Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #263 – John Abramson: Big Pharma About this episode John Abramson is faculty at Harvard Medical School and a family physician for over two decades. He’s the author of the new book Sickening about how big pharma broke American healthcare and how we can fix it. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
John’s Website: https://hcp.hms.harvard.edu/people/john-david-abramson
Sickening (book): https://amzn.to/3gsVHef
Overdosed America (book): https://amzn.to/3LmrWKn
PODCAST INFO:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(14:29) – Biggest problem with big pharma
(23:30) – Advertising
(43:22) – Corruption
(59:38) – Pfizer vaccine data
(1:08:30) – Vaccine profits
(1:19:25) – Censorship
(1:40:11) – FDA
(1:48:45) – NIH
(1:57:42) – Live longer
(2:01:13) – Medications
(2:09:37) – Doctors
(2:13:44) – Advice for young people
(2:14:40) – Big pharma’s influence
(2:19:24) – Mortality
(2:21:15) – Meaning of life
Transcript 20,485 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with John Abramson, faculty at Harvard Medical School, a family physician for over two decades, and author of the new book Sickening, about how Big Pharma broke American healthcare and how we can fix it. This conversation with John Abramson is a critical exploration of the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to talk to John in order to provide a countervailing perspective to the one expressed in my podcast episode with the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Burla. And here, please allow me to say a few additional words about this episode with the Pfizer CEO, and in general, about why I do these conversations and how I approach them.
0:45 Lex Fridman? If this is not interesting to you, please skip ahead. What do I hope to do with this podcast? I want to understand human nature, the best and the worst of it. I want to understand how power, money, and fame changes people. I want to understand why atrocities are committed by crowds that believe they're doing good. All this, ultimately, because I want to understand how we can build a better world together, to find hope for the future, and to rediscover each time through the exploration of ideas just how beautiful this life is. This, our human civilization, in all of its full complexity,
1:26 Lex Fridman? the forces of good and evil, of war and peace, of hate and love. I don't think I can do this with a heart and mind that is not open, fragile, and willing to empathize with all human beings, even those in the darkest corners of our world. To attack is easy. To understand is hard. And I choose the hard path. I have learned over the past few months that this path involves me getting more and more attacked from all sides. I will get attacked when I host people like Jay Bhattacharya or Francis Collins, Jamie Merzal or Vincent Raffagnolo, when I stand for my friend Joe Rogan,
2:10 Lex Fridman? when I host tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others, when I eventually talk to Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and other figures that have turned the tides of history. I have and I will get called stupid, naive, weak. And I will take these words with respect, humility and love. And I will get better. I will listen, think, learn and improve. One thing I can promise is there's no amount of money or fame that can buy my opinion or make me go against my principles. There's no amount of pressure that can break my integrity.
2:52 Lex Fridman? There's nothing in this world I need that I don't already have. Life itself is the fundamental gift. Everything else is just a bonus. That is freedom. That is happiness. If I die today, I will die a happy man. Now, a few comments about my approach and lessons learned from the Albert Burla conversation. The goal was to reveal as much as I could about the human being before me and to give him the opportunity to contemplate in long form the complexities of his role, including the tension between making money and helping people, the corruption that so often permeates
3:35 Lex Fridman? human institutions, the crafting of narratives through advertisements, and so on. I only had one hour, and so this wasn't the time to address these issues deeply, but to show if Albert struggled with them in the privacy of his own mind. And if he would, let down the veil of political speak for a time to let me connect with a man who decades ago chose to become a veterinarian, who wanted to help lessen the amount of suffering in the world. I had no pressure placed on me. There were no rules. The questions I was asking were all mine and not seen by Pfizer folks. I had no care whether I ever talked to another CEO again.
4:17 Lex Fridman? None of this was part of the calculation in my limited brain computer. I didn't want to grill him the way politicians grill CEOs in Congress. I thought that this approach is easy, self-serving, dehumanizing, and it reveals nothing. I wanted to reveal the genuine intellectual struggle, vision and motivation of a human being. And if that fails, I trusted the listener to draw their own conclusion and insights from the result, whether it's the words spoken, or the words left unspoken, or simply the silence. And that's just it. I fundamentally trust the intelligence of the listener,
4:58 Lex Fridman? you. In fact, if I criticize the person too hard or celebrate the person too much, I feel I fail to give the listener a picture of the human being that is uncontaminated by my opinion or the opinion of the crowd. I trust that you have the fortitude and the courage to use your own mind, to empathize and to think. Two practical lessons I took away. First, I will more strongly push for longer conversations of three, four, or more hours versus just one hour. Sixty minutes is too short for the guest to relax and to think slowly and deeply, and for me to ask many follow-up questions or follow interesting tangents. Ultimately, I think it's in the interest
5:43 Lex Fridman? of everyone, including the guest, that we talk in true long form for many hours. Second, these conversations with leaders can be aided by further conversations with people who wrote books about those leaders or their industries, those that can steel man each perspective and attempt to give an objective analysis. I think of Teddy Roosevelt's speech about the man in the arena. I want to talk to both the men and women in the arena and the critics and the supporters in the stands. For the former, I lean toward wanting to understand one human being's struggle with the ideas. For the latter, I lean towards understanding the ideas themselves. That's why I wanted to have this conversation
6:28 Lex Fridman? with John Abramson, who is an outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry. I hope it helps add context and depth to the conversation I had with the Pfizer CEO. In the end, I may do worse than I could have or should have. Always, I will listen to the criticisms without ego, and I promise I will work hard to improve. But let me say finally, that cynicism is easy. Optimism, true optimism, is hard. It is the belief that we can and we will build a better world, and that we can only do it together. This is the fight
7:11 Lex Fridman? worth fighting. So here we go. Once more into the breach, dear friends. I love you all.
7:20 Lex Fridman? And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. First is Noom, a habit establishing system that helps you get fit. Second is Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. Third is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Fourth is Athletic Greens, the all in one nutrition drink I drink twice a day. And fifth is Onnit, a nutrition, supplement and fitness company. So the choice is making habits, taking notes, or being healthy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors.
8:05 Lex Fridman? I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Noom, which is a behavior and habit changing system that helps you get fit and lose weight. Go to trynoom.com/lex to take a short survey about yourself and it will generate a custom program for you. This includes helping you find why you want to do it. Small goals along the way and guide you to 10 minutes a day for better habits. The why is where it all begins, dear friends. And I'm obviously a huge fan of forming habits, whether it's using an app or a sheet of paper or the power of your mind.
8:49 Lex Fridman? I do believe tools help, so Noom is a great tool you should definitely try out. Try to also not have an existential crisis when you take their survey because it really forces you to reflect in your life. I think that's important. That's step number zero for changing things is self-reflection, self-evaluation, honesty, radical honesty with yourself. Go to trynoom.com/lex and fill out the quick survey. That's all you have to do. Go to trynoom.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. It combines note taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more.
9:33 Lex Fridman? It's one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. People love Notion. I have been talking to a bunch of people about note taking. I am obsessed with note taking. I use a bunch of tools. And this is the cool, new, hip thing that people always recommend to me is Notion. So I've been using Notion for quite a bit of my note taking. If you want to be rigorous, Notion is where it's at. For startups, which is what Notion really wants to highlight here, it's the team part. Notion could provide a full-on operating system for running every aspect of your company to grow quickly. Notion is running a special offer just for startups.
10:15 Lex Fridman? Get up to $1,000 off Notion's team plan by going to notion.com/startups. To give you a sense, that's almost a year of free Notion for a team of 10. Go to notion.com/startups. That's notion.com/startups. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test that gives you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have machine learning algorithms that analyze your blood data, DNA data, and fitness tracker data to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes.
10:57 Lex Fridman? Now I sound like Andrew Huberman, the brilliant Andrew Huberman, with the protocols, with the advice that is science-backed and data-driven. Anyway, I love the idea of InsideTracker. You should be making lifestyle decisions and changes and so on, based on actual data from your body, not population data. Your body is a unique miracle in the full history and span of the universe. How does that John Mayer song go? Your body's a wonderland. That's actually a pretty good song. That guy's an amazing guitarist. Anyway, this has nothing to do with anything. For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire InsideTracker store if you go to
11:38 Lex Fridman? insidetracker.com/lex. That's insidetracker.com/lex. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and it's newly renamed AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals. It's the first thing I drink every day. I drink it twice a day. It forms the nutritional basis for the madness that is my physical and mental pursuits. I do all kinds of diets, either carnivore or keto, or I do crazy stuff. Sometimes, you know, there's some whiskey involved.
12:20 Lex Fridman? Sometimes I even get crazy. I party a little bit with carrots. There's an apple in there somewhere. Sometimes a Granny Smith apple. I know how to party, in case you didn't know. But given all that, even if I get wild with the apples and the carrots, I can trust the fact that my nutrition needs are all met because I'm taking Athletic Greens twice a day, drinking Athletic Greens. Anyway, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up to athleticgreens.com/lex. That's athleticgreens.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Onnit Nutrition Supplement and Fitness Company. They make AlphaBrain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory,
13:02 Lex Fridman? mental speed, and focus. I don't take it every day. I take it on special occasions as a super boost rocket launcher for the mind when I know there's a long, deep work session for a particularly difficult problem that I'm working on. It helps me be confident that I can persevere through the rigor of sort of
13:28 Lex Fridman? Mental side roads that lead nowhere. That's the hardest part about thinking about stuff about design. It's not solving problems. It's when you hit a dead end. That's painful. That's where maintaining focus, keeping an optimism is hard. And that's the most draining on the mind. And so you want to make sure you have all the energy you need. So for me, AlphaBrain helps. Go to lexfriedman, that's my name, dot com slash on it to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfridman.com slash on it. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with John Abramson.
14:29 Lex Fridman? You're faculty at Harvard Medical School. You're a family physician for over two decades. Rated one of the best family physicians in Massachusetts. You wrote the book, Overdosed America, and the new book coming out now called Sickening, about how Big Pharma broke American healthcare, including science and research, and how we can fix it. First question, what is the biggest problem with Big Pharma that if fixed would be the most impactful? So if you can snap your fingers and fix one thing, what would be the most impactful, you think?
15:03 Speaker 01 The biggest problem is the way they determine the content, the accuracy, and the completeness of what doctors believe to be the full range of knowledge that they need to best take care of their patients. So that- With the knowledge having been taken over by the commercial interests, primarily the pharmaceutical industry, the purpose of that knowledge is to maximize the profits that get returned to investors and shareholders and not to optimize the health of the American people.
15:44 Speaker 01 So rebalancing that equation would be the most important thing to do to get our healthcare back aimed in the right direction.
15:52 Lex Fridman? Okay, so there's a tension between helping people and making money. So if we look at particularly the task of helping people in medicine, in healthcare, is it possible if money is the primary sort of mechanism by which you achieve that as a motivator? Is it possible to get that right?
16:16 Speaker 01 I think it is, Lex, but I think it is not possible without guardrails that maintain the integrity and the balance of the knowledge. Without those guardrails, it's like trying to play a professional basketball game without referees and having players call their own fouls. But the players are paid to win and you can't count on them to call their own fouls. So we have referees who are in charge. We don't have those referees in American healthcare. That's the biggest way that American healthcare is distinguished from healthcare in other wealthy nations.
16:53 Lex Fridman? So, okay, you mentioned Milton Friedman and you mentioned his book called Capitalism and Freedom. He writes that there are only three legitimate functions of government: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, and to ensure that private markets work. You said that that was a radical idea at the time, but we're failing on all three. How are we failing? And also, maybe the bigger picture is what are the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism when it comes to medicine and healthcare?
17:28 Speaker 01 Can we separate those out?
17:29 Lex Fridman? Sure.
17:30 Speaker 01 Because those are two huge questions. So how we're failing on all three, and these are the minimal functions that our guru of free market capitalism said the government should perform. So this is the absolute baseline.
17:48 Speaker 01 On preserving law and order, the drug companies routinely violate the law in terms of their marketing and in terms of their presentation of the results of their trials. I know this because I was an expert in litigation for about 10 years. I presented some of what I learned in civil litigation to the FBI and the Department of Justice, and that case led to the biggest criminal fine in US history as of 2009.
18:26 Speaker 01 And I testified in a federal trial in 2010, and the jury found Pfizer guilty of fraud and racketeering violations. In terms of violating the law, it's a routine occurrence. The drug companies have paid $38 billion worth of fines from, I think, 1991 to 2017. It's never been enough to stop the misrepresentation of their data, and rarely are the fines greater than the profits that were made.
