The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel

Dr. Zeke Emanuel is one of the country’s foremost healthcare experts. An oncologist and the former chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, he was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act and now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Emanuel’s new book, “Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life,” offers practical advice on eating and living well at a time when Americans are bombarded with dubious “wellness” content everywhere they look. Kara and Zeke talk about how nutrition advice has gotten overly complicated; why it’s OK to indulge in the occasional serving of ice cream or glass of wine; and why he mostly dismisses wearable technology as a means of measuring a healthy lifestyle. Emanuel also shares his thoughts on the Trump administration’s latest updates to the food pyramid, and his fears over the distrust the government is sowing around vaccines. Special thanks to Politics and Prose Bookstore for hosting this live conversation. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  This is my favorite Emanuel, just so you know, I know all the fucking Emanuel's and they're

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I tell my brothers that all the time.

• 0:07Kara Swisher?

  Yes, exactly.

• 0:19Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. On today's show, I'm speaking with Dr. Zeke Emanuel. He was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act. He now teaches healthcare management, medical ethics, and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also an oncologist. Emanuel has a new book out this month. It's called Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life. He offers some practical advice on eating and living well at a time when all of us are bombarded with dubious wellness content everywhere we look. The Trump administration isn't helping matters right now either. Spoiler alert: Emanuel doesn't think eating more beef tallow is the solution to a healthier

• 1:01Kara Swisher?

  life, and he is 100% right. Do not get your nutrition advice from RFK Jr. All right, let's get into my conversation with Dr. Zeke Emanuel. This interview was recorded in front of a live audience at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC. Don't go anywhere.

• 1:28Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire. They fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 2:11Speaker 02

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• 3:03Kara Swisher?

  Zeke, it's great to be with you here at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC to talk about your new book, Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Happy Life.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yes, so that is my rules. Yes, I agree.

• 3:17Kara Swisher?

  All right.

• 3:20Kara Swisher?

  So, let's get started. One of the main theses of your book is that life is not a competition to live the longest, although that is the obsession with much of the tech industry, which is news to these Silicon Valley CEOs. A lot of them are obsessed with achieving immortality, whether through lots of different means, including downloading their brains to various things. Clearly, a lot of people want to live the longest. So, in a world full of wellness advice, what is your point? Why should people listen to you?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, it's common sense. But here's the problem with all of that stuff. There are multiple problems. One is, it makes wellness and living a long time an obsession. And it's the wrong obsession. It, you know, just living a long time isn't a fulfilling life. The question is, why do you want to live a long time? What's in it for you? And about, I don't know, six months ago, I was at a dinner, and yes, one of those brothers sat me next to Brian Johnson, who some of you will know is a guy who wants to live to 150. Um, and I said, "Why do you want to live to 150?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  What's the point of your living to 150?" Silence. And then he turned to someone and says, "You know, I'm the most monitored human ever." Well, that's not an answer to the question of why, right? The whole point of living a long and healthy life is because we have other things to do. We have a why to our lives. And living a long time is not about ful- it's not a fulfilling part. And so, it struck me that they were replacing, right? The means to a good life, uh, and making that the end. And that's always a mistake, as my ethics professors all the- you know, you don't need a lot of fancy logic to know that's the wrong thing to do.

• 5:21Kara Swisher?

  Right, I mean, what do you think the motivation? Because they think they're the finest people in the land, I believe.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  They can't imagine the world without themselves in it. And I, I, yeah, look, I got the lowest passing score in psychiatry rotation at Harvard Med School my year. Okay, so don't listen to me when it comes to psychiatry.

• 5:37Kara Swisher?

  You did say Harvard Med School, but go ahead.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Didn't come to psychiatry, right? I, I, but here's my, this is a hypothesis, unproven. Um, there's something deeply unfulfilling to them. You know, maybe it's they have imposter syndrome. They got rich because they just happened to be lucky. They were at the right place at the right time, whatever it is, right? And living, they're trying to find fulfillment and living a long time is the substitute for finding why they're doing what they're doing and what it is. And, you know, I think that there are many of them who are doing great things. Um, but I think if you want to live a long time, right?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And there's a title of a book, I'm sure it's here, that's, you know, um, something like- Uh, you have to know why you'll die to live a long time.

• 6:30Kara Swisher?

  Which was Steve Jobs's idea.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  By one of, um, you know, one of the civil rights people. And it seems to me that's the right answer. That's really important. You know, what are you willing to die for? That is so important to your life that you're willing to die for it. That'll give your life meaning. And I have a feeling there's nothing that these guys would die for. Um, and anyway, that's a hypothesis. I have no idea. And as I say, I'm just a terrible at psychology and psychology.

• 6:56Kara Swisher?

  But it has sort of infected the society at large. It's idea of wellness. It's been driven by these platforms. There's influencers everywhere. Talk a little bit about that because there's, there's so much nonsense, like in Gobbledygook and

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:10Kara Swisher?

  Just codswallop.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  So if you, you know, we're all inundated, whether we read the paper, get newsletters, whatever. And it turns out that even if you're on, uh, any of these platforms, right? You get this stuff whether you want it or not. It's something like 90% of people have gotten wellness or longevity stuff, even when they don't actually look for it. Um, but you know, one of the things that struck me, uh, in doing this is, uh, there's both too much and too little. It's simplistic. Now the too much, you, you know, and almost all these books, pick them up and they make things so complicated. Um, you have to do this routine in this way, or this is the number of minutes,

• 7:56Speaker 01

  or you know, exactly this number of, uh, grams of protein you have to eat. I, you know, I had a little tweeting, uh, uh, battle with the HHS yesterday and they listed, I, I, I objected to one of their recommendations of, uh, and they listed in, uh, uh, in ground beef, all the micronutrients that you get from ground beef. The selenium, the magnesium, you know, it's like, yeah, you don't have to really worry about that. If you eat a healthy diet, you don't have to count, uh, on each one of those things. So it's way too complicated. Um, since we've talked about Peter Attia, I can say, you know, page 269, I believe of his book, um, grilled into my head.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Uh, he has himself squatting and talking about the bad form of his squat. Now, do you think if he got the right form? It will make heller beans worth a difference to the longevity, the wellness, or the meaning of his life, I can assure you, no.

