When 23andMe filed for bankruptcy recently, a lot of questions resurfaced about genetic testing. Questions like, when you send your DNA to a company, where does your data go? And are the benefits of these tests worth the potential privacy risks? We tackled these questions in an episode back in March. After that episode aired, I heard from the CEO of a startup that wants to buy 23andMe. Nucleus Genomics uses genetic testing to assess people’s risks for health conditions. Their pitch is technology that sequences your whole genome, which they say can give you a better understanding of your health.
We can look at any gene. So that means we can basically provide not just analysis on a greater breadth of conditions, but on a per disease basis, we can provide far more comprehensive analysis as well.
‘I wanted to talk with Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi about his vision for the company in this moment when people are rethinking genetic testing, and get his take on what’s next for the industry. Part of that what’s-next is a somewhat controversial feature Nucleus recently announced called Nucleus Family. Using this tool, you and a partner could sync your DNA tests to assess the likelihood of passing along health risks to your potential future children. This seems great at first glance. But it also raises thorny ethical questions about family planning and whether we can responsibly use the information this technology can provide. I’m Clare Duffy and this is Terms of Service.
Thanks for being here, Kian.
Thank you so much for having me, excited.
So before we dive deeply into all of this, you are 25, right? You live in New York City. You have put out there that you are trying to use Nucleus to find a specific type of partner for yourself…
Tell me about why genetics matter in your dating life.
Well, it turns out, actually, after I did Nucleus, that I’m a cystic fibrosis carrier. And, you know, this is not something I actually knew before. And the way this works is basically that genetic marker for cystic fibrosis doesn’t impact my health, but could impact my future child’s health, assuming my partner’s also a carrier. And so we actually have a kind of Nucleus kind of partner feature. We can add your partner to the platform and you can see whether you are at risk with your significant other of passing down, you know, in this case for me, cystic fibrosis. And so when I was thinking about, you know I’m single, and I was think, well, you before I go on a date, it’s going to be like, you know where do you go to school, what do you do and have you done a Nucleus test? Because for me, I would prefer not to date someone who is also a carrier for cystic fibrosis. And obviously this is before I’ve ever met them, I know them, so there’s no connection at all. I’d rather not because I don’t want to have that risk in passing down to my future child.
Okay, yeah, I was going to ask, like, what happens if you meet your future wife in a coffee shop and it’s love at first sight…
And you’re like, does she have to take a Nucleus test?
Yeah, I mean, still, if you meet the love of your life and it turns out you are both a carrier for the same thing, it’s not a problem at all because there’s technology that enables you, once you have that information, to then basically not pass down that specific disease. And I think that’s kind of the beauty of genetics, which is it’s very preventative in nature. You can actually give patients, and in this case, couples, knowledge to basically stave off a future disease in their future child. And it’s a cheek swab, right? You literally just swab in your home and then you get results on your portal and then, you know, a piece of information can save your future baby’s life potentially. I think that’s pretty amazing.
So, where did the idea for Nucleus originally come from? How did you get interested in genetic testing?
Unfortunately, the story of Nucleus begins with a personal tragedy. My cousin actually she went to sleep one night and she she didn’t wake up the next day. Yeah, she died she died in her sleep and at the time I was almost seven, I asked my parents, how does this happen? I just you know just don’t understand it. You only seven you don’t really understand these sort of things.
‘And you know my parents said to me, it was bad genetics. What does that mean? I had no idea and so I eventually started studying genetics and when I realized that you know disease can be viewed more as a problem to be solved, right? It didn’t necessarily need to be a fact of life. Someone shouldn’t have to die at 15, I mean that’s just horrible. And so, I actually started doing some genetic engineering work and I sort of love this beauty and depth of biology. And so, I actually went to Penn to study computational biology and one day I was in a literally genetics class and the chairman of the biology department at the time, he pulled up this chart, okay? Look at this chart. It basically shows the cost of reading all of someone’s DNA. And what you find is the cost of reading someone’s all DNA has come down from around $100 million to the time in 2020 to about $1,000. And I thought, huh, you know, $100 million per sample to $1,000 per example? That’s crazy. And so I actually leave school, I actually move back into my bedroom in Brooklyn, and I literally filled in around 18 subject notebooks on basically computational genomics. And I basically realized that you can create this world’s most advanced DNA health test. There’s about 70,000 genetic tests on the market, right? If you think of your DNA as like a thousand page book, genetic tests, because it was so expensive to read all a thousand pages, a genetic test would look at a word, maybe a sentence, maybe a page. And that’s why there were so many different tests. There was a test for breast cancer, a test of Alzheimer’s, a cystic fibrosis test, another test for Tay-Sachs, and then yet another test for how your DNA affects the metabolism of drugs. In other words, there’s tens of thousands of different tests looking at all these different parts of your DNA book, so to speak. But now that the price has come down from $100 million to Nucleus provides it for just a couple hundred dollars, you can actually combine all 70,000 of these tests into one test and one swab.
