The Role of AI in Human Longevity with Dr. Johann Malawana

In this conversation, Aldo sits down with Dr. Johann Malawana—former physician, founder of Medics Academy and the Healthcare Leadership Academy (HLA), and Associate Dean for Innovation at the University of Lancashire—to explore the intersection of healthcare, leadership, technology, and AI.

Together they discuss why innovation often happens outside traditional systems, how AI is accelerating change across medicine, and how longevity advancement informs cancer research.

In this episode:

• Why Johann left a successful medical career to build Medics Academy and HLA
• The challenge of creating change from within large institutions
• How AI is reshaping healthcare, medical education, and research
• What longevity research reveals about the future of medicine
• The risks of concentrating technological power in the hands of a few
• Leadership, curiosity, and building communities that create lasting impact
• Why human relationships remain more valuable than ever

A thought worth reflecting on:

"I can't change the whole world, but I can change this bit of it—and perhaps create a ripple effect."

If you're interested in healthcare innovation, leadership, education, or the future of AI, this conversation offers plenty to think about.

Connect with Dr. Johann Malawana:

• Medics Academy
• Healthcare Leadership Academy (HLA)
• School of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Lancashire

Enjoy the conversation.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlphaWireHQ

This episode was brought together by AlphaWire: https://alphawire.xyz/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you understand the science of cancer and you can program the AI to help you move steps along and you try and work out how to solve problems. At this stage, where we are right now, it hasn't got the creativity, I don't believe yet. And we are probably on the cusp of that.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome to Pulse by AlphaWire, the podcast where science and education meet cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence. My name is Alder the Pop, and each week I sit down with innovators, thinkers, and doers who are working to change our world for the better. Together we explore their journeys, uncover the lessons they learned, and take entrepreneurial pulse that drives them on their path to success. For this episode of Pulse, I sit down with Dr. Johan Malawana, a former physician, founder of Medics Academy and the Healthcare Leadership Academy, and Associate Dean for Innovation at the University of Lancashire. We explore why innovation often happens outside traditional systems, how AI is transforming healthcare and medical education, and what longevity research can teach us about the future of medicine. Along the way, Johan shares lessons on leadership, curiosity, and creating change wherever you can, one ripple at a time. Sincerely hope you will enjoy my conversation with Doctor Johan Malawana. It is a beautiful Wednesday morning, and I have the great pleasure to sit here with my morning coffee, but even more importantly, to sit here digitally with Doctor Johan Malawana, and I'm very happy you could join me. And you have a beautiful setting behind you. You're in some beautiful library. I wish this was my room, but it's not.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

It's very much a uh a public place.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

But these are real books.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

You see, these are real books.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