• 8:58Kara Swisher?

  Right, no squatting.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Well, no squatting's good, but you know, if you got the form a little long, it's not really gonna make a difference to get it exactly right, unless you happen to be going for the Olympics of squats.

• 9:10Kara Swisher?

  Right, and then, my friend, that one of the issues-

• 9:14Speaker 01

  The other thing is, it's a little too simplistic. So if you pick up these books, they're either mainly about exercise with a little sleep and nutrition, mainly about nutrition with a little exercise and sleep, but that's it, it's sleep, nutrition, and, uh, exercise. And that's just way too simplistic. And one of the important things of my book, I think, is, you know, saying, "Look, it's what we're doing here, it's social relationships, interacting with other people, that is the single most important thing you can do for wellness, longevity, and happiness. And all the rest of this stuff is secondary." And they totally, I mean, the wellness industrial complex totally under flames.

• 9:58Kara Swisher?

  Flips the script, one of the things, since I've been doing this reporting for so long, it is actually, everyone's like, "What is the secret then?" I go, "I have to tell you, there's, you know, eating is good, not eating badly, sleeping well, exercise, fine, like..." And I said, "But not living near a cancer clinic, you know, like an Elon Musk data center." Um, which, look that up. But, one of the things, I said, "The two things, if I have to say, after all this year of reporting, is don't be poor, uh, because the longevity numbers are coming down rather significantly for people below a certain, uh, in poverty, and have friends and family, all the scientific statistical stuff is all around."

• 10:41Kara Swisher?

  Um, and you always want, you want causation, not just correlation. There really are study after study showing that. So let's get to the book, because it's organized around- Six rules, essentially. The first is, don't be a schmuck, which you divide to avoid self-destructive risks. You list smoking, alcohol, tanning, avoiding vaccines, avoiding cancer screenings, and owning a gun as the six top schmuck moves. Interestingly, I don't which one to go first. Interestingly enough, you include weed under smoking. The country's been moving towards marijuana legalization for many years now. Explain the various schmuck schmuckatudes. What stack rank stack rank them.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Well, smoking, we don't have to explain. And yes, vaping may be better, but it is no, as someone says, no free lunch. There's lots of issues with getting addicted to nicotine and whether you actually then go on to smoke cigarettes. It does help some people quit, but there are plenty of other issues with it. You know, it from my standpoint, there are a lot of things we should avoid. The gun one is interesting. It was based upon following 18 million people in California and looking, you know, wanting a gun if there's some violence in your neighborhood, very, very understandable, I think. But it turns

• 12:06Speaker 01

  out, having a gun in your house dramatically increases your risk of dying by gun violence. And it also dramatically increases the risk of any child dying by gun violence because about half of the guns are stored loaded and stored accessible in the, you know, night table drawer, in the dresser drawer, where kids can get a hold of them. And then it just turns out that you're much more prone to violence, right? You don't get killed by the stranger coming into the neighborhood a lot, but a relative or a friend, that's actually a lot.

• 12:43Kara Swisher?

  So that's sort of the checkoff's gun.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so if you take neighbors, one who owns a gun and one who doesn't, the one who owns the gun, twice as likely to die.

• 12:52Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  But my real, the sort of discovery here, I was thinking, as I was writing this chapter, what the schmuckiest thing out there? And I thought, gotta be base jumping. You know, where you put the Michelin squirrel suit on, you jump off a mountain, there's wind, and you don't control anything, there's no parachute, no nothing, right? That's gotta be really the stupidest thing you can do. Turns out, not true.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  That chance of dying from, you know, a squirrel jumping is one in 2,700. Getting injured is about one in 250, but dying is one in 2,700. Turns out, spending $100,000 to be a tourist and climb Mount Everest is schmuckier than face jumping, right? It turns out that the risks for all comers, including expert climbers, Sherpas and all the rest, one in 100 chance of dying, right? And by the way, your body doesn't come down. It's frozen up there and no one is gonna spend any oxygen bringing you down. Um, also turns out if you're over 59, I just scanning the audience here.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Our chance is one in 25. Now, what could be stupider than to make a lot of money, be 65 and say, "I'm gonna celebrate, go up Mount Everest." Well.

• 14:14Kara Swisher?

  You know, it's so funny you say that, cuz there's so many tech CEOs who always tell me their Everest stories. And at, by, by the 50th one, I was like, "Tch." And they were trying to relate Everest to life. I said, "There's nothing relatable about going up a mountain you shouldn't be up and telling me what it means to run a company." I said, "So if you mention it one more time, I'm gonna hit you." So it's like, it's, it's, I think you're stupid if you tell me the story.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Right. I've been up Mount Kilimanjaro.

• 14:39Kara Swisher?

  Most people are not, well, good for you. Um, so.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  It was dead boring, I would not recommend it.

• 14:43Kara Swisher?

