but I'm not a diehard and I'm not a even semi accomplished musician. I'm a scientist by training, a cancer researcher, as you noted that.

Mona Jhaveri:
I worked at the National Cancer Institute for years in Georgetown University doing what's called my post-doctoral training. And so, professionally, I grew up in the lab. I mean, in fact, quite the opposite of a, say, a musician where we're not in touch with people, we're really isolated, but doing research. And every now and then a discovery is made.

Mona Jhaveri:
And then what happens with that discovery is sort of anybody's best guess. If you know what I mean. And in my case, we had a discovery and I wanted to advance the discovery in hopes that it could become something for people with cancer in particular, this was for ovarian cancer. And as you know, ovarian cancer is a very deadly cancer.

Mona Jhaveri:
And so, that was the idea is at the time after we made this discovery is I want to advance it. But the only way for me to what we call commercialize the science, is to leave academia, spin out a company, become an entrepreneur. Build a startup, hire some people, raise some money, do that whole thing, and it's not trivial. And in fact, it takes a totally different hat.

Mona Jhaveri:
You go from being someone quiet in the lab to then somebody who has to be out there and talking about what you're doing and raising money and being compelling. But inevitably, my company, we ended up shutting it down because we simply could not raise the money we needed. And this actually is not a unique situation. It's happens to many entrepreneurs, but in particular, many in biotech.

Mona Jhaveri:
And the problem with the ones in biotech is that once you shut a company down, there goes the great idea. It's no longer available to help anybody. And we have this phrase in our industry, we call it the Valley of Death, where all the great ideas go to die because they lack the funding to move forward.

Mona Jhaveri:
So, I launched Music Beats Cancer as a way to support entrepreneurs who are working on biotech and med tech solutions. New treatments, new therapies, immunotherapies, precision medicine, screening tools, anything and everything that people were dreaming of, but they needed the funding. And importantly, I set up Music Beats Cancer as a charity 501(c)3, because there's so few charities that support startups and innovation.

Mona Jhaveri:
Most of the cancer charities support research. And so, when I launched Music Beats Cancer, I had to make sure that I made a distinction between research, like American Cancer Society that only supports research or Susan G. Komen, and innovation, which is basically startups. And we knew we needed charitable funds for startups because there was just too many great ideas that we're going nowhere.

Mona Jhaveri:
And if they don't get funded, they can't attract downstream capital, sort of the investors. So, our platform was just that to launch these great ideas into a place where they could really get commercialized. And then the question is, well, how did the music come in? And that was purely by sort of, I don't want to say accident, but just sort of happened on my journey that I met people in the music industry. And also, music and charity has always been aligned, right?

Mona Jhaveri:
I mean, there's so many problems in the world that sort have been captured and supported by musicians, and awareness has been raised by musicians. And so, I knew that musicians play an important role in society. In fact, they're very powerful. And in fact, if for the ones out there that aren't aligned, they need to be aligned because you've got a power and you can use that.

Mona Jhaveri:
And so, I understood that when I launched Music Beats Cancer in 2014, I understood that we had a public that just did not know what cancer innovations are. I mean, they knew research and they knew research for a cure, but they didn't really know how research becomes a cure. And the way that happens is biotechnology, it's the biotech industry is the one that puts these discoveries on a track to the clinic.

Mona Jhaveri:
But the public was unaware. So, I needed a way and a vehicle to get our messaging to the people and to the get sort of the popular culture around innovation. And so, that's how this evolved. And like I said, back in 2014, people just they looked at me like, what are you doing? I couldn't get a single musician to be on to get on board. And even the startups that we were hoping to fund, they were scared.

Mona Jhaveri:
I mean, it was just really this idea that was way too hard to embrace. And then when COVID happened, everything changed. Literally overnight, we had a new public, new lingo in our popular culture. People could now say mRNA, vaccines. Although mRNA existed for us for a long time, but for the public it was new and PCR was now a thing. So, the whole team, we found ourself on the news, we formed a relationship with iHeartRadio and it just went on and on from there.

