YouSaid · the spoken record

Zeke Emanuel

lines on the record: 59
first: 2026-01-19
most recent: 2026-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“All right I've got two favorite ice cream places in Washington, D.C., Dolceza, where Rob Duncan is a very dear friend and makes special ice cream for me, the chocolate hazelnut, and trying to get him to make a lebna honey pistachio ice cream, just heavenly. And happy ice cream has a wonderful chocolate as well. And I eat them all.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My very first thing is I would mandate through Medicaid that all newborns get nurse family partnerships so they have early childhood interventions for the first two years of life. If there's any higher return for a dollar spent, right? It's the highest return for the government spending a dollar. It's university economists estimate between $7 return to $15 return. Because what we do early on is the most important thing for brain development, for socialization for all sorts of things. So you got to work with parents. You got to make sure kids have a strong, healthy start. That would be my first thing.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why would I focus? We need to take money out of that system so we can do two things. One is spend it on other things, education, fixing our grid, lots of priorities in America. The second thing we have to do is give some of that money back to families. If we took the American healthcare spending from $17.5% of GDP down to 15% of GDP, 2.5% drop. That's $3,000 per family. Just imagine what most Americans could do with $3,000 extra dollars. I now know what I would, my very first action. Thank you for.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's the first thing I would do? That's a really good question. There's so much that needs to be done there. I don't know. Actually, you've got me stumped. I think this issue of healthcare reform and the reason I keep coming back to it is fixing the healthcare system is because we're spending $5 trillion a year. You know, the American healthcare system is the third largest economy in the world. Only the United States and China are bigger. Our healthcare system is bigger than Japan, bigger than Germany's total economy.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was first proposed in 1957, enacted 1965. You have to develop an idea, vet an idea, socialize it with people, and healthcare is particularly hard because no one knows how the hell it works. It's just so complicated. And so it takes a lot of time to socialize people and you have to talk to them. My first action, by the way. And the road to affordability is cap deductibles and out of pocket payment. There should be no higher than $1,700, which is 2% of the median income of American households. And that should be it. That's what they do in Germany.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, everyone, when insured people are afraid to go to the doctor or to the emergency room, you know you have a serious problem. When deductibles are $5,000 and most people can't afford that serious problem. So we have to do things and everyone has to be taxed. Hospitals, insurance companies, drug companies all have to suffer something to keep get the cost down. But that's not comprehensive reform. We have to move to more comprehensive reform and get a plan. And the problem is, you know, and just as much a problem for us liberals who've been working on healthcare, we haven't got a lot of plans out there. And, you know, there's a lot of depression among, I think, most health policy people. It's like, you know, we're not going to get anything. So why think about anything? No, we have to work now. And I like to remind people, you know, Medicare.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we pay. You know, there's no price for anything in healthcare. There are a million prices for, you know, go to the hospital. You know, there's a Medicare price, there's a Medicaid price, and then every private insurance company and individual plans in those companies has a different price. It's nonsense. It's one of the reasons we have so much that's so costly and we have so much administrative cost. 20% of all healthcare spending is administration. And one of the reasons is we haven't standardized things. So simplification and standardization is where I would go. Now, my plan, okay, I'm running. My plan is, you know, we need to do something about affordability now.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back. There are two big changes, sort of themes of changes that I would make. I'm not going to talk about the particular details except for one. We made healthcare more complicated. We added the exchanges and we added a bunch of stuff that made healthcare more complicated. I think one of our mantras going forth has to be simplification. We have to simplify things, not make them more complicated. We have to mean, all right, either you get insurance through your employer or you get insurance. Everyone else gets insurance this other way, which I think ought to be a small exchange. Only six plans on it. Reduce the number so that people can make rational choices. The other thing we needed to do was to make much more standardization, standardization of medical treatments, standardization of electronic health records. So, you know, you go to two different hospitals, you can actually get them moved back and forth. Standardization.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did with the Affordable Care. There are many modifications that need to happen and couldn't happen because of the political polarization. Republicans just uninterested in trying to make it better. There are many things to make it better. If I had to”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How long do you have, Sar So it's a complicated story. One of the things, look, the Affordable Care Act has been a tremendous success. 