  Okay. Um, so what, of the, most people aren't going to Everest. So of these tanning, you know, Dr. Oz today said everybody should have a drink or two. Um, uh, well.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, alcohol. So alcohol is one of these complex issues because not too long ago, we were all told, "Red wine, it's the French paradox, you drink red wine, you'll live forever." Um, flaws, uh, increasingly, the data are pretty clear. Um, from a physical standpoint, what it does for the body, uh, it's bad. You know, there are seven cancers associated with it, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, um, not a good thing. It's also associated, obviously, with liver problems and, uh, cirrhosis. Um, it's also disrupts your sleep cycle, so if you drink wine at dinner, you might go to sleep, you might be sleepy, go to sleep, but then it disrupts the cycle, so you don't get full night's sleep, you don't get deep breaths.

• 15:39Kara Swisher?

  So why did the government today recommend more drinking?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know. Um, but, uh, so you're increasingly you've got, uh, like the WHO, you've got, uh, various officials saying zero is the safest. But look, there's, you know, birds like fermented food with, uh, fermented fruit with alcohol, monkeys like fermented, uh, uh, fruit with alcohol. People have been drinking forever. It does a lot of things. You know, people get relaxed. They talk to other people. They like the taste. Um, plus, we know that 65 to 70% of the American population, I won't survey this group, drink. You're not taking 65% of the population who are drinking alcohol and going to zero.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Just not happening. And actually, when the Surgeon General report came up under Vivek Murthy, I, I wrote him and I said, you know, I think it's a little too extreme. I don't think people, people are gonna tune that report out when you say zero. Um, so be responsible. What's responsible? Okay? Do, here are the no's. No binge drinking, right? No drinking alone, and no drinking to drown out your sorrows. Here's the positives. Use it to facilitate social interaction with other people. Drinking over dinner. Or, you know, I was in Chicago. I went out with my brother, uh, and my wife to a jazz club, and Ram was regaling us with

• 17:04Speaker 01

  stories about this is where El Capone was. And by the way, the, you know, passageways where he got away from the cops when they raided the joint. There are four, and they go to different theaters and blah, blah, blah. You know, that's, first of all, it's interesting. And second of all, you know, facilitated by alcohol, and then we had great jazz.

• 17:22Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Right. That's the reason to do it. And I think, under those circumstances, you've got the positives of social interaction and, you know, being with other people. And, you know, that's a trade-off. But let's face it. You know, we all know, life is a trade-off. Right? You do some things which are-

• 17:41Kara Swisher?

  And you pay a price. Right.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:43Kara Swisher?

  All right, speaking of which-

• 17:43Speaker 01

  And there's a cost to some of that.

• 17:44Kara Swisher?

  Obviously, the most controversial, and you work for NIH, vaccines.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  I don't think that's controversial. Well, I don't either. I mean, there are some people in this town who don't like the data. But I have a table in the, in the book where I talk about the mortality of vaccine preventable diseases. And when you look at the mortality of all these diseases, you know, they're undetectable. We, we don't even, there's no mortality for many of them. You know, and one of the problems, I think, is that we have gotten to a situation where the vaccines have made so much of childhood safe that people now have become, why give my kid vaccine? It's so safe out there. Yeah, the reason it's safe is because there are vaccines, right?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Parents and our grandparents, right? In the 50s were nervous every summer because their kids might get polio, they might, you know, end up paralyzed, they might end up in an iron lung. You know, when I was, I was at, at the Dana Farber in Boston and they exiled me to this outbuilding across the parking lot, little brick building. You know, I was doing something they didn't think was all that important, like bioethics. Anyway, they put me there and I was on the second floor. And then one day I walked downstairs and I walked into the basement. All these iron lungs lined up, there's a storage of iron lungs. This was like 1995.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And it was like, these were all the iron lungs for the polio patients from Boston Children's Hospital, which was the other way across the parking lot. And once you see them, you realize, you know, it was really bad. And once that vaccine, the Salk vaccine and then the Sabin vaccine became available, parents were lining up their kids, they couldn't get their kids vaccinated fast enough. Right. So where are we now then? Uh, well, I'm most, the vaccine situation is most concerning about little kids because, you know, we're getting rid of the hepatitis B vaccine right around, you know. There are going to be some kids who get liver failure, get hepatitis B, have liver failure and are going to die from it. Unquestionably the case.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Last year, 288 kids died because of flu. We're going to have probably more this year because of flu. Obviously measles. Rotavirus, diarrhea, you know, same thing. This is a, it's a terrible thing. Vaccines have made our lives so much better. And the data are uncontroversial that they're safe. Does every medical procedure has some risks, right? Just taking blood has some risk. You might get infected, you might. There are, there are some risks to vaccines. We have a compensation system for that. And by the way, you want to know how frequently that compensation is system is used? For every million people who get a vaccine, one gets a clean.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Now, I don't know anything in life where the chances of, you know, getting harmed are less than one in a million. It's pretty obvious that this is a very good thing for all of us. Agreed, agreed.

• 20:56Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news and subscription based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together

• 21:38Kara Swisher?

  to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube starting May 13.

• 22:06Speaker 02

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• 22:37Kara Swisher?

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• 23:43Kara Swisher?

  So, rule number two: talk to people, as you noted just a second ago. Maybe not drinking as much. Including strangers. But we're living in a time when young people are habituated to living on the phone, so we're adults, let's be clear, that talking to a stranger feels rude. College students say that trying to start a conversation with a fellow student that's sitting next to them for class notes, for example, would be weird. Many of them are scared of being rejected. Talk about this social awkwardness and how to get over it. There's more substantive ways to do it. I, for example, walk behind people in San Francisco who are looking at their... when I'm ever there, and I go... Look up.

• 24:24Kara Swisher?