19:05 Speaker 01 See, executives have not gone to jail for misrepresenting data that have involved even tens of thousands of deaths in the case of Vioxx, OxyContin as well. And when companies plead guilty to felonies, which is not an unusual occurrence, the government usually allows the companies, the parent companies, to allow subsidiaries to take the plea so that they are not one step closer to getting disbarred from Medicare, not being able to participate in Medicare.
19:41 Speaker 01 So in that sense, there is a mechanism that is appearing to impose law and order on drug company behavior, but it's clearly not enough. It's not working.
19:55 Lex Fridman? Can you actually speak to...
19:59 Lex Fridman? Human nature here. Are people corrupt? Are people malevolent? Are people ignorant? That work at the low level and at the high level at Pfizer, for example, at big pharma companies? How is this possible? So I believe, just on a small tangent, that most people are good. And I actually believe if you join big pharma, so a company like Pfizer, your life trajectory often involves dreaming and wanting and enjoying helping people.
20:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:35 Lex Fridman? And so, and then we look at the outcomes that you're describing. And it looks, and that's why the narrative takes hold, that like Pfizer CEO Alba Brola, who I talked to, is malevolent. The sense is like, these companies are evil. So if the different parts, the people are good and they want to do good, how are we getting these outcomes?
21:04 Speaker 01 Yeah. I think it has to do with the cultural milieu that this is unfolding in. And we need to look at sociology to understand this, that when the cultural milieu is set up to maximize the returns on investment for shareholders and other venture capitalists and hedge funds and so forth, when that defines the culture, and the higher up you are in the corporation, the more you're in on the game of getting rewarded for maximizing the profits of the investors.
21:49 Speaker 01 That's the culture they live in. And it becomes normative behavior to do things with science that look normal in that environment and are shared values within that environment by good people, whose self-evaluation becomes modified by the goals that are shared by the people around them. And within that milieu, you have one set of standards. And then the rest of good American people have the expectation that the drug companies are trying
22:27 Speaker 01 to make money, but that they're playing by rules that aren't part of the insider milieu.
22:36 Lex Fridman? That's fascinating. The game they're playing modifies the culture, you know, inside the meetings, inside the rooms, day to day, that there's a bubble that forms. Like, we're all in bubbles of different sizes.
22:51 Speaker 01 Right.
22:52 Lex Fridman? And that bubble allows you to drift in terms of what you see as ethical and unethical.
23:01 Lex Fridman? Because you see the game as just, you know, it's just part of the game. So, marketing is just part of the game.
23:08 Speaker 01 Right.
23:08 Lex Fridman? Paying the fines is just part of the game of science.
23:11 Speaker 01 Yep, yep. And without guardrails, it becomes even more part of the game. You keep moving in that direction if you're not bumping up against guardrails. And I think that's how we've gotten to the extreme situation we're in now.
23:30 Lex Fridman? So, like I mentioned, I spoke with Pfizer CEO Albert Berla, and I'd like to raise with you some of the concerns I raised with him. So, one, you already mentioned, I raised the concern that Pfizer is engaged in aggressive advertising campaigns.
23:49 Lex Fridman? As you can imagine, he said no.
23:52 Lex Fridman? What do you think?
23:55 Speaker 01 I think you're both right.
23:58 Speaker 01 I think that the, I agree with you that the aggressive advertising campaigns do not add value to society. And I agree with him that they're, for the most part, legal, and it's the way the game is played.
24:13 Lex Fridman? Right, so, sorry to interrupt, but oftentimes, his responses are...
24:21 Lex Fridman? Especially now, he's been CEO for only like two years, three years. He says Pfizer was a different company. We've made mistakes, right? In the past, we don't make mistakes anymore. That there's rules and we play by the rules. So like with every concern raised, there's very, very strict rules, as he says. In fact, he says sometimes way too strict and we play by them. And so in that sense, advertisement, it doesn't seem like it's too aggressive because it's playing by the rules. And relative to the other, again, it's the game relative to the other companies. It's actually not that aggressive. Relative to the other big pharma companies.
25:03 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. I hope we can quickly get back to whether or not they're playing by the rules. But in general, but let's just look at the question of advertising specifically. I think that's a good example of what it looks like from within that culture and from outside that culture. He's saying that we follow the law on our advertising. We state the side effects and we state the FDA approved indications and we, we do what the law says we have to do for advertising. And I have not, I've not been an expert in litigation for a few years and I don't know what's going on currently, but let's take him at his word. It could be true. It might not be, but it could be.
25:46 Speaker 01 But if that's true, in his world, in his culture, that's ethical business behavior. From a common sense person's point of view, a drug company paying highly skilled media folks to take the information about the drug and create the illusion, the emotional impact and the takeaway message for viewers of advertisements that grossly exaggerate the benefit of the drug and minimize the harms. It's sociopathic behavior to have viewers of ads leave the ad with an unrealistic impression
26:29 Speaker 01 of the benefits and harms of the drug. And yet he's playing by the rules. He's doing his job as CEO to maximize the effect of his advertising. And if he doesn't do it, this is a key point. If he doesn't do it, he'll get fired and the next guy will.
26:48 Lex Fridman? So the people that survive in the company, the people that get raises in the company and move up in the company are the ones that play by the rules. And that's how the game solidifies itself. But the game is within the balance of the law. Sometimes, most of the time, not always. We'll get, we'll return to that question. I'm actually more concerned about the effect of advertisement in a kind of much larger scale on the people that are getting funded by the advertisement in self censorship, just like more subtle, more, more passive pressure to not say anything negative.
27:29 Lex Fridman? Because I've seen this, and I've been saddened by it, that people sacrifice integrity in small ways when they're being funded by a particular company. They don't, they don't see themselves as doing so. But you could just clearly see that the space of opinions that they're willing to engage in, or a space of ideas they're willing to play with, is one that doesn't include negative, anything that could possibly be negative about the company. They just choose not to, because, you know, why? And that, that's really sad to me that, you know, if you give me a hundred bucks, I'm less likely to say something negative about you.
28:15 Lex Fridman? That makes me sad. Because like, the reason I wouldn't say something negative about you, I prefer, is the pressure of friendship and human connection, that those kinds of things. So I understand that. That's also a problem, by the way. So sort of having dinners and shaking hands and, oh, aren't we friends? But the, the fact that money has that effect is really sad to me. On the news media, on the journalists, on scientists.
28:42 Lex Fridman? That's scary to me. But of course, the direct advertisement to consumers, like you said, has a potentially very negative effect. I wanted to ask if what you think is the most negative impact of advertisement, is it that direct to consumer on television? Is it advertisement to doctors, which I'm surprised to learn, I was vaguely looking at, is more than the advertisement, more is spent on advertising to doctors than to consumers? That's really confusing to me. It's fascinating, actually. And then also, obviously, the law side of things is the lobbying dollars, which I think is less than all of those. But anyway, it's in the ballpark. What concerns you most?
29:23 Speaker 01 Well, it's the whole nexus of influence. There's not one thing, and they don't invest all their, they don't put all their eggs in one basket. It's a whole surround sound program here. But in terms of advertisements, let's take an advertisement, Trulicity is a diabetes drug, a type, for type 2 diabetes, an injectable drug. And it lowers blood sugar just about as well as Metformin does. Metformin costs about $4 a month. Trulicity costs, I think, $6,200 a year. So $48 a year versus $6,200. Trulicity has distinguished
30:07 Speaker 01 itself because it did, the manufacturer did a study that showed that it significantly reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease in diabetics. And they got approval on the basis of that study, that very large study being statistically significant. What the, so the ad, the ads obviously extol the virtues of Trulicity because it reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke, and that's one of the major morbidities, risks of type 2 diabetes. What the ad doesn't say is that you have to treat 323 people to prevent one non-fatal event at a cost of $2.7 million.
30:48 Speaker 01 And even more importantly than that, what the ad doesn't say is that the evidence shows that engaging in an active, healthy lifestyle program reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes far more than Trulicity does. Now, to be fair to the company, the sponsor, there's never been a study that compared Trulicity to lifestyle changes. But that's part of the problem of our advertising. You would think in a rational society that was way out on a limb as a lone country besides
31:27 Speaker 01 New Zealand that allows direct-to-consumer advertising, that part of allowing direct-to-consumer advertising would be to mandate that the companies establish whether their drug is better than, say, healthy lifestyle adoption to prevent the problems that they claim to be preventing. But we don't require that. So the companies can afford to do very large studies so that very small differences become statistically significant, and their studies are asking the question, how can we sell more drug? They're not asking the question, how can we prevent cardiovascular disease in people with type 2 diabetes?
32:09 Speaker 01 And that's how we get off in this, we're now in the extreme arm of this distortion of our medical knowledge of studying how to sell more drugs than how to make people more healthy.
32:21 Lex Fridman? That's a really great thing to compare to is lifestyle changes, because that should be the bar. If you do some basic diet, exercise, all those kinds of things, how does this drug compare to that?
32:36 Speaker 01 Right. Right. And that study was done, actually, in the 90s. It's called the Diabetes Prevention Program. It was federally funded by the NIH so that there wasn't this drug company imperative to just try to prove your drug was better than nothing. And it was a very well-designed study, randomized, controlled trial.
32:59 Speaker 01 In people who were at high risk of diabetes, so-called pre-diabetics, and they were randomized to three different groups. A placebo group, a group that got treated with metformin, and a group that got treated with intensive lifestyle counseling. So this study really tested whether you can get people in a randomized controlled trial assigned to intensive lifestyle changes, whether that works. Now, the common wisdom amongst physicians, and I think in general, is that you can't get people to change. You can do whatever you want. You can stand on your head. You can beg and plead. People won't change. So give it up and let's just move on with the drugs and not waste any time.
33:43 Speaker 01 Except this study that was published in the New England Journal, I think in 2002, shows that's wrong. That the people who were in the intensive lifestyle group ended up losing 10 pounds, exercising five times a week, maintaining it, and reduced the risk of getting diabetes by 58% compared to the metformin group, which reduced its risk of getting diabetes by 31%. So that that exact study was done and it showed that lifestyle intervention is the winner.
34:16 Lex Fridman? Who, as a small tangent, is the leader? Who is supposed to fight for the side of lifestyle changes? Where's the big pharma version of lifestyle changes? Who's supposed to have the big bully pulpit, the big money behind lifestyle changes? In your sense, because that seems to be missing in a lot of our discussions about health policy.
34:42 Speaker 01 Right, that's exactly right. And the answer is that we assume that the market has to solve all of these problems. And the market can't solve all of these problems. There needs to be some way of protecting the public interest for things that aren't financially driven. So that the overriding question has to be, how best to improve Americans' health? Not... Companies funding studies to try and prove that their new inexpensive drug is better and should be used.
35:17 Lex Fridman? Well, some of that is also people sort of like yourself. I mean, it's funny, you spoke with Joe Rogan. He constantly inspires his lifestyle changes. So some of it is almost like understanding the problems that big farmers creating society and then sort of these influential voices speaking up against it. So whether they're scientists or just regular communicators.
35:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you got to tip your hat to Joe for getting that message out. And he clearly believes it and does his best. But it's not coming out in the legitimate avenues, in the legitimate channels that are evidence-based medicine and the, from the sources that the docs are trained to listen to and modify their patient care on. Now, it's not 100%. I mean, there are articles in the big journals about the benefits of lifestyle, but they don't carry the same gravitas as the randomized controlled trials that test this drug against placebo or this drug against another drug.
36:29 Speaker 01 So the Joe Rogans of the world keep going, you know? I tip my hat. But it's not going to carry the day for most of the people until it has the legitimacy of the medical establishment.
36:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah, like something that the doctors really pay attention to. Well, there's, there's an entire mechanism established for testing drugs. There's not an entire mechanism established for, in terms of scientific rigor, of testing lifestyle changes. I mean, it's, it's, it's more difficult. I mean, everything's difficult in science with, that science that involves humans especially. But it's just, it's, these studies are very expensive, they're difficult, it's difficult to find conclusions and to control all the variables. And so it's very easy to dismiss them unless you really do a huge study that's very well-funded. And so maybe the doctors just lean towards the simpler studies over and over, which is what the drug companies fund.
