Hey Friends,

I’m teaching a special AI workshop this weekend in Ibiza for my Ladies Who Claude hosted at Olivia Steele’s Studio.

It’s a 3 day workshop where we get AI working for you. We connect Claude to the tools you use everyday (gmail, calendar, Slack, Notion, etc etc), and you start to build your own automations using Claude Code. No technical experience required!

It’s last minute but better way to spend a weekend than learning how AI can change the way you work, build and live?

Grab your spot here.

Hey Friends,

Last week I wrote about the $8.64B that has been poured into AI Drug Discovery companies, with most of them focusing on the Discovery stage of Drug Development. Read it here.

I covered why investors are drawn to companies solving problems at this stage, as it seems the most solvable by computational chemistry and biochemistry modeling. Although there is a lot more complexity to solve at this stage.

AI companies are doing a decent job here, bringing this stage which typically takes 3-6 years to compress it to 18 months, as evidenced by Insilico Medicine’s drug to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) called Rentosertib.

Rentosertib which was designed entirely with generative AI and has moved through successful Phase IIa clinical trials, making their process 2-4x faster than the industry standard.

Even for Insilico Medicine, which is moving very quickly with Rentosertib, the process took 4-5 years for them to get from Phase I to completion of the Phase IIa trial.

This is a great success story, and one many points to when they say “AI Drug Discovery works!”

However, a BCG/Wellcome analysis (Jayatunga et al., Drug Discovery Today, 2024) found that while AI-discovered molecules having an unusually high Phase I success of around 80–90%,  they have only a 40% success rate in Phase II trials, which is the same as the historical average for traditional drug discovery.

I got a few comments on last week’s article about this point (thanks for the comments!).

Some people suggested that the clinical trial issue is a consequence of not getting the biology right in the first place, and I agree.

What makes drugs fail in clinical trials?

Drug failure is mostly a biology problem, not a chemistry problem.

And, we’re not getting the biology right because we do not know all of the biology.

We are still making discoveries all of the time. Finally identifying the functions of proteins and enzymes in the human body that we didn’t fully characterize or understand.

And while AI can find molecules that fit into their targets like a lock and a key, it can also mean that the key can fit into other locks as well. Resulting in what is called off-target effects, which can lead to the side effects.

Until we have a complete model of all of the biological systems at the cellular level, tissue level, organ level and whole body level, we can’t offload this entire process to AI with a 100% success rate.

This means there are still many opportunities for companies to improve in target validation, and to make improvements to preclinical drug testing. And many companies are focusing on these areas.

For example companies like Emulate, MIMETAS, and Hesperos are aiming to replace animal studies by creating “organ-on-a-chip” whey they can work with human tissue to test the drugs as the intermediate step.

But beyond getting the biology right, and preclinical testing we still need to test the efficacy of the drugs in humans in order for the drug to be approved, and that process is painfully slow, insanely expensive and takes years.

The reasons drugs fail in clinical trials deserves its own article. But today I want to focus on other areas in clinical trials which slow down the whole process of getting a drug to market.

What can speed up clinical trials?

The speed of the drug development process limits who gets access to the drugs when they may really benefit from them, and one of the areas that can really impact how fast trials are done is bureaucracy.

Read more

Hey Friends,

I’m teaching an AI for Everyday Work workshop on Sunday at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 7pm Central Europe for my Ladies Who Claude. It’s live online and you’ll get the recorded class if you can’t make it!

This will be the only online workshop for beginners I will run for the rest of the year.

Grab Your Spot Here

Recently I’ve been seeing AI drug discovery companies one after another announcing big VC fundraisers.

So far, in 2026 alone, $8.64B has been poured into AI drug discovery companies.

And I get it.

It’s an attractive bet.

If we can make more molecules, and get better at modeling the binding of those molecules to targets, then we have more chances to find interesting pharmaceutical drugs.

Right? Seems straightforward.

Investors love a straightforward, convincing story.

But…the truth to this is far more complex.

Where these companies are focusing is at a nano-fraction of the entire drug development pipeline, the discovery phase.

The discovery phase includes the identification or creation of a therapeutic that might be able to address the symptoms or underlying cause of a disease.

This is the first step to the 10+ year process to take a drug from discovery to patients.

The discovery phase has a very dismal success rate.

For every 20,000-30,000 compounds tested in this first step, only one is eventually approved.

Because of this insanely high failure rate, many of these AI drug discovery companies are solely focusing on the design step.

Like I said in the beginning…if we can design more molecules, we have more options and higher chances of success, right?

Well that’s what Isomorphic Labs believes, and they made headlines this year securing $2.1 Billion to scale its AI drug design engine.

And when you dig into the top funded AI companies, many are focusing on the same problem.

The problem of expanding the chemical space.

Now the reason that this frustrates me is that synthetic chemists have been doing this for decades. Just…not yet with AI.

It has been calculated that there are 10⁶⁰ possible drug-like molecules. This number is roughly equal to the number of atoms in the entire Milky Way Galaxy.

This figure was sketched on the back of an envelope by computational chemists back in 1996.

“Drug-like” molecules mean small-molecules that follow a set of rules that allow for a high likelihood of bioavailability which indicates whether a chemical compound can be absorbed effectively when taken orally.

Of those 10⁶⁰ possible drug-like molecules, it is believed that we have chemically synthesized 10⁸ or roughly 0.1% of small-molecule chemical space.

And honestly, 0.1% is a generous percentage. I rounded up for simplicity.

If you actually write it out in full decimal form it looks like:

0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

So…there is a LOT left to discover.

Which explains why technologies like generative AI is such an attractive investment, because traditional methods barely scratch the surface of what is chemically possible.

However to increase the chemical space comes with a lot of challenges.

Challenge #1: Blind Spots

The chemical space is so vast that any physical or virtual library we could create would be too small to hold it all.

Searching for these new chemicals can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack, or a drop in an ocean.

And because of this, there can be huge blind spots in our search.

We cannot infer the drug properties of the whole chemical space through such a tiny sample.

Challenge #2: Searching the Chemical Space

Drug-like molecules are very complex, with each one you have to track hundreds of chemical properties (molecular weight, solubility, toxicity, synthetic accessibility, etc.), another word for these molecules is high-dimensional.

Standard search algorithms break down in high-dimensional spaces.

In those environments the volume of chemical space grows exponentially, making it difficult for traditional software to find a molecule that ticks all the boxes.

Challenge #3: Chemical Synthesis

Now, let’s talk about bringing a virtual chemical designed with generative AI into reality.

Just because a machine learning algorithm can mathematically construct a molecule does not mean that a human or robot can chemically synthesize it.

When I was in grad school, the first lab I rotated with was a synthetic chemistry lab. Our entire goal was to expand the chemical space by synthesizing molecules by hand.

We would design a batch of molecules and then one-by-one try to synthetize them.

We’d use established chemical reactions to transform simple starting materials into the more complex drug-like compounds we were aiming for.

Specifically, I was using an established chemical synthesis process called the “Ugi reaction” named after the chemist who discovered it.

It is a multi-component reaction (MCR for short). MRCs use three or more starting materials to react in a single vessel, called “one-pot” reactions.

Imagine this like you are baking a cake, you put 3 or more ingredients together into a baking pan…heat and viola, you have a cake. Chemistry is similar.

At the end of an MCR you get a highly structured final product containing all the parts of the components.

This is attractive because the chemical reaction is highly modular, which can lead to a lot of chemical diversity. For example, if you have 4 different components, and 10 variations of each component, you can potentially synthesize a chemical library of 10,000 different compounds.

However, in reality…It didn’t always work that way.

If one reaction didn’t work, I wouldn’t spend too much time troubleshooting it because I had 9,999 more chemicals to synthesize instead.

So I spent a semester running endless Ugi reactions to make a chemical library of benzodiazepines, all to send to the NIH for them to put on a shelf to use for future screening.

It was so boring that I left that lab to study something else. It was definitely work that a robot could try to do instead of a human!

Read more

Hey friends,

I just got back from two weeks sailing in the Ionian Sea with my dear friends Andres, Riaz and the sailing cat, Ida.

If you’d known me 10, 20, 30 years ago, and I told you that my preferred vacation nowadays is to go for long sailing trips - you would never believe me.

I’ve suffered from severe motion sickness since I was a child.

Boats were impossible.

Planes sometimes led to vomiting.

Winding roads through the northern California mountains where I grew up were the worst.

I remember wanting to lay down in the back of the car to feel less nauseous, but for the seatbelt to work properly and keep me safe, my parents wanted me to sit up and I would…inevitably throw up.

Driving with me was a challenge.

Now the thing about motion sickness is that you never quite know when it will strike.

Some winding car rides will be OK.

But most of them make me nauseous.

Most plane rides I could handle.

But some would surprise me and I’d vomit.

Overall, all buses are horrible.

Trains are hit or miss.

Some boat rides, I could survive.

When I say “survive” I really mean, not vomiting.

Because…again as motion sickness is a strange thing, usually from an outsider’s perspective, it isn’t that bad unless you vomit.

But that is hardly the case.

For a motion sickness sufferer, you are spending most of the journey trying not to vomit, which is also its own exercise in mental strength, while simultaneously feeling dizzy, tired, nauseous and unpleasant.

One thing that does fight motion sickness is a sense of control, or being able to predict the next motion.

Learning to drive was a game changer for me, since as the driver you see the curve ahead and you can anticipate how much your body is going to move.

By driving, you can feel no motion sickness or very little, so this really saved me when I was 16.

Up until then, wow I suffered.

The same happened with sailing.

Once I learned how to sail, once I learned what to look for in the wind, to predict the motion the waves would cause in the boat, I could feel a lot better.

This doesn’t mean I’m completely cured by any means.

If it was, I wish I could bottle this up and give it to everyone who suffers with motion sickness.

But learning to sail helped me tremendously, because before that…bringing me on a boat was impossible.

Even cruise ships made me nauseous and I would use anything I could to help - the ginger chews, the wristbands, dramamine.

There have been a few motion sickness “cures” over the years.

You may remember when these motion sickness glasses came out.

They look crazy…but if you suffer from motion sickness, you’re really willing to try anything.

The rims are hollow and partly filled with colored liquid. When the car or boat tilts, the liquid tilts too, so you always have a horizon line in the corner of your eye.

The idea is that your eyes finally see the same motion your inner ear is feeling, and your brain stops panicking.

I never bought a pair, although I was tempted. But I couldn’t convince myself that wearing these on the train or bus would be realistic.

They look so so ridiculous.

And when I searched for them on Amazon this week, I found them sold in a bundle with the acupressure anti-vomiting wristbands, which did not give me much faith.

The wristbands have a little plastic ball on the inside that presses on a point on the inside of your wrist, about 3 finger-widths below your palm.

I’ve worn them on ferries, buses and that cruise ship.

But they do very little, other than bruising my inner wrist after wearing them all day, everyday for several days in a row.

So maybe the glasses would do the same. A bit better than nothing.

I really felt totally out of luck until 10 years ago I found one product that works.

It’s an Australian over-the-counter product called Travacalm. It’s a miracle, in my opinion.

The first time I tried it I was going on a snorkeling trip with my dad at the Great Barrier Reef.