The books that Yeah. And so you're in the centre of London, you're just uh on the recovering end of a great conference that you had, I believe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Yeah, we ch I co-chaired a conference yesterday on medical education or in technology enhanced learning of health professionals education up at the university up in Preston. And so um I'm back down in London for various meetings and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Nice. Uh you are a man with many hats, and I always enjoy meeting you and talking to you. We're gonna get to your exact title in a bit. Uh just a little bit of your past. You are a former physician, so you know a lot about healthcare. You're you've been uh in the trenches as a physician, uh, but you also know a lot about teaching others about healthcare and medicine, and you've got two beautiful initiatives there, uh, Medics Academy and HLA, which is Healthcare Leadership Academy, and you're also an associate dean for innovation at the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Lancashire. Yes, I got that all right. Uh so many hats on, and the exciting bit is that as an associate dean for innovation, you've just published a book at uh Springer Nature, a publisher that I know well because I used to work for them, and it's all about AI and healthcare.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Yeah, that's right. In fact, literally just before I got on this podcast, that we signed a book deal. So we actually have we we published, I've already published two textbooks with them under a different series, but I've just been commissioned to essentially edit a whole series of textbooks all around medicine and stuff, and and and that's gonna be under the banner of the HLA, so it's going to be the HLA that basically um is the kind of series partner, and then we've got uh a series of textbooks. We're gonna start off with in the space, the leadership space. So talking about we've got I think seven or eight textbooks planned in various aspects of the leadership space, and then we're we're starting to move into medicine in more general terms, like in in terms of really focusing on innovation, AI, some technology, the future of medicine kind of area. But yeah, we've we've got that coming. And I think textbooks are fascinating in that the world is moving towards more of this type of content, right? Digital content, but actually being forced to sit down and think through your ideas and and consolidate them and think them through and work out how to communicate them in a physical form. Is maybe niche, but it's kind of like hopefully like vinyl records, right? That it's still got a place in the world.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, and and I I can imagine for you it's kind of an a layer on top of something that you've already been doing for so many years, right? With Medics Academy and Healthcare Leadership Academy. If you don't mind, I'd like to start there. So you're a physician, you're done, you're frustrated with the system, you say I'm gonna do something else, I'm gonna help other doctors. And that gave life to Medics Academy, am I correct?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yeah, I mean, frustrated with the system, it's it's an interesting one because I basically, it was a decade ago. I mean, both organisations are now ten years old, it's the 10-year anniversary this year, so this is quite a timely uh conversation. And and so I was a doctor, I was an obstetrician and gynecologist, so I mainly delivered babies in central London uh for about a decade. Um I was effectively a surgeon and a obstetric surgeon, so I'd um I uh I delivered nearly a thousand babies in London uh over that time. And I loved my job. I have I loved being a obstetrician. I thought delivering babies was like the best job ever. But what I was challenged with was that I also happened to have a a lot of other roles and and uh kind of experiences in that I I held quite a lot of senior leadership roles within the healthcare field, within medicine in the in the UK. So I was on the board of the General Medical Council quite early in my career, actually, very early. I was I think I was the youngest by by about 25 years on the board at the time. And um so I sat on the board of the GMC, I sat on I I was heavily involved with the BMA, I I did a lot of work at kind of national level, uh negotiating with the UK government. Um there was quite a lot of angst in that whole process. Uh it was I I I ended up working with a lot of other very senior clinicians who were much more senior than me, were often 20, 30 years ahead of me in their in their journey, the timeline. And I noticed that what happened is that they were extremely they they were successful. These weren't unsuccessful people, these were some of the most successful people in medicine, but they were very frustrated with not being able to make a significant enough change. And they'd spent so long getting to where they had almost the authority and the the the ability to do things that they just didn't have enough runway, if I'm being honest. They were kind of they were they were at that stage in their career where they had one eye on on retirement and another eye on on on still being passionate about what they were doing. So people would say to me, What are you doing with your career? I mean, like, why are you giving up like uh this this career of yours? You're you've you know you're on a fast track to achieve to get into a senior role. Uh and uh and I remember thinking, yes, but the problem is that I could see that I'd spend so long getting to where I wanted to get to, and then I wouldn't be able to do the things that I could already see needed to be done because it would have taken me so long to get there. And so and within something like the NHS, you know, we spend something like £200 billion a year on the health service, um, and that's not including all of the university structures that sit around it, you know, you're not talking about this is just literally health service delivery. It is very hard to to kind of affect change from within that system, um, simply because you have to get, you know, you have to there is a a lot of people that have their own opinions, and in order to innovate, you need space, frankly. You need a bit of space to think and work out and make some mistakes and all of that stuff. And and it's very hard to do that within um within the structure. And so I I went off and I started the two organizations, everyone told me it was a stupid idea. But I had a very, very supportive wife.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

And here we are ten years later. I want to I want to talk about that element of of change, because you say, you know, the medics academy in HLA has been going for 10 years, and change 10 years ago versus change now, because in in many of the interviews that I do, people say AI has has been an absolute game changer, an accelerator, people can't, you know, stay on the sidelines anymore, you need to get involved, or you're out, and kind of those things. So there's this enormous FOMO, right? Fear of missing out, that has been accelerated by AI. Whereas I think before it was like, yeah, yeah, you know, change, you know, sure, you we're the royal so-and-so, and we're a hundred and you know, two hundred, three hundred years old. Um so let's sit this one out when it comes to change. Is that something you've noticed as well? Has has AI been a big game changer for you know change in healthcare in general? And if so, how should how should we respond to it? Or how should physicians respond to that?