Mona Jhaveri:
And we were always positioned, we were just right there in the right time. We were already virtual and we were working with independent artists through our relationship with ReverbNation. And that's how you and I have many artists in common. We source them through reverb.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. Yeah, it's interesting hearing you describe that, the story of having startup and the challenges with having start at the beginning. Because I think those things apply to a lot of different industries, different startups across tech businesses and education businesses, mentorship business. I know for modern musician, that we had a similar phase and for musicians.

Michael Walker:
So, there's so many musicians here that essentially, they are entrepreneurs too, and they're a startup. And they kind of have those initial struggles with funding and with just having the right guidance and how do I take this amazing idea or this amazing music? And if they don't figure out how they have a sustainable business, then it goes into the valley of death, but for their music. Their music dies.

Michael Walker:
So, it's interesting kind of hearing some of the alignment there just in terms of the overall journey that you experienced. And I think it's so awesome that you're able to kind of turn inwards in a sense, or kind of look at people who are going through that same struggle. And being able to pay it forward and help them and give them maybe what you needed when you're kind of in that stage. So, I would love to dig into this idea, you touched on this idea of how so many well-known musicians.

Michael Walker:
Some of the most iconic musicians of our time and forever, they have aligned with different missions and different purposes and different social change. And in some cases, that alignment really benefited both the cause and it also benefited their career at the same time because they were plugged in with this movement, with this community. So, maybe we could talk about this idea of, for anyone who's listening to this right now who's a musician.

Michael Walker:
And they're thinking about how can I apply some of what I'm learning right now or some of this conversation to my own career. And being able to plug into a movement. Not to do it in a way where, I don't know, it's almost like phony or it's like I'm just doing this just, because in a way that's truly connected with something that they're passionate about. I'd love to hear your take on where they could get started.

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah, well I mean, quite honestly, when I started Music Beats Cancer, I didn't think of it this way. You start something and you don't know where it's going to go from there and you don't even understand the nuances and so forth. And just to roll back a little bit, people when I began said, Ramona, you need a celebrity.

Mona Jhaveri:
You need to get a celebrity involved. You need a face. And of course, I mean I'm just a scientist, I don't know any celebrities now, I don't even know how to access. This was way out of my league. And we finally stumbled on independent artists, and we actually liked to work with them because they are more authentic. They really did get excited.

Mona Jhaveri:
So, many of them had been touched by cancer. And what we do with the artists, we run these things, we call them challenges, the music Beats Cancer Challenge. And it's basically, it's like it's a fundraising and awareness raising. And the artists who raise the most get something interesting and some interesting exposure. So, we were doing this with Republic Records for example, and they said, "Okay, Mona, we'll do it with you."

Mona Jhaveri:
So, the artist who raised the most, we'll meet with the top three winners, this kind of thing. An artist loved that. And we also did it with iHeart where we were putting artists songs on the radio. We have one coming up where we're going to put the artist video on the jumbotron at the iHeart Jingle Ball. But it's this amazing exposure. But one of the things I learned in this process is as we were sourcing our artists, I actually spend 10, 15 minutes with every single artist explaining this is who we are, this is what we're about, love to have you on board.

Mona Jhaveri:
And inevitably, the artists share their stories. And that's how I learned so much about cancer but from the other side. And they were not all American, they were not all of one particular genre, they're not all one age, they were from everywhere. And it was so inspiring to form this collection of artists that just came together because of one purpose, to help deal or mitigate cancer. And they all felt it.

Mona Jhaveri:
When I stood back it was like, it just wowed me because they came to me in a way. We just put it out there in ReverbNation and they came to me and inevitably, every single person had a story. And I realized that's our access to the people. These artists, it's their stories, it's their music, and it's sort of that energy that they emote as being part and aligning their voice with us.

Mona Jhaveri:
But I think what you're saying is so true. Because later as time went on, we came up with this interesting idea, actually this was during COVID We said, let's do some events, but let's do some virtual events. And I came up with this idea of, and we called it virtual tributes, where we would do a concert of sorts or a tribute, but to a music icon who had died of cancer.