I was really nervous about the trip because I was 28 years old, still getting super nauseous on boats (I hadn’t learned to sail yet), so I was going to take all the precautions.

Dad and I went to the pharmacy, bought ginger chews, and the pharmacist recommended Travacalm.

Take the first pill 12 hours before you are on the water, the next one a few hours before.

I did it, I went on that rocky boat, and I really enjoyed myself.

My Dad, on the other hand, felt horrible.

Almost immediately into the journey out to our snorkel spot, my Dad said “Oh Neen, I’m so nauseous and tired.”

Since my Dad is diabetic (Read: #169: 🩸 How I Fixed My Dad’s Diabetes Crashes in 4 Weeks

), my first instinct was that his blood sugar was low/high.

But…that wasn’t it.

Then I told him “OMG, you’re motion sick.”

Dad’s response” “I don’t get motion sick”

“Well, hate to break it to you…but you are…this is how motion sickness feels.”

And his reply, “This is horrible! This is how you feel all the time in the car?”

Seeing the look of shock on his face and empathy after he finally understood what I had been through with all my episodes of motion sickness was gratifying.

I gave him a suggestion that I was often told, to get in the water.

Since this trip, back in 2016 to Australia, I’ve kept a stash of Travacalm at home.

I ask friends to bring it back to me if they are coming to the US or Europe from Australia. Because it’s not sold outside of Australia unfortunately.

So if you get motion sick, and you are in Australia or know someone traveling to it, have them pick this up for you.

I swear by it.

But, if you don’t have a way to source your way to Travacalm, I just learned of something else new.

Apple has a feature called “Vehicle Motion Cues” for the iPhone.

With this on, you can use your phone as a passenger without getting motion sickness.

It adds dynamic dots to the right and left sides of your screen that move down the screen as you accelerate forwards, and then fall down the screen when you make turns.

Somehow this tricks your brain and somehow…it works.

When I have the Vehicle Motion Cues on, I somehow feel less nauseous, and I can actually use my phone in the car.

Want to add this to your phone?

1. Go to the Settings app on your iPhone.

2. Tap Accessibility, then tap Motion.

3. Tap Vehicle Motion Cues, then tap an option. If you choose Automatic, animated dots appear on the screen when iPhone detects that you’re riding in a car or other on-road vehicle; the dots are hidden when the motion stops.

4. To manually show or hide Vehicle Motion Cues, open Control Center, tap the Vehicle Motion Cues button, then tap an option.

What I’ve Learned

When I line it all up, almost everything that has ever helped me does the same thing.

Driving lets me see the curve before my body feels it.

Sailing taught me to read the wind and the waves before the boat moves.

The glasses and the dots on my iPhone show my eyes the motion my body is already feeling.

My brain just wants to know what's coming next.

Travacalm is my backup for the days it can't.

As for why I don't carry it everywhere...motion sickness doesn't strike every day, so I forget until it's too late.

So this is my reminder, to you and to me: if you get motion sick, keep something in your bag.

And if you've found something that works for you, hit reply and tell me. I'm always looking for the next thing to try

💻 Doors are Open for Cohort 2 of the 30-Day Claude Challenge

This is for my Ladies Who Claude. Ladies who are entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners. We are going to Master Claude Code in 30 days.

Topics include how to automate replies so your inbox is already handled before you wake up, making websites, creating a social media “command center” to manage posting across social channels, and automating invoicing.

In the Challenge you will get:

1. Daily video lessons delivered to your email

2. Real Use Cases, real builds, and tips from over 300+ hours of coding with Claude

3. Once a week live calls with me

4. Access to a community of women building together

You don’t need to be savvy with Claude. I’ll get you all on the same level.

If you are already using Cowork and Code, great! You will find the use cases, and live-builds truly valuable.

We start November 16.

Apply here to join.

🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

The next Online Master Claude Code in 30 Days for Businesswomen Challenge starts November 16.

Join the November Challenge

Feedback from the September challenge students

"The course is really amazing, so structured and so easy to follow."

"I'm just testing things that I didn't dare to test before."

This week she built her first app, a habit tracker her 1:1 clients can use between sessions. A few days before that, she built a website with her 13-year-old so he could start a morning bread delivery in their neighborhood, with a working backend.

Franziska, coach

“As a solopreneur, redesigning my whole shop window, my website and everything customers see first with AI, is a big deal. Doing the challenge now lets me serve more customers, and serve them better.”

Ellie, career transition coach, Rewirement by Design

In the challenge, you get

• 30 videos, with one build every day

• 4 live calls with hot seat building, all recorded

• How to build small services and websites with AI

• A WhatsApp group to support each other

• Lifetime access to the hub, including everything I add later

All of this for $397, which works out to be $13 a day, or two lattes.

In 30 days, you'll go from wondering where AI fits in your business to using it every day.

Registration closes November 13.

Join the November Challenge

Not sure if it's for you? Hit reply and tell me one task in your week you'd happily never do by hand again. I'll tell you honestly whether the 30 days would fix it.

Would love to have you in it 💜

Nina

P.S. Remember, if you register by Sunday, October 4, at 12pm GMT, you get a special offer of a 30-minute AI strategy call with me. Normally, the only way to get 1:1 time with me is a paid strategy session.

This last weekend, I drove 40 minutes south of Lisbon to spend the weekend at Casa Colab in Meco.

Roya, the founder and visionary behind Casa Colab, invited me to join the last days of a one week Artist’s Residency she was hosting.

After four Ubers canceled on me, not wanting to go on such a long ride, I finally threw too many bags in the trunk and settled into the ride.

The idea was to explore how I can build a workshop specifically for artists to solve their biggest pain points with AI.

It’s best to get the ideas straight from the people who live them, rather than making assumptions.

We sat down in a circle at sunset. A mix of men and women from around the world - Angola, Brazil,UK, USA, Spain and Portugal.

And we went one by one around the circle to talk about life as a musician and all the behind the scenes admin that they face to build their careers.

Most of them are a solo operation, which means no one to delegate admin, booking or social tasks to.

Some have band members, which rely on them as the main artist to book gigs, and this adds additional financial pressure.

To my surprise, not everyone was as anti-AI as I thought.

While many do not use AI to create art or music, they are using it for pricing, creating proposal templates, tour planning, and to maintain a google sheet functioning as their CRM for logging contacts, conversation status and follow-up dates.

They also have used AI for inspiration for scripts for content and video ideas.

Some have tried to use AI and have been unhappy with the result. For example, one artist fed AI his bio, artist profile, albums, art and more, and said that AI compressed the information too much, resulting in a media kit that didn’t show his rich portfolio.

After we left the beach, we gathered around the dinner table to continue the discussion.

Plates of food passed around, wine bottles uncorked, and we debated AI music quality and how they are using AI in making music.

One artist was using AI for music production, but not the creative part, but for separating and generating tracks. Even to create a prototype of a track to then record with live instruments later.

We spent a lot of time talking about Suno, a software that can generate full songs from prompts.

Someone mentioned that they’ve used Suno to sing a melody and then they requested a different instrument arrangement. Something that is truly unimaginable just a year or two ago.

This feature, some of the musicians agreed, is useful to professionals who know exactly what they want and to skip the technical steps.

Several musicians also agreed that they have heard AI arrangements that they have found genuinely impressive when made by skilled musicians.

Although, this then led to the topic of “getting tricked by AI’ that when they listen to a track, find it good, only to find out later it was created by AI, they when judge the track differently, or don’t like it as much.

This happens not just in music, but also in art. One Artist brought up an example of how they were tricked by AI generated “paintings” posted to art accounts.

AI content labels were agreed to be absolutely essential and should be required, and many were concerned that social media is lowering critical thinking because clickbait and AI content is rewarded. Audiences aren’t trained to second-guess.

I do hope that to balance out the AI-content, there will be a rising preference for content with visible human imperfection.

As we finished dinner, the musicians picked up their instruments and microphones and jammed for several hours into the night.

All of that human energy, emotion and the “DNA” in a performance are irreplaceable by AI.

My idea of meeting with them was to see how AI as a tool to help creatives free up more time to be creative. How we can use AI to amplify them, not to replace their talents.

The next day over breakfast, I was reflecting on the conversation and thought about their biggest bottlenecks.

#1 bottleneck: outreach.

Many of the artists have niche projects. This means they spend a lot of time finding the right venues and booking agents where their music will resonate.

Then, once they find the right ones, they struggle to manage the emails and follow-ups, daily correspondence and content delivery leading up to the gig.

It feels like a management overload.

#2 bottleneck: content backlog.

Once they get the gig, they usually get hours of video content and photos from the performance, which is great.

But it ends up in their photos album that sit unedited and unposted, creating a big content backlog.

They all have social media and platforms where they know posting the content will help build their digital portfolios, but they lack the time.

So they end up with multiple shows worth of videos and photos…and then life goes on, and new shows keep arriving before old content reaches the internet audience.

I have the same problems as an entrepreneur and teacher

I came home from the Artist’s Residency and looked at my camera roll from the weekend.

And there in my photos album was the same thing the artists were telling me…I had the same content backlog, days of videos of the artists jamming, us sharing stories, and it was just sitting there.

Then I kept scrolling, I have even more content, from AI classes I’m teaching, talks, moments with the communities I’ve built that are well worth sharing.

This is the human content that people are hungry for, so just like the musicians, my content is stuck.

And I thought…here is one real way that AI can take admin off of their plates.

So…I asked, how can Claude help manage this?

Turn One Event’s Photos Into A Content Plan

I keep all my photos in Google Photos, so the first step is to just download the photos and videos to my desktop so I can point Claude at it.

Step 1: Pick one event, download all the photos to a folder on your desktop.

Step 2: Drag the photos into claude chat and paste this prompt

Step 3: You have 5 posts ready to go - to copy, paste and schedule on your socials.

This is an easy fix…but it’s too manual, you’re dropping the photos directly into Claude Chat, and that is just for one event. But if you’re like me, there are 8 more events in the backlog.

And that means you need to use Claude Code.

Here’s how you hand Claude the whole pile at once, and get a reel from what’s on your camera roll with Claude Code in 5 steps. And the protocol so you can do it again and again.

That’s how I made this in 30 minutes without opening an editing app, and while doing my other work on the side.

Step-by-Step Guide: Make a reel from your camera roll with Claude

Before you start you’ll need Claude Code on your computer either in the Claude Desktop App or installed in the terminal.

Put all the videos from one event into a single folder on your desktop (I called mine “artist retreat”).

Open Claude Code in that folder.

The first time, Claude will ask to install 2 free tools: ffmpeg, which edits video, and Whisper, which turns speech into text. Say yes to both.

Step 1: Let Claude see your videos

Read more

It’s edition 200 of Nina’s Notes. 200 of these little notes. 🥹

Hard to believe.

This milestone means a lot to me, mostly because you all keep reading!

200 notes means four years of consistent writing…

And many many many weeks of texting my editor (re: my best friend) saying…”Ahhhh the Note this week is late! I haven’t written it yet.”

Even if it meant waking up at 6am Wednesday morning to get Nina’s Notes out on time, I did it.

It was a deadline that meant something to me.

That I was showing up for all 4000 of you readers.

