The Humanity of Health Coaching in an AI World, With Dr. Ronjon Nag
What happens to healthcare when artificial intelligence gets faster, smarter, and more accessible? In this episode of Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi speaks with Stanford professor and AI pioneer Dr. Ronjon Nag about the future of AI in medicine, why human connection still matters, and how coaches can embrace technology without losing their impact. With decades of experience building AI systems and now leading longevity science initiatives, Dr. Ronjon offers a unique perspective on where we’re headed and what it means for personalized care.
“The thing you cannot replace is human accountability. If it’s a machine telling me to do something, I can just ignore it.”
Dr. Ronjon Nag
AI is already transforming healthcare in visible ways, from chatbots that help patients research symptoms to tools that analyze skin moles or medical imaging. But when it comes to empathy, intuition, and behavior change, human coaches remain essential. Dr. Ronjon explains that while AI can nudge and inform, it cannot replace the accountability that comes from working with a real person. The most powerful model is one where coaches use AI to enhance and personalize their work rather than replace it.
This conversation is both inspiring and practical for health coaches. Dr. Ronjon encourages coaches to view AI as a creative partner that can streamline tasks, save time, and make their services more scalable. He even describes a future where coaches can build their own tools without hiring developers, using plain language to create something uniquely theirs. By combining the best of technology with the human touch, coaches can continue to lead the way in client-centered care.
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Episode Highlights
- Hear why Dr. Ronjon believes AI can enhance, but not replace, human care
- Learn how health coaches can stay relevant in a tech-driven future
- Explore the concept of an aging vaccine and the science behind it
- Understand how empathy, self-efficacy, and accountability still give coaches the edge

Dr. Ronjon Nag is a renowned inventor, entrepreneur, and educator, with over 40 years of experience in developing AI technologies for smartphones, neural networks, and biotechnology. He is the Founder and President of R42 Group, a family office and venture group that invests primarily in AI, biotechnology, and science, and supports pre-seed stage companies in their growth journey. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Genetics in the Stanford School of Medicine and a Visiting Fellow at the Stanford Center for Language and Information (CSLI), where he teaches popular courses on AI, Genes, Ethics, Longevity Science, and Venture Capital. He is a Fellow and Trustee of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and a Lifetime Member of the ACM. He has won multiple prestigious awards, including the IET Mountbatten Medal, the $1m Verizon Powerful Answers Award, the COGX AI Lifetime Achievement Award, the MIT Great Dome Award and is the 2024 Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame Inductee. He is a founder, advisor, board member, and part owner of some 100 AI and Biotech start-ups, and has sold his companies to Apple, BlackBerry, and Motorola. He is passionate about inventing, informing, and investing in the future of humanity. He has a BSc (Birmingham), an MS (MIT), and a PhD (Cambridge).
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Transcript
Dr. Sandi: Today I am really excited. We have a special guest and he is going to dig into a topic that is all over the news. It is something on everyone’s minds. It has to do with how we can use it or are going to be replaced by it? And I’m talking of course about artificial intelligence. Let me tell you about my special guest today, Dr. Ronjon Nag. He is a renowned innovator, entrepreneur, and educator. He has over 40 years of experience in developing AI technologies for smartphones, neural networks, and biotechnology. He’s the founder and president of R42 Group, a family office and venture group that invests primarily in AI, biotechnology and science, and supports pre-seed stage companies in their growth journey. He’s an adjunct professor in genetics in the Stanford School of Medicine and a visiting fellow at the Stanford Center for Language and Information where he teaches popular courses on AI, genes, ethics, longevity science, and venture capital. He’s a fellow and trustee of the Institute of Engineering and Technology and a lifetime member of the ACM.
