Most of the people shaping the conversation around healthcare and AI are old enough to be Alex Iltchev’s parents. He wants to change that. On the Rising Talent Podcast with Dennis Yu, the young Cleveland economist and biochemist makes the case that the intersection of healthcare and AI is about to become the most valuable market on Earth, and that his generation is the one that should be building in it.
Alex studied both nutritional biochemistry and economics, works at a healthcare company, and reads economics papers for fun. That combination is rare, and it is exactly what makes his read on healthcare and AI worth hearing. You can find him at Alex Iltchev and follow his work on LinkedIn.
In This Article
Who Is Alex Iltchev?
Alex grew up in a family full of doctors, and medicine was the plan from the start. Somewhere along the way the pull shifted from practicing medicine to the business and economics around it. He studied nutritional biochemistry and economics in college, a pairing his own school was one of the few outside the Ivy League to offer, and he now works at a healthcare company in Cleveland while looking for the right thing to build.
“Even as a child, I wanted to become a doctor. And then I got more interested in the intersection between business and health.”
Alex Iltchev
What sets him apart is that he treats economics as a hobby, not a chore. Growing up around medicine gave him the clinical instinct, and economics gave him the framework to see where the whole system is heading.
“I’m an economics nerd. I read papers for fun. That’s what I do for fun.”
Alex Iltchev
The Economy Now Runs on Healthcare and AI
Alex’s core economic argument is blunt: pharmacy and medical costs are climbing exponentially, chronic disease is rising, and healthcare spend is getting out of control, while most other industries shrink. In his read, two engines are actually pulling the United States economy forward right now, and both of them are healthcare and AI.
“We are literally running on healthcare and AI at the moment.”
Alex Iltchev
The intersection of healthcare and AI is framed in the conversation as a $38 trillion industry — the number in the episode title.
Aging as a Disease We Can Reverse
Alex believes the near future bends toward abundance. He points to a window within roughly ten years where aging is treated as a disease that can be reversed rather than an inevitable decline. What excites him most is not immortality for the wealthy, but access for everyone else.
“The ability for lower, middle income individuals to access these technologies without paying an arm and a leg for them, and hopefully live longer. And catch chronic diseases at a point when they’re treatable.”
Alex Iltchev
Cheaper, Safer Medical Technology
Diagnostics are the clearest example of healthcare and AI lowering the cost of care. Alex notes that an MRI machine can cost forty to fifty thousand dollars to run, which prices out huge numbers of patients. Newer AI-driven scanners, he says, can drop that cost and remove the radiation and magnets of conventional machines, which is why some radiologists are pushing back out of denial rather than evidence.
$40,000–$50,000 to run an MRI machine — the kind of cost healthcare and AI is poised to collapse.
Almond Farms vs Data Centers
Ask Alex about the environmental panic over data centers and he reaches for a comparison most critics have never run. The water argument, he says, collapses the moment you look at agriculture, and the real fight belongs at the utility level, not with the AI companies.
“California’s almond farms consume 100 times more water than the data centers. One acre of farmland consumes as much as 10 to 20 data centers.”
Alex Iltchev
His point is not that concerns are illegitimate, but that they are aimed at the wrong target. The honest conversation, in his view, is about upgrading weak United States energy infrastructure so it can carry the load.
Whoever Holds the Compute Wins
Much of the conversation turns to a first-principles idea: as frontier models converge, the durable advantage is not the model but the compute behind it. Alex and Dennis walk through data centers in space, where abundant solar and the absence of Earth’s corrosive elements can lower cost, and the race between xAI, Google’s TPUs, and Chinese open-weight models that trail by only months. Whoever supplies the inference, they argue, owns the game.
One terawatt of compute per year — the scale of buildout discussed as the prize in the healthcare and AI era.
Read the Right Science Fiction
To reason about a post-scarcity world, Dennis hands Alex a reading list: Iain Banks’s Culture series, starting with Player of Games, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The premise is that good science fiction is really early entrepreneurship, describing situations before they arrive. In a world where machines produce everything and income is universal, reputation becomes the ultimate currency.
Alex has already reasoned his way to a provocative economic conclusion about where that leads.
“When we reach large-scale labor market destruction through automation, we’ll shift away from capitalistic markets toward socialistic ones, because everybody’s wealth will be equal. There’s an infinite abundance of materials, since robots do all the work for you.”
Alex Iltchev
Why His Generation Will Gain the Edge
The takeaway Alex keeps returning to is that this shift rewards the young people who understand it early. He is betting his own career on the intersection of healthcare and AI, and he thinks anyone willing to do the same has a rare window open in front of them.
“My generation who understands that will gain the edge. If you can start a business that intersects healthcare and AI, and you work hard, you will be set.”
Alex Iltchev
He calls this the most interesting year of his life, and he is not waiting for permission to build in it. See how Dennis Yu’s team helped build Alex Iltchev’s personal brand, hear more young founders on the Rising Talent Podcast, and learn the same content-and-systems approach at the BlitzMetrics Academy.