Sibling Revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson - Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. Rashmi Murthy (Part 2)

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Last week, Kate and Oliver interviewed Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States under President Obama. On this episode, Kate and Goldie sit down with Dr. Vivek Murthy and his sister Dr. Rashmi Murthy. They discuss their childhood, their paths to becoming doctors, what it was like to be appointed Surgeon General, and much more. Executive Producers: Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, and Sim SarnaProduced by Allison BresnickEditor: Josh WindischMusic by Mark HudsonThis show is brought to you by Cloud10 and powered by Simplecast.This episode is sponsored by Third Love and Sakara.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kate Hudson. And my name is Oliver Hudson. We wanted to do something that highlighted our relationship. And what it's like to be siblings. We are a sibling rivalry. No, no. Sibling rivalry.

Don't do that with your mouth. That's good. That's good. We hope that you were able to learn a lot from last week's episode with just Dr. Vivek Murthy, and we're excited for you to now hear our conversation with him

and his sister, Dr. Rashmi, Murthy. She's a family physician. Vivek was the Surgeon General under President Obama. And Mom and I were in New York and we were able to do that one together, Ollie, because you were sick with the flu. I was sick.

I was sick in the head. A great song, Luminaires. So here is part two with Vivek and Roshmi Murphy. I'm so interested in so many parts of your life. And there's so many to go through. We look at our notes here and there's this stage of your life and there's that stage of your life. and you two have been born at the same time, one year.

I mean, that's kind of extraordinary, and it feels a little bit like twins, you know, this is... Who's older? Okay, so Rashmi, you're born, and then how many months later or... So I was born June 22nd. Okay. And then he was born July 10th. So Vivek was born...

Oh, that's my son's birthday. So being, you know, So, so, so close growing up. You said something to the effect that you always go to her. You're a little bit like the second mother. Is that correct? That's right. So how does that, what do you mean by that?

Well. And how does mom take that? Well, our mom looks at that as a source of pride, actually, because she, I think for both of my parents, I think, and this I think is common probably for a lot of parents. they want their kids to be friends and hopefully be there for each other after their time on this earth passes. And that was always her hope

was that we would be close and that we would look after each other. So I think the fact that from the very beginning Rushmi was always so motherly toward me and always took care of me, I think, was reassuring to them that hopefully this pattern would last for the rest of our lives. Because it was that way from the very beginning,

like from the day my mother and father brought me home from the hospital. Like Rushmi was only one. but despite that she was happy that i was there my my mother in fact told me that as soon as they brought me in the door rush me ran up and she gave me a kiss uh you know and you know that's not the normal or always the most common reaction right now oliver backed up you know yeah i brought katie home he backed up into the corner i went i better give katie to the baby nurse How old was Oliver?

Oliver was two and a half. Okay. Is it just you two? Mm-hmm. Oh, wow. So just bam, bam, and then mom was done. Give us the background of how you were brought up. So, you know, mom and dad were in India.

Dad trained a little bit in the UK. And then we were born there, stayed there for about two years after I was born. And then we moved to Newfoundland. So we were there for two years. And then in 1980 moved down to Miami. And how old were you? when you move to Newfoundland? About two.

Okay, so you don't really remember the UK. That's my earliest memory. We had a house on a, or we were looking down to the ocean on a cliff, and he and I would play in the water on the beach below, and my parents were sitting on the sand chatting away, and he and I were just in the midst of all this jellyfish, picking them up with our bare hands and putting them in, we'd never seen jellyfish before.

I don't think my parents really knew that it was dangerous. And so we were just, we're lucky that we never got stung, but we were just putting mint of buckets and just having her way. And then how long were you in Newfoundland? Another two years or so. So my dad was like a country doctor doing house calls on tractors and the Medda winner and delivering babies. You know, saying that's amazing.

When you hear that, it's a question I had, your father sounded incredibly altruistic. Who is daddy? He's very altruistic. He's very, he thinks, and dreams big. So he has big aspirations for himself and for his kids. And I think he's fundamentally optimistic as a human being about the world and about people. And sometimes that's gotten him in trouble, you know, in terms of being too trusting of people who have sometimes misused that trust.

