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Episode 144
Duration 34:50
Vivek Murthy

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy: Crises and Common Ground

Transcript

Harlan Krumholz: Welcome to Health & Veritas. I’m Harlan Krumholz.

Howard Forman: And I’m Howie Forman. We’re physicians and professors at Yale University. We’re trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. This is a very, very special episode. It’s our nation’s surgeon general—and our alum—joining us today for the second time for this very special episode of Health & Veritas podcast.

Harlan Krumholz: Howie, I’m really excited about this episode. It’s just going to be terrific. One thing I wanted to ask you was, what did you think about last week? I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about it. It’d be good to hear from our listeners whether they really like it when we’re on our own or do they like it better when we have a guest.

Howard Forman: I agree with you. I mean, we get a lot of positive feedback. Of course, we’re getting positive feedback mostly from people that know us.

Harlan Krumholz: And that’s okay. Those of you who know us, you know we like positive feedback, but we want also critical feedback as well.

Howard Forman: And by the way, look, I think you and I do have interest in so many topics, and it’s impossible to cover them when we have a guest. On the other hand, it’s really great to emphasize the content that our guests bring to the podcast, so we’d love to hear feedback on what people prefer and even suggestions for guests, by the way.

Harlan Krumholz: So at the end of every episode we invite that, but I guess this is just putting it at the front.

Howard Forman: I appreciate it.

Harlan Krumholz: And here’s a question in particular when we do it on our own or when we have guests or if there’s any aspect of the podcast you want to comment on, please feel free to do so. Hey, let’s get to our guest today.

Howard Forman: Dr. Vivek Murthy is the 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States, appointed by both the Obama and Biden administrations. In this role, Dr. Murthy has informed the public on myriad health topics from the e-cigarette epidemic among youth to social media and youth mental health to the dangers of loneliness, forging a name for himself as a champion of prevention. Most recently in 2024, Dr. Murthy and the Office of the Surgeon General released an advisory on firearm violence as well as an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents. Dr. Murthy is also the New York Times bestselling author of Together: The Power of Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

Dr. Murthy holds a BA from Harvard College as well as an MD and MBA from the Yale School of Medicine and the Yale School of Management, respectively, where we first met him. He completed his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. So I wanted to start off—first of all, you’ve got less than six months left in your term. You have accomplished more, in my opinion, than any prior surgeon general in a single term. You have issued multiple reports, and you’ve also issued warnings. The most recent report is on parental well-being, and this is something that is deeply personal to you. You’re a parent, and you also are a great listener, and you’ve talked to many parents across the country. What got you started thinking about doing this particular advisory?

Vivek Murthy: Well, thanks, Howie. It’s just so nice to be on again with you and Harlan, and thanks for the chance to talk about some of these issues. When you were reading my bio, by the way, I couldn’t help but reflect that part of that bio is there because of you as one of my mentors and one of my teachers when I was in medical school and business school. And Harlan also has been an important mentor to me during my student days and thereafter. So it just means a lot to me to be able to be on here with both of you. For me, the issue of parents’ mental health and well-being wasn’t one that I actually started off this term thinking I was going to work on, but actually like many of the topics that we ended up taking up this first term, they were born out of conversations with people across the country.

And when I was actually working at the youth mental health crisis, having conversations with young people and their parents, I realized that behind that youth mental health crisis was parents’ mental health crisis as well. And as I dug into it, what I came to see is that, one, parents were actually struggling at pretty alarming levels. I lay out a number of these statistics in the report, but one that has stuck with me is 48%, which is the proportion of parents who say that on most days they feel their stress is completely overwhelming. Forty-eight percent of parents—that’s a lot. It was also striking to me that parents are actually struggling with loneliness at higher rates than the general population. So 65% of parents say that they are struggling with loneliness.

That number goes up to 77% when you look at single parents. And as we’ve talked about in other advisories, loneliness has really powerful effects on our physical health as well as our mental health. So some of this is actually not entirely intuitive to people because when they look at parents, they often think, “Hey, they’re surrounded by family, so they’re probably not lonely.” It turns out that’s actually not the case. They also may think that so many parents around them seem well adjusted and everything is going well. But one thing I realized is that a lot of parents actually aren’t talking to each other about some of the most important stressors in their lives, whether it’s their kids’ mental health or how to manage technology and social media and their children’s lives.