He has won multiple prestigious awards including the IET MacFadden [SP] Medal, the $1 million Verizon Powerful Answers Award, the COGX AI Lifetime Achievement Award, the MIT Great Dome Award, and is the 2024 Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame inductee. He is a founder and advisor, a board member, and part-time owner of some 100 AI and biotech startups. And he has sold his companies to Apple, Blackberry, and Motorola. He’s passionate about inventing, informing, and investing in the future of humanity. Without further ado, I bring to you my conversation with Dr. Ronjon. Great to have you here. So, how did your career path lead you into the fields of AI and now into healthcare?
Dr. Ronjon: Okay, very long and boring story, I’m afraid. But my first AI system was basically, at this point, 40 years ago, 1983. And as I was entering the field, I thought I was late. It was my undergraduate project at Birmingham University, England. And I was building a speech recognition system that could transcribe speech. I’d tell everyone, “I’m building a machine that can understand what you’re saying.” And everyone would just fall off their chair. They said, “Well, you can’t do that. It’s the ‘Star Trek’ stuff.” But let’s say as an engineer, let’s start simply, we’ll start with telephone digits. And then I went to Cambridge, then I went to MIT, then I went to Stanford. Interestingly enough, at Stanford, that was not the computer science department. It was not the engineering department, but it was the psychology department. And the clue in the modern AI uses something called neural networks. The word neural was really invented not in the computer science departments around the world, but it was actually in that they actually didn’t believe in this technique where we would model the brain, mathematics of the brain. It had to be done in other departments at Cambridge, or in engineering and at MIT, or at Sloan, the management science department. And then at Stanford, in psychology.
And after all that, no one gave me a job. So I started companies. And the first one was doing speech and handwriting, Motorola bought that. The second one was crowdsourcing intelligence, reinvented the first mobile app store and BlackBerry bought that. Then the third one was doing back to speech dialogues, and then Apple bought that. And then after all that, I was just getting older, there’s a program at Stanford and I think also at Chicago, where you’re at, Sandra, where the program’s popping up where after you’ve got a 30-year career, there’s a program where you can go back to university and take classes and courses with the 20-year-olds. And so I did that at Stanford. You don’t have to be a Stanford alum, but it was a year’s tuition fee, not particularly cheap at Stanford. But I went there and I took all the medical school courses and all the human biology courses, genomics, genetics, and took so many.
After a while, they made me a professor in medicine, even though I’m really an engineer. I’m really an electrical engineer, but I teach AI, I teach AI for medicine. And that’s how I started looking at emerging AI and medicine, AI and longevity science. I teach longevity science at Stanford and some of the courses I teach in the evening where anyone can take actually, you know, Stanford’s cheapest courses. They’re a few hundred dollars, I guess, and some of them are online. So maybe some of your audience might be interested in that. That’s my career, Sandra.
Dr. Sandi: Well, you had a legendary career and have been such an innovator. But what do you see as the…look at AI, how do you see it transforming health care, particularly over the next decade?
Dr. Ronjon: Yeah, so as I said, AI was, the term artificial intelligence, coined in 1956. So when I entered in 1980s, I thought I was late. Of course, it’s hit mainstream in the last two, three years. And that’s what people think AI is. But even before that, AI started to inject itself in the healthcare system, in image processing, for example, looking at Pap smears, looking at x-rays. And famously, some pundits have said…I used to have computer scientists used to tell their relatives, young relatives, nieces and children, “It’s okay to go into medicine, but don’t go into radiology because it’s just all going to be done by computers.” Now, having said that, there’s basically no radiologists have been replaced yet. And in fact, there’s a shortage of radiologists because of people afraid to go into the field. And so their salaries have actually gone up by repute. And you start to see in the imaging first, that’s already happening, definitely.
What came about a couple of years ago was GPT, ChatGPT, generative pre-trained transformers, that’s what that stands for. And that allowed people to interact with AI with just normal English, instead of Python or programming languages. And when it first came out, people said, well, be afraid of it giving you medical advice. Be afraid of hallucinating, giving the wrong answer, even though it looks like it’s confident. We’re seeing it slightly still hallucinates, but you know, humans get the wrong answers too. We’re seeing actually people use it, particularly in the U.S., because healthcare is so expensive. People are using it in the initial state to research their illness, research their issue. Sometimes if it’s expensive, they stop there, and it’s usually better than nothing. But often they’ll then go into their doctor.