Mona Jhaveri:
And we started out with Van Halen and he died of lung cancer. And David Bowie, who was I think was liver cancer. And Bob Marley, skin cancer. And actually, were just about to do Aretha Franklin who passed from pancreatic cancer. And I realized that in honoring these voices and these people, these icons, there was so much there. There was raising awareness around these cancers, talking about innovation that could be next on the horizon.

Mona Jhaveri:
So, there was this education part. There was getting our brand out there in terms of what we're doing. But there was also that what you pointed out was this notion that you could be a musician and a force and a change maker. And inevitably, all these people, it's like they were all so powerful, not because they in a way chose it, but it just so happened. They were in the right place, right time, they were brilliant in terms of their talents or trade.

Mona Jhaveri:
They want to do something different, but they were so passionate about it as well. And I was thinking about just with this Aretha Franklin and I was just learning deeper and deeper about her story. And growing up, that her father as a reverend. And it was during the civil rights movement. I mean, she was rubbing shoulders with Martin Luther King and many other famous talents.

Mona Jhaveri:
Can you imagine what your world must have been? How much passion and influence that she had just as a child? And she was so prolific and profound and I think she will be remembered for generations from here on. So, I think what you say is so true. For artists to embody what impacts you is so extremely powerful, if not for you and your brand, but for what you can do for the world.

Michael Walker:
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Michael Walker:
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Michael Walker:
It's so good. It seems like music, it's really one of the best ways to communicate a shared emotion or experience and to be able to bring people together around that. So, it sounds like one of the main benefits, one of main things that you noticed through doing these campaigns with musicians that they all had their own stories to share and probably some of them were really moving. They've touched cancer in one way or another in their lives.

Michael Walker:
And their music can reflect that and can reflect that emotion from a very authentic place. And it's connected to everyone who doesn't necessarily have a voice to be able to express and share what they've gone through. They're able to give a voice to that. And it's really interesting. The movement around being able to help heal cancer, which is affected so many people and killed so many people is such a worthwhile cause.

Michael Walker:
And it seems like it's only a benefit to everyone if we can shine a light and we can you help bread a movement to innovate and help to solve cancer. But I also, I think probably the people who can really relate the most and the people who have their own stories because they've touched it in their own lives or they've been through something, are probably the people who are naturally feel attracted to you being a part of that movement.

Michael Walker:
And so, I'm curious what your take on would be for, let's say, that someone is listening to this right now. And maybe they personally have never really been affected by cancer. No one in their life, their close family has, they haven't lost anyone to it. What would you recommend maybe as a starting point for contributing to a greater cause?

Michael Walker:
So, being able to connect with a mission or cause or a purpose that's greater than them on their own. Where should they even get started finding the right, discovering the right kind of cause to connect with?

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah, and going back to cancer. Cancer is actually so prevalent that there is not, I should say, almost everybody has been touched in some way, if not directly, indirectly. It's become too many people on our planet, in our country and in our planet. And it's a disease that's been growing. In this country alone, in 1971 when Nixon declared war on cancer.

Mona Jhaveri:
This is when the government formally started pushing to support the National Cancer Institute and really make a program out of... And Nixon himself said, if we could put a man on the moon, we should be able to eradicate cancer. But here we are, we still have cancer. And at that time I think there were maybe 200,000 Americans who died of cancer in the '70s.

Mona Jhaveri:
Here we are in the 2020s and there were probably over 600,000 people. So, every year there's more and more people dying in this country. And then what happens is who's affected starts changing. It used to be pretty much cancer affected people who are in their '50s, '60s, '70s, this kind of range. But now you see younger people with cancer and rarer cancers becoming more common.

Mona Jhaveri:
And the fact of the matter is cancer is really hundreds of diseases, it's not just one. And that's why when we do lose ideas in the valley of death, that was an idea that could have helped somebody because there's so many cancers that are not addressed. So, it is not just a loss for a company that sort of went out of business, it's a public health crisis. It's a loss for people and for society. So, I think from that perspective, I just think everyone's affected.

Mona Jhaveri:
But I also think that there is a role for people who aren't fighting a disease. There's a role for people to heal, especially for people who aren't fighting disease to get on board. Because they have the voice, they have the strength, they might have the resources. Whereas people that are battling and their families, they're depleted. And in fact, so many people who have cancer and their families have declared bankruptcy.