But that's ultimately who he is in the end of the day. And he's incredibly hardworking. And when we grew up, he would really, he pushed us to really, you know, hold us. ourselves to a high standard when it came to how hard we worked and how hard we applied ourselves. But I think the most powerful way that he and my mom taught us was really through their own example because both of them were very service-oriented in their life. They devoted so much time to charity projects and to bringing community members together around these projects that typically didn't work together. And so we saw a lot of that. We were

annoyed by it a lot of times as kids because it was taking them away from us. But in retrospect, fact we look at it and we feel proud of them and how they lived their life even though it wasn't always easy because they came when they came to the country they didn't have a lot of connections or money I actually see it's funny what six with you from being a child but I remember one day when we were in elementary school and when things were really tight going to the grocery store and my mother is saying we have to be very careful about what we buy because we only have a hundred dollars to spend on food for this week or this month and I was very young at the time

but I remember being really scared because I remember wondering are we not going to have enough to eat like what's going to happen so they came and they had to deal with just a lot of hardships and setting up like a life here without much support

but despite that they always dedicated a portion of their time and energy and attention to doing things to improve the community and that really stuck with us yes I mean as Katie and I were talking together about the what is it that makes you

who you are, you know, and how much you get from your parents, because obviously we'll talk about it, but you've done a lot for people. And it's kind of in your nature, and particularly your nature when you came out immediately had this maternal instinct. Kissing your brow. You're our first doctors that we've had on the podcast, and clearly our first surgeon general. Do you think that that was always kind of growing up, like you both, because you're both doctors, correct? And are you still practicing? Yeah. So I work, I have a private practice. I share office space with my dad, which is kind of fun and nice. And I feel really blessed that I can do that. And it's a practice that my mom actually, when we were both in school, as was the tradition with a lot of Indian households,

whose husbands happen to be doctors. The wives often help manage and set up the office space and worked in various aspects. So my mom did the same thing. She was working in that office space. she was a manager. She did everything from, you know, behind the front desk to, you know, billing to everything. Skipping around in terms of, um, of this culture, because I spend a lot of time in India and I have a lot of friends in India and, and I'm a great lover of India and its culture and the soil it's steeped in and all of its history and all of its, you know, religious beliefs um, is pretty, pretty exciting. But I did notice that the family unit, and I started going there in 1980. But the family unit, particularly back then, was very strong. And no matter where I was,

I was able to see grandfathers with their children in the streets, mommy's washing hair of their children in the ditch, families hanging together and laughing and sitting on the side of the road and having chapati, but everybody in some way was related. And this family unit was like unbreakable. I wonder if that's how you grew up. I think so. You know, I think India has changed a lot over time, but for many immigrants like my parents, India is frozen in time for them, as to what it was like in 1972 when they left. And at that time, family units were very strong. That was the, that was your beginning and your final source of support. I remember going for the first time to my father's village.

You grew up in a really far out, poor village in South India. South, which part? Yeah. It was about a couple of hours outside of Mysore. Oh, okay. It's called Halegray, which is why their names are. My dad's, so part of, like, the old naming culture is you have the name of your city or your village. Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Family name, then your personal name. So that's why Vivek's middle name is Halegety. Yeah, that's right. Tradition. Tradition. I like it. Yeah.

And so I remember going there for the first time and seeing just how poor people were. I mean, many people didn't have running water in their homes, and there were no, like, bathrooms in most people's homes, et cetera. and food was not always easy to come by but people looked out for each other and families were tight and neighbors were tight as well and so even though they may not have been wealthy they were poor when it came to material resources

when it came to relationships they were rich and they were sustained by that and it was so clear so growing up I think our parents who both grew up with tight families even though they didn't have a lot materially they really wanted to keep that family unit preserved and I think they felt even more so because as immigrants who came to this country not having much support, they felt that if they didn't

have a strong family unit, then what would we have? You know, we couldn't fall back on cousins. We didn't have a community of connections. And they also worried that we might be looked at, you know, as outsiders and that we may not always be embraced. So they felt that the family had to be strong. Why did they leave? Well, they left India for, I think, reasons that many immigrants leave. My father had growing up, even though he was in a small village, it was during the time immediately following Indian independence when there was a lot of aspirations and dreams about what not just a country could be, but people were opening up their own lives and wondering,

