HEALTHCARE

“The autonomous taxi service began operating on Bay Area freeways Wednesday morning... Waymo is also adding freeway routes to Phoenix and Los Angeles.”

“Meanwhile, some of the most influential unions in the state, the Teachers Union, the Umbrella Group for SEIU, they haven't publicly taken a position. And privately, they're concerned about the idea of a tax that gets locked up in this special box and doesn't fund the programs that most tax dollars do. So there's a lot of different angles of potential concern and that's also why many of the Democratic candidates who are running for governor have expressed some reservations.”

“If you do you remember how Steve Jobs what he said when he died? The last last words? His sister, Mona Simpson, who we met later in his life. She wrote a column when he died. And, she said, he said, and I think he stage managed this, but he looked up, he had everyone around him, all his family, and he said, Wow, oh, wow. Like not giving you the way. I thought that was kind of fantastic that he stage measured.”

“For the billionaires and also many tech leaders who are not billionaires but who are aspirational, they see this as an existential threat that it really would set precedent of going after the wealth that people have earned and taxing their possessions in a way that really has never been done before. On the other side, that is also part of the motivation for this thing, to really shift the paradigm in how the government taxes wealth and how the government gets people to contribute to society.”

“So they go to the big pharmaceutical company like Lilly and they go, hey, instead of selling it for 150, sell it to us for 300, give us $150 rebate. The rebate stays at the middleman company. At the end of the year, the insurance company bills the employer for the 300 dollars.”

“I think as you scale, there's a pressure to go hire that big strategy person who has more credentials than you. And it's kind of, it feels almost confidence-inducing as a founder to like get to that level. And I think you have to fight that at all costs. I've made mistakes. I've hired people like that because I thought it was the right move. And I've always come back to find people who love the mission, who love to build, who are tactically excellent.”

“What would you do if caring for a parent meant putting your own financial future—and your kids’—on hold?”

“The market overreacted to the GLP-1 threat, forgetting that a more health-conscious population actually leads to higher diagnosis rates, not lower device demand.”

“US Southern Command posted grainy videos on social media showing explosions that destroyed two small boats alleged to be smuggling drugs. Many legal experts say these strikes amount to execution without trial or simply murder, and some allies in South America and Europe have stopped sharing some intelligence with the US military as a result.”

“I think if your business is ready from a predictability standpoint and you have a long term orientation, then I would encourage you to go public. I think those two things have to be true. I think you have to actually be able to predict your business with consistency because you can't enter the markets without that confidence.”

“The goal is to achieve wellness, not to treat chronic disease. Now I've gotten used to it, because it does, I do think it's encompassing of what we're trying to achieve. The goal is to achieve wellness, not to treat chronic disease.”

“I have a working program now that I use to draft email replies. Unfortunately, they're way too agreeable. They keep trying to, like, get me to agree to, like, speak at things in Kazakhstan and, like, sure. I would love to, like, you know, edit your, you know, self published book about AI consciousness. Sounds great. Sign me up. And I have to go in and edit and be like, well, sorry. I can't do that.”

“I'm Corva Coleman from NPR News. And here are today's top stories.”

“In a statement, James says an investigation found people arriving at New York Presbyterian's hospitals in New York City received inadequate care that, quote, put vulnerable patients at risk. Her report alleges people with mental illness weren't properly screened. And in some cases, patients who appear to pose serious risks to themselves or others were left unsupervised or received no care.”

“If you're a highly competitive person, you get to put out high benchmarks every 90 days and see if you can actually deliver on it. And you can build a high performance team to say, hey, we put this out and it's a big stretch. Let's go kick ass and figure it out. When you're private, it's so easy to get cozy.”

“So so many modalities, like a plasmapheresis. Most Americans have no clue what that is. Yeah. Plasmapheresis has been around 50 years... But historically, they have never used it for preventative care.”

“The market overreacted to the GLP-1 threat, forgetting that a more health-conscious population actually leads to higher diagnosis rates, not lower device demand.”