To celebrate this milestone, I want to walk down memory lane a little bit.

First, here are the most read pieces of Nina’s Notes over the last 4 years.

#171: The Glymphatic System Hack

#169: How I Fixed My Dad’s Diabetes Crashes in 4 Weeks

#164: The Estrogen-ADHD Connection That No One Talks About

#176: What Having Two Chronically Ill Parents Taught Me About Longevity

#21: Heart Disease And The Quest For A Cure

Next, I want to talk to you about what writing this newsletter has really done for me.

Xoxo,

Nina

💬 In this note:

• ✍🏼 What Writing This Newsletter Weekly for Four Years Has Taught Me

  Subscribe now

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#200: ✍🏼 What Writing This Newsletter Weekly for 4 Years Has Taught Me

Let's start at the beginning.

It was September 2022.

I was going through one of the hardest years of my life and  had just broken up with my long-term partner in Berlin.

We had lived together, so I moved out, and was renting a friend's place in Friedrichshain.

I was doing my best to make that space my own, while enjoying the cozy space my friends had already created in it.

On top of that, I had also made the difficult decision to close my business, Memido and I didn't know who I was without identifying as a founder.

I shifted from being a founder to being...what exactly? What am I now without Memido?

That was really hard to sit with.

I really think it's difficult for founders to make these big life changes because we so deeply identify with that life., Plusand it was my very first business too. This was my baby, and now I wasn't going to be running it anymore.

But I knew that I was a writer.

I had been journaling every day that year because it was so emotionally challenging, going through all those life changes.

Over the years prior, I'd written a couple pieces here and there on various platforms, but I never really stuck with a consistent writing habit.

So I sat down and I set myself a goal.

I said, "Okay, I am going to write. I'm going to start a newsletter. I'm going to do this once a week for 10 weeks before I really share it with anybody. That’s my goal."

But the most important thing to me was the habit of writing weekly.

When my whole life was turned upside down, I didn't have a routine.

I didn't know what I was going to work on next.

But writing kept me grounded.

People were pulling me in different directions, asking me what I'd be curious to work on.

I had just been working in diagnostics for the last 8 years, so everyone was trying to pull me into a new diagnostics company.

But I was so exhausted and scared to jump into the same thing, again.

I wanted to do something different. But didn’t know what.

So I started writing about longevity and psychedelics because of what I had studied during my PhD, and I wanted to basically just get up to date in the field.

Meanwhile, I was being encouraged by a lot of friends that said, "Nina, you are good at teaching, and you're good at explaining things in a clear and concise way."

And in my founder mindset, I thought, "Okay, how can I do that in a scalable way?"

My answer was writing those first 10 newsletters to a small mailing list of 12 readers. I didn’t want anyone to know I was writing this newsletter, not yet.

I would spend a whole week writing the newsletter - putting way too much into each one. Writing about three or four topics each.

Those early ones are embarrassing. Titled Nina’s Notes #1 - #10. Go back to the archives to check them out, they are all still there.

Despite them not being my best work…I still sent them out, on time, every Wednesday.

After 10, I think I finally had the courage to post about it on my Instagram. That’s how I got my first 100 subscribers.

Then it grew organically over the last 4 years to 4,000 readers between Substack and LinkedIn Newsletter.

Over those years, you wouldn’t believe the opportunities that have come my way simply because I write this newsletter.

I've been invited to give 33 talks on topics ranging from women's health and psychedelics, to starting a company, to the future of health tech, to immersive technology for mental health, to innovation, and finding my voice along the way.

I was even invited to speak at Oxford about women’s health and psychedelics. Because I wrote a newsletter about the topic, before anyone else.

These are opportunities that I created for myself simply by showing up week-after-week and writing about questions you ask me, or that I find interesting.

However, despite this recognition, this newsletters sometimes feels small and unserious, although it's quite the opposite.

I think that's because I'm an academic.

In academia, writing needs to be official and approved by peer review in order to be taken seriously and that’s the source of the imposter syndrome I feel.

But here I am, nonetheless, writing a weekly blog about topics that people are curious about in a way that people can understand, and that gets me on stage to talk about it.

It feels incredibly rewarding and powerful.

Through this endeavor, I built up my confidence to become a professional speaker and learned how to structure talks in a way that I can update constantly without having to rack my brain practicing it over and over.

When I was working towards my PhD, preparing for a presentation, I would spend weeks fine-tuning my slides, preparing the data, and getting everything ready to present. Because the other academics would be quick to poke a hole in any questionable data.

Now because of this practice of writing and organizing my thoughts, I can think, "Oh, I'll give a talk about newsletter 55, 165 and 131. That's an amazing talk because I've thought out very clearly what all those points are, and I can just put them together."

Creating this body of work has made me immensely proud.

It's not easy to write something every week for 4 years.

When I was feeling really low in those moments when I was closing my business, and I wasn't sure what to do next, It felt like getting the newsletter out was the only reason for me to make it through the week.

There were times when the newsletter slipped my mind because there were so many other things on my plate that I didn't know if I was going to be able to get it out as planned.

Sometimes I’m a day late, and one of my subscribers messages me and says, "Hey, what happened to the newsletter this week?"

Then I would think, "Oh, there's somebody out there waiting for this. I want to show up for them."

I've taken this newsletter on such a ride over the last 4 years as well.

I started recording myself reading these out loud around number 80 and started the Nina’s Notes podcast so that my dad, who's losing his vision, could listen to the newsletters every week.

I've had moments where I can put more of my own personal time and funding into making Nina’s Notes grow, like when I was writing guidebooks and doing podcasts and interviews.

Healthtech and biotech companies have come to me to help shape and share their message about their product to the public.

Nina’s Notes is something that I want to continue to grow and evolve for the next 4 years and even longer.

It's called Nina's Notes for a reason. I chose that name so that I didn't have to stay in one lane and I could write about whatever the fuck I want to write about.

I've been writing about longevity. I’ve written about psychedelics. I've written about neuroscience. I've written about startup life. Now I'm writing about AI and Claude and I hope that you all keep coming along for the ride.

All 200 of these newsletters have done so many things for me. It curated a community of genuinely curious individuals that like my newsletter because they don't know what topic they're going to get in their inbox each week. It's allowed me to explore different subjects that I wouldn't have been able to write about had I had to stay strictly in biotech.

It allowed me to create in person communities through Longevity Wednesdays, and larger events like Longevity Day.

I learned how to write and read sources and then publish a newsletter in an incredibly quick amount of time.

I've learned that AI sucks at writing, and it's fun in the beginning because you think, "Wow, that just made a pretty decent article” but then realized that it sounds nothing like me and is flat and boring.

I learned to write as a way of expressing what my soul has to say, while also expressing who I am and what my thoughts are (and AI has no place to replace the joy of doing that).

I’ve learned to press publish before a piece is “perfect”.

That consistency and the deadline matters more to me than how ‘good’ the piece is. Those feelings can’t be replicated at all by AI.

To all of the newsletter writers who are trying to save time by having an AI draft, schedule and publish for them, please know, there’s a character-building moment in being about to miss a deadline and getting the piece out anyway.

The beauty of the raw-unfiltered words that make it into a piece because the clock is ticking.

I'd rather have it be rough around the edges and with the occasional typo that slips through, (sorry to my editor), but that's what I really want to bring to these pieces.

I've never had a strategic direction with this newsletter, what has mattered to me most is that I've wanted it to bring joy and education to my readers.

I've wanted Nina’s Notes to be something that people look forward to seeing in their inbox and not something that they just sort of skip over.

If it's done that for you, I'd love you to write a comment, like this post, share it and restack it.

Tell me what you've learned from my 4 years of writing for you.

Tell me what you'd like me to write more about in the future.

But most importantly, thank you for reading.

P.S. Did you know I have a podcast? My YouTube channel is officially 1 year old, and is about to cross 900 subscribers. Go over there, like it, and subscribe!

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

Hi friends,

You might not know this, but most of what happens behind the scenes of this newsletter and podcast isn’t me doing it by hand any more.

Don’t worry! I’m still writing all of these newsletters myself….not outsourcing that to AI. Because AI slop is real, and you don’t deserve that.

Subscribe now

But, the mechanics of how this newsletter and media company runs, the tasks in the backend that make this possible…AI now runs A LOT of that for me.

For example…

1. Yesterday Claude fixed the tracker that logs my YouTube performance into Notion every Friday. (Btw, my YouTube Channel just crossed 800 subscribers - if you didn’t know I had a channel, go over there and subscribe!)

2. Claude swept my entire email archive to pull contact details for every podcast guest and filled the gaps in my database.

3. It built a skill that writes my client invoices.

4. It cut and edited two reels for social.

5. And it built a landing page.

I’ve coded solutions to my repetative tasks, and built things I could have never done on my own before I knew how to use Claude code.

And how I do this is not coding in the way you’re probably imagining. I’m not staring at lines of code praying it will work.

I tell my idea to Claude, and Claude goes and write the code to build the thing I asked it to do on my own laptop, with my own files, my own database, my own invoice template, my own footage, and whatever else I ask of it.

As you all know, I’m a longevity scientist. I’m not a developer.

I have no technical team, and eighteen months ago I genuinely couldn’t have told how you to use the terminal.

This is why I’m teaching it, mostly to women.

On Monday I’m starting this challenge, Master Claude Code for Businesswomen.

The challenge is 100% online. Every morning you’ll get one short video from me in your inbox where we build one real thing each day, and we have a weekly live call with the whole group on Thursday at 8pm GMT/3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific.

Here’s what you’ll get from me:

• 30 real automations, one built every single day

• Four live calls with hot seats, all recorded

• How to build small services and websites with AI

• Competitor research tools you build yourself

• A deep dive on getting AI to be genuinely accurate

• The starter vault of ready-built skills, and the full prompt library sorted by job

• The template pack: outreach, proposals, reports and invoices

• Lifetime access to the hub, including everything I add later

If you’ve been reading me for a while and you want to come and build with me, there’s a reader discount: READER10 takes 10% off.

Sign up here

Doors close Friday at midnight and we start Monday morning.💜

Nina

P.S. For my male readers who are interested in Claude Code/ChatGPT Codex training, unfortuantely this challenge is only for women, reply to this email and I’ll let you know my options for 1:1 and corporate trainings.

This week I sat down with Zack Abbott, Founder & CEO of ZBiotics, maker of the world's first genetically engineered probiotic to go to market.

We get into why hangovers were never really about dehydration, the culprit is acetaldehyde, a toxin your gut produces while you drink, and how ZBiotics engineered a bacteria that breaks it down right where it forms. We talk about why every bottle proudly says "GMO," the two-hour rule for drinking and sleep, and their second product: a probiotic that builds fiber from the sugar you're already eating, in a country where 95% of us don't get enough. Plus the radiation-recovery pitch that started it all, surviving COVID after their manufacturer walked away, and the Silicon Valley investors who doubted hangovers exist.