  And someday you're gonna hear of me murdered in the streets of San Francisco. I have to tell you, every person looks up and goes, ugh, I'm such an idiot. Like, they do not blame me for being extraordinarily rude. They feel like they're in the grips of this. But young people in particular, the isolation, there's been a movement across the world, including in this country, more of isolating kids from both social media and phones themselves. I think the problem is adults 25 to 45, myself. But talk a little bit about that, the meeting of people and what the phone environment does to that.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Well, so last year, in the fall of 2024, I banned all phones from my classroom. I also banned computers and taking notes by computers from my classroom. And two remarkable things happened. One was I came in and the classroom was a lot louder when I walked into the room. People were actually talking to each other. And it was pretty amazing. They, you know, began to be, before they were just looking at their phone. And the second is, I actually got way better evaluations. And the reason isn't because I was doing anything different. The reason is, they were paying attention.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  And makes all the difference. Every time you talk to a professor who's banned phones in their classroom, suddenly the classrooms get way better. Because people are not on the phone, they're not worrying about what's on the phone, they're actually worrying about what is the professor saying.

• 26:00Kara Swisher?

  Socialization, because it does feel social in some ways, right? Of course, these things feel social. But talk about the importance of socialization for living longevity. It's very clear that we're in a problematic situation.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So people will say, well, look, I can connect with my friends, you know, who are living in Australia or living in California via the phone. 100% true. The problem is, you made those friends face to face. You did not make them over the phone, over social media. You can continue the conversation once it's made. Now, the data on making friends and interacting, very, very interesting. So many of you will know the Dunbar number. This is an English anthropologist at Oxford.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  He looked at the brains of various animals, including people, and it's like, you know, we can have about 150 friends, that's all our brain can handle. Now, most of them are acquaintances, they're casual, you might have them over for dinner, you would recognize them, you'd have coffee with them. But five or so of them are, five to 10 are close friends, who you're very intimate with. Many of them are, you know, family. Many of them are people you got to know in college, where you were talking deeply at midnight and with them. And then we have about 15 or 20 more, who are people we have over to dinner, we see regularly, we talk to about once a month. And those are really important for our psychology.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  So, if you look at the data, people who have more close friends versus people who have one or two or zero increasingly, we have a huge number of people, about 20% of the population now have zero to one close friends, that's it.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  It's very, very clear that the more close friends you have, right, the more, the longer you live. As a matter of fact, the difference between people who are lonely and have fewer social connections and people who don't is, increase the mortality rate if you have fewer social friends, between 22 and 33%.

• 28:05Kara Swisher?

  I just was saying for this series, and Sherry Turkle about the increase in the chatbot relationships, and she said it was an outlier, she said MIT was an outlier before, and now it's regular, that people are consulting their chatbot date. Google just settled with the parents, I've done a lot on the kids that are committing suicide with those relationships. In general, these chatbot relationships are seen-

• 28:29Speaker 01

  They're no substitute. They're no substitute. So, look, my father was an extreme extrovert. I relate in the, in the book. We used to take road trips, he loved driving, and we would take road trips out to, we lived in Chicago and go out west to Montana and Wyoming and Colorado. And every time we stopped in a diner, right, he would start talking to the next table. Or if there was no next table, he'd talk to the waitress. And he would ask them all sorts of questions, like, you know- Why are you here? You know, how did you come here? What do you do here? All those kind of questions. And he didn't do it like that, you know, this is an FBI interrogation. I want to know, name, rank, and seal. He would, you know, he's just curious.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  And he was endlessly curious. He did the same thing in parks. Now, his kids, right? We were always embarrassed by this. Oh, he's off again, you know? Can we crawl under the table? But it turned out, people loved it. And I learned from him several really important things. First of all, initiate the conversation. The other person probably wants to talk and is embarrassed or shy. We're all like that. I'm still like that. But initiate. Ask the other people questions and they'll talk about themselves. And what happens if you get rejected? Happens all the time, right? Nothing will happen to you. There's no big dish issue, right? Not absolutely nothing. So I have a, a practice here.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  All of you, you're Washingtonians, you know, right? All the cab drivers, the Uber drivers, they're from Ethiopia, right? So I get into a cab, you recognize people that they're from Ethiopia, but I ask them, "Where are you from?" And they tell me Ethiopia. I said, "You know, I've been to Ethiopia five times." Suddenly they light up. They love it, right? Someone's been to their country. And so they ask me, "Where have I been?" And I said, "Well, you know, I've been to Gunda and I hiked mountains there. I've been to Addis Ababa. I've been to Lalibela to see the churches carved out of the rock." And then I say, "So where are you from?" And they tell me, I said, "How much family do you still have back there?" And we're in a conversation already. And it makes their day and it makes my day. And this is, this is one message from my dad, right?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I'm being virtuous, right? Not only am I having a good conversation, right? I'm having them have a good social interaction. It's good for their health, too.

• 30:54Kara Swisher?

  Especially these ones that aren't friends, like that they're, they're actually, the health benefits are rather like just speaking to people you don't know.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 31:01Kara Swisher?