And it’s a different relationship than maybe 35 years ago, when my doctor used to tell me, “Well, I don’t believe anything you read on the internet,” and I’d give her all these printouts. But now she says, “Well, Ronjon, what do you think it is?” But she knows I’ve spent two hours researching it. And we have a 10 minute consultation. And if I’m coming in as an informed patient, it’s more of a discussion, right? And she’s obviously seen 25,000 patients and I haven’t, even though I’m a professor in medicine, I’m more on the science side. And so, “Well, it might be this, it might…” “Oh, well, no, it’s not that, it’s not that.” So it’s more of a discussion. And so you’re going to see that.
But then the next step. Right now, we’ve got AI at the level of a single Ph.D., working at one-time speed in one expertise. People are really thinking about, is it possible to what we get what’s called not artificial intelligence, but super intelligence, where it’s 100 Ph.D.s working at 100-times speed? At that point, then people are worried whether AI will take over, Terminator, these kinds of, sort of, scenarios. But at that point, we may be able to get exponential learning, exponential research, exponential results of amazing research that’s been done at rapid speed. And so you’re going to see, I think the medical system is seeing it…they’re less critical of AI systems now, you see, and people say, “Well, okay, yeah, let’s use it.” I’ve heard many cases where people are taking camera shots of moles and it said, “This is a melanoma, go and see a doctor,” etc. Whereas otherwise you’re waiting two or three weeks for an appointment.
And so you’re going to see this merging of AI in medicine, AI in healthcare. Kicking and screaming, I think people…the biggest move in the medical community, you’re going to see people taking ownership of their own health, their own data, learning their own data, it’ll be less “respect” as, well, maybe 35 years ago with the white coat. It’d be more like a profession that people were expected on all sides to have a higher level of learning. That’s my two cents. I actually don’t know what’s going to happen, but that’s what I think might…is one scenario.
Dr. Sandi: Yes. And sincerely what you think, something that is to be considered, not taken lightly because of your background, your experience. And I see this as very promising for healthcare and the developments. One of the things that I see happening is the absence of what we used to call bedside manner. I had a pediatrician, my mother…we had a doctor and they made health calls and they didn’t have the best technology. Of course, they didn’t have AI, but they had this human connection and they took time with people. And as we have gotten better with technology, many people feel that they’ve lost that. It’s impossible to even get an appointment with your doctor, your primary care doctor. When you do, you get 10 minutes with them at most, and they don’t even know your name half the time because you’re in these big medical practices where there’s thousands of doctors, you don’t see the same person with each visit. You can share your thoughts on this. So what direction do we really need to be going in? Have we lost that human connection? And what I do is train health coaches not to replace doctors, but to offer that that we have lost in modern healthcare.
Dr. Ronjon: Yeah, it’s very important for the empathy, the human touch. Often when I see my doctor, he would say, “Well, obviously you’re smiling, you’re coming in and I can tell there’s nothing wrong with you, but let’s do some tests anyway.” And that’s the human instinctive approach. Now, there has been research that’s been done with AI and empathy. And they’ve found, actually some results have shown that actually the AI is actually more empathic than humans are. So, but that’s from a technical level. People know it’s a machine. When someone’s written you a GPT paragraph email and then, oh, they’ve been lazy. Why can’t they just type what they really think? So I think being near each other, even Roger Penrose at Oxford, who got a Nobel prize in physics, he talks about consciousness. What is consciousness? He talks about it as, like, the quantum forces in the molecules in your brain are creating small forces. And a lot of consciousness theoreticians are not very approving of his idea, but he has got a Nobel prize, so I think we should listen to him. Maybe that’s the love at first sight. You have a connection with the human when it’s a real human versus a computer that you don’t get, a machine.