37:24 Lex Fridman? They can control more variables. See, but the control there is sometimes.
37:33 Lex Fridman? By hiding things too, right? So sometimes you can just say that this is a well-controlled study by pretending there's a bunch of other stuff, just ignoring the stuff that could be correlated, it could be the real cause of the effects you're seeing, all that kind of stuff. So money can buy ignorance, I suppose, in science.
37:58 Speaker 01 It buys kind of blinders that are on, that don't look outside the reductionist model. And that's another issue is that we kind of, nobody says to doctors in training, only listen to reductionist studies and conclusions and methods of promoting health. Nobody says that explicitly, but the respectable science has to do with controlling the factors. And I mean, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm going to pick on Trulicity because it's such an obvious example, but it's not more egregious than many others. It doesn't make sense to me to allow a drug to be advertised as preventing cardiovascular
38:42 Speaker 01 disease when you haven't included lifestyle changes as an arm in the study. It's just, it's just so crystal clear that the purpose of that study is to sell Trulicity. It's not to prevent cardiovascular disease. You know, if, if we were in charge, I would try to convince you that anywhere that study, the results of that study were presented to physicians, it would be stamped in big red letters, this study did not compare Trulicity to lifestyle changes. They need to know that. And the docs are kind of trained, these blinders get put on, and they're trained to kind of forget that that's not there.
39:22 Lex Fridman? Do you think, so first of all, that's a small or big change to advertisement? That seems obvious to say, like in force that it should be compared to lifestyle changes.
39:35 Lex Fridman? Do you think advertisements, period, in the United States for pharmaceutical drugs should be banned?
39:41 Speaker 01 I think they can't be banned, so it doesn't matter what I think.
39:45 Lex Fridman? Okay. What say you were a dictator and two, why can't they be banned?
39:51 Speaker 01 Okay.
39:52 Lex Fridman? Answer either one.
39:54 Speaker 01 I believe, I've been told by lawyers who I trust, that the freedom of speech in the US Constitution is such that you can't ban them, that you could ban cigarettes and alcohol, which have no therapeutic use, but drugs have a therapeutic use and advertisements about them can't be banned. Let's assume that they can't be, because we know they won't be, anyway. But let's assume they can't be, and especially our Supreme Court now would be unlikely to take that seriously. But that's not the issue. The issue is that if drugs, if the drug companies want to spend their money advertising, they
40:39 Speaker 01 should have to have independent analysis of the message that the viewers are left with about the drug, so that it's realistic. What's the chance the drug will help them? Well, in trulicity, it's one out of 323. 322 people aren't going to benefit from the cardiovascular reduction, risk reduction. What's the true cost? When drugs advertise that you may be able to get this for a $25 copay or something, tens of thousands of dollars a year drug for a $25 copay, what an enormous disservice that is to misrepresent the cost to society. That should not be allowed.
41:20 Speaker 01 So you should have to make it clear to the viewers, how many people are going to benefit? What's your chance of benefiting? How does it compare to lifestyle changes or less expensive therapies? What do you give up if you use a less expensive therapy or gain, perhaps?
41:36 Lex Fridman? And how much it costs?
41:37 Speaker 01 How much it costs. Now, that can go either way, because if you say Humira costs $72,000 and it's no more effective as a first-line drug than methotrexate, which costs $480, people might say, I want the expensive drug, because I can get it for $25 copay. So you'd have to temper that a little bit.
41:58 Lex Fridman? Oh, you mean people are so... They don't care.
42:02 Speaker 01 They don't care. Their insurance is going to cover it and it's a $25 copay, but we could figure out how to deal with that. But the main point is that if we assume that advertisements are going to keep going, and they are, we could
42:18 Speaker 01 require that there be outside evaluation of the message that reasonable unbiased viewers take away from the ads and the ads would have to tell the truth about the drug.
42:32 Lex Fridman? And the truth should have like sub-truth guardrails, meaning like the cost that we talked about, the effects compared to things that actually, you know, lifestyle changes, just these details, very strict guardrails of what actually has to be specified.
42:53 Speaker 01 And I would make it against the law to have family picnics or dogs catching frisbees in the ads.
43:00 Lex Fridman? So you mean 95% of the ads, yes.
43:07 Lex Fridman? I mean, there's something dark and inauthentic about those advertisements, but they see, I mean, I'm sure they're being done because they work for the target audience.
43:20 Lex Fridman? And then the doctors too. Can you really buy a doctor's opinion? Why does it have such an effect on doctors?
43:29 Lex Fridman? Advertisement to doctors, like you as a physician, again, like from everything I've seen, people love you. And I've just, people should definitely look you up from, there's a bunch of videos of you giving talks on YouTube and it's just,
43:48 Lex Fridman? just it's so refreshing to hear just the clarity of thought about health policy, about healthcare, just the way you think throughout the years.
43:57 Speaker 01 Thank you.
43:58 Lex Fridman? So like, it's easy to think about like, maybe you're criticizing Big Pharma, that's part of, one part of the message that you're talking about, but you know, that's not like, your brilliance actually shines in the positive, in the solutions and how to do it. So as a doctor.
44:15 Lex Fridman? What affects your mind?
44:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:17 Lex Fridman? And how does Big Pharma affect your mind?
44:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. Number one, the information that comes through legitimate sources that doctors have been taught to rely on, evidence-based medicine, the articles in peer-reviewed journals, the guidelines that are issued. Now, those are problematic because when an article is peer-reviewed and published in a respected journal, people and doctors obviously assume that the peer reviewers have had access to the data and they've independently analyzed the data and they corroborate the findings in the manuscript that was submitted, or
45:00 Speaker 01 they give feedback to the authors and say, "We disagree with you on this point and would you please check our analysis and if you agree with us, make it..." That's what they assume the peer-review process is, but it's not. The peer reviewers don't have the data. The peer reviewers have the manuscript that's been submitted by the, usually in conjunction with or by the drug company that manufactures the drug. So, peer reviewers are unable to perform the job that doctors think they're performing, to vet the data to assure that it's accurate and reasonably complete. They can't do it. And then we have the clinical
45:45 Speaker 01 practice guidelines, which are increasingly more important as the information, the flow of information keeps getting brisker and brisker and docs need to get to the bottom line quickly. Clinical practice guidelines become much more important. And we assume that the authors of those clinical practice guidelines have independently analyzed the data from the clinical trials and make their recommendations that set the standards of care based on their analysis. That's not what happens. The experts who write the clinical trials rely almost entirely on the publications presenting the results of the clinical trials,
46:28 Speaker 01 which are peer-reviewed, but the peer reviewers haven't had access to the data. So we've got a system of the highest level of evidence that doctors have been trained over and over again to rely on to practice evidence-based medicine to be good doctors that has not been verified.
46:47 Lex Fridman? Do you think that data that's coming from the pharma companies, do you think there are, what level of manipulation is going on with that data? Is it at the study design level? Is it at literally there's some data that you just keep off, you know, keep out of the charts, keep out of the the aggregate analysis then you then publish? Or is it the worst case, which is just change some of the numbers?
47:20 Speaker 01 It happened. All three happened. I can't, I don't know what the denominator is. But I spent about 10 years in litigation. And for example, in Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 and the biggest drug recall in American history. The problem was that it got recalled when a study that Merck sponsored showed that Vioxx doubled the risk, more than doubled the risk of heart attacks, strokes and blood clots, serious blood clots. It got pulled then. But there was a study that, a bigger study that had been published in 2000 in the New
47:59 Speaker 01 England Journal of Medicine that showed that Vioxx was a better drug for arthritis and pain, not because it was more effective, it's no more effective than a leave or Advil, but because it was less likely to cause serious GI complications, bleeds and perforations in the gut. Now, in that study that was published in the New England Journal, that was never corrected, it was a little bit modified 15 months after the drug was taken off the market, but never corrected. Merck left out three heart attacks. And the FDA knew that Merck left out three heart attacks.
48:42 Speaker 01 And the FDA's analysis of the data from that study said that they weren't gonna, the FDA wasn't gonna do the analysis without the three heart attacks in it. And the important part of this story is that there were 12 authors listed on that study in the New England Journal. Two were Merck employees. They knew about the three heart attacks that had been omitted. The other 10 authors, the academic authors, didn't know about it. They hadn't seen that data. So Merck just, they had an excuse. It's complicated and the FDA didn't accept it. So there's no reason to go into it. But Merck just left out the three heart attacks.
49:25 Speaker 01 And the three heart attacks, it may seem, three heart attacks in a 10,000-person study may seem like nothing, except they completely changed the statistics so that had the three heart attacks been included, the only conclusion that Merck could have made was that Vioxx significantly increased the risk of heart attack. And they abbreviated their endpoint from heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots to just heart attacks.
49:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So those are, maybe in their mind, they're also playing by the rules because of some technical excuse that you mentioned that was rejected. How can this?
49:59 Speaker 01 No, no, no, let me interrupt. No, that's not true. The study was completed. The blind was broken, meaning they looked at the data. In March of 2000, the article was published in the New England Journal in November of 2000. In March of 2000, there was an email by the head scientist that was published in the Wall Street Journal that said, the day that the data were unblinded, that it's a shame that the cardiovascular events are there, but the drug will do well and we will do well.
50:45 Lex Fridman? But removing the three heart attacks, how does that happen? Like, uh,
50:51 Lex Fridman? who has to convince themselves? Is this pure malevolence?
50:55 Speaker 01 Um, you have to be the judge of that. But the person who was in charge of the data safety monitoring board issued a letter that said they'll stop counting cardiovascular events a month before the trial is over. And they'll continue counting GI events. And that person got a contract to consult with Merck for $5,000 a day, I think for 12 days a year for one or two years. That was signed, that contract was signed within two weeks of the decision to stop counting heart attacks.
51:37 Lex Fridman? I want to understand that man or woman.
51:41 Lex Fridman? I wanna, I want, it's the, uh, I've been reading a lot about Nazi Germany and thinking a lot about the good Germans.
51:50 Lex Fridman? Because
51:52 Lex Fridman? I want to understand so that we can each encourage each other to take the small heroic actions that prevents that. Because it feels to me, removing malevolence from the table, where it's just a pure psychopathic person, that there's just a momentum created by the game, like you mentioned.
52:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
52:13 Lex Fridman? And so it takes reversing the momentum within the company, I think, requires many small acts of heroism. Not gigantic, I'm going to leave and become a whistleblower and publish a book about it. But small, quiet acts of pressuring against this. Like, what are we doing here? We're trying to help people. Is this the right thing to do? Looking in the mirror constantly asking, is this the right thing to do? I mean, that's how, that's what integrity is. Uh, acknowledging the pressures you're under and then still be able to zoom out and think, what is the right thing to do here?
52:53 Lex Fridman? But the data, hiding the data makes it too easy to live in ignorance. So like within those, inside those companies.
53:06 Lex Fridman? So your idea is that the reviewers should see the data. That's that's one step. So to even push back on that idea is. I assume you mean that data remains private except to the peer reviewers. The problem with, of course, as you probably know, is the peer review process is not perfect. You know, it's individuals. It feels like there should be a lot more eyes on the data than just the peer reviewers.
53:37 Speaker 01 Yes. This is not a hard problem to solve. When a study is completed, a clinical study report is made. And it's usually several thousand pages. And what it does is it takes the raw patient data and it tabulates it in the ways. It's supposedly and usually in the ways that the company has pre-specified. So that you then end up with a searchable, let's say, 3,000 page document. As I became more experienced as an expert in litigation, I could go through those documents pretty quickly. Quickly may mean 20 hours or 40 hours, but it doesn't mean three months of my work.
54:22 Speaker 01 And see if the companies, if the way the company has analyzed the data is consistent with the way with their statistical analysis plan and their pre-specified outcome measures. It's not hard. And I think you're right. Peer reviewers, I don't peer review clinical trials, but I peer review other kinds of articles. I have to do one on the airplane on the way home. And it's hard. I mean, we're just ordinary mortal people volunteering to.
54:52 Lex Fridman? Unpaid. The motivation is not clear.
54:55 Speaker 01 The motivation is to keep, to be a good citizen in the medical community and to be on friendly terms with the journals so that if you want to get published, there's sort of an unspoken.
55:11 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
55:12 Speaker 01 Incentive.
55:13 Lex Fridman? As a, as somebody who enjoys game theory, I feel like that motivation is good, but could be a lot better.