  Is really interesting. Now, you also, another way to stay sharp mentally, because a lot of it is about mental sharpness. Explain the difference between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence and how people can maintain, what you want is fluid intelligence.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  So crystallized intelligence is, all you crossword puzzle people who know all these words or your Scrabble people, you've got crystallized intelligence. You know a lot of words and they're gonna stay with you for a long time. I was just talking to an 85-year-old wife of my former dissertation, of my former, my dissertation advisor for my PhD, who unfortunately passed away, and she said to me that she has, you know, gone back to playing ping pong. And I was curious, well, is ping pong kinda like bicycling? That, you know, you never forget it. You know how to ride a bicycle as a kid? You don't ride it for a long time, you get back on the bicycle, you know how to ride it. She says, absolutely yes, and my serve is killer. Right?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  So, you know, that's crystallized intelligence. Knowing the muscle movement, or knowing, you know, your old telephone number, your old home address, where an event happened a long time ago. Crystallized intelligence, the last thing to leave. Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, is, you know, being able to keep something in your head and concentrate on something else, come back to remember it. It's decision-making or fixing a pattern that you see, or solving puzzles. That is fluid intelligence. And it's really important in new circumstances, that you haven't seen before, to bring all your information back together.

• 32:37Kara Swisher?

  So doing new things.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Doing totally.

• 32:39Kara Swisher?

  The reason I have honey here, this is Vix's honey. This guy's a famous scientist, but he decided to make honey, and by the way, it is the most delicious honey you've ever seen, but he learned how to-

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Twenty bucks for you after this.

• 32:51Kara Swisher?

  Okay. He learned to make honey because it was hard for him, right? Anything that's hard, whether it's, you learn to make chocolate.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 33:00Kara Swisher?

  He and I in the video, he made me put on colonial garb and march. I had never marched in a colonial parade, and never will again.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  As a Minuteman.

• 33:07Kara Swisher?

  As a Minuteman, which was fun. It was actually fun and interesting. So doing things different-

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:13Kara Swisher?

  Is fluid, promotes-

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It's part of fluid intelligence, yeah. And it, you know, declines, beginning in the late 30s or early 40s, our fluid intelligence declines. And it's the thing that is really, really important, that allows us to be creative, allows us to continue with things.

• 33:31Kara Swisher?

  Anything, anything that's, it can be physical, mental-

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Exactly, totally. And- There are things you can do to keep it going. Um, and the first thing is, uh, you know, get a lot of education. Turns out raising your baseline really, really important. Um, and this movement that really hit university professor has me shuddering is, you know, university's not worth it. Well, may not be worth it to you from money standpoint, but it's worth it to you from a brain standpoint. Why is that? Well, getting a lot of education makes more neural connections. Bringing together, you know, learning Dostoyevsky and connecting him to other writers, uh, other messages, right?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Really, really important. Because once you start high, the decline seems to be pretty similar for people. Um, and you start from a higher baseline.

• 34:28Kara Swisher?

  Right, it can be anything, it doesn't have to be Dostoyevsky.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no, of course.

• 34:31Kara Swisher?

  Learning how to do a carburetor, right? Okay.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  He'd be a fantastic trumpet player, whatever. And then, as you grow, trying new things, trying to establish those connections, um, and trying to do things that challenge your mind and make you, force you to make new connections.

• 34:45Kara Swisher?

  Well, beyond crossword puzzles and things like that.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 34:48Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, just whatever, something that's hard for you.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Well, crossword puzzles are probably the same thing, they're, they're relying on the same store of, of knowledge.

• 34:54Kara Swisher?

  Knowledge, rather than like...

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was talking to Walter Isaacson, um, the other day, and he, uh, he was interviewing me, and he said that he's been learning French for the last, uh, four years, because he's writing a book about, uh, Marie Curie, and...

• 35:09Kara Swisher?

  He's moved on to better people, dead ones.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  And then he, he's learning French so that he can report on her, and that is, so then he spent a lot of time. No, you don't do these things passively, uh, or like transiently, I mean, not passively, transiently, you've got to actually stick to it to make those connections.

• 35:26Kara Swisher?

  Connections.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  But those are what keep your brain young. Now, one of my big heroes who appears in this book several times is Ben Franklin. He is the model of this. He was endlessly curious about everything, always thinking, and, um, you know, what is he famous for? If I ask you, you'll say bifocals, right? Almost everyone, that's the immediate connection.

• 35:48Kara Swisher?

  I was not gonna say that at all.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Oh, what were you gonna say? The lightning rod?

• 35:51Kara Swisher?

  Uh, drinking.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Oh, conservation of electricity. No, he was not a big drinker, not a big drinker.

• 35:55Kara Swisher?

  I'm teasing you, I'm teasing you.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh, when did he invent the bifocals? He was 79 years old. Yeah, wow. And he had two more inventions after that. That was, he invented them just before he left France to come back to the United States the last time. And then he built an addition to his house, a massive library for his 4,000 books, so he could stay curious, looking at books. And he had to get the books high up on the shelf. So he's the guy who invented that arm. Do you have any of those, Brad? That gets the books from high shelves. And then he invented a chair where you fold down the seat, and there are steps there, so you can climb up, uh, three or four steps to get a high book. All of this after 79.

• 36:41Kara Swisher?

  Because he had neuroconnects. Go ahead. All right.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  He had plasticity in his brain like no one.

• 36:45Kara Swisher?

  Brain plasticity is where a lot of neuroscientists use. Um, I played a lot of games. We played, we did a lot of games, which another poker and different. I just, we just, my wife and I took a Mahjong lesson just recently. It's a trend thing. So everybody get on it 2026.

• 37:00Speaker 04

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• 39:28Kara Swisher?