25 million people or so got health insurance, and we know that giving people health insurance actually decreases their mortality. We actually plateaued on healthcare costs as a percent of GDP for 15 years, unprecedented in American history. I unfortunately can't say that our quality has gone up, and I also can't say that our satisfaction has gone up in that time. One of the problems, the biggest problem is you put in place a bill and there was no mechanism to make moderate changes without going back to Congress. No company, no company would put in a strategic plan, operationalize it, and then not reexamine it for 15 years. You just wouldn't do it. And that's basically what...”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your pediatrician, you want the old vaccine schedule and no screwing around. Okay, but I think it's going to sew a lot of uncertainty. And we've already seen this. The vaccination rate, not just for MMR, but for diphtheria and tetanus is down. 65% of the counties in the United States now have the herd immunity level, which is 95% for MMR. They're below the herd immunity level. We're going to see lots of outbreaks. Lots of kids hospitalized and lots of deaths.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is very true. A country of six million people, universal healthcare coverage, where when you go to the point of service, you go to get care, copay zero, right? And they've got nurses that pay attention to kids to make sure they get all their vaccines. They actually are doing well. And they actually follow a little more paternalistic, you might say, than America. That contrast, right? They're down at 11. By the way, they're the outlier. They are very short on the vaccine. That is a bad mistake. And I can tell you the most difficult or the worst thing about it is the call I got from my three daughters, which is, Dad, what should we do about vaccines for the kids? Now they have a doctor they can consult, but most people don't have that. I said, you just tell.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. So one of the interesting things is we all have 75 vigorous 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise, 150 weeks of moderate exercise. And if you push that up, you do more and more, there's a plateau and you don't get any more and then you just increase your risk of getting repetitive motion injury, you know, tennis elbow, whatever, problems with your knees doesn't decrease your mortality at all. And the other problem I find is, you know, just think about it. 10 hours.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Four, three, four times the inside bike three or four times a week for 20 minutes, just 20 minutes, get it in again. You can fit 20 minutes into any day.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exercise, the answer is yes, you got to do all the kinds of exercise. There are three kinds of exercise, aerobic, right, for your heart, lungs, vasculature, reduces cardiac problems and stroke risk and things like that. You got to get your heart rate up. Strength training, really important so you're not the fragility is you're not fragile and really, really important and then balance and flexibility, yoga. So, you know, I start my day. My wife and I start our day 20 minutes of yoga in the morning, followed by about five minutes of core exercise. And then we go off and it's not a lot.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we reach for the pills. Terrible idea. They don't work. And this is in Zeke Emmanuel talking. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine is like negative on all of them. You go to like the Cleveland Clinic webpage. You go to Mayo Clinic. They all say the same thing. The only thing proven to work besides setting the bed is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is to figure out what's going on.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It also allows you to restore your muscles and lots of other things. It moves the memories from short-term memory to long-term memory that the short-term memories have, campus, long-term. That's why I'm pointing to, this is a biology lesson and including everything else. Anyway, really, really important. We do a terrible job because we think less is better. No, less is not better. And we have to change our attitude. Now, we Americans like to quick fixers.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we do sleep. Sleep is really, just think about it, really dangerous. You're knocked out for eight hours. You are the most vulnerable you could possibly be to the cheetah next door, right? And yet it's preserved. It must be important, right? Nothing would have been conserved through evolution like that that made you so vulnerable unless it were really, realistic.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, I don't quite understand that, but sleep is a huge problem mainly because of what you said, is that we have this sort of Protestant worth ethic in America, and we think less sleep is better. I had my debate partner when I was 15 years old. He had this idea. I'm wasting a third of my life sleeping. No, sleeping is really important for you. How do we know that?”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me first talk about the wearables because I am in general against the wearables and especially for sleep. I should note very carefully in my household I'm the minority opinion. My wife who has a PhD from MIT, very quantitative. She loves the numbers. It really motivates her. Now if the numbers motivate you good, but I've never understood the wearables especially for sleep. Sleep, you get up in the morning, you feel like shit, you know. You didn't have a good night's sleep. You feel good. You know you had a good night's sleep. I don't need a little, you know. Or a ring to tell me that. And that's what I told the CEO of Aura. I was giving a talk somewhere and he was sitting right next to me and I said, you know, I think that thing you're selling is like, anyway.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. So, my big breakfast recommendation is a bowl of berries, some granola with oats in them, yogurt and kefir on there, and throw in some hemp hearts for additional protein. Nothing could be better.