“So this would place a 5% tax on the net worth of any billionaires who are California residents as of January 1st of this year. The money would go into a special fund at the state level and would have to be spent on health care services. It's unusual to tax the assets of a person as opposed to their income. So their assets would be their stocks, the jewelry they own, the cars in their garage, the paintings, anything that contributes to their wealth.”

“Well, I think there's a couple of lessons we can take away from this. One is that the idea of sticking it to the rich is very popular. The other lesson is that it's still really hard to pass and get across the finish line because of all of the particulars involved, because of the way that a tax is structured, and because of how influential the billionaire class is in our society. The third lesson is that because it's so hard, people who want to do this kind of thing need a really broad base of support to push it across the finish line.”

“Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has secured a parliamentary majority. His Liberal party won the majority Monday night following two special election victories. Carney has said that a win would help him deal more effectively with the trade war started by president Trump.”

“For Amy Jackson... her premium is going from under $300 a month to $1250. You know, for them, a thousand bucks is probably nothing... but for me, that's half of my wage.”

“So roughly 30% of the revenue generated by the insurance companies, United, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, who are multi-billion dollar conglomerates, these companies, 30% of the revenue comes from rebates on prescription drugs.”

“Producing each penny was costing the US government nearly 4 cents, and ending production would save the US more than $50 million a year.”

“I seek out grit. Because I think when you're disrupting an industry, which we are, and even in the last year, our category has exploded and changed and been fraught with all types of chaos. You have to have a team that is used to being uncomfortable and used to getting through it and used to staying calm and having that resilience.”

“The UK has begun denying certain intelligence sharing requests out of concern over US military actions in the Caribbean because they do not align with British foreign policy.”

“I feel like there's a certain bind here that these companies and their leaders are in when it comes to talking about some of the scarier possible outcomes of AI. I think a lot of them watched the social media CEOs claim that their technologies during the last decade would produce nothing but good for the world. And I think a lot of them took the lesson from that that, well, we have to be upfront. If we think the thing that we're building has some risk attached to it, we should be open and honest about that and not sugarcoat it.”

“So they started freaking out late last year in advance of this January 1 deadline because the ballot measure says that anyone who was a resident of California on January 1 could be subject to this tax. So at the end of the year, there was a lot of jockeying, and there were a few pretty high profile billionaires who made moves to leave the state to change their official residency. A couple of the founders of Google relocated. Sergey Brin moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Larry Page left for Florida. And then also some of the people who are really influential in the world of, you know, investing in technology left. David Sacks moved to Texas, and Peter Thiel moved to Miami.”

“So this would place a 5% tax on the net worth of any billionaires who are California residents as of January 1. The money would go into a special fund at the state level and would have to be spent on health care services. It's unusual to tax the assets of a person as opposed to their income. So their assets would be, you know, their stocks, the jewelry they own, the cars in their garage, the paintings, anything that contributes to their wealth.”

“What would you do if caring for a parent meant putting your own financial future—and your kids’—on hold?”

“I don't think this is going to work. Right? Like, if you vote the data center project out of your town, they're just going to go to another state or to Canada. They'll put the data centers in space. You know, the they've got options here, and I don't think this is going to meaningfully slow down or stop anything.”

“Well, it was kind of wild. I went to this conference in Orange County a couple of months ago where a bunch of tax advisors and wealth managers were meeting. And one of the sessions they had was basically kind of like how to help your clients reduce their net worth. So suggestions that were like, oh, move your Picasso out of your house in Beverly Hills to your house in Aspen. Or if you were carrying more insurance than you needed on your wife's six-figure diamond necklace that just reduce the insurance policy to what it's actually worth, because that's what you'll be taxed on.”

“I went to this conference in Orange County a couple months ago where a bunch of tax advisers and wealth managers were meeting, and one of the sessions they had was basically kind of like how to help your clients reduce their net worth. So suggestions that were like, oh, move your Picasso out of your house in Beverly Hills to your house in Aspen, or if you were carrying more insurance than you needed on your wife's, you know, six figure diamond necklace that just reduced the insurance policy to what it's actually worth because that's what you'll be taxed on.”

“Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff. According to the Feet, he is personally involved in testing and training his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees. This character, this Mark Zuckerberg bot is being trained on Zuckerberg's mannerisms, tone, and publicly available statements as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.”

“California has this ballot initiative system that a lot of political actors use as leverage to get what they want out of the legislature and the governor. And so now that this thing has qualified for the ballot, this is a period over the next couple months where there could be some backroom negotiations to try to get this thing off the ballot. Sergey Brin and the committee that he created, they have put money into a couple of ballot measures that would negate the billionaire's tax. And it's possible that those could be used as leverage.”

“But even though it has a lot of support seemingly from the public, there are a lot of high profile Democrats who have come out against it and a lot of unions who are just sitting on the sidelines. Meanwhile, some of the most influential unions in the state, the teachers union, the umbrella group for SEIU, They haven't publicly taken a position. And privately, they're concerned about the idea of a tax that gets locked up in this special box and doesn't fund the programs that most tax dollars do.”

“And that's why when he does talk about this, he really focuses on his objection to a state specific wealth tax. And he does frequently say, we ought to have a conversation about a national wealth tax, leaving the door open to the idea of a wealth tax if it was applied evenly across the country. It is worth noting that he has opposed many wealth taxes in the past when they've come up in the California legislature.”

“Well, I think you summarized it exactly right. And that's why when he does talk about this, he really focuses on his objection to a state-specific wealth tax. And he does frequently say, we ought to have a conversation about a national wealth tax, leaving the door open to the idea of a wealth tax if it was applied evenly across the country.”

“So they started freaking out late last year in advance of this January 1 deadline because the ballot measure says that anyone who was a resident of California on January 1 of this year could be subject to this tax. So at the end of the year, there was a lot of jockeying and there were a few pretty high-profile billionaires who made moves to leave the state to change their official residency. A couple of the founders of Google relocated, Sergey Brin moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, Larry Page left for Florida, and then also some of the people who were really influential in the world of investing in technology left. David Sachs moved to Texas and Peter Thiel moved to Miami.”

“Most of our listeners have probably heard by now that, late last week, there was an attempted attack on Sam Altman at his house in San Francisco. A 20 year old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam's home. No one was hurt, but according to the criminal complaint against the suspect, this was someone who had a document that identified views opposed to artificial intelligence, also had a list of names and addresses of other AI executives, investors, and board members.”

“For the billionaires and also many tech leaders who are not billionaires, but who are aspirational, they see this as a kind of an existential threat that it really would set a precedent of going after the wealth that people have earned and taxing their possessions in a way that really has never been done before. On the other side, that is also part of the motivation for this thing to really shift the paradigm in how the government taxes wealth and how the government gets people to contribute to society.”

“Scientific death acceptance makes you live longer. Death denial makes you hateful, tiny, and dying quicker.”

“If you want to continue to scale in our organization or any organization that's growing, you have to realize that your job is changing every 12 months to level yourself up to the next, next highest leverage focus area. In order to do that, you have to replace yourself every 12 months with talent equal or better always.”

“Israel says that it will have full control of the Lebanese town of Bin Shabeel, quote, within days. The town has become the center of intense fighting. It's part of land that Israel says it's seizing from Lebanon to create what it calls a buffer zone so Hezbollah can't fire rockets into Israel.”

“What really does me is the one of the simplest things for all of us to live longer is universal healthcare, right? I went to Korea to talk to the people there. They all have universal healthcare. And every peer country of ours is way up and to the right on all the good things. And we pay double the amount of money, dollars 15,000 a year compared to seven, six to seven. And we get, we're at the bottom of all the outcomes.”

“You cannot have a Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it's not gonna happen. So I can't, I think he's very weak on crime and other things. So I'm not I mean, he he went public. I'm just responding to Pope Leo.”

“Gallup has found a 17-point drop in the percentage of US adults who say religion is an important part of their daily lives... such a large drop is rare among the 160 plus countries it studies.”

“And the problem with the health care system is it's a sick care system that is monetizing chronic disease. And insurance companies are one of the key players in this. Insurance companies are not there to keep you healthy and prevent chronic disease. Insurance are there to manage medications and to monetize chronic disease.”