Mona Jhaveri:
I mean, it's a big problem. So, I say the other way around. I say, if you haven't been directly impacted by disease, maybe this is your call to action. Because we need the people that are standing that are strong to get up and use their voice. And I think what happens is in charities and so forth, I think these people are untapped. Because there's so many that actually care and they don't know where to begin.

Mona Jhaveri:
Music Beats Cancer is not a charity for patient advocacy, it's a charity for people to get around innovation, to support the fight against cancer. But unlike charities that are sort of helping people who already have cancer. And I think about healthcare as like a flood. And in a flood, you see people drowning. And what we normally do is we jump in and we try to save them or maybe we'll build rafts and form communities and try to save them.

Mona Jhaveri:
But what we really need to do is figure out how do we stop the flood to begin with. So, we really need to be looking at how to deal with problems upstream rather than wait till people are sick and so forth. And that's how I see Music Beats Cancer, we're trying to deal with a problem before it happens, and it's a tall order.

Michael Walker:
It is. Yeah, that's really interesting hearing your perspective on that. And I have heard of a story before, ideally you want to work on prevention. Because if you can prevent the problem before it happens, then it takes much less resources to fix it. While the inherent challenge is that if you're trying to prevent something before it happens, then the awareness around the problem may not be front and center because it's not a problem yet.

Michael Walker:
And so, it's much easier to, if someone's currently in the middle of a problem, for them to see the priority and to see the challenge of it versus a better time for it would be around prevention. So, definitely really interesting. And also another point that came up as you're just describing that because it sounds like the point that you're making there is that even if you haven't necessarily had a personal loss or you've had a personal experience or been personally affected by cancer, that you can still have a very important voice.

Michael Walker:
And you can still help the movement. And in fact, you might even be a greater resource to help the movement because you're standing on your feet and you have more resources perhaps to be able to share. And what came up was, you're thinking about how some very, very talented songwriters are able to write songs for other artists. And write about stories and experiences that they personally haven't had themselves, but be able to write massive number one songs about these other experiences because they can have empathy, because they can relate with these other experiences.

Michael Walker:
And so, that kind of something just tapped in my own mind in terms of realizing that you don't necessarily have to have had that experience to be able to write a song for example, and be able to support a cause that you care about. As long as you have empathy, then you can be able to serve in that way. So, in terms of cancer itself, as we had this conversation, I'm realizing more and more, you have an amazing foundation as a scientist around cancer research and what are the causes of cancer.

Michael Walker:
And because it is such just an important health crisis and issue, I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts and perspective on what's the current state of cancer? Do we understand what exactly causes cancer? Why is it getting worse? What are some ways that we can prevent it? And this would be great for awareness for all of us. And yeah, just be curious, what is the most up to date research right now as it relates to cancer and how to overcome it?

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah, I mean it's like a loaded question. Because the fact of the matter is cancer is part of us and actually, it's part of evolution. What is cancer but a rogue cell in your body that has mutated and now no longer conforms to the society of cells. So, if you think of, we're multicellular beings and within our multicellularity we have organs. And the organs are cells that get together and they do certain functions, like the heart that pumps blood and the lungs that enables you to breathe.

Mona Jhaveri:
But what happens when you have rogue cells and they don't do that anymore and then they just grow uncontrollably. How did your body deal with that? And so, what's interesting is a long time ago, let's say in the 1970s when we declared war cancer, I think that we thought about cancer as being something very simplistic. It's not a virus, it's not a bacterium, it's not like, oh there's penicillin and we can now get rid of it.

Mona Jhaveri:
Or we have a vaccine for polio or smallpox and now we can eradicate it. That's not cancer because it's something within us and it's something that's very normal and natural. And what some people even said, it's the price of what we call multicellularity. It's the price of being that has many cells. And so, it could strike any of us. So, some of the theories around cancer is that of course as you may know, is it's mutations in the DNA.

Mona Jhaveri:
People say, well key genes get mutated and if you get too many of these mutations and the cell goes rogue. But we know that that's not the 100% truth because clearly, there's a lot of mutations in normal cells that then don't become cancerous. So, it's complicated. Is it stress? Are there other sort of signals? Recently I was reading a paper that I was looking at pollution in cancer.

Mona Jhaveri:
And they said it was a little bit of a breakthrough where they found that cells that were sort of... We've got a lot of cells that are mutated and that are sort of in that pre-cancerous space, but what turns them into cancer cells is a signal, is an external signal and maybe it's pollution. And so, this is what they found in this paper. It was really interesting because it helped us rethink what cancer is.

Mona Jhaveri:
It's no longer just a series of mutations, maybe it's mutations plus sort of a boost externally. But also, it's been thought that initially we thought cancer, the immune system doesn't see that you have a tumor because it looks like you, a tumor's from you. So, it doesn't recognize it as being a foreign substance.

Mona Jhaveri:
But later we found that that's not true, that maybe we all have cancer but our immune system is flagging it and sort of wiping out the rogue cells. However, for people who actually get cancer, those cancers have figured out how to hide from the immune system. And that's what enables them to grow and grow tumors and become malignant and spread is that they've been able to evade our own immune system. So, all of these advances have been happening over decades.

Mona Jhaveri:
And that we're getting a clearer and clearer view and understanding of the complexity. And that you can even wipe out cancer by treatment, but then the cancer comes back. How does it do that? And we've even understood, by the way, which this is something that I find fascinating is that as you know every cell has genes that can recreate you. Every cell has all your genes.

Mona Jhaveri:
Cancer has a way to capitalize on this. The cancer cell has a very unstable genome. And if it's a heart cell or if it's a liver cell and it wants to be a vein, it can do that. It can figure out how to unleash the genes to recreate a new organ and a new function. That's how smart it is. It's like evolution that would normally take a millennia of time to happen is happening in your body, but in a month or in weeks.

Mona Jhaveri:
That is the fascinating thing about this disease and why it's just so hard. It's like a moving target. But that being said, we've had in some incredible new types of therapies that have now been launched, like immunotherapies. And therapies that where we can take out your immune cells and re-engineer them and put them back into you and now, they're going to go after your cancer and now we don't need chemo.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Mona Jhaveri:
We have sequencing and we can actually have more intelligence around cancers. And really you spoke about prevention. So, if you ask the public, what do you want? How do you want to deal with cancer? People would say, I want to prevent it. Why not prevent it? Because if you can prevent it before we get it or at least find it early, our chances of survival will be multi multifold across all cancers.

Mona Jhaveri:
But that hasn't happened. We don't have that many screening tools. And that has a lot to do around finances around cancer and what pharma is willing to do or not do. But then, there's the public voice. And maybe this is where I see Music Beats Cancer being important. Because at what point does pharma and the government and investors, who normally make these decisions, at what point do they just listen to the people's voice?

Mona Jhaveri:
And so, I see our platform as being a place where people can say, we really want... There's somebody working on a diagnostic for breast cancer and it's really easy and it costs $5. Everybody get around that one. Our platform is very much like Kickstarter. And as you know, at Kickstarter, is it was for creatives who couldn't raise the money through classical channels.

Mona Jhaveri:
So, they went to their fan base. And so, many great movies and albums have been born and widgets and whatnot have been born out of Kickstarter raises. And we thought, well, we as scientists we're creatives, we should do the same. And so, that's how this whole thing sort of evolved. And again, it harnesses the voice of people versus the decision of the few who have the money.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. Yeah, I forget who had this quote, but this idea that people vote with their dollars. And that obviously money means different things to us based on our relationship with money and how much wealth we have. But money is sort of our best objective view of value. And if you want to know what someone values, you look at, okay, well how much money do they have and where are they spending that money?

Michael Walker:
And that's going to give you a direct look at exactly what they value. And it's really interesting the movement that you've created. And being able to raise these funds I think is a direct testament to exactly what you're saying. This is people's voices and they're literally putting in their voices. And they're voting and saying this is something that's important to us, it's something that we value. Super interesting.