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. Definite? No. Yes. So that's the recommendation. Now, of course, I deal with a lot of other things. If there's one other big positive thing you have to do that Americans are terrible at More than 90% of Americans do not eat enough fiber every day. We don't eat fruits and vegetables, which is main source or nuts, main source of fiber. And that is bad because the fiber is basically the prebiotic. So we spend a lot of money on those stupid prebiotics. Just eat your fruits and vegetables.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good dairy associated with a drop in type 2 diabetes. Great for the microbiome because it's fermented. Kefir is the same. Kim-chi, sauerkraut, really, really good. The thing I vehemently disagree with in that book is they're pushing more red meat. We know we've got tons of studies about red meat at high in saturated fats. Not way too much emphasis on that. Don't use seed oils, use beef tallow. Wrong. Seed oils are actually quite good. You know, canola, sunflower oils, you know, the best oil, if you want, is olive oil. It's very expensive these days, but so there are many good things.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I would say there are positives in yesterday's announcement. Okay. And I was very pleasantly surprised. The positives are mostly on the what not to do. Eat ultra processed so much ultra processed foods. 58% of the American caloric intake is ultra processed foods. It's horrid. Horrid. Don't drink sodas. Cut down on your sugar. All of that's in his recommendations. It's also the top couple of Zika Manuel's recommendations. He's also against packaged cakes and cookies and things like that. All of that, I agree with, okay. He doesn't emphasize fermented foods, which is my big, the positive thing to do, eat fermented foods good for the microbiome. In the case of probably the thing I push the most in the book if I had to, with no financial conflicts of interest, by the way, yogurt.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when did he invent the bifocals? He was 79 years old. Yeah, wow. And he had two more inventions after that. He invented them just before he left France to come back to the United States the last time. And then he built an addition to his house, a massive library for his 4,000 books, so he could stay curious looking at books. And he had to get the books high up on the shelf. So he's the guy who invented that arm. Do you have any of those, Brad? That gets the books from high shelves. And then he invented a chair where you fold down the seat, and there are steps there so you can climb up three or four steps to get a high book.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then he's learning French so that he can report on her. And that is, then he spent a lot of time. No, don't do these things passively or like transiently, I mean, not passively, transiently. You've got to actually stick to it to make those connections. But those are what keep your brain young. Now, one of my big heroes who appears in this book several times is Ben Franklin. He is the model of this. He was endlessly curious about everything, always thinking, what is he famous for if I ask you, you'll say bifocals, right? Almost everyone, that's the immediate.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was talking to Walter Isaacson. The other day, and he was interviewing me, and he said that he's been learning French for the last four years because he's writing a book about Marie Curie.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be a fantastic trumpet play, or whatever. And then as you grow trying new things, trying to establish those connections and trying to do things that challenge your mind and make force you to make new connections.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Totally. And There are things you can do to keep it going. And the first thing is get a lot of education. Turns out raising your baseline really, really important. And this movement that really hit university professor, has me shuddering is, you know, university's not worth it. Well, may not be worth it to you from a money standpoint, but it's worth it to you from a brain standpoint. Why is that? Well, getting a lot of education makes more neural connections, bringing together, you know, learning Dostoevsky and connecting him to other writers, other messages, right? Really, really important. Because once you start high, the decline seems to be pretty similar for people. And you start from a higher baseline.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is fluid emotional. It's part of fluid intelligence. And it declines beginning in the late 30s, early 40s, our fluid intelligence declines. And it's the thing that is really, really important, that allows us to be creative, allows us to continue with things.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fluid intelligence, on the other hand, is being able to keep something in your head and concentrate on something else, come back to remember it. It's decision making or fixing a pattern that you see or solving puzzles. That is fluid intelligence. And it's really important in new circumstances that you haven't seen before to bring all your information back together”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, crystallized intelligence is all you crossword puzzle people who know all these words or you scrabble people. You got crystallized intelligence. You know a lot of words and they're going to stay with you for a long time. I was just talking to an 85-year-old wife of my former, my dissertation advisor for my PhD, who unfortunately passed away, and she said to me that she has gone back to playing ping pong. I was curious. Well, this ping pong kind of like bicycling that, you know, you never forget it. You know how to ride a bicycle as a kid. You don't ride it for a long time. You get back on the bicycle. You know how to ride it. She says absolutely yes. And my serve is killer, right? So, you know, that's Crystal Lives Intelligence. Knowing the muscle movement or knowing, you know, your old...”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been on. I said, Well, you know, I've been to Gundar and I hike mountains there. I've been to Addis Ababa. I've been to Lalibela to see the churches carved out of the rock. And then I say, so where are you from? And they tell me, I said, how much family do you still have back there? And we're in a conversation already. And it makes their day, and it makes my day. This is one message from my dad. Right, I'm being virtuous, right? Not only am I having a good conversation, right? I'm having them have a good social interaction. It's good for their health too.