Right now, a Nucleus test starts at $399 plus a $39 per year membership. So talk to me about if I am going to be a Nucleus customer, how do I get a test, what happens, just sort of walk me through the process?
Yeah, so you go on mynucleus.com and you basically fill in some information about yourself. We have an independent physician network that reviews the order. Our physician network approves it, a DNA kit comes, and this DNA kit basically has a cheek swab. And you swab your cheeks, you stick in this tube, then you send the tube to our lab. And then the lab basically, what they do is they extract the DNA, they process it, and out comes then a raw DNA file. That raw DNA files then runs through all our models and algorithms. And then a couple weeks later, they log into their account and they see basically results for today, what’s over 900 different conditions.
Will you give us some examples?
Of what you get analysis for?
It’s a huge range. So you get an analysis on things like cancers, like gastric cancer, breast cancer, all the way to neuroderm diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, all the ways to things like diabetes, even your psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia. And then of course, rare diseases, like I mentioned cystic fibrosis as an example.
And what is the value of having such a comprehensive look at your DNA, like rather than just sort of the regular things that people might be worried about, like Alzheimer’s, why give people so much information?
Well, you have patients like myself, right? If I went to a clinic today, would they have recommended me get genetic tests? No, the entire thesis of genetics is that you don’t actually want to get the symptoms for the condition first and then get a genetic test.
That kind of defeats the purpose, right. And that’s unfortunately the kind of complex that we’re in today. And moreover, you find that family history is a very bad measure. There’ve been many studies that show basically in a lot of cases, people have no family history in medical records or they might even have a family history but it wasn’t properly transmitted down. And so in other words, there’s really no way of knowing the risk that could be in your genes.
Okay, so I can understand the medical information like cystic fibrosis risk, but I know that Nucleus also provides information on, you know, what is your risk of alcoholism or if there is intelligence information. Talk to me about the value of those pieces of information.
Well, I think we really believe in empowering patients, customers with information, that they can use then to live longer, healthier lives or even understand themselves much deeper. Alcoholism is a great example. There was actually a great customer case of this where they did Nucleus and they discovered that they were in the 99 percentile for the genetic risk for alcoholism. And we had a beautiful customer anecdote where they said that alcoholism had been running their family for generations. And everyone felt so guilty. Everyone blamed themselves and you know it’s almost like this idea of viewing kind of addiction as more of like a disease versus addiction as something that you just lack kind of mental power fortitude for. And they said to me that by doing this test, by doing Nucleus and actually discovering this, they were actually so much more gracious to themselves.
Nucleus is now looking to acquire 23andMe, but not because of its existing customer genetic data. Instead, Kian says he’s interested in a subsidiary of 23andMe called Lemonade Health, a telehealth platform that offers doctor consultations, prescriptions, and medications online.
‘And so, what I like about Lemonade Health is, and 23 had this vision but never materialized, but it’s a really good one actually, which is someone really needs to build sort of an integrated health platform that’s consumer-centric, real-time, that’s quantified, that combines your genetics, your blood, your drugs, your full-body MRIs, everything, the entirety of someone’s health data onto a single application. You got to combine someone’s drugs with their DNA because you find that there are different genetic markers that basically affect people’s metabolism of different drugs differently. And it’s still baffling to me. It’s like unbelievable to me that people haven’t put these pieces together. Of course, if you take lemonade Health, which is basically a bunch of different drugs, you can do two things. One is, depending on people’s risk for conditions, you could, where clinically appropriate, recommend someone to take a drug. And then, on the other end too, you can actually adjust the right dosage to the patient. And so Lemonade Health is very interesting to us in that world and building that kind of health stack, so to speak. Then the other thing that is the reality is 23andMe, the brand is tarnished now, but it’s still the most well-known genetics company there is. And so we’re interested in thinking about how do we kind of secure the genetic future? How can we bring back trust and privacy to genetic testing? Because we really wanna build software that stops what happened to my cousin, to happen to anyone in the world. And we really don’t want privacy and security get in the way of that. Nucleus is HIPAA-compliant, 23 was never HIPPA-complient. We’re a medical provider, we’re CLIA certified, we are CAPA-credited. In other words, we follow the infrastructure that exists for health information.
For those who don’t know, HIPAA is the law that requires health care providers to get patient consent before sharing their sensitive health information. Kian says Nucleus is required to follow HIPPA as a provider of medical tests.
Because we give medical grade insight, we are a medical provider, we are medical laboratory, and we have to be approved by the United States to do this sort of analysis.
After 23andMe filed for bankruptcy, we’ve seen users are really concerned about what’s going to happen to their data, who is going to acquire the data. Do you think that people should be concerned who have used that service?
‘I would say a couple of things. First, I would say that I cannot say this loudly enough. There are regulations in place, most notably GINA, Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act. It’s passed in 2008. That basically makes it illegal for employers or health insurance companies to use your genetic data against you. That’s the first and most important point, which is there are some protections in place. Now, that said, I also would say that, you know, what I recommend if I was a 23andMe user is I would probably download my data and then, you know, if it makes you feel comfortable, you could request to delete it off of 23andMe servers as well.
Kian says that unlike 23andMe, if a company like Nucleus that’s HIPAA compliant gets sold, its customer data would have to continue to be protected in the same way.
People always talk about this in the genetics context but it applies to any health data, any health system, any hospital. If that company went under, then you could actually know that the owner has to follow the same regulations which is HIPAA, which is that basically your data is going to be used to provide you with care.
So what you’re saying is, and hopefully this won’t happen, but if the same thing were to happen to Nucleus, if the company were not to succeed, people wouldn’t have to have the same concerns that they do now with 23andMe.
Because Nucleus follows HIPAA, the acquiring company would have to follow HIPPA. So yes, exactly, that is correct.
‘And if people don’t, just for people who might not be so familiar with HIPAA and what exactly it involves, I just want to ask if people are wondering, Nucleus doesn’t share data with third-party advertisers or researchers, anything like that.
No. By default, we do not share any genetic data or protected health information with any third party. Sometimes customers come to us and say, look, my grandfather had Alzheimer’s, I wanna help advance Alzheimer’s research. It is in the customer’s right and choice to share that data if they want with a researcher. That’s the way we view it.
So, Kian says that medical information from genetic testing can be a helpful tool in thinking about your own future. But what about if you’re planning to start a family? If you’re thinking about having kids, what questions should you consider before syncing up your genetic data? That’s after the break.
‘Nucleus is backed by some very big names in the tech world, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s 776 Fund. But geneticists and ethicists have also raised big questions and some red flags about this kind of technology. They worry it could give people an unrealistic impression of just how much their genetics contribute to future health or personality outcomes for them and especially their future children. Some also worry about discrimination based on genetics. I wanted to hear more from Kian about how he sees this technology. So Nucleus recently launched Nuclease Family, this option where somebody and their partner can upload their DNA. How is that different, or how do you expect it to be used differently than what Nucleus has offered before?
‘Well, I think, you know, going back to the book analogy, that your DNA is a thousand-page book, I see this as really the natural evolution of the genomics industry, where now that you can actually read a thousand pages, there’s no reason to do separate genetic tests for separate different applications. It makes sense to bring every application under one umbrella. And principally, if you think of Nucleus as a preventive health company, which we really are. You know, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give someone their diseases assessment for cancer and then also give them insight that helps them have healthy children.
Yeah, I was going to ask, because if you are a couple that is trying to conceive, thinking about conceiving, a lot of times you can go and get certain genetic tests from your doctor, it’s covered by your insurance, why, I mean, if you have good insurance, and if you don’t have good insurance, you probably can’t afford Nucleus, either, like, why use Nucleus instead of that?