Michael Walker:
And there are other ways that you can vote too that aren't just... Money is an objective value mechanism, but our time and our energy and our attention is also so valuable. And those are things that musicians can inherently contribute. And you can contribute your music and your music in some ways even it's so priceless, it's so valuable. So, you have something to offer, you have something to share.

Michael Walker:
Also, just really interesting hearing you describe cancer and just what exactly cancer is and the understanding that a little bit more. So, you mentioned that one of the areas that you focus on is biotech and actually helping these startups who are working on innovation in the field of being able to solve cancer. That's one thing that I'm super fascinated by is biotech and things like Neuralink and brain interfaces.

Michael Walker:
And the future of what it seems like Apple's moving towards with measurements. And potentially nanotechnology being able to detect cancer inside of us. So, I'd be curious to hear what types of research you see that are happening right now around biotech. And how you see that affecting the relationship with cancer over time and eradicating it.

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah, so in my platform, people come to me and they pitch their companies. So, I get to see anything and everything under the sun that's just kind of what people are working on garages type of thing. And that's sort the best part because that's where all the innovation is, all the creativity is. But what I dream of is a kind journey, a medical journey where we really can be more precise about how to treat cancer.

Mona Jhaveri:
But really how to treat anything and everything. And it seems to me, I guess this is what sort of bugs me as a scientist is that we have the tools. We can sequence genomes and like that in hours. It used to be it would take months. We can sequence a person's genome in a matter of a couple of hours. We have artificial AI tools, artificial intelligence tools that can tell us and guide us if you've got this issue in the genome or whatever, you're more likely to have that.

Mona Jhaveri:
We can look at proteins. We can sort data we've never done. And that can help us create a medical experience where we can diagnose and we can clearly understand what medicine should or should not be taken. Where right now that's not the case. You get sick with cancer and you have a certain cancer, then there's called standard of care.

Mona Jhaveri:
And that's one size fits all standard of care. We don't go looking at your genome and say, "You know what? More likely you're going to respond to chemo X and not chemo Y. Or maybe you shouldn't take chemo, you need hormone therapy." We don't have any of these tools. We don't do this as a practice.

Mona Jhaveri:
And so what happens is it's what I call this in imprecision. It's like just a crap shoot. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, maybe we do surgery, maybe we don't. And I think it becomes a painful patient experience. And for some people you luck out because you fit standard of care. But for a great number of others it didn't work and nobody knows why. So, when I look at what biotechs, I look at, ones that can enhance that experience, can make us more precise.

Mona Jhaveri:
That can quicken the journey to healing that. We have smart phones, we have Netflix that takes you to the next movie that you should see because it's based on what you like. We need a same for medicine. And so, yeah, we support biotech but we also support med tech companies that are doing the same thing. That monitor, that are easing that process that help you with referrals, that help you get patient data out there, that help privacy.

Mona Jhaveri:
All the many, many things that are issues today. But even issues that are not grave like cancer, it seems so archaic in terms of how we actually handle them. Smaller things, oh you have strep throat. Well, it takes three days to get a culture. We should be able to do it like this. And I think COVID changed a lot of that for us.

Mona Jhaveri:
And I remember when people were getting COVID, there were no tests. So, what do we do because we don't know if we're sick or not? We have these symptoms. I mean, why should we act if we don't have a test? And these were the breakdowns that just happen every day for people with cancer. So, I think I look for companies that can... I mean, what we traditionally look for was a cure.

Mona Jhaveri:
Everybody wants a cure. But there may not be a cure. There might be some really great treatments that can get you through or get you to a point. But is there something called the cure? And again, cancer is part of you, so maybe you saw one cancer, but there might be another one lingering somewhere. And even as scientist, we don't use the word cure.

Mona Jhaveri:
I think what's more impactful is to really catch it before it can wreak havoc, screening, and being really precise at how we treat patients down to male, female, person of color, where you live. Even those sort of differences in our genetic makeup can influence or can be part of whether or not drug works for you. And that's been another issue.