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Turned out people loved it. And I learned from him several really important things. First of all, initiate the conversation. The other person probably wants to talk and is embarrassed or shy. We're all like that. I'm still like that. But initiate. Ask the other people questions and they'll talk about themselves. And what happens if you get rejected? Happens all the time, right? Nothing will happen to you. There's no big issue, right? Absolutely nothing. So I have a practice here. All of your Washingtonians, you know, right, all the cab drivers, the Uber drivers, they're from Ethiopia, right? So I get into a cab. You recognize people that they're from Ethiopia. But I ask them, where are you from? And they tell me, Ethiopia. I said, you know, I've been to Ethiopia five times. Suddenly they light up. They love it, right? Someone's been to their country. And so they asked me, where have I?”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, really? Committing suicide with this relationship. No substitute. No substitute. So look, my father was an extreme extrovert. I relate in the book. We used to take road trips. He loved driving, and we would take road trips out to, we lived in Chicago and go out west to Montana and Wyoming and Colorado. And every time we stopped in a diner, right, he would start talking to the next table. Or if there was no next table, he talked to the waitress. And he would ask them all sorts of questions, like, you know, why are you here? How did you come here? What do you do here? All those kind of questions. And he didn't do it like, you know, this is an FBI interrogation. I want to name rank and seal. He would, you know, he's just curious. And he was endlessly curious. He did the same thing in parks. Now his kids, right, we were always embarrassed by this. He's off again, you know. Can we crawl under the table?”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many of them are people you got to know in college where you were talking deeply at midnight and with them. And then we have about 15 or 20 more who are people we have over to dinner. We see regularly, we talk to about once a month. And those are really important for our psychology. If you look at the data, people who have more close friends versus people who have one or two or zero increasingly we have a huge number of people, about 20% of the population now have zero to one close friends. That's it. Very, very clear that the more close friends you have, right, the more the longer you live. As a matter of fact, the difference between people who are lonely and have fewer social connections and people who don't is increase the mortality rate if you have fewer social friends between 22 and 33%.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So people will say, well, look, I can connect with my friends who are living in Australia or living in California via the phone. 100% true. The problem is you made those friends face to face. You did not make them over the phone, over social media. You can continue the conversation once it's made. Now, the data on making friends and interacting is very, very interesting. So many of you will know the Dunbar number. This is an English anthropologist at Oxford, and he looked at the brains of various animals, including people. And it's like, you know, we can have about 150 friends. That's all our brain can handle. Now, most of them are acquaintances. They're casual. You might have them over for dinner. You would recognize them. You'd have coffee with them. But five or so of them, five to ten are close friends who you're very intimate with. Many of them are, you know, family.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so last year in the fall of 2024, I banned all phones from my classroom. I also banned computers and taking notes by computers from my classroom. And two remarkable things happened. One was I came in and the classroom was a lot louder when I walked into the room. People were actually talking to each other. And it was pretty amazing. They, you know, began before they were just looking at their phone. And the second is, I actually got way better evaluations. And the reason isn't because I was doing anything different. The reason is they were paying attention and makes all the difference. Every time you talk to a professor who's banned the phones in their classroom, suddenly the classrooms get way better. Because people are not on the phone, they're not worrying about what's on the phone, they're actually worrying about what is”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rotavirus, diarrhea. You know, same thing. This is a, it's a terrible thing. Vaccines have made our lives so much better and the data are uncontrovertible that they're safe. Thus, every medical procedure has some risks, right? Just taking blood has some risk. You might get infected. There are some risks to vaccines. We have a compensation system for that. By the way, you want to know how frequently that compensation system is used for every million people who get a vaccine, one gets a clean. I don't know anything in life where the chances of getting harmed are less than one in a million. It's pretty obvious that this is a very good thing for all of us.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where are we now then? Well, the vaccine situation is most concerning about little kids because we're getting rid of the hepatitis B vaccine right around. You know, there are going to be some kids who get liver failure, get hepatitis B, have liver failure, and are going to die from it. Unquestionably the case. Last year, 288 kids died because of flu. We're going to have probably more this year because of flu.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like 1995, and it was like these were all the iron lungs for the polio patients from Boston Children's Hospital, which was the other way across the parking lot. And once you see them, you realize, you know, it was really bad. And once that vaccine, the salt vaccine and then the Sabin vaccine became available, parents were lining up their kids. They couldn't get their kids vaccinated fast enough.