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Yeah, I mean I I can definitely see that there is significant change that is happening because of technology in general. Now, what is the impact of AI? I think AI is an accelerant. No, I I look back when I came out of medical school and the impact of just Google, like the the fact you had all information at your fingertips. That was actually a massive change for the health professions, right? Because the assumption had always been that, well, there was a massive diff power differential between a clinician and a patient. Very quickly, it changed to like the patients were coming in, having Googled everything and having that conversation and and having an empowered conversation. This is it wasn't a negative thing. This was like, okay, well, I've looked this up, and this is like, look at this evidence, or I think this, or whatever. And they were having a very kind of, you know, patients were having a much more uh some patients, not all patients, but a significant number of patients were having a much more um nuanced conversation with a clinician. And suddenly clinicians had to step up to that, right? They couldn't just say, well, I'm sorry, but I'm the surgeon, I've done this for 40 years, you know, I don't care what your opinion is, this is how we're doing it. With AI, what I saw was an accelerant, like much like the curve of uptake of you know the most downloaded app in history in like six months, it went to like two billion or whatever. It literally was the same thing of how the scientific community kind of accepted this, right? Was that was that what I saw. Was that actually very quickly, unlike it in the previous kind of iteration of this of technological intervention, where it took a long period of time for people to kind of accept it and understand it and work with it, AI had that same kind of storming, norming, performing kind of phase where there was people just who were just totally dismissive and angry and pissed off and you know all of that stuff. But it very quickly shifted, very quickly to be like, hold on, this is a game changer.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

So I would like to focus on medicine on healthcare, and then specifically your book, the premise of your book, and and how you focus as an associate dean for innovation on how to apply AI. Could you come up with some concrete use cases? So one of the things that have been dubbed is like AI is gonna enable us to cure cancer. Is is that w where do where are you on that? Is that are you uh is that a yes or a no for you?

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Yes, I think I mean if you understand the science of cancer and you can program the AI to help you move steps along and you try and work out how to solve problems. At this stage, where we are right now, it is it hasn't got the creativity I don't believe yet. And we are probably on the cusp of that. But if you look at why Demis Hasabis has won the Nobel Prize, you know, it it's because this is this, we know this is going to, I mean, you can tell, you know this is going to have a massive impact on on big biology, right? Because big biology is complex systems. This is the thing, right? So we've always talked about big chemistry and big physics, but big biology is complex systems that was all that were always really hard to like kind of do the same things that we did with big physics, right? But we can do that with big biology because now we have the tool to understand the complexity and process the information at a speed that allows us to and and this is not played out in cancer, this is being played out in longevity research. So you're seeing this with billionaires pouring an enormous amount of money into how to live longer, right? And you know, there are a lot of big biology companies, effectively science companies, that are essentially trying to work out how do we preserve life for longer. And it's often a really good, you know, it's a good indicator of where society is going at this stage, in this part, in this time in society, right? Because they have a lot access to a lot of information that I don't have access to, even though I'm an academic, they have access to a lot of data, information, and resources. And the diversion of the resources, if you know, follow the money, if you see where that flow of money is going, they're not putting the money into trying to help the m vast majority of the population to stay survive and live longer. They're not you know, you whilst Bill Gates is doing a lot of stuff around, you know, about with his wealth around trying to um trying to help human society, the vast majority of billionaires are not focused on the bottom 50%. They're really focused on how do they live longer. And big biology, the science of that, is going into the preservation of their lives, right? And in that scenario, what how are they doing that? They're using AI. They're using very, very powerful AI tools to model biology. So, you know, you've got these these little organelles, versions of a heart or a version of a brain that is a tiny human version of it, and they're experimenting on that. They're they're doing, you know, there's a whole load of big biology going on. I mean, your own work around genomics, right? Huge amounts of big biology around that stuff, right? And so the reality is this is where AI is is already having a massive impact. And the question is, is that impact going to be spread evenly across society, or is this an impact that is just simply the next iteration of the of the division between the haves and the haves-nots?

SPEAKER_00 14:32

I've heard that before, the haves and the haves not, the digital haves and the have-nots, and yeah, how how that is going to play out. I would say that in the beginning it's definitely going to be for the haves and and and then it's gonna drip down to the have-nots, but so many years later.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Uh yeah, the trickle the trickle-down economics have been proven on many, many different levels to not work. Yeah. Um, and and so the question is, do we do we believe that somehow this particular intervention is somehow going to work where trickle-down economics, when it doesn't work anywhere else, it suddenly works in this particular area where it's so important about you know life preservation and so on.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