55:21 Speaker 01 Yes, you should get more recognition or in some way academic credit for it. It should go to your career advancement.
55:29 Lex Fridman? If it's an important paper and you recognize it's an important paper as a great peer reviewer, that this is not in that area where it's like clearly a piece of crap paper or clearly an awesome paper that doesn't have controversial aspects to it. And it's just a beautiful piece of work. Okay, those are easy. And then there is like the very difficult gray area, which may require many, many days of work on your part as a peer reviewer. So it's not, you know, it's not just a couple of hours, but really seriously reading, like some papers can take months to really understand. So if you really want to struggle, there has to be an incentive for that struggle.
56:12 Speaker 01 Yes, and billions of dollars ride on some of these studies.
56:18 Lex Fridman? And lies, right?
56:20 Speaker 01 Right.
56:20 Lex Fridman? Not to mention.
56:21 Speaker 01 Right, but it would be easy to have full-time statisticians hired by the journals or shared by the journals, who were independent of any other financial incentive, to go over these kind of methodological issues and take responsibility for the, for certifying the analyses that are done and then pass it on to the volunteer peer reviewers.
56:50 Lex Fridman? See, I believe in even in this, in the sort of capitalism or even social capital. After watching Twitter in the time of COVID and just looking at people that investigate themselves, I believe in the citizenry. People, if you give them access to the data, like these like citizen scientists arise. A lot of them on the, it's kind of funny. A lot of people are just really used to working with data. They don't know anything about medicine and they don't have actually the biases that a lot of doctors in medical and a lot of the people that read these papers, they'll just go raw into the data and look at it with like they're bored almost and they do
57:33 Lex Fridman? incredible analysis. So I, you know, there's some argument to be made for a lot of this data to become public, like de-anonymized, no, sorry, anonymized, all that kind of stuff, but for a lot of it to be public, especially when you're talking about things as impactful as some of these drugs.
57:53 Speaker 01 I agree 100%. So let's turn the microscope, let's get a little bit more granular.
57:58 Lex Fridman? Sure.
57:58 Speaker 01 On the peer review issue, we're talking about pre-publication transparencies and that is critically important. Once a paper is published, the horses are out of the barn and docs are going to read it, take it as evidence-based medicine. The economists call what then happens as stickiness, that the docs hold on to their beliefs. And I, my own, my own voice inside says, once doctors start doing things to their patients' bodies, they're really not too enthusiastic about hearing it was wrong.
58:32 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's the stickiness of human nature. Wow. So that, that bar, once it's published, the, the doctors, that's when the stickiness emerges. Wow.
58:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube. Now, that's pre-publication transparency, which is essential. And you could have, whoever saw that data pre-publication could sign confidentiality agreements so that the drug companies couldn't argue that we're just opening the spigots of our data and people can copy it and all the excuses they make. You could argue that you didn't have to, but let, let's just let them do it. Let the peer reviewers sign confidentiality agreements and they won't leak the data. But then you have to go to post-publication transparency, which is what you were just getting at, to let the data free and let citizens and citizen scientists
59:25 Speaker 01 and other doctors who are interested have at it. Kind of like Wiki, Wikipedia, have at it. Let it out and let people criticize each other.
59:38 Lex Fridman? Okay, so speaking of the data, the FDA asked 55 years to release Pfizer vaccine data. This is also something I raised with Albert Berla.
59:48 Speaker 01 What did he say?
59:50 Lex Fridman? There's several things I didn't like about what he said. So some things are expected and some of it is just revealing the human being, which is what I'm interested in doing. But he said he wasn't aware of the 75 and the 55.
1:00:04 Speaker 01 I'm sorry, wait a minute. He wasn't aware of?
1:00:07 Lex Fridman? The how long? So here, I'll explain what.
1:00:10 Speaker 01 Do you, do you know that since you spoke to him, Pfizer has petitioned the judge to join the suit in behalf of the FDA's request to release that data over 55 or 75 years? Pfizer's fully aware of what's going on.
1:00:28 Lex Fridman? He's aware. I'm, I'm sure he's aware in some formulation, the exact years, he might have not been aware. But, but the point is that there is.
1:00:39 Lex Fridman? That is the FDA, the relationship with Pfizer and the FDA. In terms of me being able to read human beings was the thing he was most uncomfortable with. That he didn't want to talk about the FDA. And that, that relate, it was clear that there was a relationship there. That if, if the words you use may do a lot of harm, potentially because like you're saying, there might be lawsuits going on, there's litigation, there's legal stuff, all that kind of stuff. And then there's a lot of games being played in this space. So I don't know how to interpret it, if he's actually aware or not, but the, the deeper truth is that he's deeply uncomfortable.
1:01:26 Lex Fridman? Bringing light to this part of the game.
1:01:29 Speaker 01 Yes, and I'm gonna read between the lines and Albert Borla certainly didn't ask me to speak for him, but I think, but when did you speak to him? How long ago?
1:01:40 Lex Fridman? Wow, time flies when you're having fun. Two months ago.
1:01:43 Speaker 01 Two months ago. So that was just recently, it's come out, just in the past week, it's come out that Pfizer isn't battling the FDA. Pfizer has joined the FDA in the opposition to the request to release these, these documents in the same amount of time that the FDA took to evaluate them.
1:02:09 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:02:10 Speaker 01 So Pfizer is offering to help the FDA to petition the judge
1:02:24 Lex Fridman? Right.
1:02:25 Speaker 01 to not enforce the timeline that he seems to be moving towards.
1:02:30 Lex Fridman? So for people who are not familiar, we're talking about the Freedom of Information Act request to release the Pfizer vaccine data, study data, to release as much of the data as possible, like the raw data, the details, or actually not even the raw data, it's data, doesn't matter, there's details to it. And I think the response from the FDA is that, of cour- yes, of course, but, you know, we can only publish like some X number of pages a day.
1:03:06 Speaker 01 500 pages.
1:03:07 Lex Fridman? 500 pages of data.
1:03:09 Speaker 01 It's not a day, though. It's a
1:03:11 Lex Fridman? Whatever.
1:03:12 Speaker 01 A week, I think.
1:03:13 Lex Fridman? The point is, whatever they're able to publish is ridiculous. It's like, my printer can only print three pages a day, and we cannot afford a second printer. So it's, it's some kind of bureaucratic language for, you know, there's a process to this. You know, and now you're saying that Pfizer is obviously more engaged in helping this kind of bureaucratic process prosper in its full absurdity, Kafkaesque absurdity. So what is this? This really bothered people. This really
1:03:51 Speaker 01 This is really troublesome. And just to put it in just plain English terms.
1:03:57 Speaker 01 Pfizer's making the case that it can't. Pfizer, the FDA and Pfizer together are making the case that they can't go through the documents. It's going to take them some number of hundredfold, hundreds of folds more time to go through the documents than the FDA required to go through the documents to approve the vaccines, to give the vaccines full FDA approval. And the FDA's argument, talk about Kafkaesque, is that to do it more rapidly would cost them $3 million. $3 million equals one hour of vaccine sales over two years. One hour of sales. And they can't come up with the money.
1:04:42 Speaker 01 And now Pfizer has joined the suit to help the FDA fight off this judge, this mean judge who thinks they ought to release the data. But evidently Pfizer isn't offering to come up with the $3 million either. So, but for $3 million, I mean, maybe, maybe the FDA should do a GoFundMe campaign.
1:05:01 Lex Fridman? Well, obviously, the money thing. I mean, I'm sure if Elon Musk comes along and says, I'll give you 100 million, publish it now, I think they'll come up with another. So, I mean, that, there, it's clear that there is cautiousness. I don't know the source of it from the FDA.
1:05:23 Speaker 01 Well, there's only one explanation that I can think of, which is that the FDA and Pfizer don't want to release the data. They don't want to release the 300,000 or 500,000 pages of documents. And I don't know what's in there. I'm, I want to say one thing very clearly. I am not an anti-vaxxer. I believe the vaccines work. I believe everybody should get vaccinated. The evidence is clear that if you're vaccinated, you reduce your risk of dying of COVID by 20-fold. And we've got new sub-variants coming along, and I just want to be very clear about this. That said, there's something I would.
1:06:08 Speaker 01 Give you 10 to 1 odds on a bet that there's something in that data that is going to be embarrassing to either FDA or Pfizer or both.
1:06:17 Lex Fridman? So there's two options. I agree with you 100%. One is they know of embarrassing things. That's option one. And option two, they haven't invested enough to truly understand the data. Like, I mean, it's a lot of data that they have a sense there might be something embarrassing in there. And if we release it, surely the world will discover the embarrassing. And to do a sort of the steel man their argument, they'll take the small, the press, the people will take the small embarrassing things and blow them up into big things.
1:06:53 Speaker 01 Yes, and support the anti-vax campaign.
1:06:56 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:06:57 Speaker 01 I think that's all possible. Nonetheless, the data are about the original clinical trial. And the emergency use authorization was based on the first few months of the data from that trial. And it was a two-year trial. The rest of that data has not been opened up. And there was not an advisory committee meeting to look at that data when the FDA granted full authorization. Again, I am pro-vaccine. I am not making an anti-vax argument here. But I suspect that there's something pretty serious in that data. And the reason why I'm not an anti-vaxer, having not been able to see the data
1:07:40 Speaker 01 that the FDA and Pfizer seem to willing not just to put effort into preventing the release of, but seem to have quite a bit of energy into preventing, invest quite a bit of energy in not releasing that data. The reason why that doesn't tip me over into the anti-vaxicide is because that's clinical trial data, early clinical trial data that involved several thousand people. We now have millions of data points from people who have had the vaccine. This is real world data showing the efficacy of the vaccines. And so far, knock on wood, there aren't side effects that overcome the benefits of vaccine.
1:08:21 Lex Fridman? So I'm with you. I'm now, I guess, three shots of the vaccine.
1:08:29 Lex Fridman? But there's a lot of people that are kind of saying, well, even the data on the real, the real world use, large scale data has, um, has, is messy. The way it's being reported, the way it's being interpreted. Well, one thing is clear to me that it is being politicized. That it's, I mean, if you just look objectively, don't have to go to, at the shallow surface level, it seems like there's two groups that, I can't even put a term to it, uh, because it's not really pro vaccine versus anti vaccine, cause it's, it's, it's pro vaccine, triple
1:09:12 Lex Fridman? mask, Democrat, liberal, and then anti mandate, whatever, whatever those groups are, I can't quite, cause they're changing, anti mask, but not really, but kind of. So those two groups that feel political in nature, not scientific in nature, is they're bickering. And then it's clear that this data is being interpreted by the different groups differently. It's very difficult for me as a human being to understand where the truth lies, especially given how much money is flying around on all sides. So the anti vaxers can make a lot of money, too.
1:09:56 Lex Fridman? Let's not forget this, from the individual perspective, you can become famous being an anti vaxer. And so there's a lot of incentives on all sides here. And, and, and there's real human emotion and fear and also credibility, you know,
1:10:14 Lex Fridman? scientists don't want to ruin their reputation if they, if they speak out in whatever, like speak their opinion, or, um, they look at some slice of the data and begin to interpret it in some kind of way, they're very, it's clear that fear is dominating the discourse here, especially in the scientific community. So I, I don't know what to make of that.
1:10:38 Lex Fridman? And the only happy people here is Pfizer. It's just plowing all ahead. I mean, uh, uh, you know, with every single variant, there's X, you know, there's very, I would say, outside of.
1:10:56 Lex Fridman? Arguably, a very flawed system. There's a lot of incredible scientific and engineering work being done in constantly developing new like antiviral drugs, new vaccines to deal with the variants. So they're happily being a capitalist machine. And it's very difficult to know what to do with that.
1:11:19 Speaker 01 And let's just put this in perspective for folks. The best selling drug in the world has been Humira for a number of years. It's approved for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and eight other indications. And it's sold about $20 billion globally over the past few years. It leveled out, it peaked at that level. Pfizer expects to sell $65 billion of vaccine in the first two years of the pandemic. So this is by far the biggest selling and most profitable drug that's ever come along.
1:12:01 Lex Fridman? Can I ask you a difficult question here? In the fog that we're operating in here, on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, what was done well and what was done badly that you can see now? It seems like we'll know more decades from now.
1:12:26 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:12:28 Lex Fridman? But now, in the fog of today, with the $65 billion flying around, where do you land?