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have gotten to a situation where the vaccines have made so much of childhood safe that people now have become, why give my kid vaccine? It's so safe out there. Yeah. The reason it's safe is because there are vaccines, right? Parents and our grandparents, right? In the 50s were nervous every summer because their kids might get polio. They might, you know, end up paralyzed. They might end up in an hour long. When I was at the Dana Farber in Boston, and they exiled me to this outbuilding across the parking lot, a little brick building. I was doing something they didn't think was all that important, like bioethics. Anyway, they put me there and I was on the second floor. And then one day I walked downstairs and I walked into the basement. All these iron lungs lined up. There's a storage of iron lungs.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think that's controversial. Okay, I mean, there are some people in this town who don't like the data, but I have a table in the book where I talk about the mortality of vaccine preventable diseases. And when you look at the mortality of all these diseases, they're undetectable. There's no mortality for many of them. One of the problems I think is that”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jazz. Right. That's the reason to do it. And I think under those circumstances, you've got the positives of social interaction and being with other people. And that's a trade-off. But let's face it. You know, we all know life is a trade-off, right? You do some things which are...”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. But so you increasingly saying zero is the safest. But look. There's birds like fermented fooded. Actually, when the Surgeon General report came up under Vivek Murti, I wrote him and I said, you know, I think it's a little too extreme. I don't think people are going to tune that report out when you say zero. So be responsible. What's responsible? Here are the no's. No binge drinking, right? No drinking alone and no drinking to drown out your sorrows. Here's the positives. Use it to facilitate social interaction with other people. drinking over dinner or i was in chicago i went out with my brother and my wife to a jazz club and rom was regaling us with stories about this is where el capone was and by the way the you know passageways where he got away from the cops when they raided the joint there are four and they go to different theaters and blah blah blah you know that's first of all it's interesting and second of all you know facilitated by alcohol and then we had great”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, alcohol. So alcohol is one of these complex issues because not too long ago we were all told, red wine, it's the French paradox. You drink red wine, you live forever. False, increasingly the data are pretty clear from a physical standpoint what it does for the body, it's bad. There are seven cancers associated with it, esophageal cancer, breast cancer, not a good thing. It's also associated obviously with liver problems and cirrhosis. It's also disrupts your sleep cycle. So if you drink wine at dinner, you might go to sleep. You might be sleepy, go to sleep, but then it disrupts the cycle so you don't get full night sleep. You don't get deep friends.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It turns out that the risk for all comers, including expert climbers, Sherpas, and all the rest, one in a hundred chance of dying, right? And by the way, your body doesn't come down. It's frozen up there, and no one is going to spend any oxygen bringing you down. Also, it turns out if you're over 59, I'm just scanning the audience here. Our chances, one in 25. Now, what could be stupider than to make a lot of money be 65 and say, I'm going to celebrate, go up Mount Everest? Well. You know, it's so funny.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so if you take neighbors, one who owns a gun and one who doesn't, the one who owns the gun twice as likely to die. But my real sort of discovery here, I was thinking, as I was writing this chapter, what The schmuckiest thing out there. And I thought, got to be base jumping. You know, where you put the Michelin squirrel suit on, you jump off a mountain, there's wind, and you don't control anything. There's no parachute, no nothing. That's got to be really the stupidest thing you can do. Turns out not true. That chance of dying from a squirrel jumping is one in 2700. Getting injured is about 1 in 250, but dying is 1 in 2,700. Turns out spending $100,000 to be a tourist and climb Mount Everest is schmuckier than face jumping.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From my standpoint, there are a lot of things we should avoid. The gun one is interesting. It was based upon following 18 million people in California and looking, you know, wanting a gun if there's some violence in your neighborhood, very, very understandable, I think. But it turns out having a gun in your house dramatically increases your risk of dying by gun violence. And it also dramatically increases the risk of any child dying by gun violence because about half of the guns are stored loaded and stored accessible in the night table drawer in the dresser drawer where kids can get a hold of them. And then it just turns out that you're much more prone to violence, right? You don't get killed by the stranger coming into the neighborhood a lot, but a relative or a friend. That's actually... A lot. So”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, smoking, we don't have to explain. And yes, vaping may be better, but it is no, as someone says, no free lunch. There's lots of issues with getting addicted to nicotine and whether you actually then go on to smoke cigarettes. It does help some people quit, but there are plenty of other issues with it.”
2026-01-19 · On with Kara Swisher · The Problem with Wellness Culture, According to Dr. Zeke Emanuel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT