“I read your book last night.” The author replies: “So you’re the one.” This is not what FDA Commissioner and book author Marty Makary said at one of his many public appearances (here, here, here) recently. It is dialogue from Good Will Hunting, which is that great story created by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck about a hard-luck math prodigy. This is what came to mind when I was listening to a talk by Dr. Peter Lee, head of research at Microsoft, this week. His wisdom and work make me want to reassess my contributions to society. Or, I could just binge-watch the new Netflix series The Beast in Me over the Thanksgiving holiday. More deep, soul-searching thoughts in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
This news is unlikely to impact your soul, but it may make you want to talk to the side of your family that has no idea any of this is happening over the Thanksgiving break:
- After President Trump publicly backed the idea of blocking states from overregulating AI, several news outlets reported that he plans to issue an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to challenge state AI laws through a new litigation task force. House Republicans are reportedly trying to revive a federal moratorium on state AI regulation through a defense spending bill. More here, here.
- HHS announced a new $2 million AI prize competition focused on supporting family caregivers and direct care workers. The competition will run through the agency’s Administration for Community Living and includes three phases (design, implementation, and scaling). More here.
- On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing to examine AI chatbot risks, particularly for mental health and data privacy. Discussion focused on the growing use of AI chatbots for mental health support, potential safeguards like crisis referral protocols, and technology companies’ data retention practices.
“My boy’s wicked smart.” This line from Good Will Hunting is another reason why I was thinking of that movie as I listened to Dr. Peter Lee talk at Microsoft’s headquarters this week. He was the keynote at the Digital Health Counsel 2025 AI Summit that they co-hosted with the law firm Ogden Murphy Wallace. Dr. Lee exudes scientific genius with a weird amount of humility. He was talking about how his research team’s paper on BioEmu-1, a deep learning system that “rapidly generates diverse protein conformations” (translation: an AI model that can accelerate drug development and help us understand how proteins work, etc.) was featured on the cover of Science Magazine. I am sure the room full of lawyers and policy people listened attentively but silently thought to themselves “yeah, sounds really important, but I’ll never read that.” Which was kind of Dr. Lee’s point. After reminding the room that last year’s Nobel prizes were awarded to similar AI-related breakthroughs, Dr. Lee gently suggested to the lawyer-policy audience that the world’s policymakers are going to need politically-palatable messaging about these futuristic, AI-related scientific discoveries. With apologies to Dr. Lee, who would never put it this way, my translation of what he was saying is: “people are just plain scared of what they can’t understand, and humanity needs these advances to solve our biggest problems, so you lawyer-policy people had better come up with the plain English that makes it ok with everyone so these revolutionary scientific advances aren’t stopped in their tracks.” In Good Will Hunting, the boy-genius from Southie gets some advice from his therapist about being brave that we could all use right now: “You’ll never have [a good, healthy] relationship in a world where you’re afraid to take the first step because all you see is every negative thing 10 miles down the road…”