1:12:39 Speaker 01 So we're going to get to what I think is one of the key problems with the pharmaceutical industry model in the United States about being profit driven.
1:12:53 Speaker 01 So in 2016, the NIH did the key infrastructure work to make mRNA vaccines. That gets left out of the discussion a lot. And Pfizer, BioNTech actually paid royalties voluntarily to the NIH. I don't know how much it was. I don't think it was a whole lot of money, but I think they wanted to avoid the litigation that Moderna got itself into by just taking that 2016 knowledge and having that be the foundation of their product. So Pfizer took that and they did their R and D, they paid for their R and D, having received that technology.
1:13:35 Speaker 01 And when they got the genetic code from China about the vaccine, about the virus, they very quickly made a vaccine and the vaccine works. And President Trump, to his credit, launched Operation Warp Speed and just threw money at the problem. They just said, we spent five times more per person than the EU early on. Just pay them whatever they want. Let's just get this going. And Americans were vaccinated more quickly. We paid a lot of money. The one mistake that I think the federal government made was they were paying these
1:14:15 Speaker 01 guaranteed fortunes and they didn't require that the companies participate in a program to do global vaccinations. So the companies, doing their business model, distributed the vaccines where they would make the most money. And obviously, they would make the most money in the first world. And almost, I think, 85% of the vaccines early on went to the first world. And very, very few vaccinations went to the third world. So what happened is, there was such a low vaccination rate, in May of 2021, there was
1:14:56 Speaker 01 an all-hands-on-deck cry for help from the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the IMF, and the World Bank made a plea for $50 billion so that we could get to 40% vaccination rate in the third world by the end of 2021.
1:15:21 Speaker 01 And it was unrequited. Nobody answered. And now Africa has about a 8.9% vaccination rate. India is coming up, but it's been very low. The problem with all this is I believe those mRNA vaccines are excellent vaccines. But if we leave the third world unvaccinated, we're going to have a constant supply of variants of COVID that are going to come back into the United States and harm Americans exactly like Delta and Omicron have. So we've made a great drug. It reduces the risk of mortality in Americans who get it by a lot.
1:16:05 Speaker 01 But we're not doing what we need to do to protect Americans from Omicron. You don't have to be an idealist and worry about global vaccine equity. If you're just ordinary selfish people like most of us are, and you're worried about the health of Americans, you would ensure global vaccine distribution. Let me just make one more point. That $50 billion that was requested by the four organizations back in May of 2021, 32 billionaires made $50 billion from the vaccines at that point, took it into their private wealth. So what had been taken, these enormous amounts of money that had been taken into private wealth was enough to do what those organizations said needed to be done
1:16:49 Speaker 01 to prevent the sub-variants from coming back and doing what they're doing.
1:16:53 Lex Fridman? The money was there. But how does the motivation, the money-driven motivation of Big Pharma lead to that, um, that, that kind of allocation of vaccines?
1:17:05 Speaker 01 Because they can make-
1:17:06 Lex Fridman? More money in the United States?
1:17:08 Speaker 01 They're going to distribute their vaccines where they can make the most money.
1:17:11 Lex Fridman? Right. Is there a malevolent aspect to this? Where, boy, I, I don't like saying this, but-
1:17:23 Lex Fridman? That they don't see it as a huge problem that variants will come back to the United States.
1:17:29 Speaker 01 I think it's the issue we were talking about earlier on, where they're in a different culture, and their culture is that their moral obligation, as Milton Friedman would say, is to maximize the profits that they return to shareholders.
1:17:44 Lex Fridman? And don't think about the bigger picture.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 The collateral damage. Don't think about the collateral.
1:17:49 Lex Fridman? And also kind of believe, convince yourself that if we give into this capitalist machine in this very narrow sense of capitalism, that in the end they'll do the most good. This kind of belief that like, if we just maximize profits, we'll do the most good.
1:18:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's an orthodoxy of several decades ago, and I don't think people can really say that in good faith. When you're talking about vaccinating the third world so we don't get hurt, it's a little bit hard to make the argument that the world's a better place because the profits of the investors went up.
1:18:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but at the same time, it's, I think that's a belief you can hold. I mean, I've interacted with a bunch of folks that kind of, it's the, I don't want to mischaracterize Ayn Rand, okay? I respect a lot of people, but there's, it's a belief that can take hold. If I just focus on this particular maximization, it will do the most good for the world. The problem is, when you choose what to maximize and you put blinders on, it's too easy to start making gigantic mistakes that have a big negative impact on society. So it really matters what you're maximizing.
1:19:07 Speaker 01 Right. And if we had a true democracy, and everybody had one vote, everybody got decent information and had one vote, Ayn Rand's position would get some votes, but not many, and it would be way outvoted by the common people.
1:19:25 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you about this very...
1:19:29 Lex Fridman? Difficult topic. I'm talking to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. The topic of censorship. I don't know if you've heard, but there's a guy named Robert Malone and Peter McCullough that were removed from many platforms for speaking about the COVID vaccine as being risky. They were both on Joe Rogan's program. What do you think about censorship in this space? In this difficult space where so much is controlled by, not controlled, but influenced by advertisements from Big Pharma?
1:20:11 Lex Fridman? And science can even be influenced by Big Pharma. Where do you lean on this? Should we allow, should we lean towards freedom and just allow all the voices, even those that go against the scientific consensus? Is that one way to fight the, the science that is funded by Big Pharma? Or is that do more harm than good, having too many voices that are contending here? Should the ultimate battle be fought in the space of scientific publications?
1:20:51 Speaker 01 And particularly in the era of COVID, where there are large public health ramifications to the, this public discourse, the ante is way up. So I don't have a simple answer to that. I think everyone's allowed their own opinion. I don't think everyone's allowed their own scientific facts. And how we develop a mechanism that's other than an open internet where whoever is shouting the loudest gets the most clicks and rage creates value on the internet? I think that's not a good mechanism for working this out.
1:21:35 Speaker 01 And I don't think we have one. I don't have a solution to this. I mean, ideally, if we had a philosopher king, we could have a panel of people who were not conflicted by rigid opinions.
1:21:50 Speaker 01 Decide on what the boundaries of public discourse might be. I don't think it should be fully open. I don't think people who are making, who are committed to an anti-vaccine position and will tailor their interpretation of complex scientific data to support their opinion. I think that can be harmful. Constraining their speech can be harmful as well. So I don't have an answer here, but yeah.
1:22:18 Lex Fridman? I tend to believe that it's more dangerous to censor anti-vax messages. The way to defeat anti-vax messages is by being great communicators, by being great scientific communicators. So it's not that we need to censor the things we don't like. We need to be better at communicating the things we do like or the things that we do believe represent the, a deep scientific truth. Because I think if you censor, you get worse at doing science and you give the wrong people
1:23:00 Lex Fridman? power. So I, I tend to believe that you should give power to the individual scientists and also give them the responsibility of being better educators, communicators, expressers of scientific ideas, put pressure on them to release data, to release that data in a way that's easily consumable, not just like very difficult to understand, but in a way that can be understood by a large number of people. So the battle should be fought in the open space of ideas versus in, in the quiet space of journals. I think we no longer have that comfort, especially at the highest of stakes.
1:23:45 Lex Fridman? So this kind of idea that a couple of peer reviewers decide the fate of billions is, is, doesn't seem to be sustainable, especially given a very real observation now that.
1:24:03 Lex Fridman? That the reason Robert Malone has a large following is there's a deep distrust of institutions, deep distrust of scientists, of science as an institution, of power centers, of companies, of everything, and perhaps rightly so. But the way to defend against that is not for the powerful to build a bigger wall. It's for the powerful to be authentic and maybe a lot of them to get fired and for new minds, for new, fresh scientists, ones who are more authentic, more real, better communicators to step up. So I fear censorship because
1:24:44 Lex Fridman? it feels like censorship is an even harder job to do it well than being good communicators. And it seems like it's always the C students that end up doing the censorship. It's like, it's always the incompetent people, and not just the incompetent, but the biggest whiners. So like, what happens is the people that get the most emotional, the most outraged, will drive the censorship. And it doesn't seem like reason drives the censorship. That's just objectively observing how censorship seems to work in this current. So there's so many forms of censorship. You know, you look at the Soviet Union, or the propaganda,
1:25:29 Lex Fridman? or Nazi Germany, it's a very different level of censorship. People, people tend to conflate all of these things together. You know, social media trying desperately to have trillions or hundreds of billions of exchanges a day and like, try to make sure that their platform is, has some semblance of like, quote, "healthy conversations." Like, people just don't go insane. They actually like using the platform. And they censor based on that. That's a different level of censorship. But even there, you can really run afoul of the people that get the whiny C students controlling too much of the censorship. I believe that you should,
1:26:13 Lex Fridman? you should actually put the responsibility on the self-proclaimed holders of truth, AKA scientists, at being better communicators.
1:26:23 Speaker 01 I agree with that. I'm not advocating for any kind of censorship. But Marshall McLuhan was very influential when I was in college. And his, that meme, "The medium is the message." It's a little bit hard to understand when you're comparing radio to TV and saying, "Radio's hotter," or "TV's hotter," or something. But we now have "The medium is the message" in a way that we've never seen, we've never imagined before, where rage and anger and polarization are what drives the traffic on the internet.
1:27:04 Speaker 01 And we don't, it's a question of building the commons. Ideally, I don't know how to get there, so I'm not pretending to have a solution. But the commons of discourse about this particular issue, about vaccines, is, has been largely destroyed by the edges, by the drug companies and the advocates on the one side, and the people who just criticize and think that, even though the data are flawed, that there's no way vaccines can be beneficial. And to have those people screaming at each other does nothing to improve the health of the 95% of the people in the middle
1:27:47 Speaker 01 who want to know what the rational way to go forward is, and protect their families from COVID, and live a good life, and be able to participate in the economy. And that's the problem. I don't have a solution.
1:28:03 Lex Fridman? Well, there's a difficult problem for Spotify and YouTube. I don't know if you heard, this is a thing that Joe Rogan is currently going through, as a platform, whether to censor the conversation that, for example, Joe's having. So I don't know if you heard, but Neil Young and other musicians have kind of spoke out and saying they're going to leave the platform because Joe Rogan is allowed to be on this platform, having these kinds of conversations with the likes of Robert Malone.
1:28:31 Lex Fridman? And it's clear to me that Spotify and YouTube are being significantly influenced by these extreme voices like you mentioned on each side. And it's also clear to me that Facebook is the same. And there was going back and forth. In fact, that's why Facebook has been oscillating on the censorship is like one group gets louder than the other, depending on whether it's an election year.
1:28:55 Lex Fridman? It, uh, there's several things to say here. So one, it does seem, I think you put it really well. It would be amazing if these platforms could find mechanisms to listen to the center, to the, um, to the big center that's actually going to be affected by the results of the, uh, our pursuit of scientific truth. Right? Um, and listen to those voices. I also believe that most people are intelligent enough to process information and to make up their own minds. Like they're not in terms of, um, this, it's complicated, of course, because we've just been talking about advertisement and how people can be influenced. But I feel
1:29:36 Lex Fridman? like if you have raw, long form podcasts or programs where people express their mind and express their argument in full, I think people can hear it and make up their own mind. And if those arguments have a platform on which they can live, then other people could provide better arguments if they disagree with it. And now we as human beings, as rational, as intelligent human beings can look at both and make up our own minds. And that's where social media can be very good at like this collective intelligence. We together listen to all of these voices and make up our own mind, humble ourselves actually often. You
1:30:19 Lex Fridman? know, you think you know, like you're an expert, say you have a PhD in a certain thing. So there's this confidence that comes with that. And the collective intelligence, uncensored, allows you to humble yourself eventually. Like, uh, as you discover, you know, all it takes is a few times, you know, looking back, uh, five years later, realizing I was wrong. And that's really healthy for a scientist. That's really healthy for anybody to go through. And only through having that open discourse, can you, can you, can you really have that? That said, Spotify also, just like Pfizer as a company.
1:30:59 Lex Fridman? Which is why this podcast, I don't know if you know what RSS feeds are, but podcasts can't be censored. So Joe's in the unfortunate position, he only lives on Spotify. So Spotify has been actually very good at saying, we're staying out of it for now. But RSS, this is pirate radio. Nobody can censor it. It's the internet. So financially, in terms of platforms, this cannot be censored, which is why podcasts are really beautiful. And so if Spotify or YouTube
1:31:36 Lex Fridman? wants to be the host of podcasts, I think where they flourish is free expression, no matter how crazy.