Watch & listen to the whole episode on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction

• 00:59 Champagne moments: the world's first GMO probiotic launch

• 05:16 Vinegar moments: COVID, canceled occasions, and losing the manufacturer

• 11:12 Why "proudly GMO" is printed on every bottle

• 18:47 Why you take it before you drink — not after

• 22:50 Alcohol and sleep: the two-hour rule

• 26:44 The radiation-recovery pitch that came before ZBiotics

• 33:06 Pitching VCs who asked if hangovers were real

• 40:07 The acetaldehyde mechanism: why it's not dehydration

• 45:11 Sugar-to-Fiber and the fiber deficiency problem

• 48:38 Sachets, flavors, and habit stacking

LINKS

• ZBiotics & Nina’s Promo

• ZBiotics Linkedin

• Zack’s LinkedIn

ABOUT ZACK ABBOTT: Zack Abbott is the founder and CEO of ZBiotics, a company working to develop practical applications of synthetic biology. After completing his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan, he focused on using genetic engineering to build new probiotics that could help solve everyday problems in unique ways. At ZBiotics, he works with a talented team, ultimately aiming to make biotechnology more accessible and useful in people's daily lives. He believes in the potential of synthetic biology to create practical solutions and continues to explore new possibilities in this field.

ABOUT NINA'S NOTES: Nina's Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA'S NOTES

• Newsletter: https://www.ninasnotes.xyz

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

• Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Hey friends,

A few weeks ago, I drove out to a festival at a resort in Mafra, about thirty minutes from Lisbon, to try the Neera bed topper.

It is a mattress with speakers built into it, but instead of playing sound into your ears, it plays very low frequencies through the whole surface of the bed, into your body.

I left the experience relaxed, calm and like I had taken a much longer nap.

I was curious to find out why a vibrating bed can result in blissful experiences, falling asleep faster and more restorative sleep.

So I sat down with Igor, one of Neera's cofounders, for a podcast about Neera, and then I went down the research rabbit hole.

Here’s what I learned.

Nina

💬 In this note:

• 🔊 The Science of Sound, Vibration and Deep Sleep

• 📚 The Calamity Club

• ⚡️ Master Claude in 30-days

  Subscribe now

  ---

#198: 🔊 The Science of Sound, Vibration and Deep Sleep

Millions of neurons are firing together in your brain all of the time, even in the deepest sleep.

The neurons fire together in rhythmic waves that we can measure by EEG, where we measure the speed in hertz (Hz) or speed per second.

These waves can then be simplified into frequency bands, which associate with a rough state of mind:

• Delta (roughly 0.5 to 4 Hz) is the slowest and largest wave. This is deep, dreamless, non-REM sleep. The more delta you have, the less aware you are of the world around you.

• Theta (4 to 8 Hz) is the drowsy in-between state, the drifting feeling right before you fall asleep, and it also shows up in meditation and daydreaming.

• Alpha (8 to 12 Hz) is relaxed wakefulness. Think eyes closed, calm, but awake. Alpha is what fades when you actually fall asleep.

• Beta (13 to 30 Hz) is alert, focused, task-oriented thinking (and also worry and rumination, which is why it is not what you want at 2AM).

• Gamma (above 30 Hz, often centered around 40 Hz) shows up when the brain needs to bind information from many regions at once, and it has become a hot research topic for reasons I will get to below.

Two of those numbers matter most for this story today.

The first is 1 Hz and below, the frequency of deep sleep.

The second is 0.25 Hz, which is even slower than any brain wave, and which turns out to be the magic number for rocking.

Why Rocking Works

Every parent knows a baby falls asleep in a moving car, and every commuter has nodded off on a train. That gentle, rhythmic motion makes us sleepy.

What we have not known, until quite recently, is what it does inside the brain.

In 2011, a team of researchers  at the University of Geneva built a bed that could either remain stationary, or rock gently at 0.25 Hz, which is one full rock every four seconds.

Illustrated elegantly in Figure 1A from their 2011 paper in Cell below. (cute)

The researchers asked people to nap on the bed, and compared to the bed when it was stationary.

Participants in the study fell asleep faster, spent more time in N2 sleep (non-REM sleep), and their EEG showed a boost in slow oscillations that mark stable, protected sleep.

The authors' explanation was that the swinging motion "exerts a synchronizing action in the brain that reinforces endogenous sleep rhythms." In plain words, the bed was nudging the brain's own sleep rhythm along.

But how?

Paul Franken's lab at the University of Lausanne, answered this question in mice in 2019.

His team showed that rocking put mice to sleep faster and kept them asleep longer.

This only happened if their otolith organs, the tiny sensory structures in the inner ear that sense gravity, head tilt, and straight-line motion, were intact and functioning properly.

Mice without a working inner ear sensory system got nothing from the rocking.

That means that the pathway that rocking and/or vibration reaches the brain, is through the inner ear, into the brainstem, and up into the circuits that time sleep.

Fun fact: The mice liked 1 Hz best, while humans liked 0.25 Hz. Mice have a faster heartbeat than humans (nearly 10x faster), so the faster rocking fits their much faster natural rhythms.

What Neera Actually Does

While it would be cool to have a giant rocking bed at home, it’s just not practical. (le sigh).

Neera Sleep is much more subtle, and something that would actually fit in your bedroom.

Inside the mattress is a sandwich of actuators, the same components that make a speaker cone move, enclosed in a waveguide that spreads the vibration across the whole surface of the bed.

Neera founder, Igor Me, told me in our podcast interview that the design goal was a sound that "shouldn't sound as a sound."

In my experience, you do not hear it so much as feel it, as if the vibration is a field you are floating in.

When I asked him how they chose the frequencies that the bed plays (for lack of a better word).

He said that the starting point was the same as this article's.

That our brain has frequency signatures in each stage of sleep, from alpha down through theta and delta.

In designing Neera Igor’s hypothesis was that if you could deliver those frequencies through the skin, you could help the body reach those states faster.

His reasoning is that we have far more mechanoreceptors (the pressure and vibration sensors in our skin, muscle and bone) than we have auditory receptors, and the mechanoreceptors feed straight into the primal, ancient, older parts of the brain without passing through the consciousness.

However, achieving those frequencies in a bed is an engineering challenge.

So what Neera does, which is very clever, is that it generates two much higher frequencies that are very close together and the interference between them produces a slow "beat" at the difference between them, which the body feels as a 2, 3 or 4 Hz pulse.

Igor's example was 20,000 Hz played against 20,002 Hz….resulting in a 2 Hz pulse.

He also told me it took a lot of algorithmic tuning to get a consistent effect across different bodies.

Essentially, your response and my response to the same frequency are not the same (which was a big surprise to me too).

The session I did was the daytime program, which is not designed to be below your perception.

You can very much feel the vibrations across your whole body.

It ran in three parts: a lymphatic drainage segment, then a non-sleep deep rest segment where the frequencies move down through the body, then a ramp back up toward alertness so you do not walk out groggy.

For me, it took me a while to drop into a meditative state, and once I did I stayed there, but each transition between segments ended abruptly enough that my thinking brain woke up and started counting programs.

I gave that feedback to the team.

Igor told me that their night program is a different thing entirely.

It runs at about 10% of the daytime power, because if the stimulation is too immersive, your prefrontal cortex switches on and starts paying attention.

Which is exactly the opposite of what you want at 11PM when you are trying to fall asleep.

Two other things I learned that are worth knowing. Neera has a "cat purr" program!!

How cute!

They tuned the Neera to the frequency range of a purring cat. Awww.

But most surprisingly, Igor told me half jokingly, that three people that they tested who hate cats could not feel it at all.

They really couldn’t feel the frequency of the cat purring.

Perhaps this is also why they hate cats. Because they can’t feel the lovely cat purr has been studied to lower cortisol, and well…also just bring us joy.

Neera also has a feature for what he called sleep inertia to address the problem when you wake up at 3AM and can’t get back to sleep.

In this program, the bed senses you’ve woken up, and it replays the frequencies of the sleep stage you just left.

He says most of those wake-ups cluster around the point in the night when core body temperature bottoms out and starts to rise again.

So far, Neera has run roughly 120 internal tests measuring heart rate variability, sleep scores from wearables and EEG. With self-reported results from participants across their sleep, recovery and relaxation protocols.

They’ve also observed that about 40% of people fall asleep during a daytime demo, including a handful who normally cannot nap at all.

He would love a proper longitudinal study and knows it is the thing that will earn more trust for Neera sleep, and I have connected him with a neuroscientist in Lisbon who has EEG and cortisol testing to design the study.

So, more to come from the Neera team as they expand their studies!

Vibration, Not Just Rocking

Which brings me to the question I wanted answered.

Are there any published peer-reviewed studies that vibration through a bed helps you sleep?

And I found one!

In 2017, Hiroshi Kimura's group in Japan built a bed that sits on a motor and slides gently back and forth, halfway between a rocking cradle and a vibrating mattress.

Check out this figure from their paper (that is hardly understandable) showing how they made a bed that moves a very small amount in order to create the vibration sensation.

Their experiment tested naps of ten healthy young men at 0.5 Hz, which resulted in one gentle cycle every two seconds.

What the researchers changed in the experiment was how far the bed moved on each cycle, from a 2.4 mm shift you can barely notice, up to a 7.5 mm one you would clearly feel.

Without any vibration/oscillation, the men took on average 14.7 minutes to fall asleep.

With the smallest 2.4 mm movement, that dropped to around 10 minutes.

The sweet spot is a vibration you almost cannot feel. This broadly aligns with Neera’s approach to nighttime use program, where the intensity is reduced to remain gentle and unobtrusive.

Then there is one more study that comes closest to Neera's two-frequency trick.

A team at Brigham Young University placed four vibration generators under the corners of a bed and tried two settings on 14 people with mild to moderate insomnia in 2021.

In the first, all four corners vibrated at 26.75 Hz.

In the second, the top of the bed ran at 26.5 Hz and the bottom at 27 Hz, so the two waves drifted in and out of phase with each other and produced a slow travelling wave at 0.5 Hz, the "beat frequency."

The result of the beat frequency is that the person on the bed feels it as a gentle wave rolling head to toe, which stimulates both the skin and the vestibular system, sensory system located in the inner ear (remember the experiment with the rocking mice from the beginning of this article). And the result is a feeling a bit like being rocked.

That is the same basic superposition principle Igor described: combining two nearby frequencies to create a low-frequency beat pattern that can be experienced through the body.

As a result, the beat-frequency led to participants falling asleep in under five minutes versus about seven minutes for the control, and participants rated the 0.5Hz experience as more comfortable and easier to fall asleep with.

And What About Sound or Vibration at 40Hz?

This specific frequency is interesting because 40Hz is the gamma frequency associated with high-level cognition, memory consolidation and, we now believe, glymphatic activation.

The glymphatic system is the waste removal system for the brain.

As we age, and especially in Alzheimer’s, gamma oscillations weaken and become disorganized.

In Nina’s Notes #171, I covered a study published in PNAS on January 5th that found that playing sound at exactly 40Hz for one hour a day helped the brains of older rhesus monkeys flush out amyloid-beta, the sticky protein found in Alzheimer's disease brains.

After a week of 40Hz sound exposure, amyloid-beta levels in the cerebrospinal fluid increased by more than 200%.

What that means is that the amyloid-beta wasn’t accumulating in the brain tissue where it causes damage, it was showing up in the fluid draining away from the brain and the brain was actively expelling its toxic buildup.

And remarkably, those elevated CSF amyloid levels remained five weeks after the sound therapy ended.