I mean I d the thing what I would what I would say is that it it will democratize certain things is because we're all affected by healthcare. So and and if if it's not only an accelerator, but it could also be a lot more economic way of doing things, right? AI, you know, so I'm I don't know. I like yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Yeah, I'm a bit I'm a bit the use of the word democratization to me is like the use of the word woke, right? It's it's uh it's it's basically a hijacked concept, right? People talk about democratization all the time. And the funny thing is that all the biggest things I've heard telling me that it's about democratization have almost destroyed are destroying democracy. Social media was the great democratization of like information and news, and it was taking away the kind of the billionaires like Rupert Murdoch controlling information and all this stuff. And yeah, we're effectively what we've done is democratize it we call it the democratization, and yet it's destroying democracy itself, right? So so to me, I'm a on this particular point, I'm a bit cynical about trickle-down economics when applied to this scenario. Um, but I mean, what do I do about it? I mean, I can only do what I think I uh it I've come to a kind of a view of the world, which is that I know what I can achieve. And this was going back to my you know what you asked me about 10 years ago when I set up Medics Academy in the HLA. I know what I can do, I know what I can achieve. I'm not I don't give up on the world. That's the one thing I don't do, right? So I know lots of people throw their hands up and they blame the politicians and they just, you know, it's almost giving up on the world. That's never been my kind of thing. But I um I also have a sense of, okay, what is it can what what intervention can I do in order to make the world around me a better place for my children, the ripple of my ecosystem, like the people I care about and and the people who care they care about and the people they care about, because ultimately as a human society, what's really important is that we have a community. And in the community I live in, if there happens to be, there isn't, to be clear, I don't know any billionaires, but if there happens to be a billionaire, they still happen to be a human being. And if there is a uh a homeless person, they still happen to be a human being. Now, does the billionaire have more value as a human being than the than the homeless person? In my reckoning, they don't. I think they just happen to have more levers to pull, more resources. Where I see value is if they take those levers and support and help those that don't have those levers, that to me puts them on a pedestal. And so I think there is a whole uh kind of philosophical and and I I work in this space, right? My my work, the Healthcare Leadership Academy is a social enterprise not-for-profit that's all about leadership development and the philosophy of leadership. And we have people at one at the you know, we actually have got people who have a very, very strong right wing, like really strong right wing view of the world, and we have people that have a very strong left wing. I don't impose my view on on the people I'm around, and I don't have an objection to spending time with them. I don't live in this bubble world where you can't talk to one side or the other, you have to pick a tribe. I don't believe in that, and I think the destruction of democracy as I'm seeing it is often done by people who keep saying the word democratization.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

I now so regret using that word. But I use the word democratization, not that I need to defend myself, but I I use the word democratization to kind of have an opposite to trickle-down economics. That was kind of my you know, whatever that word is, is uh like you know, will knowledge be accessible faster to all of us, right? You you you you mentioned the homeless person and the billionaire, Chat GPT or Claude or whatever of those tools, you don't need to be a billionaire to use it, you know, just as an example, right? If you ask it the right questions, you can you can get ahead quicker. What I do need to know is I need to know how to use them. I I think it's an interesting concept, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Because I mean I I sit here in clearly a place of privilege, right? I literally I've lived in a city, I I I live now outside of London, but I I've lived in a city that you know has an incredible population of very diverse people. It is, you know, it is the crossroads of humanity. They come here and and it has and the funny thing is it has billionaires living right next to homeless people, right? And living in like weirdly not like kicking off about it, you know. And I think that's an incredibly beautiful thing as a as uh in terms of for human society. And I think about how does that translate into the work I do around helping other people think about their leadership journeys. And I guess for me, the challenge is is is going to be when I think about this, what's what's the next decade, two decades, three decades, um, and the work we do and and how what what what contribution we make to society. And then the important bit, this is the entrepreneur and the technologist in me, right? Because you can be the philosopher and you can be the academic, but to make the world a better place, to genuinely change the world, you need the entrepreneur and the and the and the doer. And that journey for me is all about okay, take that language, understand it, be curious about it, poke at it, question it, but then do something about it. Don't just sit in an ivory tower and talk about it to your fellow ivory tower members. Get out there, let's do something about it. And that's where I think you know, the work we do, the work I've worked with, you know, I've I've I got to know you through, is getting out there and actually saying, okay, well, I think this is what the world is. I think this is where the challenge is for the world. And I can't do anything about everything. I can't, I can't change the whole world, but I can change this bit of it, and I can try and make this slightly better. And if I do this, then maybe it'll it'll have a ripple, um, uh a ripple effect on on the rest of the on the rest of the uh world. I mean, I I I I I'll say this, I uh I'm I'm gonna plug this. I I actually uh do a podcast called The Ripple Effect, and it doesn't have it's not about a big audience. In fact, our audience is very specific. We want to get to an audience of 200 people a year. The reason is the Ripple Effect is a podcast that literally is about the people that apply to my scholarship programme, the Global Scholarship Programme for the Leadership Academy. And we put the Ripple Effect podcast episodes into the application process and get people to listen to the case studies, to hear people that have gone through the program before and what they've gone on to achieve and had the impact they've made, and why, and how they thought about the world, how they changed the world, etc. etc. And to the audience is incredibly narrow. Listen to what other people have said.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

And I think this is where technology is absolutely amazing. I had one question about a ripple effect. Could you give me kind Of a concrete use case. Can you give an example of an episode of what you look into?

SPEAKER_01 22:05

We have about 25 episodes, and literally they are one-to-one conversations between me and my students. So more the scholars come. And when I say students, these aren't like students, right? They're often at senior level. So some of them are very senior within the health system, within health systems. Sorry, they're not even within the UK one. They they apply from all over the world. Because we run this scholarship program completely free, right? So as in we give out about 60 to 80 scholarships a year. I think we've put something like 1.5 million pounds of resources into setting this thing up. But we also get resources from a variety of other sources, from the health service, from other partners, and from lots of activity where they believe in what we're doing. So anyone can apply. And guess what? We get applications from everywhere. We were, we had scholars, people who were had scholars who got a scholarship in the middle of the war zone in Tigray, who were in the program for a year, they're on the program for a year, they were actually in the middle of the war zone, like in and they were doing this scholarship and they were like applying the project, the leadership projects in, et cetera, et cetera. We had, you know, we've got people in all over the world who apply to the program, they do the, they spend a year with us, and then uniquely we basically have a very weird setup in that if you complete one of our programs successfully, we will support that individual anywhere on the planet for the rest of their career. Right? We don't, we don't make, we don't, it's not like a uh like a transactional thing of one year you pay, you get your piece of paper. You know, we support that community for the rest of their career. And that has been a massive, like, and and most people are hyper suspicious of this, right? And yet we've done it for 10 years, and it it the fact it's really interesting. Recently we're getting lots of people saying, Oh my god, I can't believe you guys have been around for 10 years. This is crazy. Like, you know, most of the organizations, most of the tech companies that I that were started at the same time as me just don't exist anymore, right? And so, but we built it all with the idea that the the commercial tech company, Medics Academy, basically underpinned the social enterprise, the the I the social mission that I I I kind of set out on 10 years ago. And as a result, so to go back to your original question about the podcast, the podcast is an opportunity for me to sit down with my with my scholars, my students, and reflect on their journey as scholars. It's literally just telling the individual story of the of people that have gone through the program. And we we've had over 600 or 700 people now go through the program, so it's hard to get around all of them. But my my basically my mission is to, over the next several years, is to document the journeys of all of these individuals and what they've gone on to do.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

So I think there's loads of space for optimism and and how to use technology and AI. I would be looking for an example, you know, whether in your capacity as Associate Dean for Innovation at the University of Lancashire or um as the founder of uh Medics Academy, uh if there's one kind of field in healthcare and medicine that stands out, that you say, well, if you apply AI to this, here's like you know, a match made in heaven, or potentially maybe the opposite, whereby you say, Well, there's nothing there. Could could you could you pinpoint anything? Is there anything that you could say, well, these are.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

I think actually the the the thing I kind of was a bit probably I sounded quite negative on, but actually the best case study right now is longevity research because so much money has been poured in that we can now see what the impact of AI would be if we you if we took the tool, if we took like it's like a it's like a torch in the dark, right? If we took the torch and we shone it in a certain way, we can now see the strength of the torch, where the light shines, what it would light up, etc. etc. What what longevity research, which has been, you know, has been funded fundamentally by billionaires for self-interest, but what it's taught us is what could be done if we applied this same torch to other fields. Like, how could we improve cancer care? How could we improve um, you know, how do we stop the Ebola virus that is currently ravaging through Central Africa right now? How do we think about that hantavirus that is going on that ship that's you know coming up the Atlantic? You know, is there something here that we could use this torch, this this kind of tool for? But the the good thing about what's going on with uh longevity research is that it's showing us what is possible whether we do it.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