Mona Jhaveri:
A lot of clinical trials are done on white men, but they don't include enough women or they don't include enough African Americans or Asian Americans. So, all of these things have become holes in our system that people are aware of. But then the question is, well how do we actually change that? And some of the way that that's happening is that convergence of artificial intelligence. Those tools are helping us scale and get better and more precise at what we do.

Michael Walker:
Wow. I love this conversation. And it's so interesting here. I mean, what you're describing is it seems like a movement globally that's happening as artificial intelligence increases and intelligence is increased personalization. And all of these algorithms are basically doing exactly what you described. They're personalizing content based on data that they understand about you.

Michael Walker:
And what's really interesting is it kind of brings up some controversy or some good conversations or discussions that we had around our data and our privacy. And a lot of these services, they're there and they're providing an invaluable service. Being able to personalize things to you based on who you are is great, but there needs to be transparency around that data and what's being used for.

Michael Walker:
And that you're essentially writing off on the fact that you're okay with these platforms using this data to personalize things for you. But it seems like a no brainer, at least a huge opportunity is in the medical field and having a personalized data set of you and all of your medical history, your family's medical history. You walk in, and you scan your ID, and boom, it has everything that's relevant to you and your health history. Can I tell you about kind of a far-out idea?

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah. It may not be far out. They may be are recently working on it.

Michael Walker:
I'm sure there is. The fact that we're having this conversation right now. I've heard this, whenever you have an idea, it's probably popping up, the bubbles popping up around the world. There's other people having the same idea. Because we don't live in a vacuum. We have the same input, at least relatively.

Michael Walker:
But the idea is what we've referred to kind of internally as a singularity records. And singularity records is the idea that everyone could have connected to a decentralized platform that's not owned by a private company, but a decentralized on web3. And functions like an o of provider. In the sense that o of is a very common service nowadays for things like Google and Facebook and any data provider.

Michael Walker:
Basically, it's whenever you log in with Google, for example, then you might click on login with Google. And then you go to Google and it says, do you want to allow this app to access your email? And it really puts the ownership of authorization in your hands as the end user. And so, the idea with singularity records is what if we had a global ID for every human in the world that was associated with them and essentially their digital avatar and we all had one.

Michael Walker:
And this digital avatar, rather than trying to hide with, there's so many privacy trackers or things like we're trying to hide our data from everyone because we want to be keep it safe. But that's hurting the ability for good actors to be able to use that data to be able to personalize things to you. And so, what if there was a decentralized platform that you don't have to worry about someone else owning this very sensitive data, but it was a 100% in your hands.

Michael Walker:
But it also, you had a digital avatar where you could fill it out. And maybe there's a big long questionnaire where you get to answer all of the details that... All the things that you're interested in, all of the different aspects of your life. And maybe there would be some sort of onboarding sequence like health wise. Where you go into a hospital one time and they basically do import of all of your health data as much as possible.

Michael Walker:
And then you have a global ID. Everyone in the world has one. And this would probably be connected with anytime you're traveling, instead of needing a passport or a driver's license, you have an ID. And when you're going into the hospital, you can talk to your doctor and they can request access to your medical data, but just your medical data. And you can grant access to it based on having this record. And yeah, it's a pretty tall order obviously to create that.

Mona Jhaveri:
I think that this is happening. I think to take this yet to the next level is that in fact, people's data, which will be on blockchain, to secure it, is now also considered an asset like any other asset. You buy a house and you've got a physical property. But you also have your health data as an asset on a blockchain property type of thing. And that could be worth a lot of money. And that's in going to be in wills and ways that people could leverage it, and it's like a banking thing.

Mona Jhaveri:
So, people are already seeing health encrypted in these ways and having it easy to access by giving clinicians keys. In fact, we had somebody on our platform who was doing just that is because they wanted to. And they were doing it through an app in the hopes that they could help those children in particular who were fleeing hospitals when new Ukraine was being bombed. And how a lot of those hospitals were being bombed.

Mona Jhaveri:
And then they'd lose all their medical records. But well, what if they were stored on blockchain? And so, that didn't need physical buildings. You could flee out of Ukraine and go to Poland and continue your treatment. And they were many children that were doing just that. They were on hooked on these sort of respirators or whatnot and just trying to cross the border and get yeah...