  The next chapter should be everyone's favorite. It's titled Eat Your Ice Cream, which is the title of the book. In it, you give advice on food that mirrors, in some cases, the newly inverted food pyramid that was published by the FDA and/or RFK. Sometimes a broken clock is right. There may be a surprise for some people. Tell us why you should eat our ice cream, but he does not think... Well, maybe he does because of whole milk, but compare and contrast your advice on food and RFK Jr.'s.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I would say I was... There are positives in yesterday's... It's yesterday? Yesterday's announcement, okay? And I was very pleasantly surprised. The positives are mostly on the what not to do. Don't. Uh, eat ultra-processed, so much ultra-processed foods. Fifty-eight percent of the American caloric intake is ultra-processed foods. It's horrid, horrid. Um, don't drink sodas. Cut down on your sugar. All of that's in his recommendations. It's also the top, uh, couple of Zeke Emanuel's recommended. He's also against packaged cakes and cookies and things like that. All of that, I agree with, okay?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Um, he doesn't emphasize fermented foods, which is my big, the positive thing to do. Eat fermented foods, good for the microbiome. In the case of, uh, you know, probably the thing I, I push the most in the book if I had to, uh, with no financial conflicts of interest, by the way, yogurt. Um, good dairy, associated with a drop in, uh, um, uh, type-two diabetes. Great for the microbiome because it's, uh, it's fermented. Ke- kefir is the same. Kimchi, uh, sauerkraut, uh, really, really good. The thing I vehemently disagree with in that book is they're pushing more red meat. We know, we've got tons of studies about red meat.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Uh, high in saturated fats, heavily associated with cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes. We could go down the list. There's a long, much longer list. You know, you like that? I like it every so often, you know? Maybe once every two months, I'll have some red meat. Um, I like a hamburger too. Um, uh, not a, way too much emphasis on that, you know? Don't use seed oils, use beef tallow. Wrong. Seed oils are actually quite good, you know? Canola, uh, sunflower oils. You know, the best oil, if you want, is olive oil. It's very expensive these days, but, you know? So, there are many good things.

• 42:00Kara Swisher?

  Beef tallow is a no.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, definite, definite no.

• 42:04Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  So, I, I, that's the recommended. Now, of course, I deal with a lot of other things. If there's one other big positive thing you have to do that Americans are terrible at.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Fiber. More than ninety percent of Americans do not eat enough fiber every day. We don't eat fruits and vegetables, which is main source, or nuts, main source of fiber. And that is bad because the fiber is basically the prebiotic. So we spend a lot of money on those stupid prebiotics. Just eat your fruits and vegetables.

• 42:37Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Really crazy.

• 42:38Kara Swisher?

  The surprising one, avocados.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yes, avocado.

• 42:41Kara Swisher?

  Huge, one avocado will give you almost all the.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  That's right, absolutely. So my big breakfast recommendation is a bowl of berries, some granola with oats in them, yogurt and kefir on there, and throw in some hemp hearts for additional protein. Nothing could be better.

• 43:02Kara Swisher?

  All right. Last chapter is on sleeping well. I don't sleep a lot.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  None of us do.

• 43:07Kara Swisher?

  But I wear this and I now am very much tracking it. This is the Oura ring.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Does it help?

• 43:13Kara Swisher?

  I have to say, I used to call all of them unwearables.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:17Kara Swisher?

  They're called wearables, but this one actually gives me some interesting information, especially around sleep.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  More information than, say, getting up and feeling good?

• 43:24Kara Swisher?

  Ah, yes. No, you're right, correct you are. But it's just interesting to me, and we're doing this thing, so I wanted to find out. But I did interview a bunch of sleep experts, and of course, you don't quite need as much sleep as they say two at the same, like, it's more like seven hours. It's the time that you wind down.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:41Kara Swisher?

  Sleeping on cold, having a cold room. And so there's some typical things, but talk about sleep, because there's a lot of people who don't sleep a lot, high achievers, Martha Stewart, Tom Ford, Bill Clinton, and I hate to say it, Donald Trump, doesn't sleep very much.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, you talked about high achievers.

• 43:58Kara Swisher?

  All right, okay.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:00Kara Swisher?

  No, I said.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Let, let, let.

• 44:02Kara Swisher?

  He's achieved a lot, I'd say.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  So, so let me first talk about the wearables, because I am in general against the wearables, and especially for sleep. I should note very carefully, in my household, I'm the minority opinion. My wife, who has a PhD from MIT, very quantitative, she loves the numbers, it really motivates her. Now, if the numbers motivate you, good, but I've never understood the wearables, especially for sleep. Sleep, you get up in the morning, you feel like shit, you know, you didn't have a good night's sleep, you feel good, you know you had a good night's sleep. I don't need a little, you know. Aura Ring to tell me that and that's what I told the CEO of Aura. I was giving a talk somewhere and he was sitting right next to me and I said,

• 44:49Speaker 01

  you know, I think that thing you're selling is like, anyway.

• 44:52Kara Swisher?

  You Larry David in him. You Larry Dave, you went.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Anyway, I don't quite understand that, but sleep is a huge problem mainly because of what you said. Is that we have this sort of, you know, Protestant ethic in America and we think, you know, less sleep is better. I had my debate partner when I was, you know, 15 years old. He had this idea, I'm wasting a third of my life sleeping. It's gotta... No, sleeping is really important for you. How do we know that? Because we do sleep. Sleep is really, just think about it, really dangerous. You're knocked out for eight hours. You are the most vulnerable you could possibly be to, you know, the cheetah next door, right? And yet it's preserved. It must be important, right?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Nothing would have been conserved through evolution if, like that, that made you so vulnerable unless it were really, really important.

• 45:48Kara Swisher?

  It also cleans out your brain.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Very important to clean out your brain.

• 45:52Kara Swisher?