Dr. Sandi: That’s such a good point. There are so many companies that are racing to get out AI health coaches. We’ve got Apple is on it and Samsung and Google’s developing one and they’re claiming that they are going to be incredible for creating a relationship with…they’re going to be able to guide people’s behavior, change their lifestyle, for example. And I just was wondering your thoughts about this, because we’ve got a lot of our listeners who are health coaches who may be thinking, whoa, is there going to be a role for me in the future? Will I be replaced by an AI health coach where someone can just get alerts throughout the day or engage in conversation with the AI as opposed to working with a real coach?
Dr. Ronjon: Well, I think it’s going to be a very crowded area because engineering-wise, it’s not that hard to do to build a health coach system at this point. Even we have one, R42, that’s my organization, which we’re building. But here’s the thing, I think there are other domains as well, like physical trainers, you can just go on YouTube and learn what exercise to do. I used to be quite critical of the wearables because I’d wear it for three months and put it in a drawer. But then now I’m less critical because it nudges you to do the right thing.
And the main thing, yes, there will be machines and hopefully health coaches will use them. The thing is you cannot replace is human accountability. If it’s a machine telling me to do something, I can just ignore it. I’ve got to see Sandra next week. And so, well, I didn’t actually do those push-ups that you told me to do. It’s a different accountability versus a machine versus a human where I have to really be accountable to you. That’s why I think the many domains where you actually want the person to basically beat you up and tell you what to do, otherwise you just don’t do it.
Dr. Sandi: I think, yeah, absolutely. And the power is really the combination. There was not an either or. It’s having a human coach who is then leveraging AI and leveraging the…like, for example, you are developing in terms of that AI coach who can support them, so it’s not necessarily either/or.
Dr. Ronjon: Exactly. If you could accelerate them because your clients get lazy and maybe they can see, oh, they haven’t done their jogging. And so send them a little encouraging personal note instead of a machine. You know, it’s just more.
Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. And the beauty of health coaching is really it builds…it stops self-efficacy. As it so what health coaches do so beautifully, all coaches really, is help you to have that aha moment when you realize, like, you can take charge and in healthcare, they can take charge of their health and they can make these small changes in their daily habits that really do matter. So it’s exciting to see what the future will bring with AI. And I’d love for you to share what you are doing in terms of longevity. We hear so much about longevity. It used to be called anti-aging and now it’s longevity, and you are doing some pioneering work. And so I wonder if you could share.
Dr. Ronjon: Oh, yes. I’ve really been looking at it for the last 10 years, mathematics and medicine. Right. And I guess the most interesting project that might be interesting for your audience…I’ve got quite a number of projects ranging for a longevity portal, longevity retreats, longevity symposiums, longevity lectures. But it’s my idea for a vaccine. For what, you may ask? A vaccine for aging, a vaccine that stops you…So I’m in the mode now of asking big questions, big ideas, and just a lot of small questions. So just like the old speech recognition days, we say, well, that’s impossible. How can you possibly do that? And of course, as we know, time and time again, it appears on our phone and we can actually do it. So we’re using computational techniques to find out which pathways are common across as many diseases as possible and which proteins need to be protected for which disease.
So there’s something called the central dogma theory, which is now we have DNA and it was amazing. The DNA is the same in every cell, whether it’s your stomach cell, your skin cell, but it’s expressed differently. The DNA causes RNA, which creates proteins and the proteins tell your cells what to do. The problem is as you age, those proteins get corrupted and the immune system needs to really protect it. And that’s what we’re trying to do, computationally use peptides to protect the proteins, but without harming our regular cells. So that’s a project I’ve been working on and much, much longer theory, but in a nutshell, it’s kind of an elevator speech on how that might work.