1:31:49 Speaker 01 Yes, but I do want to push back a little bit on what you're saying. Because I have Antifax friends who I love, and they're dear cherished friends. And they'll send me stuff. And it'll take me an hour to go through what they sent to see if it is credible. And usually it's not. It's not a random sample of the anti-vax argument. I'm not saying I can disprove the anti-vax argument. But I am saying that it's almost like, we were talking about how medical science, clinical trials, the presentation of clinical trials to physicians could be improved.
1:32:34 Speaker 01 And the first thing we came up with is to have pre-publication transparency in the peer review process.
1:32:42 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:32:42 Speaker 01 So bad information, biased information doesn't get out as if it's legitimate. And you can't put it back, recapture it, once it gets out. I think there's an element of that in the arguments that are going on about vaccines. And they're on both sides, but I think the anti-vax side puts out more units of information claiming to show that the vaccines don't work. And I guess in an ideal situation, there would be real time fact checking by independent people, not to censor it, but to just say that study was set up to do this and this is what the conclusions were.
1:33:24 Speaker 01 So the way it was stated is on one side of this argument.
1:33:29 Lex Fridman? But that's what I'm arguing. Yeah, I agree with you. What I'm arguing is that this big network of humans that we have, that is the collective intelligence, can't do that real time if you allow it to, if you encourage people to do it. And the scientists, as opposed to, listen, I interact with a lot of colleagues, a lot of friends that are scientists, they roll their eyes. Their response is like, ugh, like they don't want to interact with this. But that's just not the right response. When a huge number of people believe this, it is your job as communicators to defend your ideas. It is no longer the case that you go to a conference and defend your ideas to two other
1:34:12 Lex Fridman? nerds that have been working on the same problem forever. I mean, sure, you can do that, but then you're rejecting the responsibility you have explicitly or implicitly accepted when you go into this field, that you will defend the ideas of truth. And the way to defend them is in the open battlefield of ideas and to become a better communicator. And I believe that when you have a large, you said you invested one or two hours in this particular, but that's little ants interacting at scale. I think that allows us to progress.
1:34:48 Lex Fridman? Towards truth, at least, you know, at least I hope so.
1:34:51 Speaker 01 I, I think you're an optimist. I, I want to work with you a little bit on this. Let's say, um, a person like Joe Rogan, who, by the way, had me on his podcast and let me-
1:35:02 Lex Fridman? It was an amazing conversation. I really enjoyed it.
1:35:04 Speaker 01 Well, thank you. I did too. And I didn't know Joe. I didn't know much about his podcast.
1:35:09 Lex Fridman? And you pushed back on Joe a bunch, which is great.
1:35:12 Speaker 01 And he was-
1:35:12 Lex Fridman? I love it.
1:35:13 Speaker 01 He was a gentleman and we had it out. In fact, he put one clip, at one point, he said something that was a little bit wrong and I corrected him. And he had the guy, uh-
1:35:23 Lex Fridman? Jamie.
1:35:23 Speaker 01 Jamie. He had Jamie check it and was very forthright in saying, yeah, you know, John's got a right here. You know, we got to modify this. In any event, in any event.
1:35:33 Lex Fridman? You got him.
1:35:34 Speaker 01 Well, I, I wasn't trying to get him. I was just trying to get him.
1:35:38 Lex Fridman? You're totally, it was, it was a beautiful exchange. There was so much respect in the room, pushing back and forth. That was great.
1:35:43 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I respect him and I think when he has somebody on who's a dyed-in-the-wool anti-vaxxer, the question is, how can you balance, if it needs balance, in real time? I'm not talking about afterwards. I'm talking in real time. Maybe you record, well, he does record it, obviously. But maybe when there's a statement made that is made as if it's fact-based, maybe that statement should be checked by some folks who, imaginary folks who are trustworthy.
1:36:24 Speaker 01 And in real time, as that discussion is being played on the podcast, to show what independent experts say about that claim.
1:36:35 Lex Fridman? That's a really interesting idea. By the way, this, for some reason, this idea popped into my head now is, I think real time is very difficult and it, it's not difficult, but it kind of ruins the conversation because you want the idea to breathe.
1:36:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:36:48 Lex Fridman? I think what's very possible is before it's published, it's the pre-publication. Before it's published, you let a bunch of people review it and they can add their voices in post, before it's published. They can add arguments, you know, that what they, you know, arguments against certain parts. That's very interesting to sort of, as one podcast, publish like addendums, publish the peer review together with the publication. Yes. That's very interesting. I might actually do that. That's really interesting because I've been doing more debates where at the same time have multiple people, which has a different dynamic because both people, I mean, it's
1:37:33 Lex Fridman? really nice to have the time to pause just on you by yourself to fact check, to look at the study that was mentioned, to understand what's going on. So the peer review process, to have a little bit of time. That's really interesting. You're sure would, I'd like to try that. To agree with you on some point in terms of anti-vax. I've been fascinated by listening to arguments from this community of folks that's been quite large called Flat Earthers, the people that believe the earth is flat. And I don't know if you've ever listened to them or read their arguments, but it's fascinating how consistent and convincing it all sounds when you just kind of take it in, just like,
1:38:17 Lex Fridman? just take it in like listening normally. It's all very logical. Like if you don't think very, well, no. So the thing is, the reality is, at the very basic human level with our limited cognitive capabilities, the earth is pretty flat. When you go outside and you look, it's flat. So like when you use common sense reasoning, it's very easy to play to that, to convince you that the earth is flat. Plus this powerful organization that want to manipulate you and so on.
1:38:54 Lex Fridman? But then there's, you know, the whole progress of science and physics of the past. But that's difficult to integrate into your thought process. So it's very true that the people should listen to Flat Earthers because it was very revealing to me how easily it is, how easy it is to be convinced of basically anything by charismatic arguments.
1:39:19 Speaker 01 Right. And if we're arguing about whether the flat Earth is flat or not, as long as we're not navigating airplanes and doing other kinds of things, trying to get satellites to do transmission, it's not that important what we believe. But if we're arguing about how we approach the worst public health crisis in I don't know how long, I think we're getting worse than the Spanish flu now. I don't know what the total global deaths with Spanish flu were, but in the United States, we certainly have more deaths than we had from Spanish flu.
1:39:49 Lex Fridman? Plus the economic pain and suffering.
1:39:51 Speaker 01 Yes, yes. And the damage to the kids in school and stuff. We got a problem and it's not going away, unfortunately. So when we get a problem like that, it's not just an interesting barroom conversation about whether the Earth is flat. There are millions of lives involved.
1:40:11 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you yet another question, an issue I raised with Pfizer CEO Albert Burla.
1:40:18 Lex Fridman? It's the question of revolving doors, that there seems to be a revolving door between Pfizer, FDA and CDC. People that have worked at the FDA now work at Pfizer and vice versa, including the CDC and so on.
1:40:37 Lex Fridman? What do you think about that? So first of all, his response once again is there's rules, there's very strict rules and we follow them. Do you think that's a problem?
1:40:47 Speaker 01 Hoo-ha.
1:40:49 Lex Fridman? And also, maybe this is a good time to talk about this Pfizer play by the rules.
1:40:55 Speaker 01 Let's, one at a time.
1:40:57 Lex Fridman? One at a time.
1:40:57 Speaker 01 Okay, and this isn't even about Pfizer, but it's an answer to the question.
1:41:01 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:41:01 Speaker 01 So, there's this drug, Aduhelm, that was approved by the FDA, uh, maybe six months ago. It's a drug, uh, to prevent the progression of low-grade Alzheimer's disease.
1:41:15 Speaker 01 Um, the target for, uh, drug development for Alzheimer's disease has been the amyloid, reducing the amyloid plaques in the brain, which correlate with the progression of Alzheimer's. And Biogen showed that its drug, Aduhelm, reduces amyloid plaques in the brain. They did two clinical trials to determine the clinical efficacy, and they found that neither trial showed a meaningful benefit. And in those two trials, thirty-three percent more people in the Aduhelm group develop symptomatic brain swelling and bleeding than people in the placebo group.
1:41:58 Speaker 01 There was an advisory committee convened, uh, to debate the, and determine how they felt about the approvability of Aduhelm, given those facts. And those facts aren't in dispute, they're in Biogen slides, uh, as well as FDA documents. The advisory committee voted ten against approval and one abstain. So that's essentially universal, uh, unanimous vote against approving Aduhelm. Now, the advisory committees have been pretty much cleansed of financial conflicts of interest.
1:42:40 Speaker 01 So this advisory committee votes ten, no, one abstention.
1:42:46 Speaker 01 And the FDA overrules the unanimous opinion of its advisory committee and approves the drug.
1:42:54 Speaker 01 Three of the members of the advisory committee resign. They say, we're not going to be part, if the FDA is not going to listen to a unanimous vote against approving this drug, which shows more harm than benefit, undisputed, we're not going to participate in this. And the argument against approval is that the surrogate endpoint, the reduction of amyloid, the progression of amyloid plaques, is known by the FDA not to be a valid clinical indicator. It doesn't correlate, 27 studies have shown, it doesn't correlate with clinical progression. Interrupting the amyloid plaques doesn't mean that your, that your Alzheimer's doesn't get worse.
1:43:38 Speaker 01 So it seems like it's a slam dunk and the FDA made a mistake and they should do whatever they do to protect their bureaucratic reputation. So the head of the Bureau of the FDA, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research that approves new drugs, who had spent 16 years as an executive in the pharmaceutical industry, issued a statement and said, what we should do in this situation is to loosen the prohibition of financial ties of interest with the drug companies, so we get less emotional responses.
1:44:17 Speaker 01 Said this, it's in print.
1:44:26 Lex Fridman? People are just too emotional about this.
1:44:28 Speaker 01 People were just too emotional, the 10 people who voted against it and the no people who voted for it, it's all too emotional. So this gets back, this is a long answer to your short question. I think this is a wonderful window into the thinking of the FDA, that financial conflicts of interest don't matter, in a situation when I think it's obvious that they would matter.
1:44:51 Lex Fridman? But there's not a direct financial conflict of interest. It's kind of, like, it's not, like, like, like Albert said, there's rules. I mean, you're not allowed to have direct financial conflicts of interest. It's, it's indirect.
1:45:08 Speaker 01 Right, but what I'm saying is, I'm not denying what he said is true. But the FDA, a high official in the FDA, is saying that we need to allow conflicts of interest in our advisory committee meetings.
1:45:25 Lex Fridman? Ah.
1:45:26 Speaker 01 And that, she wants to change the rules.
1:45:30 Lex Fridman? Right.
1:45:30 Speaker 01 So Albert Borla would still be playing by the rules, but it just shows how one-sided the thinking here is.
1:45:40 Lex Fridman? But you think that's influenced by the fact that there were pharmaceutical executives working at the FDA and vice versa?
1:45:46 Speaker 01 And they think that's a great idea.
1:45:49 Lex Fridman? Who gets to fix this? Do you think it should be just banned?
1:45:53 Speaker 01 I don't know. Two separate questions.
1:45:55 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:45:55 Speaker 01 One is, should the officials at the FDA come from pharma?
1:46:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:46:00 Speaker 01 And vice versa?
1:46:01 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:46:01 Speaker 01 That's one question. And the other question is, should advisory committee members be allowed to have financial conflicts of interest?
1:46:08 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:46:09 Speaker 01 I think, in my opinion, and people might say I'm biased, I think advisory committee people should not have conflicts of interest. I think their only interest ought to be the public interest. And that was true, from my understanding of the situation, it's the afterward in my book, I spent some time studying it about ADEHelm, I think it's a slam dunk that there ought to be no conflicts of interest. Now, the head of CEDR, Center for Drug Evaluation Research, thinks that that's going to give you a biased result because we don't have company influence. And that, I think, shows how biased their thinking is.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 That not having company influence is a bias.
1:46:55 Lex Fridman? Let me try to load that in. I'm trying to empathize with the belief that companies should have a voice at the table.
1:47:05 Lex Fridman? I mean, yeah, it's part of the game. They've convinced themselves that this is how it should be played.
1:47:10 Speaker 01 And but they have a voice at the table. They've designed the studies.
1:47:14 Lex Fridman? Right. That's their voice.