  REM sleep.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yes, it also allows you to restore your muscles and lots of other things. It moves the memories from a short-term memory to a long-term memory that the short-term memories have campus long-term. That's why I'm pointing to, um, this is a biology lesson by, and including everything else. Anyway, um, really, really important. Um, and we do a terrible job because we think less is better. No, less is not better and we have to change our attitude. Now, we Americans like to, quick fixes. So we reach for the pills. Terrible idea. They don't work. The Ameri, and this is in Zico Manuel talking. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine is like negative on all of them.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  You go to like the Cleveland Clinic pay webpage, you go to Mayo Clinic. They all say the same thing. The only thing proven to work besides making the, setting the bed is, um, uh, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is to figure out what's going on, you know, so.

• 46:53Kara Swisher?

  There are some new classes of drugs that they're looking at, correct?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Lots, yeah, yeah.

• 46:57Kara Swisher?

  That are not like...

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Kara, you can invest.

• 47:01Kara Swisher?

  I'm not investing, I'm not investing. So, very last, and then we're gonna get to questions in a second, but, uh, exercise. And then I have two newsy questions.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Uh, exercise, the answer is yes. You gotta do all the kinds of exercise. There are three kinds of exercise. Aerobic, right for your heart, lungs, vasculature, reduces cardiac problems and stroke risk and things like that. You gotta get your heart rate up. Strength training, really important, so you're not, the fragility is, you're not fragile, and, um, really, really, uh, important. Um, and then, uh, balance and flexibility, uh, yoga. So, you know, I start my day, uh, we, my wife and I start our day, 20 minutes of yoga in the morning, uh, followed by about five minutes of core exercise, um, and then we go off and...

• 47:53Kara Swisher?

  So, it's not a lot, you don't have to do a lot, like obsessive?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  That, that's, that's the, that's the yoga. I ride a bike, um, in the winter, uh...

• 48:01Kara Swisher?

  You do?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Uh, four, three, four times, uh, the inside bike, three or four times a week for twen- uh, 20 minutes, just 20 minutes, get it in, get... You can fit 20 minutes into any day.

• 48:12Kara Swisher?

  Obsessive, uh, exercise is not, is proven not to be that much beneficial unless you like it, correct?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, right. So, one of the interesting things is, we all have 75 vigorous exercise, 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise, 150 weeks of moderate exercise, and if you push that up, you do more and more, um, there's a plateau, and you don't get any more, and then you just increase your risk of getting, uh, repetitive motion injury, you know, tennis elbow, whatever, you know, problems with your knees, um, doesn't decrease your mortality at all, um, and the other problem I find is, you know, just think about it. Ten hours a week, what is the opportunity cost there? What aren't you doing in that time that you could be doing? Now, sometimes, there's a good excuse, you know?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  When I'm writing, I usually come to some problem. I can't say it right, I don't know exactly what I want to say. And then when I go out, I go out for a run. You know, and I think about it, and it usually solves my problem.

• 49:15Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  But there is a plateau, and I think we don't recognize that enough. Don't overdo it, because you're either wasting time, or you're risking serious injury.

• 49:25Kara Swisher?

  Right, and don't tell everyone about your exercise routine, because it's exhausting. Um, we would end very quickly on quickly on some newsy question. The CDC recently dropped childhood vaccine recommendations for six diseases. Seems schmucky to me. Uh, but the CDC said, "We're now more in line with other developed nations that recommend fewer vaccines that have similar, better outcomes." Uh, where do you come down on the schedule? Look at your face.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Wrong, okay?

• 49:48Kara Swisher?

  Okay, all right, okay.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, Denmark, just think about Denmark, right? A country of six million-

• 49:55Kara Swisher?

  Denmark does not want us to think about them right now.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  A country, that is very true. A country of six million people, universal healthcare coverage, where when you go to a point of service, you go to get care, co-pay zero, right? And they've got nurses that pay attention to kids to make sure they get all their vaccines, they actually are doing well, um, and they actually follow, a little more paternalistic, you might say, than America. That contrast, right, they're down at 11. By the way, they're the outlier. They are very short on the vaccine. That is a bad mistake. And I can tell you, the most difficult, or the worst thing about it, is the call I got from my three daughters, right?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Which is, "Dad, what should we do about vaccines for the kids?" Right? Now, they have, you know, a doctor they can consult, but most people don't have that. I said, "You just tell your pediatrician you want the old vaccine schedule and no screwing around, okay?"

• 50:59Speaker 01

  But I think it's going to sow a lot of uncertainty.

• 51:02Kara Swisher?

  Your own daughters.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  And we've already seen this, the vaccination rate, not just for MMR, but for diphtheria and tetanus is down. Sixty-five percent of the counties in the United States now have the herd immunity level, which is ninety-five percent for MMR. They're below the herd immunity level. We're going to see lots of outbreaks, lots of kids hospitalized, and lots of deaths. That is not a good thing for the next generation. The wrong direction.

• 51:29Kara Swisher?

  The wrong direction, okay. Last question. Republicans in Congress have refused to re-authorize the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but now they did tonight. They voted, they went against Trump and the others. Yeah, but the Congress.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  It didn't pass, didn't pass.

• 51:43Kara Swisher?

  It hadn't passed, but it passed in the House.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  The Representatives, House of Representatives.

• 51:47Kara Swisher?

  It might pass in the Senate. You were instrumental in creating the ACA. If you could go back to those negotiations, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently to make the law harder to undermine?