‘So there’s different kinds of preconception testing, right? Some might look at one gene, some might look at two genes. If you took like the best clinical genetics company and then look at the total number of genes they look for, right? I think it’s around 400 or so, we look at from more than 500 more genes. Why? Because we use the whole genome. We’re fundamentally not limited by basically, oh, one gene two genes, 10 genes, 20 genes. We look at whole thing. And what that means is we can identify far more genetic markers that parents could have and pass on to the child. And the reason why this is so important is if you look at the babies that are born with a hereditary disease, I think the statistic is like 80% do not have any known family history or any idea. So the second you start saying, oh, I’m in this subpopulation, oh, you know, I should get only tested, you know maybe, you’re Jewish, oh, actually get tested for Tay-Sachs or something. The second you start doing that, you actually miss out on the huge number of genetic markers that you may have, and then you could also pass down to your child. So that’s kind of the way we think about it.
‘Do you think of this as usable for same-sex couples too? Obviously slightly different, but…
‘Well, actually, interestingly, we had an interesting conversation at Nucleus weather to allow same-sex because, you know, even though obviously practically speaking It doesn’t work a lot of the theory could still work and there are, there are new science that’s coming out We can actually take like a stem cell for example And you know Maybe you can actually have a same- sex couple and make it into like a sperm and you know an egg for example. So I actually do think the future is coming where same-sex couples will be able to use their DNA to have children I think that’s beautiful. That’s awesome. Also, you can build even more sophisticated simulations of people’s babies as well, and that’s not necessarily dependent on the male and the female, they don’t necessarily need to be opposite. Currently today, if you try to matchmake on Nucleus with the same sex, just because it will break some of the sex-specific disease-linked models, because obviously that’s what we have to assume, it’s a, you know, whatever, X, Y, XX, so it would break some of those models, so we don’t, necessarily, allow it today, but that’s something, actually, we’ve thought a lot about.
‘What do you hope is the future for at-home genetic testing?
I think genetics is going to be moving from ancestry and genealogy. The future is a DNA health test that basically, as I mentioned, the cost has come down now from $10 million to now it’s a couple hundred dollars. I think in the next five years it’s going to tens of dollars, literally, 10, 20 dollars. You’re going to go buy a candy bar, you’re going buy your whole genome kit too. I think you’re gonna see everyone in the world is going get a DNA health test, and that’s going to enable kind of a level of precision medicine that we basically haven’t seen before. Where you can much more targetly give people recommendations on when they should get their screenings on different medical interventions they should specifically take on, you know, how they can have the healthiest family possible, on what drug dosages are best for them, right? So this price is going to keep crashing down. People are going to basically use genetics. It’s going to be integrated into standards medical care. It’s gonna be like a blood test, right. You go to your checkup, you get a blood tests, you can get your genetic test done.
You talked about GINA, which is the law that prevents employers and health insurers from using genetics.
‘You’re going to say it doesn’t apply to life insurance companies, it doesn’t apply to long-turn for disability care. Yeah.
‘Well we have heard some stories about folks getting denied long-term disability care because they were asked, have you taken a genetic test? Does that worry you?
‘So I think a couple of things. One is I think GINA should be expanded to cover life insurance as well as long-term disability care. Two, I think this is really hard. And the reason why this is so hard is because the exact kinds of genetic markers that would have someone be denied a long-term disability care is the exact kind of genetic markers you’d want to know about. Right. Right? Because someone sometimes, oh, you know, I have this genetic marker, now I can’t get, you know, long-time disability care, but also that genetic marker might save your life. You know, if you don’t do a test then, and then, God forbid, you know, you get some dilatating disease, you know, man, that’s horrible, right? Imagine if you’ve been known to actually prevent it. So it’s a really, really tricky scenario. I think GINA should be expanded. I think what patients can do is they can get long-term disability care, they can life insurance, and then they can do genetic tests.
So that’s what you would recommend. Do that first.
If you want to get get do life insurance you want and then do a genetic test I think GINA should be expanded and I think everyone should feel comfortable doing genetic tests and that’s what Nucleus hopes to do. We bring in that kind of medical grade quality, but at a scale so everyone can access to it.
Yeah. What about the fact that there are some traits that are so dependent on your environment, your lifestyle, other factors that aren’t related to genetics? Like the alcoholism one I was thinking about, certainly I can imagine that it has genetic markers that would indicate that, but I imagine also so dependent on the culture and the time of life you’re in.
How should people think about understanding the genetic information knowing that it’s not necessarily gonna tell them everything about them or their future children?