1:47:16 Speaker 01 They analyze the data. I mean, what bigger voice do you deserve?
1:47:19 Lex Fridman? But I do also think on the on the more challenging question, I do think that there should be a ban. If you work at a pharmaceutical company, you should not be allowed to work at any
1:47:34 Lex Fridman? regulatory agency.
1:47:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:47:38 Lex Fridman? You should not. I mean, that going back and forth is just even if it's 30 years later.
1:47:43 Speaker 01 I agree, and I have another nomination for a ban. We're in this crazy situation where Medicare is not allowed to negotiate the price of drugs with the drug companies. So the drug companies get a patent on a new drug. Unlike every other developed country, they can charge whatever they want. So they have a monopoly on a utility because no one else can make the drug. Charge whatever they want and Medicare has to pay for it. And you say, how did we get in this crazy situation? So how we got here is that in 2003, when Medicare Part D was passed, Billy Taushen was head of the Ways and Means Committee in the House, played a key role in ushering this through with the non-negotiation clause of it.
1:48:29 Speaker 01 And after it was passed, Billy Taushen did not finish out his term in Congress. He went to pharma for a $2 million a year job.
1:48:38 Lex Fridman? This is this is incredible.
1:48:41 Speaker 01 You might think that a ban on that would be a good idea.
1:48:46 Lex Fridman? I spoke with Francis Collins, head of the NIH on this podcast. He and NIH have a lot of power over funding in science.
1:48:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:48:58 Lex Fridman? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? In this interplay with big pharma? How connected are they? Again, returning to the question, what are they doing right? What are they doing wrong in your view?
1:49:13 Speaker 01 Yeah. So my knowledge of the NIH is not as granular as my knowledge of pharma. That said, in broad brushstrokes, the NIH is doing the infrastructure work for all drug development. I think they've participated in 100% of the drugs that have been approved by the FDA over the past 10 years or so. They've done infrastructure work. And what they do is not work on particular drugs, but they develop work on drug targets, on targets in the human body that can be affected by drugs and might be beneficial to turn on or off.
1:49:58 Speaker 01 And then the drug companies can, when they find a target that is mutable and potentially beneficial, then the drug companies can take the research and choose to invest in the development of the drugs, specific drug. That's our model. Now, 96% of the research that's done in clinical trials in the United States is about drugs and devices. And only a fraction of the 4% that's left over is about preventive medicine and how to make Americans healthier. I think, again, from the satellite view, the NIH is investing
1:50:39 Speaker 01 more in science that can lead to commercial development, rather than, as you said at the beginning of the podcast, there's no big fitness and lifestyle industry that can counter pharma. So I think at the NIH level, that countering can be done. And the Diabetes Prevention Program study that we talked about before, where lifestyle was part of a randomized trial and was shown to be more effective than metformin at preventing the development of diabetes, that is absolute proof positive that investing in that kind of science can produce good results. So I think that we're aimed at drug development.
1:51:19 Speaker 01 And what we ought to be aimed at is an epidemiological approach to improving the health of all Americans. We rank 68th in the world in healthy life expectancy, despite spending an extra trillion and a half dollars a year. And I believe strongly that the reason why we've gotten in this crazy position is because the knowledge that we're producing is about new drugs and devices, and it's not about improving population health. In this problem, the NIH is the perfect institution to play a role in rebalancing our research agenda.
1:51:59 Lex Fridman? And some of that is on the leadership side with Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, not just speaking about basically everything that just leads to drug development, vaccine development, but also speaking about healthy lifestyles and speaking about health, not just sickness.
1:52:17 Speaker 01 Yes, and investing, investing in health.
1:52:19 Lex Fridman? I mean, it's like, it one feeds the other. One, you have to communicate to the public the importance of investing in health, and that leads to you getting props for investing in health, and then you can invest in health more and more. And that communicates, I mean, everything that Anthony Fauci says or Francis Collins says has an impact on scientists. I mean, you know, it sets the priorities. I don't think they, it's the sad thing about leaders, forgive me for saying the word, but mediocre leaders, is they don't see themselves
1:53:00 Lex Fridman? as part of a game. They, they don't see the momentum. It's like a fish in the water. They don't see the water. Great leaders stand up and reverse the direction of how things are going. And I actually put a lot of responsibility, some people say too much, but whatever, I think leaders carry the responsibility. I put a lot of responsibility on Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins for not actually speaking a lot more about health, not, not and bigger, inspiring people.
1:53:35 Lex Fridman? In the power and the trustworthiness of science. You know, that that's on the shoulders of Anthony Fauci.
1:53:48 Speaker 01 I'm going to abstain from that because I'm not expert enough, but.
1:53:52 Lex Fridman? Neither am I, but I'm opinionated.
1:53:56 Speaker 01 I am too, but not on camera.
1:53:57 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:53:59 Speaker 01 No, but seriously, the problem is pretty simple. That we're investing 96% of our clinical funding of clinical research and drugs and devices. And 80% of our health is determined by how we live our lives.
1:54:14 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:54:15 Speaker 01 And this is ridiculous. We're the United States is going further and further behind the other wealthy countries in terms of our health. We ranked 38th in healthy life expectancy in 2000. And now we're spending a trillion and a half dollars extra and we rank 68th. We've gone down.
1:54:36 Lex Fridman? You have this excellent, there's a few charts that I'll overlay that tell the story in in really powerful way. So, so one is the healthcare spending as percentage of GDP that on the X axis is years and the Y axis is percentage. And the United States as compared to other countries on average has been much larger and and growing.
1:55:03 Speaker 01 Right, we are now spending 7% more of our GDP, 17.7% versus 10.7% on healthcare. 7% and I think GDP is the fairest way to compare healthcare spending. We're per person in dollars, we're spending even the difference is even greater. But other costs vary with GDP. So let's stick with the conservative way to do it.
1:55:27 Lex Fridman? 17.7 or no 18% of GDP, 18% of GDP spent on healthcare, 7% higher than the comparable country average.
1:55:41 Speaker 01 Right.
1:55:41 Lex Fridman? 17.7% versus 10.7, 7% higher.
1:55:46 Speaker 01 Right, and 7% of $23 trillion GDP is more than $1.5 trillion a year in excess.
1:55:55 Lex Fridman? And then you have another chart that shows healthcare system performance compared to spending. And there's a cloud, a point cloud of different countries. The X axis being healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP, which we just talked about, that US is, you know, 7% higher than everyone, the average. And then on the Y axis is performance. So X axis, spending, Y axis, performance. And there's a point cloud, we'll overlay this if you're watching on YouTube, of a bunch of countries that have high performance for what they're spending.
1:56:37 Lex Fridman? And then US is all alone on the right bottom side of the chart, where it's low performance and high spending.
1:56:47 Speaker 01 Correct. So this is a system that is abiding by spending that is directed by the most profitable ways to deliver healthcare.
1:56:59 Lex Fridman? So you put that in the hands of Big Pharma. Is you maximize for profit? You're going to decrease performance and increase spending?
1:57:08 Speaker 01 Yes, but I want to qualify that and say it's not all Big Pharma's fault. They're not responsible for all the problems in our healthcare system. They're not responsible for the administrative costs, for example. But they are the largest component of the rising, our rising healthcare costs. And it has to do with this knowledge issue. Controlling the knowledge that doctors have makes it so that doctors can live with this situation, believing that it's optimal, when it's a wreck.
1:57:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Let me ask you the big, so as a physician, the, so everything you've seen, we've talked about 80% of the impact on health is lifestyle. How do we live longer? What advice would you give to general people? What, what space of ideas result in living longer and higher quality lives?
1:58:07 Speaker 01 Right. This is a very simple question to answer. Exercise for at least a half hour, at least five times a week.
1:58:17 Speaker 01 Number one. Number two, don't smoke. Number three, maintain a reasonably healthy body weight. Some people argue that being lower than a BMI of 25 is healthy. I think that may be true, but I think getting above 30 is unhealthy. And that ought to be. Now, that's largely, largely impacted by socioeconomic status. And we don't want to blame the victims here. So we've got to understand that when we talk about all of these things, not cigarettes, but exercise and a good diet and maintaining a healthy body weight.
1:58:59 Speaker 01 We have to include in doing those things, the impediments to people of lower socioeconomic status, being able to make those changes. We've got to understand that personal responsibility counts for some of this, but also social circumstances accounts for some of it. And back to your fishbowl analogy. If you're swimming in a fishbowl, if you live in a fish tank that's not being properly maintained, the approach wouldn't be to treat individual sick fish. It would be to fix your fish tank, to get the bacteria out of it and whatever bad stuff is in there,
1:59:42 Speaker 01 and make your fish tank healthier. Well, we invest far less than the other wealthy countries do. We're flipped. We have the mirror image in the spending on social determinants of health and medical determinants of health. We have exactly the wrong order. And not only does that choke off social determinants of health, which are very important, but actually just the ratio. Even if you were spending, if we raise the social spending and raise our medical spending in proportion, it's the ratio of social spending to medical spending that's the problem. So, and why do we do that? Well, the answer is perfectly obvious that the way to transfer money
2:00:25 Speaker 01 from working Americans to investors is through the biomedical model.
2:00:31 Speaker 01 Not through the social health model. And that's the problem for, and I'd like to discuss this because the market isn't going to get us to a reasonable allocation. All the other wealthy countries that are so much healthier than we are and spending so much less than we are, have some form of government intervention in the quality of the health data that's available, in the budgeting of health and social factors. And we don't. We're kind of the Wild West and we let the market determine those allocations. And it's, it's an awful failure. It's a horrendous failure.
2:01:12 Lex Fridman? So one argument against government, or I'm sorry, an alternative to the government intervention is the market can work better if the citizenry has better information. So one argument is that, you know, communicators like podcasts and so on, but you know, other channels of communication will, will be the way to fight Big Pharma. Your book is the way to, by providing information. The alternative to the government intervention on every aspect of this, including communication with the doctors, is to provide them other information and not allow the market to provide
2:01:54 Lex Fridman? that information by basically making it exciting to buy books, to get, make better and better communicators on Twitter, through books, through op-eds, through podcasts, through so on. So basically, because there's a lot of incentive to communicate against the messages of Big Pharma. There is incentive because people want to understand what's good for their lives and they're willing to listen to charismatic people that are able to clearly explain what is good for them.
2:02:27 Speaker 01 And they do. And more than 80% of people think that drugs cost too much and the drug industry is too interested in profits.
2:02:35 Lex Fridman? But they still get influenced.
2:02:38 Speaker 01 They can't, you can't get the vote through Congress.
2:02:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:02:42 Speaker 01 You know, Democrats and Republicans alike are taking money from Congress and somehow it just doesn't work out that these, even small changes. I mean, the pared down part of Medicare, the plan for increasing Medicare negotiation drug costs in Build Back Better, it's literally going to reduce the number of new drugs that are beneficial, uniquely beneficial, by about one new drug or two new drugs over 30 years. It will have virtually an indecipherable impact.
2:03:25 Speaker 01 And yet Pharma is talking about the impact on innovation. And if you vote for this, if you let your congressman vote for this, you're gonna severely slow down drug innovation and that's gonna affect the quality of your life.
2:03:46 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you about over-medication that we've been talking about from different angles, but one difficult question for me, I'll just, I'll pick one of the difficult topics, depression. So depression is a serious, painful condition that leads to a lot of people suffering in the world. And yet, it is likely they were over-prescribing antidepressants. So as a doctor, as a patient, as a healthcare system, as a society, what do we do with that fact that people suffer?
2:04:29 Lex Fridman? There's a lot of people suffering from depression. And there's also people suffering from over-prescribing of antidepressants.
2:04:38 Speaker 01 Right. So a paper in the New England Journal by Eric Turner showed that the data, if you put all the data together from antidepressants, you find out that antidepressants are not effective for people who are depressed but don't have a major depression. Major depression is a serious problem. People can't function normally. They have a hard time getting out, doing, performing their normal social roles. But what's happened is that the publicity, I mean, Prozac Nation was a good example,
2:05:19 Speaker 01 of making the argument that why should people settle for normal happiness when they can have better than normal happiness? And if you're not having normal happiness, you should take a drug. Well, that concept that serotonin metabolism is the root cause of depression is really a destructive one. We don't, we have drugs that change serotonin metabolism, but we don't know if that's why antidepressants work on major depression. And they don't, certainly don't work on everybody with major depression. I forget what the number needed to treat is. I think it's around four. One out of four people have significant improvement. But the people without major depression don't get better.