That's that's a second. Yeah, there's a difference. I I agree with you. There's a difference between talking about it in your ivory tower with other people in their ivory tower or actually going out there and do something about it. And I hope that this conversation is not an ivory tower conversation, but is a conversation that many listen to and more people will embrace and maybe act upon it as well. We'll be sure to include the the links to Medics Academy and HLA and and and potentially also School of Medicine at University of Lancashire in our show notes. Uh before I go to my uh two very uh last questions.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Can I interrupt you? If if anyone wants to come, you know, I mean some of your listeners will be in technology and technologists and have resources and stuff. If any of them ever want to come and do something positive with that, like I'm sure they're doing positive stuff anyway, but they want to work with the HLA or with the social enterprise, or they want to work uh with the with the work we're doing in the university around this area. Like there is so many ways that they could engage with me and my team and my various different teams that I work with. And you know, we'd absolutely love, I'd love for people to connect with me on LinkedIn and reach out to me and say what it is that they think they can support and help us with. I'd so be up for that if anyone listening to this, you know, hears this and thinks, oh yeah, I can I can totally get where this is coming from. I'd love to be part of that.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Yeah, definitely. Well, let's uh let's make sure we push it out. And I I couldn't have said it better myself. So I'm I'm sure people will respond to it. Hopefully you'll get loads of good uh uh leads for it. Out of these ten years as uh the founder of Medics Academy and HLA, and before that as a physician, can I ask you what are you most proud of?

SPEAKER_01 28:11

This is the most probably predictable and probably people will just roll their eyes answer. I've got two kids and I love my children, right? And I basically I get to spend lots of time with them um because of the various work I do, because I'm I am a workaholic. I was always a workaholic, I will always be a workaholic, but I've changed my work pattern and the type of things I work on just so that I know I can spend time uh with them. And I guess the the thing from a professional perspective is the HLA. It's that it's it's my other baby, as it were, with the impact that I get to have and the people I get to meet. I mean, I get to meet some of the most unbelievable, crazy interesting people on our planet. Um and the weird thing is they want to come and work with us rather than me chasing after them. Now is it's kind of my dream scenario, and that's I think the most thing I was most proud of.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

Loads of love. Well, thank you for those beautiful answers. And then my two very last questions. One, I ask every guest on this podcast, and I I've become uh an amateur researcher in the topic, and it's a topic of morning routines. Do you have one? And if so, do you care to share? I I I for the listener that Dr. Malamana did a face like once.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

Uh, do I have a morning routine? I I am not one of those people, you know, that you get these people that talk about how they get up at four o'clock in the morning or five o'clock in the morning and they do this, this, this. And it sounds amazing. I mean, I'm more of a night routine kind of guy. Because I'm a I'm a night guy rather than a morning guy, if that makes sense, right? So I tend to like so what I like to do is I like at the end of the day, if I'm on a completely relaxed scenario, I'd like I like to sit there watching either the news, so the news at 10 or news night if it's uh during the week. And I'd I'd sit there watching news night, usually with uh either a fruit juice or with a glass of uh nice glass of single-balled whiskey. I'm I'm really into whiskey, and and then just sit there watching the news and understand what's going on in the world, and then just think about like what what I've done that day and what maybe I need to think about for the rest of the week.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

It's wonderful to hear those things. It's I I just I just like uh the responses of people on that level. And then my very last question, Joan, it's about reading. So um or or or uh doesn't have to be reading, but you know, inspiration, let's put it that way. In your uh long-standing career again as a physician, founder of Medics Academy, HLA, and now Associate Dean of Innovation at the University of Lancashire. Is there anything that uh any reading for people who are listening and say, hey, I love this career path? Uh I'm inspired by all the work Johanna has done. Has there been any reading you would recommend them to uh dive into?

SPEAKER_01 30:50

But honestly speaking, I I don't think that is the way to do this. I think the way to do this is go and meet people. Yeah. If I need to gain information, to me, the best way of gaining information is to interact with other human beings. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Interact with other human beings. On that note, it has been a great pleasure of interacting with you as a human being. Thank you so much, Dr. Johan Malawana, for your time. Thanks, Alan. You've listened to Pulse by Alpha Wire, produced by Natalie Piles and Amela Faisal, with great music, The Optimist, written by Holly Hamill, performed and produced by Alo. Episodes hosted weekly by me and Aldo Department.