Hello friends,
I expected to make more documentaries with Steve Brown. I didn’t expect him to become the subject of one.
Steve has been a dear friend and documentary partner for years. I knew him as a Stanford-trained physicist and computer scientist, a filmmaker, and someone who had spent decades building technology companies.
Before his diagnosis, Steve was chief AI officer for Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE. He created digital versions of thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, then brought them into conversation to see what different perspectives might surface.
Then the Palisades wildfire destroyed his home.
Steve had already been sick for months. He had lost 25 pounds and undergone blood tests and scans, but his doctors had not found the cause. They believed stress might be responsible.
The fire displaced Steve into a different healthcare system. A few weeks later, he landed in an emergency room, where doctors discovered an aggressive blood cancer that had been missed for months.
He went into founder mode.
This episode arrives during an extraordinary moment in the AI conversation. Leaders from Anthropic and OpenAI are warning that frontier AI may be moving faster than our ability to understand and control it. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously.
Steve’s story shows another side of the same technology. While the world debates what AI could eventually do to humanity, he was asking what it could do for one person trying to stay alive.
Today, his treatment is working.
Now he is building CureWise to help people with cancer organize their medical information, examine their records from multiple perspectives, and become more informed partners in their own care.
Listen or watch the episode.
For Tony
Last week, Tony Sandow, a dear family friend who had known me since birth, died from cancer.
As a kid, Tony introduced me to National Geographic and to live music, two doorways into a larger world that helped shape my own life. He and his wife Pam were lifelong adventurers who traveled to more than 80 countries.
This spring, they returned from Uzbekistan. Tony had developed what seemed like an ordinary sore throat. It was a rare and aggressive cancer. Before surgery, he did what I remember him doing when I was a child: he picked up his guitar and sang.
This episode is for Tony, for the larger world he opened to me, and for the example he set: keep the music going when times are hard, and keep exploring for as long as you can.
If someone you care about is navigating cancer, or helping a loved one make sense of a diagnosis, please share this conversation with them.
Onward,
Timothy Wheeler
Co-host, Before the Cure
More on Steve’s story: The ASCO Post · Forbes