2:06:04 Speaker 01 And the vast majority of these drugs are used for people without major depression. So what's happened is that the feelings of life satisfaction, of happiness and not sadness, have been medicalized, the normal range of feelings have been medicalized. And that's not to say that they shouldn't be attended to, but it, the evidence shows that attending to them by giving somebody a medicine doesn't help except that they feel like somebody cares about them and believes that they're suffering. But there are problems in living that give rise to much of this symptomatology of less than major depression.
2:06:47 Speaker 01 And let's call it what it is and figure out a way to help people. Individual therapy, group therapy, maybe lifestyle modification would work, we gotta try that. But let's call it what it is, instead of saying, oh, you're in this vast basket of people who are depressed, so we'll give you an antidepressant, even though the evidence shows that people who are suffering from your level of depression don't get better.
2:07:14 Lex Fridman? And that's a consequence of not focusing on preventative medicine, the lifestyle changes, all that kind of stuff.
2:07:23 Speaker 01 Well, yes, but it's really a consequence of the drug companies creating the impression that if you're sad, take a pill.
2:07:33 Lex Fridman? If you're a non-major depression, how do you overcome depression?
2:07:40 Speaker 01 Well, you have to talk about what the problem is.
2:07:43 Lex Fridman? So talk therapy, lifestyle changes?
2:07:46 Speaker 01 Well, no, I'm not jumping to that. I'm saying that you ought to, A, the way you feel must be respected.
2:07:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah, acknowledge that you're suffering.
2:07:57 Speaker 01 Acknowledge that you're suffering and deal with healthcare providers who acknowledge that you're suffering. So let's take that first step.
2:08:06 Lex Fridman? Big first step, also.
2:08:09 Speaker 01 Big first step, yeah. Family docs are pretty good at that. That's kind of the arena that caused me to go into family medicine, the subjective experience of the patient. Okay, so you're a person who is not getting the enjoyment out of their life that they feel they ought to be getting. Now, let's figure out why, and whether that means some time with a social worker, some time with a psychiatrist, some time with a psychiatric nurse. I'm not sure how you'd best do that most effectively and efficiently, but that's what you need to do. And it may be that there's a marital problem and there's something
2:08:49 Speaker 01 going on and one of the spouses can't find satisfaction in the life they have to live within the relationship. Maybe there's a past history of trauma or abuse that somebody is projecting onto their current situation. Maybe there's socioeconomic circumstances where they can't find a job that gives them self-respect and enough money to live. All, you know, an infinite range of things, but let's figure out, make a diagnosis first. The diagnosis isn't that the person feels sadder than they feel, than they want to feel. The diagnosis is why does the person feel sadder than they want to feel?
2:09:31 Lex Fridman? You mentioned this is what made you want to get into family medicine.
2:09:37 Lex Fridman? As a doctor, what do you think about the saying, "Save one life, save the world"?
2:09:46 Lex Fridman? This was always moving to me about doctors because you have like this human in front of you. And your time is worth money.
2:09:59 Lex Fridman? Your, what you prescribe and your efforts after the visit are worth money. And it seems like the task of the doctor is to not think about any of that. Or not, not the task, but it seems like a great doctor, despite all that, just forgets it all and just cares about the one human. And somehow that feels like the love and effort you put into helping one person is the thing that will save the world. It's not like some economic argument or some
2:10:38 Lex Fridman? political argument or financial argument. It's a very human
2:10:44 Lex Fridman? drive that ultimately is behind all of this that will do good for the world.
2:10:49 Speaker 01 Yes, I think that's true. And at the same time, I think it's equally true that all physicians need to have a sense of responsibility about how the common resources are allocated to serve all, the whole population's interest best. That's a tension that you have as a physician. Let's take the extreme example. Let's say you had a patient in front of you who, if you gave a 10, one $10 billion pill to, you would save their life. I would just be tortured by that as a physician because I know that $10 billion spent properly
2:11:32 Speaker 01 in an epidemiologically guided way is going to save a whole lot more lives than one life.
2:11:40 Lex Fridman? So it's also your responsibility as a physician to walk away from that patient?
2:11:45 Speaker 01 I, I wouldn't say that. I think it's your responsibility to be tortured by it. That's exactly right.
2:11:53 Lex Fridman? Ah, the human condition.
2:11:58 Lex Fridman? That's a tough job, but yeah, yeah. To maintain your humanity through it all.
2:12:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, but you've been asking at different points in this conversation, why are doctors so complacent about the tremendous amount of money we're spending? Why do they accept knowledge from different sources that may not pan out when they really know the truth?
2:12:22 Speaker 01 And the answer is that they're trying to do their best for their patients. And there's this, it's the same kind of torture to figure out what the hell is going on with the data. And that's a sort of future project. And maybe people will read my book and maybe they'll get a little more excited about it, become more legitimate in practice. I would feel like my life was worthwhile if that happened. But at the same time, they've got to do something with the patient in front of them. They've got to make a decision. And they probably, there are not many weirdos like me who invest their life in figuring out what's behind the data. They're trying to get through the day and do the right thing for their patient.
2:13:08 Speaker 01 So they're tortured by that decision, too.
2:13:11 Lex Fridman? And so if you're not careful, Big Pharma can manipulate that, that drive to try to help the patient, that humanity of dealing with the uncertainty of it all. Like, what is the best thing to do? Big Pharma can step in and use money to manipulate that humanity.
2:13:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would state it quite differently. It's sort of an opt out rather than an opt in. Big Pharma will do that, and you need to opt out of it.
2:13:44 Lex Fridman? What advice would you give to a young person today in high school or college,
2:13:51 Lex Fridman? stepping into this complicated world full of advertisements, of big, powerful institutions, of big, rich companies? How to have a positive impact in the world? How to live a life they can be proud of?
2:14:07 Speaker 01 I would say, should that person who has only good motives go into medicine? They have an inclination to go into medicine, and they've asked me what I think about that, given what I know about the undermining of American healthcare at this point. And my answer is, if you've got the calling, you should do it. You should do it because nobody's going to do it better than you. And if you don't have the calling, and you're in it for the money, you're not going to be proud of yourself.
2:14:39 Lex Fridman? How do you prevent yourself from doing, from letting the system change you over year, over years and years? Like, letting, letting the game of pharmaceutical influence affect you?
2:14:56 Speaker 01 It's a very hard question, because the sociologic norms are to be affected, and to trust the sources of information that are largely controlled by the drug industry. And that's why I wrote Sickening, is to, to try and help those people in the medical profession to understand that what's going on right now looks normal, but it's not. The health of Americans is going downhill. Our society's getting ruined by the money that's getting pulled out of, pulled out
2:15:36 Speaker 01 of other social, socially beneficial uses to pay for healthcare that is not helping us.
2:15:45 Lex Fridman? So fundamentally, the thing that is normal, now question the normal. Don't, if you conform, conform hesitantly.
2:16:01 Speaker 01 Well, you have to conform. You can't become a doctor without conforming. I just made it through.
2:16:11 Speaker 01 But there aren't many, and it's hard work. But you have to conform. And even with my colleagues in my own practice, I couldn't convince them that some of the beliefs they had about how best to practice weren't accurate. There's one scene. A younger physician had prescribed hormone replacement therapy. This is back in 2000, 2001. Had prescribed hormone replacement therapy for one of my patients, who happened to be a really good personal friend. And I saw that patient covering for my colleague at one point. And I saw that her hormone replacement therapy had been renewed. And I said, are you having hot flashes or any problem?
2:16:56 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no. But Dr. So-and-so said it's better for my health. And I said, no, it's not. The research is showing that it's not. It's harmful for your health, and I think you should stop it. So my colleague approached me when she saw the chart and said, wait a minute. That's my patient, maybe your friend, but it's my patient. And I went to a conference at my, from my alma mater, medical school. And they said that healthy people should be given hormone replacement. And I said, there's got to be drug companies involved in this. And she said, no, no, no, it was at my university. It was, it was not a drug company thing. We didn't go to a Caribbean island. I said, do you have the syllabus? She said, yeah.
2:17:41 Speaker 01 And she went and got the syllabus, and sure enough, it was sponsored by a drug company. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. And it's back to Kuhn, that groups of experts share unspoken assumptions. And in order to be included in that group of experts, you have to share those unspoken assumptions. And what I'm hoping to do with my book, Sickening, and being here, having this wonderful conversation with you, is to create an alternative to this normal that people can pursue and...
2:18:19 Speaker 01 Practice better medicine and also prevent burnout. I mean, about half the doctors complain that they're burned out and they've had it. And I think that this is a subject of, I don't have a date on this. This is just my opinion. But I think that a lot of that burnout is so-called moral injury from practicing in a way that the docs know isn't working.
2:18:44 Lex Fridman? It's not actually providing an alternative to the normal. It's expanding the normal, it's shifting the normal, just like with Kuhn. I mean, you're basically looking for, to shift the way medicine is done. To the original, I mean, to the intent that it represents, that the ideal of medicine, of healthcare.
2:19:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, in Kuhnian terms, to have a revolution. And that revolution would be to practice medicine in a way that will be epidemiologically most effective, not most profitable for the people who are providing you with what's called knowledge.
2:19:23 Lex Fridman? You helped a lot of people as a doctor, as an educator. Live better lives, live longer. But you yourself are a mortal being. Do you think about your own mortality? Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of death?
2:19:41 Speaker 01 I'm not. I've faced it. I've been close.
2:19:48 Lex Fridman? Yourself?
2:19:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
2:19:50 Lex Fridman? How do you think about it? What wisdom do you gain from having come close to death? The fact that the whole thing ends?
2:19:58 Speaker 01 It's liberating. It's very liberating. I mean, I'm serious. I was close and not too long ago. And it was a sense of, you know, this may be the way it ends. And I've done my best. It's not been perfect. And if it ends here, it ends here. The people around me are trying to do their best. And in fact, I got pulled out of it. But it didn't look like I was going to get pulled out of it.
2:20:36 Lex Fridman? Are you ultimately grateful?
2:20:41 Lex Fridman? For the ride, even though it ends?
2:20:44 Speaker 01 Well, it's a little odd. I think so. If I know, you know, you can't take the ride if you know it's going to end well. It's not the real ride, it's just a ride. But I, having gone through the whole thing, I definitely freed me of a sense of anxiety about death. And it said to me, do your best every day because it's going to end sometime.
2:21:15 Lex Fridman? I apologize for the ridiculously big question, but what do you think is the the meaning of life, of our human existence?
2:21:28 Speaker 01 I think it's to care about something and do your best with it. Whether it's being a doctor and trying to make sure that the greatest number of people get the best healthcare. Or it's a gardener who wants to have the most beautiful plants, or it's a grandparent who wants to have a good relationship with their grandchildren. But whatever it is that gives you a sense of meaning, as long as it doesn't hurt other people, to really commit yourself to it. That commitment, that being in that commitment, for me, is the meaning of life.
2:22:06 Lex Fridman? Put your whole heart and soul into the thing.
2:22:09 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:22:11 Lex Fridman? What is it, the Bukowski poem, "Go All the Way"? John, you're an incredible human being, incredible educator. Like I said, I recommend people listen to your lectures. It's so refreshing to see that clarity of thought and brilliance. And obviously, your criticism of Big Pharma or your illumination of the mechanisms of Big Pharma is really important at this time. So I really hope people read your book, Sickening, that's out today, or depending on when this comes out.
2:22:44 Lex Fridman? Thank you so much for spending your extremely valuable time with me today. It was amazing.
2:22:49 Speaker 01 Well, Lex, I wanted back to you. Thanks for engaging in this conversation, for creating the space to have it and creating a listenership that is interested in understanding serious ideas. And I really appreciate the conversation.
2:23:06 Lex Fridman? And I should mention that offline, you told me you listened to the Gilbert Strang episode. So for anyone who don't know Gilbert Strang, another epic human being that should check out. If you don't know anything about mathematics or linear algebra, go look him up. He's one of the great mathematics educators of all time. Of all the people you mentioned to me, I appreciate that you mentioned him because he is a rock star of mathematics. John, thank you so much for talking to us. This is awesome.
2:23:32 Speaker 01 Great, thank you.
2:23:34 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Abramson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Marcus Aurelius. Waste no time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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