And actually dealing with that stress in isolation compounds it and makes it even more challenging. So putting all of this together, I realized that we needed to address parental mental health for a couple of reasons. One, because parents matter. We have millions and millions of parents across the country who are struggling. But second, because the mental health of parents impacts the mental health of kids. And we all know that parents are doing one of the most important jobs out there, which is to raise the next generation. If they’re not well, and if their well-being impacts children, then it makes sense for us as a society to all care about parents and well-being, whether we’re parents or not.

Harlan Krumholz: I thought there was... You published an eloquent piece in The New York Times about this, and it really did talk about how it’s in society’s great interest to take a view of this. One thing that’s impressed me about your term—you historically had taken positions that had been somewhat polarizing in the sense that there were people on either side of the political spectrum who may have agreed or disagreed with the things that you cared deeply about, but you’ve been able to tack towards issues that are equally important but resonate with both sides of the political spectrum that really actually apply to everyone. And one indication of this to me was when you published that New York Times piece, the letters that were sent in were almost uniform. Uniform in applauding your work in this area, and you rarely find that kind of unanimity in people coming out once you’ve taken a position.

I wonder, how can we capitalize on this kind of approach that you’ve taken, which is to find those areas that matter to everyone and to try to bring people together to find solutions. I mean, I just have so admired your ability, not to say it’s not important to take tough positions that people may disagree on, but in this moment and to our histories, it’s so important to find those areas that we all care deeply about. How have you identified those, and how can we build on what you’re doing in that way?

Vivek Murthy: Well, that’s very kind of you to say, Harlan. I think that what’s really informed my approach this term actually has been to honestly really try to just learn from the conversations I’m having with people and from the experiences I’m having in communities across the country and to do, in fact, what I was taught to do in medical school. I remember very distinctly a training session we had during first year where we were learning how to interview patients, and it was actually right in one of the classrooms that we met in every day. And we had some model patients come in who were playing the part. And I was really nervous at the time, and I was trying to keep in mind all the questions that I was supposed to ask to get a sense of what the diagnosis might be.

And at one point, I didn’t realize this, but I think it was evident to the people around me that I was just talking a lot, asking a lot of questions, but not giving the patient enough time to really answer. I wasn’t digging really deeper and listening to what they were saying, but I was trying to remember my list that was in my head. And Auguste Fortin, who both of you know, one of our professors there, who was very kind, very compassionate, wonderful teacher. He just came up behind me and very gently whispered into my ear, “Vivek, if you listen to the patient long enough, they’ll usually tell you what’s wrong with them.” And it was a very subtle but powerful piece of advice that not only helped me during that interview but honestly has helped me throughout medicine and throughout life.

To just realize that sometimes if I just stop and listen more, I’ll find the path forward. And that has actually been true to me during this term as surgeon general. And I’ve realized that it’s through listening that I learned about the mental health crisis that was broadly affecting the country. Prior to that, I had seen mental health concerns among my patients. I had seen that certainly in my own life, but I hadn’t realized just how deeply and widely felt it was. So that has sort of been the approach that I’ve taken. But I would also say, Harlan, that in addition to that leading me down the path of addressing issues like youth mental health, social media and kids, parental well-being, loneliness, there are also other issues that we have worked on, like gun violence, which might be unfortunately polarized and politicized.

But I think what our challenges with issues like gun violence is to take them out of that realm of polarization, put them back into the world of public health, which is where they belong, and to find the common threads that concern people and to start there. This is actually something I think we did relatively effectively with tobacco decades ago. There was a time when I wasn’t alive when Luther Terry, my predecessor, put out his 1964 seminal report on tobacco. But at that time, as I suspect all three of us have read, the country was not in a place where it was a foregone conclusion that tobacco was bad for your health, right? We had a large portion of the country—42%—who smoked.

You had doctors who were smoking, many doctors were recommending smoking to their patients, and people said, “Hey, this is part of the culture. It’s part of a way of life. What are you trying to do, take that away from people.” But what we were able to do actually, decades later with David Kessler’s leadership and others at the time that tobacco movement, is in the 1990s recast tobacco for really what it was, which was a kids’ issue. There were kids who were getting addicted to tobacco in middle school and high school, and that was leading to a lifetime of addiction and disease. And we frame this as really about protecting our kids. That actually helped bring a lot more people into the fold around this issue.

It’s never simple to do these things, and there are 50,000 other considerations here, but one of the things I’ve learned from this term is that we have to do what Auguste Fortin advised me to do years ago, what both of you do so expertly as clinicians every day, which is to listen to people and understand what their concerns are, to meet them where they are in addressing the issues that are of greatest concern to us. And when we do that, my experience has been that we tend to find that most people actually share those concerns. Most parents are worried, for example, about how to keep their kids safe with regard to social media. Most parents also want to keep their kids safe from gun violence, whether it’s in their schools, neighborhoods, movie theaters, or churches.