what could I do and what could I become? And at that time, like if you wanted to get a really good education or build a really good career, you went to the UK or you went to America. And so after he finished medical school, that was his first step, was to say, okay, well, maybe I can build a better life for the family abroad. And I think if he had to do it again, he probably would have come directly to America, given what he knows now. Back then in the 1970s, there was a lot of racism in England. It was actually quite overt. So, for example, when he was a doctor working in the hospital there, and they had to assign the call schedule, so who has to work evening duties and night duties and weekends and weekdays, if you were somebody of color,

then you were automatically given the bad shift. If you were someone of color, then you generally weren't called on during the hospital-wide meetings to speak if you had ideas. So it was very overt back then, and it's changed a lot now. But I think at that time, he sort of, after seven years of being in England,

they realized they needed to go somewhere different. And they wanted to actually come directly to America. But the first opportunity they got to leave was actually to go to New Finland, and that's why they went there. We always say, you know, you are what you know, And when you grow up in a family of doctors, a lot of times you become a doctor. It's just something that's in the bones.

It's sometimes challenge, like I always thought that you're certainly born into, this is maybe more of the Indian take on it, but that you're born into a family that cultivates a certain desire for you, you know, and support for you. So I can't remember a time where it wasn't about health. Like maybe I would have been a vet, but, you know, we were the kids that went to Toyser us and got the anatomy, you know, the dissection kit. And you love operation. You did that on your own?

Yeah, yeah. See, that's just a fraud. It's a dissect everything. It's so fun. Didn't you? I loved Operation. Did you do that? Yeah.

We got wheeh, when you did some. Why Miami? Why did your parents go from, I mean, clearly like Newfoundland after like freezing, cold delivering babies, your pops was probably like, going up to Miami. He's like, what is this black? Black Raid. There were two job offers. Okay.

One was Buffalo and the other one was Miami. So it was like a no-brainer. Did you like growing up in Miami? Yeah. I mean, it was nice. I mean, we were the only Indians in our school. But I was oddly enough, I didn't grow up feeling colored in any way. I felt colorless.

I didn't really notice racial differences. You know, yeah. Did you? Yeah. Yeah, very much. Yeah, I didn't notice. I didn't feel any of that. I think I was lucky I didn't have a lot of experiences with over racism either, except for one of, you know, when we were driving somewhere and somebody saw us and in my parents in Osari and we were in some Indian clothes and yelled something out the window.

So what was it like for you growing up in Miami? I mean, I loved growing up in the same grade, right? We were, yeah, from first grade onward, yeah. Wow. That's wild. He skipped kindergarten. Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay, we got the best friends. Why did this one really skipped kindergarten?

This is what I've been wondering for years. I wasn't like demonstrating great intelligence or something like that. Maybe I colored well. I don't know. He just thought you looked very bored. So, you know, there's a lot that I loved about Miami. I like playing outside and doing sports. And Miami was so nice all around year to do that.

But I was very conscious of my culture and my race, in part because, in part because, you know, I felt a lot of pride around it. And our parents made it a point to teach us a lot about Indian culture and tradition and about spirituality, but I also felt conscious of it because I remember discrete instances as a young person where I was made fun of because I was Indian and people used to call me Tomahawk boy, you know, thinking of like Native American culture and history. And it was just, those were unpleasant experiences like when I was in elementary school. And it's funny, like I know that most people weren't like that, but those experiences really stick with you. And I think it took me many years to shed some of those experiences and to not automatically sort of assume that someone

might think less of me because of my racial and ethnic background. I still remember feeling that in college, even though I was surrounded by a lot of people who were Indian and of various ethnicities. It's amazing how the brain actually holds on to that part of the brain, and it just replays itself. So it doesn't seem to go away so easily, even when you talk to your own brain. and say, this is silly, you know, but it still triggers you. I mean, it is something that it's very tough to get rid of, but I think just because the brain does have a level of plasticity,

we can do it. So I love the fact that you came in as maternal, for him. Even though you guys are basically the same age, do you always feel like clearly the older sibling? You know, now it's situational. Because I think probably around college, you know, there's certain instances where I might feel like I need to ask him for advice. He's the older, wiser person when it comes to this topic or he'll ask me for advice with certain things. But growing up, like in grade school, high school.