‘Absolutely. It’s such a great point because, and this is really important to say, think about like two things. Let’s say height. If you ask someone, is height more genetically driven or biologically driven? They’ll probably say it’s more genetically-driven, right? Which makes sense. If you take something like a personality trait, like extraversion, it’s less genetically driven, right. Height is around 80 percent, extraversion I think is like 10 percent or so, can be attributed to genetics. In other words, if you built the perfect genetic model that was perfectly predictive, there would still be error. Of course there would be, because there’s environment, and that’s not like a bad thing. That’s something that is great. I mean, there’s error. That’s just life. That’s the reality. And so you can build models that can tell you about tendencies and averages, but there’s still going to be error. And the thing that we do, which I think is one of the most underappreciated parts of our platform, is we actually take your entire genome and we combine it with your age, your sex, your BMI, in other words, relevant non-genetic clinical factors, and combine those together into your overall risk. Let me give you a great example of this, sometimes you go to the doctor, and I recently did actually, and unfortunately I have high LDL.
It’s basically, bad cholesterol. It’s associated with an increase in heart disease. Okay, so I got my blood test, and the doctor said, oh, you know, you’re at a high risk for a heart disease. And the thing is that if you ask the doctor, what does that mean? And then the doctor will say, without fail, well, it depends on your genetics. It depends on how much you work out. It depends how tall you are. It depends your BMI. It depends these factors. And to me, that’s not a challenge, that’s an opportunity, which is what Nucleus does, is we say, it does depend on those factors. That’s what we do is if you look at our heart disease model, we combine the entirety of your genome. We combine your total cholesterol. We combine your BMI. We combine sex. We combine your age. We actually build these integrated models that gives you overall risk assessments. And it turns out, even with my above average cholesterol, because of my genetics and I’m in good shape, et cetera, whatever, it turns out my risk for heart disease, my overall risk actually is very low. That’s the future of medicine right there. That’s the beauty of actually building these integrated models. You start going from very, very fuzzy models to building far more sophisticated statistical models that gives you a complete and holistic assessment of someone’s unique risk for disease, and then they can take steps to basically prevent or bring down that condition.
Services, especially when we talk about the family piece, services that offer to help people weed out genetic risk or even give people information about IQ level, things like that, have drawn comparison to eugenics, concerns about disabled people being discriminated against or this idea that there are good genes and bad genes. What would you say to those concerns?
I would say that if you look at preconception testing, the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians actually recommend it for every woman that wants to have children. In other words, it’s good science and it’s a good medicine. We really believe, not just in great clinical science, great genetic science, we really believe also in giving couples information that then they have the liberty to choose, right? Maybe someone is both a carrier for cystic fibrosis, they choose to do IVF, and they choose a baby without cystic fibrosis. That’s their right and that’s their choice. Maybe they’re both a care for cystic fibrosis, meaning they both have the genetic marker, and they decide just to have kids. They don’t mind the risk, and they wanna have kids organically, so to speak. That’s also their choice and their right. And we view it as giving people super high quality, unoptimatically relevant genetic information, and then letting the patient, and where appropriate, genetic counselors and also physicians, decide for themselves what they wanna do with that information. That’s empowerment. That’s patient empowerment.
For the record, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that information about carrier screening be provided to couples who are pregnant or hoping to be. But it stops short of recommending whether they should actually do a screening, except in the case of those with a family history of a select few conditions.
Knowing that we’re in the early days of this, I’m just curious, like, if we look forward 10, 20 years and you say you give people the choice, but I’m curious, in the same way that, you know, you have social media platforms that say people can use our platform however they want, that’s their choice, then we’ve seen that lead to genocide or to attacks on the Capitol, do you worry that saying we’re just going to give people a choice could lead to some dangerous choices?
Well, what we do, so our job is to very rigorously and very thoughtfully give information to patients, right? In other words, like, let’s look at something like IQ, for example, right, you brought up IQ. Of course IQ’s not completely genetic determinists. Of course not. Of course it matters who you are, what you do. We all have free will at the end of the day. In other word, and I said this earlier about height, about extraversion, and it applies actually to any, any trait, which is, even if you build the perfect model, there’s error, and that’s not a bug. That’s a feature of life. That’s the beautiful part about life is that DNA is a part of the picture. And so often I think, you know, when people talk about genetics, it’s in two extremes. It’s horoscope. It’s not real. Some people say, like, wow, that’s interesting, but okay, sure. Right? It’s real. And then it’s Gattaca. It is deterministic. Here’s a model…It’ in between. Genetics is something. It not everything. And it will never be everything.