Mona Jhaveri:
But along with that, they needed their hospital records. So, this is of a new way, could we do this and could we all do this like you were saying? And be anywhere and act as any hospital at the same time. Can we put a value to our records, a monetary value? Kind of like we talk about NFTs and all that stuff. Why can't health data also have that kind of value? Because right now, a lot of groups are taking our health data for free and doing things with it.

Michael Walker:
And spending billions of dollars on advertising for marketing intelligence and essentially doing exactly that. They're spending money to acquire data from relevant people. And maybe rather than having a bridge that you're paying in order to guide you to the right person, you're able to directly pay that money to the end users. Super interesting.

Michael Walker:
And it kind of brings up the question too of, man, how could we organize that in a secure way. Having that data, how do we make sure that there's not an owner of it that can... I don't know, it seems like it's really important to make sure that the end user data is in the hands of the end users as opposed to in the hands of a specific government, for example, maybe.

Mona Jhaveri:
True. Yeah, I agree.

Michael Walker:
But then again, maybe there's a OAuth integration with the government. It's like with America, it's like, hey, do you want to enter America? Great. We're requesting access to this data from you so that we can know, are you someone who doesn't have a criminal record that's globally recognized or something like that. So, interesting.

Michael Walker:
Well anyways, this conversation is one of my favorite things to geek out about is going really far out and talking about stuff like this. So, it's so cool to see what you've created in the movement that you've plugged into. And how you've integrated with really the influence and the power of musicians and their craft and their voices, being able to really emote and be able to connect with a greater purpose like this.

Michael Walker:
So, cool. So, thank you again so much for taking the time to hop on here and talk through this and kind of geek out with you about some of this future tech stuff. And for anyone who's here right now who is hearing this is like, this sounds incredible, I'd love to be connected and be a part of this movement. Where can the go to learn more about Music Beats Cancer?

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah. So, it's musicbeatscancer.org. That's our website and they can contact us through there. And also, they can contact me directly, Mona@musicbeatscancer.org. We are hosting a virtual tribute to Aretha Franklin next Thursday, September 22nd, 7:00 PM Eastern. So, yeah, we would love for people to join and be part. It's free actually. Actually, we have a headliner Jay Holiday, he's going to be I guess doing a medley of three four per songs.

Mona Jhaveri:
Plus two of our partnered artists will be opening for Jay Holiday. But as we spoke about in the beginning, it's really this chance to bring together music and purpose and real change on this planet. And so, I encourage people to come to that. But in future, we've got a lot of other things we have. I mean, we were talking about biotech. We have an event coming up next month, so stay tuned for. It's called The Battle of the Biotech. It's a pitch competition, but it's judged by musicians.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Mona Jhaveri:
Yeah. And we have a couple of Grammy award winning musicians that are on this judging panel. And the idea is that they decide which of these biotechs should win first, second, and third place. And the audience gets to vote. So, we have polling going on, we have judges, we've got prizes. And the whole purpose of this is to help launch our biotechs on our crowdfunding site and to get the people to weigh in.

Mona Jhaveri:
So, it's never kind of been done before. And also, it's really weird to have musicians to judge biotechs. And so, the musicians were getting a little scared and I said, "No, no, no. That's the point. If you guys can't understand this, then we are not doing our job. We need to create innovation so people get it and we'll get behind it."

Mona Jhaveri:
And the winners is not about what's the most lucrative company going to be. It's who's got an innovation that's going to be perhaps the most powerful for the world and for mitigating the global cancer burden. That's the way we need to see innovation. So, yeah, that's another cool thing that we've got cooking up.

Michael Walker:
Wow, very cool. The whole platform that you created is such an interesting thing to watch. So, thank you on behalf of all of us. And behalf on of everyone who has been personally affected by cancer especially, thank you for what you've built and what you're doing. And like always, we'll make sure to put the links for everything in the show notes for easy access. And yeah, thanks again so much. It's been great talking with you today,

Mona Jhaveri:
So, appreciate it. Take care. Thank you, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. And you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us, that really helps us out.

Michael Walker:
And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. It's time to be a modern musicians now. And I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.