While I didn’t ask the Neera team which frequencies played during the last cycle when I tested the bed, the “ramp back up toward alertness” cycle…perhaps it included 40hz.

This means they could potentially offer a glymphatic activation program at 40Hz vibration in the future, possible idea!

My Final Question For the Neera Team was Around Pain.

After my session on the Neera, I also asked the team if they considered studying reduction in pain from the Neera bed.

Vibration has been shown to reduce certain types of pain by more than 40%.

This is a great alternative to pain killers and opioids which are often the last available option for people in chronic pain.

What happens is that naturally occurring mechanisms help to blunt the severity of pain signals sent to the brain. Participants may be distracted from the pain, or simply experience pain relief from the vibration.

While this is not on the roadmap for Neera at the moment, this could be very compelling for people in chronic pain, or recovering from injury, as falling asleep can be difficult as pain can keep a person awake.

Finding a way to reduce the pain, plus the soothing feeling of rocking or vibration, can be very powerful for this group of people.

What I Am Taking Away

A slow rhythmic input, whether it is a rocking hammock, a moving car, a vibration you can barely feel, or a soft beat in your headphones, seems to help the brain find the rhythm of sleep.

Louder and stronger seems to work against you.

And the closer the input is timed to what your brain is already doing, the better it works.

While we wait for the Neera to reach our homes (reserve one here), we will just have to experiment with sounds…or a fully rocking bed, to fall asleep faster.

📚 Book of the Week

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Rating: ★★★★★

Ok, the first 15% of this book…I was bored. AND THEN, everything shifted and I couldn’t put it down.

I was reading until 1AM most nights last week.

The story starts with Meg, whose mother disappears one night before Christmas, and she is taken to an orphanage in rural Mississippi. In a second storyline, a young woman named Birdie, and her family are struggling and she goes to visit her sister, who had married into a wealthy family, to ask for money. Birdie arrives and is asked to volunteer at the orphanage, where she meets Meg and becomes determined to help her.

The rest of the story captivated me more than any book I’ve read in recent years. If I could give this book six stars, I would.

The Calamity Club is written by the author of The Help.

💻 Join My 30-Day Claude Challenge

This is for my Ladies Who Claude. Ladies who are entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners.

We are going to Master Claude Code in 30 days for business women.

Topics include how to automate replies so your inbox is already handled before you wake up, making websites, creating a social media “command center” to manage posting across social channels, and automating invoicing.

In the Challenge you will get:

1. Daily video lessons delivered to your email

2. Real Use Cases, real builds, and tips from over 300+ hours of coding with Claude

3. Once a week live calls with me

4. Access to a community of women building together

You don’t need to be savvy with Claude. I’ll get you all on the same level.

If you are already using Cowork and Code, great! You will find the use cases, and live-builds truly valuable.

We start September 21.

And I only have 3 spots left.

Join the Challenge!

🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

This week I sit down with Ekua Yankah, founder of Awodee, a social epidemiologist who left a long career in the UN system, learned the power of big period data at Berlin's Clue, and is now building the research infrastructure to cure endometriosis, fibroids, and PCOS, conditions affecting over 170 million women worldwide.

Ekua’s founder story starts with a diagnosis. Her doctors found a 9cm, baseball-sized ovarian cyst at 23 years old, then found more than 10 fibroids, and recommended surgery at 39. She navigated symptom-free menopause with tai chi, qigong, and acupuncture (her experience, not a prescription). Through this experience she learned the harsh realities of the medical system and the gaps in women’s health. Like why insurers file these conditions under "fertility" or "pre-existing" and refuse to pay.

Her company Awodee's is focused on research-ready data collection with partners like Nigeria's Fertitude, women as co-creators, starting with a self-funded 200-woman study in Kenya.

We also discuss Lupita Nyong'o's 75 fibroids, the "Period Insurance" dream, and the first-day-of-your-cycle leave policy at Awodee.

Watch & listen to the whole episode on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts

Timestamps00:00 Teaser: a 20-year mission to cure fibroids00:49 Welcome: Nina's first in-person interview, meet Ekua and Awodee01:50 From the UN system to FemTech at Clue03:23 Ekua's story: a 9 cm cyst at 23, 10+ fibroids, surgery at 3906:08 The "Period Insurance" dream: six-month data check-ins08:07 Why insurance calls it "fertility" and won't pay11:07 The Big Three decoded: endometriosis, fibroids, PCOS13:56 Lupita Nyong'o's 75 fibroids and going public15:33 You are the expert on your own body18:18 Funding gaps, environmental factors, and unequal care20:39 Awodee's model: research-ready data, women as co-creators23:04 Not an app: partnering with Fertitude and existing trackers26:10 The womb as ancestral technology: Daoism meets longevity28:41 Ekua's routine: TCM, qigong, and a symptom-free menopause32:13 The self-funded 200-woman pilot study in Kenya37:36 Where to start if you suspect endo, PCOS, or fibroids41:31 Rapid-fire: qigong, funding blind spots, harmful myths43:51 First-day-of-cycle leave: working with your cycle45:53 How to find Ekua and what's next for Awodee

RESOURCES

Clue - Period Tracking App - https://helloclue.com

Endometriosis Society of Kenya - https://www.facebook.com/Endometriosiskenya/

Lupita Nyong'o Fibroids Campaign - https://www.foundationwomenshealth.org/lupita

Traditional Chinese Medicine - Ovarian Breathing - https://example.com/ovarian-breathing

ABOUT DR. EKUA YANKAH:

Social epidemiologist with a PhD from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and 15 years at UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF and WHO. Founder of Awodee, a frontier health research platform closing the data gap on African women's health. Her personal longevity journey through Tai Chi, Yoga and Traditional Medicine runs alongside her epidemiological work, making her a rare bridge between ancestral practice and global health science.

CONNECT WITH EKUA:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/africanwomenshealth/

ABOUT NINA'S NOTES:

Nina's Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA'S NOTES

Newsletter:https://www.ninasnotes.xyz

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

Website:https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Do you like Nina’s Notes? Can you share it with a friend and ask them to subscribe??

It would mean the world to me.

Xo,

Nina

Share

💬 In this note:

• 🏥 YOU are the Treatment

• 📚 I Make Envy on Your Disco

• ⚡️ Master Claude in 30-days

  Subscribe now

  ---

#196: 🏥 YOU are the Treatment

For the last decade, there has been a movement towards “personalized medicine” in healthcare.

I even wrote in edition #46 of this newsletter, about what Peter Attia called “Medicine 3.0” and I hypothesized what “Medicine 4.0” a.k.a “Med4” would look like.

Medicine 3.0 is the era of prevention.

Medicine 4.0 is the era of personalization.

I hypothesized that Medicine 4.0 will have regenerative care using advanced stem cell therapies that can move us beyond transplants and give doctors the ability to repair and replace damaged organs.”

And we are moving in that direction. Where the patient can produce their own treatment for their disease or damaged organs.

This is even available to us right now, it’s not a dream for the future, it’s called autologous medicine.

Autologous Medicine

Autologous medicine procedures use a patient's own cells, tissues, or organs instead of donor material.

You own cells = a personal treatment = YOU are the treatment.

Risk of rejection is low because the cells are from the patient’s own body.

The opposite of this is allogeneic treatments.

Allogeneic treatments use donor cells or an organ from another person.

We’ve all probably heard about this. For example, a patient needs a kidney transplant, they can get a kidney from an organ donor but allogeneic treatments have a higher risk of immune rejection and graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) because the cells are from a donor.

This risk reduces with autologous treatments because there is no “donor,” you are your own donor.

There are autologous medicines available right now, which encompass a broad range of FDA-approved cell, gene, and tissue engineering treatments that use a patient's own collected cells to target specific diseases, mainly blood cancers and solid tumors.

For example, there are CAR T-Cell immunotherapies like Kymriah, Yescarta and Tecartus which modify a patient’s own T-cells to target proteins found on blood cancers including ALL large B-cell lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma respectively.

Beyond CAR T-Cell immunotherapies, there are other autologous cell therapies that can harvest a patient’s immune cells to expand them to fight solid tumors such as Amtagvi (lifileucel) and Tecelra (afamitresgene autoleucel).

One of the biggest wins in personalized medicine and autologous therapy of this decade is Casgevy and Lyfgenia, both are autologous hematopoietic stem cell (HSCs) therapies which are used to cure sickle cell disease and severe beta-thalassemia by harvesting a patient’s own cells, editing them and giving them back to the patient.

Furthermore, autologous cells are being used to rebuild physical tissue and structures without the risk of donor rejection.

Notably, MACI (Autologous Cultured Chondrocytes) uses a patient's own cartilage cells grown on a collagen membrane to repair knee cartilage defects.

Autologous medicine completely flips the current treatment model.

We are moving from generalized, off-the-shelf treatments toward personalized medicines that we know will work with your body.

We now have the opportunity to move away from a one-size-fits all methodology, and towards a future where organ donation may not be required because we are able to generate our own organ and tissue repairs and replacements from our own genetic material.

With autologous approaches, the patient’s own biology becomes the starting point to creating personalized medicine.

So What are Those Starting Materials?

Your own biology. Your own cells.

The place to start repair is with your own stem cells.

Stem cells are the cells in your body that can become any type of cell, a nerve cell, skin cell, liver cell….anything.

Where are those stem cells? How do we get access to them?

I’m sure most of you are familiar with embryonic stem cells. These exist only in early-stage embryos, amniotic fluid and perinatal stem cells found in umbilical cords.

Embryonic stem cells raise many ethical concerns but fortunately are not the only source of stem cells in the body.

Adult stem cells live in specific tissues like bone marrow, fat, hair and skin and are there to repair damage.

Scientific research has also discovered a way to turn any type of cell back into a stem cell.

In 2006, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka discovered a group of four proteins (genes) that can turn adult cells back into stem cells, aptly named the Yamanaka factors after their discovery, and earned a Nobel Prize in 2012.

When an adult cell is exposed to the Yamanaka factors it becomes an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC). iPSCs can now grow into any cell type in the body.

While this discovery is groundbreaking, why hasn’t it taken over?

Mostly because of manufacturing cost and time. But there are also regulatory concerns, especially around genomic instability and the risk that the cells could turn into cancer cells.

Some scientists are exploring partial reprogramming of the adult cells by using short bursts of exposure of the Yamanaka factors to make old cells young again without losing their specific job or function.

iPSCs were supposed to be the gateway into regenerative medicine and personal rejuvenation.

The technology is arriving, but we still have technical challenges. One of those challenges is that iPSCs are only as good as the adult cell you started from. If that adult cell had accumulated a lot of mutations, it will have an epigenetic memory that it will carry into the iPSC.

Your Cells and Your Body Have an Expiration Date

Our cells are aging.

They are aging according to the 12 hallmarks of aging, including DNA mutations and the accumulation of senescent cells to name a couple.

We can measure the biological and chronological age of our cells using epigenetic tests, like the Horvath methylation clocks.

The stem cells you have today are the youngest you will ever have.

Your stem cells at age 35 will not be the same stem cells you have at 65. Although you are the same person, those extra decades can accumulate damage within even your stem cells.