And so I think that meeting people where they are, starting from those points of common concern and framing this as what it is, which is often, in these cases, kids’ issues as we’re talking about or family issues. This is I think how we can start to slowly bring people together. It’s not always easy, but I think it’s worth fighting for because these are big issues. And if we don’t address issues like mental health, for example, then I worry that we are just going to see a continued erosion of not just traditional mental health diagnoses, rising depression, anxiety, etc., but our mental health is a foundation in which we build everything else, and if we’re not well in terms of our mental health and well-being, it impacts our physical health, how we show up in school, how we show up in the workplace, how we interact and work together as a community. And I think it often can contribute to some of the division and polarization that we’re seeing today.

Harlan Krumholz: It’s such an important point. I will say that your ability to find those areas where everyone can agree engenders the kind of trust that allows you to enter into spaces where people may have some discomfort, but that you’re able to provide this kind of reframing. Anyway, it’s something I admire very much in the way in which you’ve proceeded. Just as one quick follow-up, though, is as you get to the end of the term, I don’t know what your plans are, even though you want to continue depending on the election and what’s happened—how do we institutionalize the kind of change that provides a support for, for example, parents and communities and addresses these areas of loneliness?

So you are doing an important service by acknowledging the problem because many people feel heard, but we also then need to go further to be able to get our responses embedded in the way in which society is constructed. How are you thinking about that?

Vivek Murthy: I think part of what we have to understand is that there tend to be sometimes two sides that emerge on these issues. One that says, “Well, this is all structural and can only be addressed through policy solutions.” And the other side, which says, “This is all cultural and up to families, and it’s about individual decisions.” And the truth is often some combination of those in terms of what’s needed, right? And that is true here as well. That yes, we do need structural shifts that will allow us to better support parents. And we know that more affordable childcare, paid leave so parents can be with a sick child, we know that these are really important parts of ensuring that parents are supported.

We also know that access to mental healthcare and all healthcare that’s affordable and high-quality, that’s important to families as well. One of the greatest stressors for families is when you have a child who’s sick and can’t get help. And so these are important structural areas, issues where policy is necessary and makes a difference. But there is a cultural piece here as well. And that culture shift that we have to make is in recognizing the value that parenting has to all of us. I was not surprised, but I was struck, I should say, that there was a significant minority, I would say, of the feedback that we got to the parental advisory, which was centered around this question of, “Hey, why does this concern me? If people are making decisions to have kids, then that’s on them and they should deal with all the stress and consequences of it.”

And I can understand why some people may think that that’s the case, but this is one of those issues when it comes to parents where how they do affects all of us in the long term and the future society. So shifting culture means shifting fundamentally how we look at parents and our responsibility towards other parents, involve shifting how we step up and support parents in our own lives, right? Whether that’s stepping in to help them with some parts of child care or basic tasks or even just checking on parents in our lives to make sure they’re okay because recognizing how isolating parenting can be.

But finally, Harlan, I do think that one of the most important things we can do to ensure that there’s momentum and lasting change, if you will, on the horizon, is to ensure that when we issue these call to actions, that we’re also bringing community organizations together to invest and to commit to addressing them. And that’s what we seek to do, in fact, when we launch our advisories. It’s why we have an engagement team, which is a really important part of our operation. In this case, you think about everything from parent-teacher associations, other parenting groups, church, synagogue, mosques, and other faith-based organizations that can be a powerful part of the coalition that comes together to help support parents.

There are natural partners here who care about the well-being of parents, and when we can activate and bring them together, then we can help build the kind of coalition that my hope is can help drive not just the cultural change but also the policy change that we need down the line.

Howard Forman: I wanted to pivot to what you do every May and June, frequently, and that is give commencement speeches, and specifically you came to Yale for Class Day, which for those listeners that haven’t gone to Yale, Class Day is effectively when the big keynote address for commencement is given. And you gave it this year. And it was striking on several levels. First of all, every one of our listeners should listen to it. We will link it in the show notes. It’s about 22 minutes long. I listened to it again today. But there were several things striking about it. One you already talked about, and that is how important it is to listen.

But the other is, you tell personal vignettes, very deeply personal vignettes like you told about Dr. Fortin today that really strike at you. That could be critical of you, but you’re willing to tell them to make these things personal. I’m wondering, when you do that, are you critical of yourself at those moments or do you reflect on those things as being universal feelings and that other people should recognize the universality of experiencing pain and having your child reach out to you and show you their love at that moment? Or the universality of feeling shame at times, which you describe aptly about a family episode that you had never told me about before, and yet you told it in front of thousands of people on Class Day.

Can you talk more about the difficulty even of bringing your own personal life in order to share important ideas and motivations?

Vivek Murthy: Well, thanks, Howie. I so appreciate that. And being able to give commencement at Yale, where my wife had gone to school, and just to be there to soak up so many of the memories that I have, fond memories from my time at Yale. That was an incredibly meaningful moment to me. So I’m very grateful to the school for giving me that opportunity. For me, Howie, I spent much of my life feeling embarrassed and ashamed of my imperfections, hiding them, trying to walk around with a mask on to show that I was okay and that I was not as imperfect as I really was. And I realized a couple of things after that. One is, it’s exhausting to live like that.

And this is one of the reasons, actually, I worry so much about young people in particular today who are immersed in a social media environment where it’s like masks on 24/7. But the other thing I just realized is that we are all imperfect. We all have these jagged edges. We all have these embarrassing moments in our life where we did or said something that we really wish we hadn’t. But I also realize that we’re more than our worst moments. And if we can appreciate that in other people, then maybe people will be able to accept that about us too. And so I share the stories I share sometimes because number one, they’ve been the stories of my own shortcomings and imperfections and struggles have been really important sources of learning for me.

And I want to share those because I want to also share the lessons that came from that with others. But I also share that because I know that when we can have honest moments with each other, then that puts us at ease.

Harlan Krumholz: It’s just extraordinary the way that you’re able to be vulnerable and still, at the same time, project strength and leadership. Here’s somebody who was valedictorian in their high school class, went to Harvard, went to Yale, has achieved great heights, and yet is still willing to talk about very personal, intimate issues around their own degree of confidence and who they are. I’m sure it helps so many people. I know it helps me to hear you talk like that. It’s amazing.

Vivek Murthy: Harlan, can I just actually add one thing too? So you said one of the privileges of working in this job and doing the work we’ve done is I’ve had the opportunity to meet people who are leaders in many different spaces, cultural leaders, political leaders, scientific leaders all around the world. And people who we sometimes will look at from the outside and say, “Wow, what a blessed and perfect life they seem to lead.” And in getting to know many of these people, I’ve just realized that many of them are plagued by the same demons the rest of us are plagued with.

They have moments of insecurity or jealousy, or they have these moments where they regret what they said or how they treated somebody, or they feel embarrassed about making the wrong decision in a certain place, but they also just feel uncertain about what the future brings. Everything is not set out in stone for them and guaranteed, and most of all, they, like everyone else, craves love and a sense of acceptance and belonging. And so I’ve just realized that even though our trappings look so different, and it can be easy to idolize people from the outside or think they have the perfect life, at some level, we’re all actually struggling.

I just think the more that we’re able to be open about these, the more people can just see this for what it is, which is, these are universal struggles that we go through, and if we can talk about them more openly, then maybe we can actually help each other and learn from our experiences and build a path forward that feels more fulfilling.

Harlan Krumholz: Great comments. I know we’re getting to the end. I want to just hit on one other thing that you’ve talked about time and time again, which is this issue about social media. You’ve also talked about misinformation, which is related and overlapping, not completely the same thing, but it’s promulgated in large part by the social media enterprise. What is your advice to parents and to our society as we start to have more and more of this? And we’re not even talking about artificial intelligence. I have a feeling your next advisor is going to be on AI, but how about social media and misinformation? What do you tell parents?

Vivek Murthy: Here are a few concrete things that I would suggest, and these are things, by the way, that my wife and I are planning to do for our kids as they grow up. And number one is if your child has not started using social media yet, I would wait until at least after middle school. Middle school is a time where brain development is at a very sensitive stage for kids where they’re more prone to social suggestion and comparison, where impulse control has not been well developed yet, and we want to protect our kids during that time. Second, I would say if your child’s already on social media, I would create tech-free zones in their life to help protect sleep, in-person interaction as well as learning and physical activity.

These are four areas that are really critical to a child’s development, but right now, many kids are staying up well past midnight on school nights on their devices, using social media. Many of them are waking up in the middle of the night to use their devices. So what could this look like? It could look like saying, “Okay, before bedtime, we’re all going to turn in our phones and charge them.” And you give them to back to your kids in the morning. It could look like saying, “Mealtimes are a time where we’re all going to put our tech away and we’re going to focus on each other, on talking to one another.”

And then the third thing I would suggest for parents is to lead by example here. The thing about social media and kids is that many of the struggles kids are having, parents are having too and adults more broadly are having. Many of us feel addicted to our phones and to social media in particular. And so being able to lead by example is critical. But finally, just keep this in mind: all of these changes are harder to do on your own than they are when you’re part of a group. And I’m actually now seeing more and more parents come together to form packs, to wait until they start their kids on social media or to set these kinds of boundaries. It’s a lot easier to do that when you can also tell your kid, “You’re not the only one in class who’s not going to have social media in seventh grade, but these other kids are also going to be waiting too.” That makes it a lot, lot easier.

Harlan Krumholz: You mean parent groups are coming together spontaneously in doing this?

Vivek Murthy: Many more are. One, we’re seeing existing groups bring the tech management of technology into their existing discussions, parent associations and schools, one example of that. But we’re also seeing new movements build as well. We’re seeing the Wait Until 8th movement, which is about waiting until eighth grade to allow your child to have a device. We’re seeing these young people in fact start their own movements. There’s the Log Off movement that is being run by Emma Lembke and other college students, which is seeking to fundamentally transform kids’ relationship with technology. So there are new movements, there are old movements that are bringing this into the conversation.

We need all of that because ultimately it’s a movement of parents that I think is going to be one of the most powerful forces we have, to not only drive the cultural changes and changes in practice but also to drive a lot of the policy changes that we need. Just like moms did when it came to drunk driving and trying to reduce motor vehicle fatalities.

Howard Forman: As we wrap up, I want to just reflect. Harlan mentioned that you have this great platform. You’ve used it well, and you’ve given us examples of how you’ve communicated in a bidirectional way with communities both about what the problems are as well as how to solve them, potentially. But this also involves elected leaders, both in the executive and in the legislative branches and probably also locally. I’m wondering what you consider the greatest successes on that side in terms of working with both parties or even one party on specific ideas and being able to advance them to help their offices understand these issues?

Vivek Murthy: I feel very fortunate that we’ve been able to do some great bipartisan work with members of both parties, both at a federal level but also at a state and local level. And a lot of the bipartisan conversations I’ve had have been actually around youth mental health and about social media. Since we put out our call for a label, we’ve seen now bills sponsored by members of both parties to actually advance the idea of a warning label on social media. We’ve seen more action to move forward bipartisan legislation on safety standards and safety measures for social media. And we’ve seen support for pushing for more investment in youth mental health.

I see all of these as not just bright spots, but I see them as examples of what can happen when we put forward ideas for how to advance causes that people care about and then work hard to have conversations on both sides of the aisle that actually bring real solutions to the table. Now, there’s a lot more work to do on all of these fronts, but I sometimes think about the conversations I’ve had with legislators. And I just think that in many of these cases, you wouldn’t know walking out of that room whether you spoke to a Republican or a Democrat, because what we’ve been able to really connect on so deeply is a shared concern we have for our kids, for protecting our kids, for doing right by them.

And again, so much of this in my mind comes back to what I was blessed to learn in medical school and from patients during clinical practice, which is to recognize that people may have different points of view on approaches to illness or what challenges we should prioritize. But I remember in medicine learning that you should always work hard to bring people together on a care team around the interests of the patient, regardless of what their differences of opinion may be. And in this case, I think bringing legislators together around the common interests of kids in particular has been an area where I’m really proud to see that we’ve made progress, and certainly, clear to me that there’s a lot more to do, but I want us to be taking this sort of human-centered approach to policy and to dialogue.

I’ll lastly say that one of the things that worries me the most is that our fundamental ability to dialogue with each other, to talk to each other, has fractured, has been broken. And if we can’t talk to each other, it’s really hard to figure out how you solve any problems in society. But so much of our conversation has been driven in part by algorithms that exacerbate outrage and amplify outrage. And when I talk to people sometimes who are either in the entertainment business or the media business, they lament the fact that so much of what has to drive them now is what’s going to get clicks and attention. And we know that from a human behavior perspective, the best way to get somebody’s attention is to spark outrage or fear.