I mean, at that age, most of my caretaking was, you know, we're like in elementary school, we'd sit up and we'd make our parents eat at like 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, because we'd be. studying straight through. And it was cruel. But it happened for several years. And they would never want to eat dinner without us. That's why they would wait until 11 p.m. Yeah. They have to eat dinner as a family. Well, see, there you go. That's togetherness. That's unity. These are all the things that ultimately build resilience. Yes. And, you know, loyalty. So they would fall asleep, you know, and waiting for us. And then we'd have to wake them up and say, okay, we're ready. Or let's just take a break. Let's eat dinner and then go back. So, but then. But then, you know, at midnight, you know, he'd be hungry.

I wish I was that good of a person. Well, that we would sacrifice our own need for that food. You're so hungry. I'll wait for you, darling, until you finish your home. I mean, it really is like, it's like an amazing thing that I never had. Mom. Oh, my God. These are, like, small sacrifices that sometimes you don't pay attention to.

You know, you look at the big ticket sacrifices, like, okay, I didn't buy something that I wanted because I'm saving for my kids' college education. But on a daily level, these were the things that my parents would do for us. So you guys go to the same high school and then you go the same year to different colleges and did you leave each other? Was that so hard? That was really hard. Yeah.

We had not only been in the same grade, but a lot of times because we were alphabetized, we were sitting next to each other. class. Oh, right. So it was, we shared homework. I may have copied her homework on more than one occasion. Like there, there was a lot that we did together. And, yeah, and then all of a sudden we're in totally different places.

Did you feel lonely? Profoundly, yeah. You know, we went away to one of those pre-college programs. And I feel like Vivek thrived in that year. We were both at the same program. And he thrived and he was just throwing himself into all those classes and homework and everything. And for me, it was sort of devastating because it was the first time I was away from home. He was studying all the time. But the situations were reversed when we actually went

to college. I think he felt it more than I did. I still felt, you know, out of place and a little bit isolated. Parents were far away. And, you know, he was in, I was in New York. He was in Boston. Where did you go to school? I was at Barnard. Oh, nice. And you? I was at Harvard. at Harvard oh oh so it's like that you never saw those schools in our day oh nobody in our family went to bono to Harvard oh so anyway actually none of us went to school well I went one year for the acting

yeah so this is this is really interesting this is all that connectivity and taking being together for so long. Oh, that's so hard. Very, very hard. Yeah. Very hard. Did you talk to each other often when you were gone?

Oh, all this time. Oh, yeah. My dad would call me every day at six o'clock in the morning. Oh, my God. Your parents. I call you early, but, you know. Yeah. Well, we live seven blocks away from each other.

Well, there you know. Okay. So, yeah. I feel like the daughters just don't really go far. And you work with your parents now. So I work with my, yeah, my mom's. still comes into the office every now and again, but mostly she does work from home and she's a realtor part-time. But my grandmother lives with my parents now. Yeah. So I go there nearly daily

just to see her. And kids? I don't have children. My husband and I don't have kids. Vivique and Alice's two children are like our sorgette kids. Oh, I love it. So when we're there, we're like all involved. Oh, yeah. That's so fun. Second set of parents. She's their godmother. Out of college, How long were you in school? I was in school for, so I took a year off after college and then I was. Which was very stressful for my parents. Yes. Yeah, they were afraid that, you know, once he breaks the track of education,

that he might get sidetracked into other things or maybe. Yeah, like bartending at somewhere in Ibiza or something. Like what? What about that? Or jays somewhere, yeah. Making a shoe. I did. Maybe it scared them because I actually did call my mother one day in college and say that I was thinking about,

bartending part-time just to make some money i did i did and the thing is i didn't drink alcohol i knew nothing about like you know what to make but i figured somebody would teach me she was not happy about that so when i proposed taking a year off they they both well yeah it's true i mean you guys are so accomplished like did you ever party no yeah well no a little bit i mean but you guys ever like get like wasted moment where you were both like, I mean, honey? Are you listening to this? No. I mean, yeah. Oh, you guys are so good.

I was in college. I didn't go out very much. I think I went to two parties in college, right? But in medical school and when I was in business school, I went to and through a lot of parties then. I feel like I finally like came out of my social show when I was there. Oh, that's good. Well, you can go to parties and have fun and dance on tables. You don't have to be completely wasted. Yeah, but like at some point, you know. you're going to get wasted. Well, I mean.

Right, Ollie? I wouldn't say, no, but don't you, okay, enough out of you. Yeah, shut up. Mom, just say it, just tell him. I'm waiting for something to come out that I forgot about. I don't know. But anyway. Who went into what kind of medicine after your 100 years at school?