The problem is you need regenerative medicine and rejuvenation when you are old and this is the precise time when your body is the least capable of delivering it.

So Where Do You Actually Get Stem Cells?

Harvesting stem cells from bone marrow, adipose tissue or blood all require medical procedures.

To extract stem cells from bone marrow, you need to put a needle into the iliac crest of the bone and aspirate them out. This is a very invasive painful surgery which requires sedation.

You can collect stem cells from fat through a liposuction procedure.

Or alternatively, stem cells can be retrieved from your peripheral blood, which requires apheresis. Apheresis is a process where blood is drawn, then passed through a machine which separates it into platelets, plasma or white blood cells, then the remaining blood is safely returned to the body.

None of these procedures are what a healthy 30-something wants to do on a regular day of the week.

However new research has shown that there are other sources of stem cells without invasive medical procedures, and one of those sources is the hair follicle.

The Hair Follicle

You have ~100,000 follicles on your head.

Each follicle contains many different cell types, including keratinocytes, dermal fibroblasts and mesenchymal stem cells.

What is most interesting about the hair follicle is not just that it contains stem cells, but that it is a replenishing source.

Our hair falls out, the follicle regrows. This is a replenishing source of stem cells, which allows for a non-invasive, relatively painless collection in less than 30 minutes, with no recovery time.

That’s a huge change from a bone marrow extraction. (Ouch!)

I Sat Down With The Founder Of Acorn Biolabs To Talk About This

Dr. Drew Taylor CEO at Toronto-based Acorn Biolabs, the first non-invasive follicle-based cell banking service.

Want to watch our conversation? It’s on the Nina’s Notes Podcast. Watch it here.

Here’s how it works.

• First you meet with a doctor for a consultation

• Then you will meet with the doctor to collect the hair follicles. They take ~50 intact follicles.

• Then they test them for viability

• Viables ones go to cryopreservation at -180℃

Collection costs vary depending on the doctor and on-going storage costs ~$10/month.

Acorn Biolabs can use those banked cells to create their YOU^TH Secretome. That is the result of the banked cells being cultured to produce exosomes and growth factors that are formulated into a personalized topical product.

This is something you can do today. It’s available now, it’s not something that we have to continue to wait for.

Banking cells are also a bet on future therapies that are currently being trialed and approved.

When you cryopreserve your hair follicle cells, you lock those cells in time at their biological age. Acorn’s own marketing language says that they are “halting the effects of aging.”

They say that the best time to bank your cells is right now. They even recommend banking your cells as young as 12 years old, because the hair follicles are mature at that age and it’s possible to collect enough healthy hair.

What makes this so interesting is that the cost of banking your cells now is low, relative to the irreversibility of not having it done.

It’s giving you future self options and it’s better to have the optionality than not.

If you do it now, you will have the youngest possible version of YOU as the treatment.

Medicine 4.0 won’t just be personalized.It’ll be time-shifted.

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📚 Book of the Week

I Make Envy On Your Disco by Eric Schnall

Rating: ★★★★★

I love reading books about cities I’ve lived in, and of all of those cities, reading about Berlin always resonates. (If you want more stories set in Berlin, recently I read Perfection (BOTW #159) and The Deserters (BOTW #181).

I Make Envy On Your Disco took me right back to Berlin. Sam Singer is a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor from New York, with a rocky relationship back home, who arrives in Berlin for a gallery opening expecting a quiet work trip.

Instead the city does what it always does to visitors who let their guard down, it pulls him into something messier and more alive than he planned for.

💻 Join My 30-Day Claude Challenge

This is for my Ladies Who Claude. Ladies who are entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners.

Join my 30-Day Master Claude Code For Businesswomen Challenge.

In the Challenge you will get:

1. Daily 10min video lessons delivered to your email

2. Real use cases, real builds, and tips from over 300+ hours of coding with Claude

3. Once a week live calls with me

4. Access to a community of women building together

You don’t need to be savvy with Claude. I’ll get you all on the same level.

If you are already using Cowork and Code, great! You will find the use cases, and live-builds truly valuable.

We start September 21.

Apply here to join.

🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

When Igor said this, I had to go and try out the Neera bed myself, and afterward I interviewed Igor about the innovative science and technology behind Neera. It is a device designed to improve sleep through vibrational frequencies and personalized algorithms. In our conversation we explore how this technology can transform sleep quality and overall well-being.

Topics:

• Science of vibrational frequencies and sleep

• Personalized algorithms for sleep optimization

• Acoustic and mechanical engineering in sleep devices

• The role of frequencies in regulating nervous system and chakras

• User experience and self-reporting in sleep tech

• Future developments in vibrational sleep technology

Timestamps:

• 0:33 Who Igor is and what Neera does

• 1:19 Why he built it: devices measure, apparatuses act

• 2:57 Why sleep is the highest-leverage longevity target

• 4:05 “See how it feels” and the phrase that sold it

• 5:30 Where standard sleep advice runs out

• 6:32 The mechanism: frequencies through touch, not ears

• 9:48 Do solfeggio frequencies and brainwaves connect?

• 11:24 Making 2 Hz on a mattress without a giant speaker

• 12:38 Composing a state, and AI programs on request

• 15:02 Personalization: wearables, self-reporting, onboard sensors

• 17:23 Nina’s session, and the cat purr program

• 20:12 Chakra frequencies and the 96% blind test

• 21:54 Inside the mattress: actuators and waveguides

• 24:57 Validating with EEG and the cost of clean sleep research

• 27:05 Day programs vs night programs

• 28:43 Who it works best for: athletes, NSDR, day reboots

• 29:58 Sleep inertia and the 3am wake-up

• 32:53 Catching micro-wakeups and returning you to sleep

• 35:06 The first week, and napping vs the 20-minute program

• 39:12 Hardest part: hardware or software?

• 41:15 The one non-responder

• 42:09 Launch & Founders Club

ABOUT IGOR:

Igor is the co-founder of Neera. They are building nervous system regulation hardware for high performers. Over 15+ years in deep tech, he was design director on YotaPhone, the first dual-screen smartphone, and co-founded Gero (disease prediction from wearable movement data) and Atmotube (air quality sensing, 70,000+ units shipped, used in research at Stanford and Harvard).

CONNECT WITH NEERA:

• Website

• Neera LinkedIn

• Igor’s LinkedIn

ABOUT NINA'S NOTES: Nina's Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA'S NOTES

• Newsletter:https://www.ninasnotes.xyz

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

• Website:https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

A few months ago, longevity influencer Bryan Johnson, announced on X that he has a chronic autoimmune disease.

He started the “Don’t Die” movement, truly believing he could live forever. On his socials he would post bold claims about the number of nighttime erections and boast about his impeccable sleep quality and organ health.

Yet, somehow he missed finding a chronic disease.

What does this say about measurements and healthcare?

That’s what today’s newsletter is all about.

Let’s go.

Cheers,

Nina

💬 In this note:

• 🏥 Bryan Johnson Has A Chronic Illness

• 📚 Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

• ⚡️ Sleepscroll

  Subscribe now

  ---

#194: 🏥 Bryan Johnson Has A Chronic Illness

Last month Bryan Johnson announced on X that he has autoimmune gastritis (AIG), with the clickbait title “My stomach is eating itself.”

Ok Bryan…drama.

In that same post, he detailed the trial-and-error of testing and missing the true diagnosis over several years.

He’s enraged he didn’t find it sooner.

The earliest signal was his low ferritin, a measure of the body’s stored iron.

Bryan had changed his diet and tried oral iron supplements, but his ferritin stayed low.

And according to his reports, it stayed low for about a decade.

Once his team finally decided to chase after the root cause of the low ferritin, they turned to antibody blood testing, an upper endoscopy and five stomach biopsies from three regions of his stomach.

That rigorous testing is what finally produced the diagnosis.

Why A Decade Of Data Didn’t Say Anything

Ferritin measures stored iron, while hemoglobin (the common measurement for iron on routine blood tests) measures circulating iron.

When your iron stores run low, your body protects hemoglobin first. It drains the reserves to keep your blood count looking normal.

It is possible to be completely iron depleted with a perfectly normal CBC.

Hemoglobin is the lagging indicator, and ferritin is the leading one.

Standard care is built around the lagging indicator, hemoglobin. Because that is how anemia is defined and diagnosed.

Important note: Ferritin is not commonly measured on blood tests, even on my last blood panel here in Portugal, they didn’t include it, my doctor’s only measured hemoglobin. Ask your doctor to include ferritin on your blood tests, especially if you are a menstruating woman.

Bryan wasn’t anemic, so the low ferritin kept getting ignored.

Secondly, there is another problem.

The bottom of the ferritin reference range marks depletion, not sufficiency.

That number is derived from a population that includes plenty of iron deficient people.

Sitting above the bottom of the range reads as “ok” on a lab report, instead of “your iron tank is empty” in your body.

The real problem was the non-response.

His doctors recommended higher iron diets, even iron infusions.

But the ferritin didn’t move into the normal range.

His doctor thought that it was the dose. They thought, ok we will just give Bryan more iron.

They switched the formula and tried to add other supplements. But that loop can run for years, as you want to supplement for a given period of time before retesting.

But an intervention (like IV iron infusions) that should work and doesn’t is diagnostic information.

Iron that goes in and doesn’t stick means you're either losing it, or you can’t absorb it.

Also, Bryan already had an autoimmune thyroid disease.

Autoimmune gastritis and autoimmune thyroiditis cluster together often enough to have a name, thyrogastric syndrome.

Low iron blunts the conversion of the thyroid hormone into its active form, and low thyroid function impairs how the body handles iron.

Each one makes the other harder to fix.

And this information was sitting in Bryan’s medical records the whole time.

The data was there the whole time!

He, and his care team, missed the interpretation.

I can only think about all of the women with immune-mediated conditions who struggled for decades to get a diagnosis (ahem…endometreosis), without a private care team, without unlimited testing panels, without anyone willing to keep digging to find a diagnosis.

Endometriosis takes an average of 7 to 10 years to diagnosis.

Most of those women never get their endoscopy equivalent.

What does this mean about testing in the longevity space?

The thing is….Bryan did catch his diagnosis early.

Even if he doesn't believe it.

His biopsies showed atrophy confined to the acid-producing lining, with the rest of the stomach spared.

Most people get diagnosed years later, when they are anemic and have B12-related neuropathy.

He cited a study where roughly 18% of people with precancerous gastric lesions carried the autoantibodies and only about 1% had ever been diagnosed.

So the frequent testing did work, eventually.

Just not in the way the longevity narrative promises.

It didn't prevent him from ever getting autoimmune gastritis.

What it did produce was a decade of anomalies that finally escalated to actual clinical medicine.

Even the most measured man still needed an endoscopy, five biopsies from three regions of the stomach, and antibody testing.

Testing generates hypotheses.

The value of a testing panel is entirely determined by whether anyone is willing to chase the outlier that doesn't fit.

And the longevity model is built to optimize markers that respond to levers, not to investigate the one that refuses to.

💻 Join My 30-Day Claude Challenge

This is for my Ladies Who Claude. Ladies who are entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners.

We are going to Build Your Client Machine in 30 days.

That means we will automate prospecting leads, automate outreach, generate proposals and chase invoices, all with Claude.