Okay, so this is something I’m just personally curious about, because I feel like I’m the kind of person where maybe I’d just rather not know, I just kind of would like life to unfold however it’s going to unfold. Am I wrong? Like, is that dumb?
‘I think that one analogy we like to use sometimes is like, let’s say a month from now, you were going to get on a plane that was going to crash. If I give you that piece of information, you’d be stressed, right? But you know what you would say? You’d say, thank God I knew because I’m not going to be on that plane. In other words, if you do have a rare genetic marker that could dramatically increase your risk of condition, there may be some short-term stress. Admittedly, there will be. But you have support from genetic counselors, you have a support from your doctors, and support of the entire medical system. So that, God forbid, you don’t get on that plane. I mean, if I say it like that, you’re gonna think there’s, of course, like, if, if…
I don’t know, what if I have to get on the plane?
Right, like if I was gonna tell you, hey, a month from now, this is gonna happen, if you had a horoscope, you looked into the horoscope and you saw the plane was gonna crash, you know what you’re going to do? You’re not gonna get on a plane. You know, of, course, right? Do you think that’s fair?
Like, you’re not going to get the plane, right, of course not. And you’re like, thank God for telling me.
But what if it’s like in 60 years, I, you know, God forbid, I’m going to develop ALS or something that we currently don’t have a cure for.
‘Well the thing with ALS or like let’s say Alzheimer’s is we might not have a cure today but we will tomorrow. So often with what we find with patients is they’ll be like give me the Alzheimer’s score even when they’re young like 25 or something and the reason for that is because otherwise they would have no idea to even pay attention to it right like if I knew I had a high risk of Alzheimer’s I know that in the next several decades, right I’m going to be paying attention to all the cutting-edge research diagnostics you know drugs et cetera, that are coming out. And also even different lifestyle measures, whatever supplements that I can take to basically prevent that condition from happening. And obviously, you know that the way that things are advancing, especially with AI, you know we shouldn’t get so much better. But of course, if you don’t know something exists, how could you possibly prevent it? So that’s the beauty of, I think, where knowledge really is power.
Well, I’m sure that we will hopefully keep talking as all of this continues to develop. Kian, thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
‘After talking with Kian, it feels clear that consumer genetic testing won’t be dying off with 23andMe’s bankruptcy. If anything, this technology and how it can impact our lives is evolving rapidly. The idea of a future where medicine is more personalized and patients have more control in an often opaque healthcare ecosystem could be exciting, but that will depend on a whole bunch of people using this technology responsibly. Here are a few things that I think would be useful to keep in mind if you’re considering using one of these services: First, even with whole DNA tests, like Nucleus, your genetics can’t tell you everything about your future health risk or that of future children. And ditto with personality traits like IQ. Some of this information can be useful. But remember that humans are complex beings, and genetics are just one of many factors that make us who we are. If you have family history or think you might be at risk of a specific condition, you might want to consider obtaining something like life insurance before taking a genetic test to prevent the risk that you might be turned away or charged more because of a genetic condition down the road. Since, as Kian said, the US Genetic Nondiscrimination Act currently doesn’t cover life and long-term disability insurance. Nucleus tests can be paid for with your FSA or HSA funds, but it’s also worth remembering that if you’re concerned about a specific genetic risk, you may be able to access testing covered by insurance through your doctor. It might not be as comprehensive as whole DNA testing, but if money is tight for you, that might be a good place to start. That’s all for this week’s episode of Terms of Service. I’m Clare Duffy. Talk to you next week.
Terms of Service is a CNN Audio and Goat Rodeo production. This show is produced and hosted by me, Clare Duffy. At Goat Rodeo, the lead producer is Rebecca Seidel, and the executive producers are Megan Nadolski and Ian Enright. At CNN, Matt Martinez is our senior producer, and Dan Dzula is our technical director. Haley Thomas is senior producer of development. Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. With support from Kyra Daring, Emily Williams, Tayler Phillips, David Rind, Dan Bloom, Robert Mathers, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, Alex Manasseri, Mark Duffy, Leni Steinhardt, Jon Dianora, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman, David Goldman, and Wendy Brundige. Thank you for listening.
