What I'm listening to: Yale's Health and Veritas Podcast.
If you want to hear about the amazing career of a wonderful doctor—starting from the wards at UCSF during the difficult days of the AIDS crisis to key insights about the healthcare system in the present day—please take a listen to this Yale Health and Veritas podcast.
Here’s the background (i.e., why we care).
In February of 2020, I was working on a piece for Slate about the implications of the heart attack that then Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had experienced a few months prior. To get insights, I cold emailed a Yale cardiologist who had done influential work on long-term outcomes among heart attack survivors. This guy was a big deal in the field of tracking health outcomes, and it was not an area I knew much about.
We had a few brief, cordial emails. I learned some things, I got what I needed, I published the piece, and that was that. Or so I thought.
Looking back, it’s strange to think that even in mid-to-late February of 2020, I had no idea that all of our lives were about to change. Nor did most people. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked the day I sent that email, and it wouldn’t tank for another couple of weeks. I had no idea that those emails would be the first of hundreds in the following months and years.
Fast forward to March, April, and May. The Covid-19 pandemic had upended my life. I was working all the time, voraciously learning about this novel virus and our responses to it. Things were getting complicated and I began to collaborate with some highly respected people in public health.
One day, I was thinking about testing (a big concern back then, remember?). I saw a tweet that I really, really liked. It echoed a thought that I’d been having about how we were misusing the few available tests we had during those days. The tweet’s author rang a bell. It was the Yale cardiologist I’d emailed back in February. His name was Dr. Harlan Krumholz.
I emailed Harlan and set up a call. My hope was that we could write something together on this topic.
That phone call changed my life—not because it led to a USA Today byline that we wrote together, but because it led me to perhaps the most important mentor I’ve had in my entire professional career. In the nearly three years since that day, Harlan and I have built a collaboration and friendship that goes beyond fruitful. It has been formative. Harlan not only consistently makes my work better, but he provides moral leadership. He leads by example, always thanking every member of the teams we work with, prioritizing family over work at key times, and demonstrating kindness. If I have a really good idea, Harlan celebrates it and you can feel the sincerity. He’s excited about ideas and he loves supporting them and making them even better.
It’s impossible to quantify how supportive Harlan has been of me and my work. And while I never could have foreseen any of that during our first call, It’s heartening that I immediately knew that I had stumbled on a truly great individual. Fortunately, I don’t have to try to remember my reaction to that fateful call, because I know exactly what I was thinking roughly an hour later. That’s because I recorded a voice memo (as I often did back then) that is still saved on my phone. Here’s a snippet of what I recorded late in the afternoon of May 7, 2020:
“I had a phone call with Harlan Krumholz….and really Harlan is an interesting and smart guy—one of the very smartest people I’ve talked to in a long time.”
You have to understand the context for that comment. At that time, I was routinely having conversations with some incredibly intelligent and famous people. But even in that one call, it was clear to me that he was on a different level.
Every day since has only confirmed that initial impression, and far more.
So, now that you know what this man means to me, please take a listen to a “This Is Your Life” episode of Yale’s Health and Veritas podcast (which Harlan co-hosts). In the episode, Harlan’s co-host (the great Dr. Howie Forman) interviews him. (Kudos to Howie, as I know it took a lot of convincing to get Harlan to let the spotlight fall on him in this way.) They cover just some of the highlights of the incredible, brilliant, imaginative, productive, and ongoing career of my friend and mentor Dr. Harlan Krumholz.
Terrific interview