And so you have what has developed in our country and around the world, which is an outrage industrial complex, which profits off of amplifying outrage. And while that may be good for clicks and ultimately for dollars down the line, it is terrible for the health and well-being of society, for their ability to dialogue and hence for our ability to come together and solve tough problems. And so what I find myself thinking about is, how can we rebuild the kind of conversations and dialogue that we need? How can we do that in a human-centered way in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our communities? Because that ultimately is a foundation of relationships and community. And community and relationships are the foundation for being able to come together and solve tough problems. It’s the formula for resilience.

Harlan Krumholz: Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us and for your inspiration, words of wisdom, and for your service to our country. Thank you.

Howard Forman: Your friendship.

Harlan Krumholz: And your friendship. You have done a great service to the nation, and we are so fortunate to know that even after that, you’ll continue serving the nation in many different capacities. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Howard Forman: Thank you.

Vivek Murthy: Well, I so appreciate your friendship, your mentorship over the years—both of you. And I’ll just say that I feel so lucky to have had this opportunity to serve in this role twice. And I am one of those people who never, ever, ever thought that I was going to work in government. Howie knows from our conversations when he would often sit down with me and help me try to figure out my life when I was a student and a resident and the years after. Working in government was never on that list. But I feel, given that in particular, especially lucky to have had this opportunity. There’ve been times where I’ve gone on trips with other government officials and flown with the First Lady, for example, or others in their plane.

And when getting on the plane, have just paused to look at the side of the plane, which is emblazoned with the words “United States of America.” And I always, without fail, just feel this sense of pride and gratitude getting onto that plane and knowing that I’ve been blessed with this opportunity to work for our country to, in some cases, represent our country, to serve our nation. And it is just hard to fully describe just how gratifying that has been. I often have talked about how service is one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness, and it’s also an incredibly powerful source of meaning and purpose in our lives.

And to have been able to serve in this way over these last few years to make whatever small contribution I hope to have made, it feels like an incredible privilege, but especially given my parents’ immigrant journey and that, coming to the United States nearly 45 years ago, as they did with this glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, their kids would have the opportunity to learn to contribute to this new home that they were now adopting. And I just feel very, very grateful to our country, to the United States of America that I’ve had the opportunity to serve in this way.

Harlan Krumholz: If anyone gets a chance to see the picture of you and your family on the day that you were surgeon general, you can just feel what you’re talking about. It’s just an extraordinary picture. We should provide a link to that, Howie, to anyone wants to see that? So inspiring.

Vivek Murthy: Thank you both.

Harlan Krumholz: Thank you.

Howard Forman: Thank you.

Harlan Krumholz: Well, that was a terrific podcast, Howie, and it’s always nice to have the surgeon general join us and for you to pull your connections to bring us really great people.

Howard Forman: You’re as connected to him as I am. His loyalty to Yale, as I mentioned when I talked about Class Day, is just enormous. He truly loves Yale, and Yale truly loves him.

Harlan Krumholz: And I know he loves you.

Howard Forman: And you.

Harlan Krumholz: The thing about it is, he’s really using his bully pulpit to promote issues that other people tend to steer away from. And he’s not afraid. And I just thought it was a terrific podcast, and it was so great to hear him talk about that.

Howard Forman: I couldn’t agree more.

Harlan Krumholz: So Howie, it’s always great to have a special guest. We should do this from time to time like this and devote the whole episode to it like we did this time.

Howard Forman: Absolutely right. I hope our listeners like it, and if they don’t, they should tell us.

Harlan Krumholz: You’ve been listening to Health & Veritas with Harlan Krumholz and Howie Forman.

Howard Forman: So how did we do? To give your feedback to keep the conversation going, email us at health.veritas@yale.edu or follow us on any social media.

Harlan Krumholz: And like Howie said, we’re interested in feedback, questions, or experiences on these topics. Topics you heard today are big issues for many people. We’re glad to hear from you. If you feel strongly about the podcast, rate us and review us. That helps other people find us.

Howard Forman: Yes, it does. If you have questions about the MBA for Executives program at the Yale School of Management, reach out via email for more information or check out our website at som.yale.edu/emba.

Harlan Krumholz: Health & Veritas is produced with the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of Public Health. Thanks to our researchers, Ines Gilles and Sophia Stumpf, and to our producer, Miranda Shafer. Amazing people doing amazing work for us every week.

Howard Forman: We are very fortunate to have them. And in the case of Ines and Sophia, they’re graduating this year, and they will be big shoes to fill.

Harlan Krumholz: They will. Talk to you soon, Howie.

Howard Forman: Thanks, Harlan. Talk to you soon.