• 52:01Speaker 01

  How long do you have, Kara? So, let me, it's a complicated story. One of the things, look, the Affordable Care Act has been a tremendous success. Twenty-five million people or so got health insurance, and we know that giving people health insurance actually decreases their mortality. We actually plateaued on healthcare costs as a percent of GDP for fifteen years, unprecedented in American history. I unfortunately can't say that our quality has gone up, and I also can't say that our satisfaction has gone up in that time. One of the problems, the biggest problem, is you put in place a bill, and there was no mechanism to make moderate changes

• 52:44Speaker 01

  without going back to Congress. No company, no company would put in a strategic plan, operationalize it, and then not reexamine it for fifteen years. You just wouldn't do it. And that's basically what we did with the Affordable Care. There are many modifications that need to happen and couldn't happen because of the political polarization. Republicans just uninterested in trying to make it better. There are many things to make it better. If I had to.

• 53:11Kara Swisher?

  Go back.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Go back. There are two big changes, sort of themes of changes that I would make. I'm not going to talk about the particular details, except for one. We made healthcare more complicated. We added the exchanges and we added a bunch of stuff that made healthcare more complicated. I think one of our mantras going forth has to be simplification. We have to simplify things, not make them more complicated. We have to mean, all right, either you get insurance through your employer, or you get insurance, everyone else gets insurance this other way, which I think ought to be a small exchange. Only six plans on it, reduce the number so that people can make rational choices. The other thing we needed to do was to make much more standardization.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Standardization of medical treatments, standardization of electronic health records. So, you know, you go to two different hospitals, you can actually get them moved back and forth. Standardization in what we pay. You know, there's no price for anything in healthcare. There are a million prices for, you know, you go to the hospital, you know, there's a Medicare price, there's a Medicaid price, and then every private insurance company and individual plans in those companies has a different price. It's nonsense! It's one of the reasons we have so much, it's so costly, and we have so much administrative cost. 20% of all healthcare spending is administration, and one of the reasons is we haven't standardized things. So, simplification and standardization is where I would go.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Now, my plan, okay, I'm running. My plan is, you know, we need to do something about affordability now, right now. Everyone, when insured people are afraid to go to the doctor or to the emergency room, you know you have a serious problem. When deductibles are $5,000 and most people can't afford that, serious problem. So, we have to do things, and everyone has to be taxed. Hospitals, insurance companies, drug companies, all have to...

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Suffer something to keep, get the cost down. But that's not comprehensive reform. We have to move to more comprehensive reform and get a plan. And the problem is, you know, and just as much a problem for us liberals who've been working on healthcare. We haven't got a lot of plans out there. Um, and you know, there's a lot of depression among, I think, most health policy people. It's like, ah, you know, we're not going to get anything, so why think about anything? No, we have to work now. And I like to remind people, you know, Medicare was first proposed 1957. Enacted 1965. You have to develop an idea, vet an idea, socialize it with people.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  And healthcare is particularly hard because no one knows how the hell it works. It's just so complicated. And so it takes a lot of time to socialize people and you have to talk to them. My first action, by the way, on the road to affordability is cap deductibles and out-of-pocket payment. They should be no higher than $1,700, which is 2% of the median income of American households. And that should be it. That's what they do in Germany. That's what civilized countries do.

• 56:25Kara Swisher?

  Okay. Um, if, if, if your brother runs for president and wins, we'll see. Um, if he made you HHS thing, what's the first thing you would do? You say, buy RFK and your beef tallow, move along.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Uh, what's the first thing I would do? That's a really good question. Um, there's so much that needs to be done there. Um, uh, I don't know. Actually, you've got me stumped. Oh, um, I think, I think the, this issue of healthcare reform. And the reason I keep coming back to it is fixing the healthcare system. Is because we're spending $5 trillion a year. You know, the American healthcare system is the third largest economy in the world. Right? Only the United States and China are bigger. We, our healthcare system is bigger than Japan, bigger than Germany, total economy.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  So why would I focus on? We need to take money out of that system so we can do two things. One is spend it on other things. Education, you know, fixing our grid. Lots of priorities in America. The second thing we have to do is give some of that money back to families. If we took the American healthcare spending from seventeen and a half percent of GDP down to fifteen percent of GDP, two and a half percent drop. That's three thousand dollars per family. Just imagine what most Americans could do with three thousand extra dollars. I now know what I would. My very first action. Thank you for giving me time to bullshit filibuster while I was thinking.

• 58:00Kara Swisher?

  All right, okay, excellent.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  My very first.

• 58:03Kara Swisher?

  Go ahead.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  My very first thing is I would mandate through Medicaid that all newborns, right? Get nurse family partnership so they have early childhood interventions for the first two years of life. If there's any higher return for a dollar spent, right? It's the highest return for the government spending a dollar. It's university economists estimate between seven dollar return or to fifteen dollar return. Because what we do early on is the most important thing for brain development, for socialization, for all sorts of things. So you gotta work with parents. You gotta make sure kids have a strong, healthy start. That would be my first thing.

• 58:48Kara Swisher?

  Because that's what it takes to live long.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  It's an investment in the future.

• 58:52Kara Swisher?

  All right.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  All right.

• 58:53Kara Swisher?

  Well, the book is called Eat Your Ice Cream. And by the way, there's ice cream all around this area. Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life. What is your favorite ice cream?

• 59:03Speaker 01

  I've got two favorite ice cream places in Washington DC. Dolcezza, where Rob Duncan is a very dear friend and makes special ice cream for me, the chocolate hazelnut, and trying to get him to make a Ledna honey pistachio ice cream, just heavenly. And Happy Ice Cream has a wonderful chocolate as well, and I eat them all.

• 59:29Kara Swisher?

  All right. On that note, Zeke Emanuel, everyone. Thank you so much.

• 59:36Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwara is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho. Aliyah Jackson Perez engineered this episode, and our theme music is by Trackademics. Thanks again to Politics and Pros for hosting this event. If you're already following the show, you're eating ice cream. If not, you're drowning in beef tallow. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

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