In the Challenge you will get:

1. Daily video lessons delivered to your email

2. Real Use Cases, real builds, and tips from over 300+ hours of coding with Claude

3. Once a week live calls with me

4. Access to a community of women building together

You don’t need to be savvy with Claude. I’ll get you all on the same level.

If you are advanced, not to worry. You will find the use cases, and real builds truly valuable.

We start September 7.

Apply here to join.

📚 Book of the Week

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller

Rating: ★★★★★

In the small town of Troy, Georgia, a local woman born and raised in Troy, Lula Dean, has taken on the mission of ridding the town of any inappropriate books (which she may or may not have ever read herself).

Once all the inappropriate books are removed from the library, she sets up her own little lending library outside her house full of appropriate books.

One day, someone takes the dust jackets off the books in Lula’s library, and hides the “banned” books underneath - literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books and more. The neighbors who borrow these books find their mindset shifting and lives changed.

I really enjoyed this book because it allows you to analyze tough topics like racism, prejudice, sexual assault and other heavy issues through a more light hearted storyline.

⚡️ Check This Out

Doomscrolling, that is nothing at all about doom and gloom.

It’s actually designed to put you to sleep.

A starry night, where you can scroll and scroll and scroll.

Double-tap to light up stars, and count sheep.

Give it a try the next time you find yourself endlessly scrolling before bed.

🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

I asked Drew if we were heading toward a future where my younger cells become a currency I could trade. He didn’t say “no”.

There’s a version of you from ten years ago. Skin that bounced back, hair that grew in thick, cells that healed fast and inflamed less.

That version is gone.

Unless you saved it.

This week on the Nina’s Notes Podcast, I sit down with Drew Taylor, CEO of Acorn Biolabs, whose team figured out that the stem cell goldmine we’ve been drilling into hip bones to reach has been sitting at the root of your hair this whole time.

With their protocol, you pluck about hairs from the back of your head at your doctor’s office, the follicles get shipped to a lab, checked for viability, and dropped into liquid nitrogen at -196°C.

At that temperature there’s no metabolism. No aging. Nothing.

A version of you, frozen mid-sentence in storage for when you need it.

And, banking those cells costs less than Netflix. $190 a year for frozen storage.

Acorn has already taken plucked hair follicles, turned them into iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells which can become anything) and turned them into cartilage, bone, fat, and neurons. They even pushed those neurons into the exact dopamine-producing cells that Parkinson’s destroys. Acron is also exploring using their protocol to create pancreatic cells for type 1 diabetes, and natural killer cells that hunt down senescent and cancerous cells, the same population that falls off a cliff as we age.

Oh, and three patients have reported their gray hairs coming back. Nobody was tracking for that!

I also asked - Who actually owns your cells if the company gets acquired? Does banking at 12 versus 45 create a two-tier longevity system? He answered both without flinching.

Watch & listen to the whole episode on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to the future of healthcare and cell currency

02:05 The significance of cells in regenerative medicine

06:19 Innovative methods for stem cell collection from hair follicles

08:26 From plucked hair to banked cells: the process explained

15:31 The secretome: what it is and how it benefits skin and hair

24:40 Protocols and treatments for skin and hair regeneration

28:30 Using AI to enhance regenerative medicine workflows

37:32 Future therapeutics: from 3D printed organs to cell therapies

44:28 Ownership, accessibility, and the future of cell banking

52:39 Sci-fi visions of medicine: bioprinting and organ regeneration

53:26 The importance of early cell banking and next steps

LINKS

Acorn Biolabs - https://acorn.me/

Cell Banking - https://acorn.me/cell-banking/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-taylor-65b6ab10/

ABOUT DREW TAYLOR:

Dr. Drew Taylor is Founder and CEO of Acorn Biolabs, a regenerative medicine company pioneering the use of a person’s own cells to power longevity, aesthetics, and personalized healthcare. With a PhD in stem cell bioengineering, he leads development of the world’s first non-invasive platform for banking hair follicle stem cells and YOU™, an autologous secretome for skin rejuvenation, hair restoration, and recovery. His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and NewBeauty, and Acorn now partners with more than 200 medical practices across North America.

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES: Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA’S NOTES

Newsletter: https://www.niasnotes.xyz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Hey Friends,

I’m super excited to announce that I have published a new psychedelics and longevity guide. I wrote this for . You can find the guide on their substack and website.

Read it here

I have been giving lectures about longevity and psychedelics for several months. I most recently gave one at the House of Beautiful Business Conference in May in Athens, and I’m so glad that there are enough recent publications to actually write a guide about the connection between the two.

Check out the guide and tell me what you found interesting.

If you want me to write guides about something else, can you drop your ideas in the comments?

I’d love to hear them.

Xo,

Nina

Subscribe now

🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Seriously, Claude knows how to Code, and once you know how to use Claude…then you know how to code too.

I’ve taught this live class many times now, and every single time, the women leave the room, empowered, excited and ready to keep building with Claude Code

Before my class

My students felt “confused and a bit overwhelmed with what it could do.”

After my class

I recorded my class so you don’t have to wait for the next live cohort.

It’s called Level Up With Claude Code, and it’s the exact class I teach in person.

Grab the Recording

Why I built this

I’m a scientist. I have a PhD, I’ve built four companies, and I still spent months treating Claude like a fancy Google…asking it questions, using it as a thought partner and then just…moving on.

It wasn’t until I took my first Claude Code class and learned what it can really do that my life changed.

Now, I have a full-time intern: eager, occasionally forgetful, and getting better every time I use it. For only $20/month.

That shift, from talking to Claude to building with Claude, is what my Level 1 class teaches.

What’s actually in it

You get the full class, recorded start to finish. IN my live class, I have alot of time to build, so press pause on the video and build alongside the class as we go. I do include some parts where things load slowly or I have to nudge Claude in the right direction, because that’s real, and I want you to see what real looks like.

You’ll learn:

• The 6 ways to actually use Claude: Chat, Cowork, Code (both the desktop app and the terminal), Design, and Science

• How to connect your tools so Claude can see your inbox, your calendar, your notes, and all of the other software tools you use every day

• How to build and schedule a real recurring task. I walk through setting one up live, dictated by voice, start to finish

• How to use Claude Code in the terminal without being scared of it (it just looks like MS-DOS from 1990, and it’s not actually scary…its powerful)

• How to build something playful first. We build a browser game together, because learning can be fun too

• How to create a CLAUDE.md file so you never have to re-explain who you are, how you write, or what you care about, ever again

• A real working example. You build your own, and I demo 1 I built and start building something new

You’ll leave with at least one thing built and one thing automated.

You will build something that actually saves you time by the end of the recording.

Who this is for

This is for the women who’ve been curious about Claude but haven’t had a reason to sit down and actually learn it properly.

You don’t need to know how to code.

You don’t need to understand how large language models work.

I don’t, and I don’t need to, and neither do you.

You just need 90 minutes and a willingness to talk to your computer and tell it what you want to do.

The details

Level Up With Claude Code: the full recorded Level 1 class $99. One-time payment, yours to keep and rewatch. Pause. Play. Build. Go back to it.

Get Instant Access

And if you finish this and want to go further, to build real, complex automations around the actual messy problems in your business, applications are open for the Ladies Who Claude Mastermind a small, three-month cohort with weekly live sessions and office hours with me directly.

Come build something with me.

Love from Lisbon,

Nina

John Krakauer, neuroscientist & neurologist, builds therapeutic games for a living, and he is also one of the most honest skeptics you will hear on what actually helps the brain. In this conversation we get into the messy truth behind brain training, why he does not buy most of the hype, and the one long-term study on dementia that he genuinely cannot explain away.

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From there we go somewhere bigger. We talk about why AI keeps looking smarter every year (and why part of that might be us getting a little dumber), why "uploading your brain" belongs in the same bucket as imagining a plane flying backwards, and why the whole idea of longevity might be a misnomer, since most people do not want more years, they want to be young again.

In this episode you will learn:
- How most brain training falls short of what it promises, and the surprising result that made Krakauer pause
- Why language lets us describe impossible things fluently, and what that means for claims about consciousness and brain uploading
- Why medicine reaches for the gadget and skips the hard behavioural work, and why it can be harder to rehabilitate doctors than patients
- What immersive, almost psychedelic digital experiences might offer for healing without any drug involved

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to John and his work in neurotechnology
02:06 Overview of the Champlimaud Institute for Brain Research and Repair
03:59 Digital Neurotherapeutic Center and its impact
06:51 Comparing Hopkins and Champlimaud's approaches to neurotherapy
09:55 The concept of digital psychedelics and immersive experiences
15:02 Decoupling psychedelic experiences from drugs
19:52 Long-term effects of brain training and cognitive games
24:50 The potential of digital psychedelics in stroke and neuroplasticity
29:56 The importance of sleep, diet, and exercise for brain health
34:58 The future of brain uploading and collective consciousness
40:06 The role of exergaming and immersive therapy spaces
44:48 Prevention and treatment of stroke and neurodegenerative diseases
49:54 Barriers to behavioral change in medicine and wellness
55:07 The cultural and societal aspects of longevity and aging
01:00:09 The human desire for youth and the meaning of aging
01:04:58 The limitations of AI and the imagination of future technology
01:09:56 Book recommendations and reflections on culture and philosophy

Here’s a few stats that made me want to throw my laptop across the room.

Only ~1/3rd of women use AI at work.

There’s a 25% gender gap in adoption between men and women.

Only 9% of women use AI multiple times a day.

Meanwhile every headline out there is telling us AI is about to change how we all work and live.

So I did the only thing that made sense to me, I opened up my living room in Lisbon and started teaching my girlfriends how to use Claude.

And my program, Ladies Who Claude was born.

That was three weeks ago. Since then I’ve taught more than 30 women across group classes and private sessions. Next week I’m moving the class out of the living room and into a larger venue in central lisbon for a class on July 22 from 17:00 - 19:30. Sign up here.

This week’s note is the story of what happened and what my students have built.

Cheers,

Nina

P.S. Before I dive into the note - Please answer this poll

In this note:

• 💻 Ladies Who Claude: What 30 Women Built in Three Weeks

• 🎥 A Original Animation Created in 30m with Claude Code

• ⚡️ Claude’s Science Beta

Subscribe now

#190: 💻 Ladies Who Claude: What 30 Women Built in Three Weeks

I learned Claude Code through Nick Sarafa’s class back in April and wrote about it here.

It completely changed my life.

In the very literal sense that I don’t start a task anymore, I go to Claude.

Let me repeat that.

I do not start a task. I do not open a spreadsheet. I do not open a software.

I just go to Claude first and tell Claude (with my voice, not typing) what I want to do, then I watch Claude help me do it.

This is the future.

No more software. No more keyboard.

It’s not only a mindset shift but a tooling shift too.

So when I read that women are adopting AI at a fraction of the rate that men are, I couldn’t just be annoyed about it on the internet.

It’s not just that women aren’t adopting AI. This also means they aren’t learning the new tools that support AI. They don’t yet know that soon the keyboard will be obsolete.

And that made me want to bring a room full of actual women together to do something about it.

I’ve always believed women learn differently without men in the room. Something opens up.