Dr. Sandi: Wow. That is absolutely fascinating. So yes, it’s the what can be done. And I think when we look back at, as he’s talked about with speech recognition, so much as like, who could have imagined what we have now in terms of the technological advancements? And with these advancements, there are some people who have ethical concerns about AI in healthcare or as we go further in terms of longevity, you can comment and share your thoughts about that.
Dr. Ronjon: Yeah, certainly privacy, your genome doesn’t want…I think at this point, my genome is probably on the dark web. It’s too late for me. So 23andMe have got hacked.
Dr. Sandi: Oh, yeah, me too.
Dr. Ronjon: I didn’t even bother downloading it because I thought it was on the dark web, already too late. Now, I think I’m on the mode, you know, people are worried about it and they should be concerned in the context of many other things that you might have your bank account, your passport, etc. I would say, I don’t think I know of any particular example where anyone’s being harmed by their genome being out there. I think there’s a couple of criminals have been caught from them being traced back from relatives and the like, but I think it should be more carrot than stick, right? So for example, if everyone uploaded their genome, we could make a lot more progress. So that’s on the genome side. Then there’s the sort of ethics side, other ethics sides in terms of can a machine give you the right answer? Can you devolve your responsibility? Can a doctor or a nurse devolve their responsibility to a machine? That’s why often the FDA, not often, the FDA states it has to be a human in the loop because the final prescription, the final word, the problem is if people get lazy.
We see this in the autonomous driving world where people have just…in the trials sometimes, unfortunately, people have just been reading the newspaper and they’d run someone over by accident, unfortunately. So people just get lazy. I think that with this preoccupation of data, my personal…it might be a bit controversial, but you want to know my opinion. It may be overdone. I think we could cure a lot more things if we just had it out there. And there are lots of other things where we have data problems and people should be cognizant of it, but not overbearing on the concept.
Dr. Sandi: Yeah, I agree. I think that looking at it as in terms of privacy and certainly when the health coaches are keeping records private, for example. But personal, I agree, my 23andMe is out there. Yes.
Dr. Ronjon: I’d rather have my data out there with lots of scientists working on it than keeping it to myself.
Dr. Sandi: Absolutely. So if you don’t mind getting personal…There’s so much out there with AI and people get overwhelmed. And most people in my…I’m 75 and I know people, my contemporaries, they don’t use ChatGPT, they may have heard of it, but I was giving a talk a few months ago and I said, “So, hands who use,” and nobody, and these were people that were my contemporaries. So, but where do you see personally, what are some of the things that you turn to in terms of personal use or you think would be helpful for others to use in terms of what’s out there that’s really exciting about some of these systems?
Dr. Ronjon: Yes. About 25% of the population have actually used it, 75% have not. And I know extreme users who use it 120 times a day. I think the feature that’s popped up recently on ChatGPT is the voice control. So you can just talk to it, it comes back to you, and you can talk about it…I use it as, sort of, an intellectual partner now. Any problem…in my field, there’s all these gobbledygook words popping up and I don’t want to look stupid. So I go to Cloud or GPT and ask these questions. What do these words mean? What’s what is a peptide? Yes. Let’s see. What’s an epitope? What is the…how does it work? Right. And then I’d upload decks, science decks or science essays into one of these things. And, “Please explain to me in simple language, as if I am 15 years old, what it’s trying to say.” And there is a field known as prompt engineering where you try and actually tell it exactly. And also negative prompt, tell it not what to do. Another little trick is you tell it what to do and then say, “Please improve this prompt,” as well automatically at the end. So it’s actually better at you than writing the prompt. So you built it in instead of some people do it as two steps.
Certainly using, I could have done it for this interview, you know, “Tell me about Sandra and there’s going to be an interview on health coaching and give me some clever ideas to tell Sandra.” Maybe I’m doing that right now while you’re waiting. But anyway, if you use it every day, contrary to popular opinion, people will say it makes you less lazy, less creative, you’re divorcing your brain, I think it can make you more creative, more interesting, more able to win friends and influence people.
Dr. Sandi: I agree. I use it more and more, anything from I can’t think of who starred in a particular movie fast or, “I was having people over for dinner on a summer night. What are some ideas? Now tell me the recipe for that. And oh, I don’t want to use eggs in that recipe, make it a different way.” So yes, absolutely the prompt. I learned that as well to ask it to give…how could I have improved. And sometimes we’ll put it into two different systems like Perplexity and ChatGPT, and they’re quite different. Yeah.
Dr. Ronjon: And I think there is something called vibe coding. That’s my other exciting thing where either to get engineers to help you build a project, and now you can just do it in English. So we’re building entire applications. You just type in English. Each of your health coaches could go on the mini-industry of companies and sites and labs and tools. You just type in English and then build a website for them in five minutes, not in five days or five months. You can just do the whole thing and you don’t have to hire anyone, and they can start thinking about that. So it’s going to be like PowerPoint. Everyone knows how to use PowerPoint. I wouldn’t be able to give a lecture on PowerPoint and say, what are you doing? A year from now, I won’t be able to give a lecture on some of the AI things I talk about now. They’ll just say, “Oh yeah, of course I use it.” The internet, we don’t even talk about the internet anymore. But when it first came out in the mainstream, which is in the late ’90s, people were shocked.
Dr. Sandi: Yeah. Well, I was playing around just before our interview, but I wonder if I ask ChatGPT, “I’m going to be interviewing…again. What would be some good questions to ask him?” And it came up with some good ones for this one. “Do you see a time when AI could help scale personalized health coaching to more people? Or, “Can health coaches leverage AI to use it without losing the human connection so critical to coaching?” So it did a pretty good job coming up with [inaudible 00:25:40.546].
Dr. Ronjon: Yeah, definitely. They can save lots of time if they built…jump in. It’s not frightening anymore. I teach a course with lots of other courses and you can build things. It’s not just using it. I think right now people are using, interacting like the way you said, but you can build your own Sandra. You can build your own thing and you can actually do it yourself. You don’t need to hire any engineers. Now, that’s worrying for engineers actually, but again, it’s the same kind of thing. You’ll need people to guide you in what you do. If you want to scale it, you’re going to need a billion people start using it. You need more help with that, but if you get…each health coach could almost build their portal just for themselves and put their own flavor.
Or my expectation is there’s probably somebody will…maybe your organization will do it. Will have a health coach portal that they can add onto and put their own screen and the picture and all these kinds of things. But that’s something you could do without instead of a $100,000 project in a year, probably a $100 project in 2 weeks. That’s the revolution that’s happening. We’re all going to be inventors, all going to be…And so generate creativity in yourself. That’s one of the other recommendations…young people when their brains are still plastic up until 25. Now, they’re worried about jobs. That’s what I hear from that generation, the current 20-year-old generation. And I say, “Well, put yourself in creativity scenarios out of your comfort zone, right, and do something you haven’t done, and learn how to be inventive and creative because that’s where we have the thing on top of AI. That’s how we can beat AI system.”
Dr. Sandi: This has been such a fascinating discussion. Ronjon, if listeners want to learn more about your work, where should they go? Where can they find you?
Dr. Ronjon: They can go to www.r42group.com. That’s my organization. It’s a venture firm. It’s an institute. They can just Google me, Ronjon Nag and Stanford. Those courses will pop up. And of course they can email me, ronjon@stanford.edu.
Dr. Sandi: Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been a fascinating discussion. Thanks for being with us.
Dr. Ronjon: Thank you, Sandra. Thank you for having me.
Health Coach Talk Podcast
Hosted by Dr. Sandra Scheinbaum
Conversations About Wellness Through Functional Medicine Coaching
Health Coach Talk features insights from the most well-respected names in health coaching and Functional Medicine. Dr. Scheinbaum and guests will explore the positive impact health coaching has on healthcare, how it can transform lives, and help patients achieve better health and wellness outcomes.

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