People actually say “wait, can you say that again” instead of nodding along and then Googling it later.

So that’s the room I built.

From My Living Room to a Waitlist

Three weeks ago it was me, my laptop, and a handful of friends on my couch. Since then it’s turned into group Zoom classes, hours-long private 1:1 sessions, an in-person workshop planned for next week, and a growing community in a WhatsApp chat.

I’m sending the WhatsApp group a weekly Monday prompt “What are you building this week?” and I’m impressed by every reply of what these ladies are building.

I’ve also started doing 10-minute onboarding calls for every person before the in-person classes so we don’t waste time downloading software during class time.

And now, the next step is my new in-person class at a bigger venue in central Lisbon (Sign up!).

I did not see this coming three weeks ago.

I just wanted to teach my friends.

The Four Ways I Teach Claude

Every session starts the same way because there are four doors into using Claude, and most people only know about one of them.

Chat is the one everyone already knows. Drafting, brainstorming, asking basic questions. Using it as a thought partner.

Cowork is where you start to see the power of AI. This is where you connect your Gmail, your calendar, your Google Drive (and more), then let Claude run light automations and scheduled tasks for you.

Claude Code in the desktop app where you start actually building things. Tools, workflows, small apps, and websites.

Claude Code in the Terminal is the deep end and also the most powerful Claude tool. It’s where Claude was natively built, and it’s the only one with real persistent memory through local project folders.

Almost everyone arrives only knowing Chat, and by the end of class everyone has all 4 options installed and has built their first AI automation.

That’s a win in my book.

The Moments That Made Me SO SO Happy

One of my students, Grace, runs a communications agency across three time zones and told me she resisted Claude “so much” before the class. By the end of our session she said,

“My productivity is insane. Like, I’m quick anyway. But now I’m, like, chaining it. It knows my tone of voice. It’s talking to all my tools. It’s in the Google Drive. It’s in my shoes. Like, it’s just amazing.”

It’s in her inbox, her Drive, her tone of voice, and she said her productivity now feels insane.

That’s Ladies Who Claude in one sentence.

Hayriye, a chef and restaurant owner, opened her session with “I’m a chef, I don’t need AI,” and by the end of class was connecting her restaurant’s Gmail to manage orders.

She almost downloaded a lookalike app with a logo just close enough to Claude’s to fool her, which is a useful thing to watch out for if you’re just getting started. Always download directly from the source, not just the first result in a Google or app store search. (FYI - Claude desktop app can only be downloaded from the Claude.ai/download link.)

One participant created a time-audit and she watched Claude surface that her job search should be her top priority right now, instead of a packed social calendar of Lisbon summer events. (Harsh Claude, but ok).

She also used Claude Code to diagnose why her laptop storage was full, and found close to 150GB of forgotten screen recordings from 2023 she didn’t even know she had.

And then I introduce all my students to my favorite app of all time right now, WisprFlow, the speech-to-text tool I recommend in every single session. I talk at 185 words a minute and type at 80, so the math there isn’t even close. One student clocked in even faster, and asked me, only half joking, why she would ever type again.

Suzy’s Idea Is Now Part of the Program

At my last in-person class on Monday, Suzy (an IFS therapist who came in with a healthy dose of resistance) suggested we end with everyone sharing what they built. I loved it so much that it’s now a permanent part of my program format. Some of the best ideas in this whole program haven’t just come from me, they’ve come from the room.

Nicole, who joined from Barcelona, had already built her own website and brand guide with Claude before ever meeting me.

She mentioned offhand that her WhatsApp group of 27 professional moms was already trading AI tips, things like grocery lists for nannies, school email triage, and multilingual homework help. There’s clearly a “MomBosses Who Claude” workshop waiting to happen, and we’re piloting it.

And there’s Joseph, a private client referred from a ‘Ladies Who Claude’ Alumna, who is a fractional CFO trying to build a slower paced life.

He asked me the question I think everyone secretly wants to ask: has this actually made you more money, or is your life just easier?

My honest answer is both. Claude 100% has made my life easier. I’ve created more hours in the day to enjoy my life - to spend time with friends and do ceramics.

I’ve also made money with Claude. I’ve had Claude help me design guidebooks that I’ve been able to launch within 3 hours, a task that would have taken me hiring a designer and a week’s worth of time before. Claude has helped me to create prospect lists for sales outreach that have landed me podcast sponsorship deals.

And well….*clears throat* I’m launching a movement to empower women with AI because of Claude, and money is flowing in through that too.

Claude helped me to build the entire Ladies Who Claude website and payment pages in one day, making launching this company the easiest launch I’ve ever had.

Mastering Claude is like having a personal assistant with you 24/7. However, you also have to think about Claude the way I’d think about an eager intern, smart, fast, occasionally saving a file in the wrong folder, but completely unbothered when you point it out.

That analogy I took from Nick Sarafa’s class back in April, and I believe it gives people more patience with AI because we shouldn’t expect perfection from AI, just like we don’t expect perfection from humans.

Want to Join Ladies Who Claude?

Next in person class is Wednesday, July 22 at 17:00 - 19:30 in Central Lisbon.

The online program is TBA, but you can sign up for updates on the Ladies Who Claude website through the contact form.

Head to ladieswhoclaude.com to see what’s coming up, or just reply to this email and tell me where you’re stuck with AI.

I read every single message.

🎥 Content of the Week

No book this week, and honestly no show either. The only thing I’ve actually consumed lately is my own AI experiments, so we’re counting that. Besides that I’ve been teaching women how to AI in my living room.

But yesterday, Claude blew my mind. AGAIN.

I built a 20 second teaser trailer for an upcoming guidebook I am launching.

I prompted Claude Fable 5 with this super simple prompt in the terminal:

“I want to create a 20-second teaser trailer for my upcoming guidebook, Longevity and Psychedelics. I can give you the videos of three lectures I gave on the topic. I can also give you the entire text of the guidebook, and I want you to use Higgsfield to create the teaser trailer.”

14 min later, Claude created an animation - gorgeous, colorful, all on its own with no brand direction or creative guidelines.

Then I just had to give it a voiceover file with my own voice, add the Nina’s Notes original jingle, and some small edits. Another 14 min later I had this.

I can’t believe it.

This would have cost me a few hundred dollars, hiring a designer and an animator, and probably 2 weeks of my own time.

⚡️ Check This Out

Claude Science Beta just went live.

I’ve clicked around in it for 10 minutes and I can already tell you this would have saved me at least a year of my PhD.

The first suggested task “Map Recent Literature of the Subfield,” is what most first-year graduate students spend a year doing.

I had to try it.

I asked Claude Science to map the literature of the Psychedelics + Longevity field, which is a small emerging field, and after 20 minutes. It gave me these 2 figures and a list of 42 of the most relevant papers.

This is insane. It’s built for exactly the kind of research-heavy, cite-your-sources, repeatable biology lab bench work that I used to do in my PhD and at my biotech startups.

I’ll report back as I dig deeper.

But already, Wow.

I wish I had this 10 years ago.

Looking for My Podcasts?

You find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

• 🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

• 📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

• 🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, and 🔴 YouTube. We just hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube!!!

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Frederik Dierick, a family and sports medicine physician turned founder of Pioneer Wellness Group, to explore how hospitality could become one of the most effective (and most overlooked) tools for helping millions of people live longer, healthier lives.

Listen & watch on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, & 🟣 Apple Podcasts

Frederik makes the case that hotels and resorts are uniquely positioned to deliver science-backed longevity care at scale: guests arrive with time, attention, and motivation that almost never exists in a doctor’s office. We dig into what it actually takes to build a luxury wellness experience that’s grounded in real clinical science (not spa-day wellness theater), why nutrition is the most sensitive topic in medicine, where AI fits in as a health accountability partner, and what it will take to democratize longevity so it’s not just for the ultra-wealthy.

Subscribe now

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 The Journey to Longevity Medicine

• 05:47 Creating Transformative Experiences in Hospitality

• 12:01 Practical Applications of Health in Hospitality

• 18:00 The Future of Longevity in Hospitality

• 23:57 The Challenges of Personalized Medicine

• 29:10 Challenges in Patient Care and Systemic Issues

• 38:35 Democratizing Longevity Medicine

• 45:07 Nutrition: The Most Sensitive Topic

• 51:16 The Future of Health Hospitality

ABOUT DR. FREDERIK DIERICK Dr. Frederik Dierick trained as a family and sports medicine doctor before founding Pioneer Wellness Group, a consultancy on a mission to turn hotels and resorts into the world’s most powerful health platforms. He works at the intersection of clinical medicine and hospitality, helping brands build wellness experiences rooted in real science rather than trend-driven spa treatments.

CONNECT WITH PIONEER WELLNESS GROUP:

• Website: https://www.pioneerwellnessgroup.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederikdierick/

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES
Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA’S NOTES
Newsletter: www.ninasnotes.xyz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/
Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Keywords: longevity, health optimization, hospitality, wellness, science, experience, behavior change, AI health coaching, preventive medicine, luxury wellness

Can a 5-minute brain scan detect dementia years before symptoms?

Jurij Dreo, co-founder and CTO of BrainTrip, draws on 20+ years of EEG research to reveal how brain activity can be measured, interpreted, and used to catch the earliest signs of cognitive decline and dementia — often before they’re visible or irreversible.

In this episode of Nina’s Notes, host Nina Patrick (PhD) and Jurij explore the real potential of EEG technology, why it’s been underused in clinics, and where brain-health diagnostics are headed next. If you care about protecting your memory and measuring your cognitive capital, this one’s for you.

🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The fascination with the brain
03:49 – Neuroscience vs. genetics in clinical practice
06:17 – Understanding EEG: the hidden talent
11:50 – EEG waves and brain health
18:31 – EEG in cognitive decline & dementia
25:32 – Cogniscore: a new approach to brain health
29:26 – Understanding Cogniscore & cognitive assessment
32:24 – The accessibility of EEG testing
35:34 – Advancements in EEG technology
38:24 – Interpreting cognitive assessment results
44:17 – Next steps after cognitive assessment
45:59 – When to get a Cogniscore assessment
47:43 – Daily practices for brain health
52:01 – The brain of Marie Curie

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Why EEG beats other brain-imaging tools for early detection

• How brain waves reveal your mental and cognitive state

• The challenges of turning EEG research into clinical tools

• How EEG can flag early dementia and cognitive decline

• How AI and machine learning decode EEG data

• Network-level brain activity and why it matters

• How accessible EEG assessments are right now

• The future of EEG for diagnosing brain disorders

ABOUT JURIJ DREO
Jurij Dreo is a Slovenian leader in neuroscience and brainwave analysis with over 20 years of experience. His work targets one of the defining health challenges of our time: cognitive decline. Through validated brain-monitoring methods, he’s built a system that detects the earliest signs of memory loss — making it possible to intervene before decline becomes irreversible. From clinical research to directing EEG labs, he bridges science and real-world application, setting new standards for how high performers protect and strengthen brain function over time.

BrainTrip: https://braintrip.net/
BrainTrip LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/braintrip/
Jurij Dreo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jurij-dreo-38360b198/

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES
Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA’S NOTES
Newsletter: www.ninasnotes.xyz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/
Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

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