So I ended up doing internal medicine with this specialty in hospital medicine. So what that means is I took care of adults, and I took care of them when they were admitted to the hospital. So when they were really sick enough to be admitted. And I basically went into family medicine because it encompassed a lot of, I couldn't pick. I like pediatrics. I loved OB. I like dermatology. I like doing surgeries.

So with family medicine, you can do, you know, like you're the old-fashioned country doctor. You can do everything. In the Midwest, you've got FPs who do colonoscopies and C-sections. Oh, wow. So you can just do it all. So I could go to you, you could look at my sinuses and look at my moles. Yes, right, and listen to my heart and do, you know, that's awesome. And do PRP for something and, you know, everything.

Oh, how fun. Yeah, it's nice. So it gives you a lot of breath. Third love, I'll take this one, Ollie, because I'm a female. I will, but can I say one thing before you go to this? So in this time of quarantine, My cup size has grown from an A to a double A. Okay, go ahead.

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Do you think I'm a double A, like actually? Do you think if I was measured, I would be a double A? Yeah. I mean, you definitely do have little boobies right now. Okay. So what you do is you go into the fit quiz. You answer some simple questions. Go do the fit quiz. You'll see. Oh, yeah.

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I like this part. It's a remedy for bloating, weight, gain, and fatigue. The three BWG and Fs. And right now, Sikara is offering our listeners 20% off their first order when they go to sakara.com slash sibling or enter code Sibbiby and F's. at checkout. That's Sakara, S-A-K-A-R-A-com, slash sibling to get 20% off your first order. Sikara.com slash Sibling. You got this amazing appointment, Surgeon General. How do you get appointed the position of

Surgeon General? I have no idea how it usually works. I can tell you how it worked for me, and I suspect it's very different every time. I actually had never sought out the position of being surgeon general or thought I would work in government. I was kind of doing my own thing in the private sector. And that involved a mix of doing medicine, you know, building a tech company and then doing some advocacy, work around health policy. So it was involved in health care stuff, but I wasn't in government. But literally what happened is one day I was flying back from L.A. to Boston, when I lived in Boston, on a red-eye flight. I landed on July 10th, my birthday, and I was about to go to sleep, and I was like, oh, no, I just left my, I've left my dry cleaning at the dry cleaners for like the last week while I've been gone.

I was like, I should go get it. So I went to go get it. And while I was walking back with my hands full of dry cleaning, my phone rings, and I look at the phone, and it's a 202 number, which is Washington, D.C., and I knew it was Washington, D.C. But I didn't know who it was, and I recognized the number, so I just kept letting it ring, and then it rang. And finally, at the very end, it was like, let me just pick it up. And it was that phone call that was the White House calling to ask if I would be interested in serving as Surgeon General. Who at the White House is calling? So it was somebody who was, it was not the president and it was not like his immediate circle.

It was somebody several wrongs below. The president. You wouldn't believe it. The president doesn't make that first call. No. Okay. Because in part, you would never put the president on the phone unless you were sure the person was going to say yes. that's one of the reason

the president wasn't on the phone but it was also very early in the process while they were actually thinking about multiple people and they were calling to engage my interest in being considered for that role and even though I actually

had no interest in serving in government prior to that there were something interesting about this role very unusual in fact about this role that struck me in that moment just deeply instinctually as a role that might be a good fit and that's that unlike most of

other politically appointed roles. The job of the Surgeon General is not to execute the agenda of the president, but it's actually to have the highest fidelity to the public interest in science and to work on issues and comment on issues, even if they contradict your president. At least if you do it well, that's what you're supposed to do. And there was something about that that appealed to me. There was also something about the fact that you could really work with and engage with the public directly that was exciting to me, and it felt like a way to really make a

contribution hopefully to public health that would be interesting and that I would be able to craft, you know, like with my own vision. And so that was, that was exciting. When did you get the call that they wanted or he wanted you to be the search in general? So this was actually a big, like, crazy like journey. And I'll just, I'll tell you the sort of highlights and low lights, if you will. But there were a series of interviews and conversations they wanted to have after that. So I meant, you know, a bunch of different people. But it was like, you never really. You never really know, like, there's a lot, the whole process is very opaque, first of all. You don't, it's very opaque. It's very unclear. Like, who's involved in decision making, who else they're talking to,

how long it'll take. Like, none of this is at all clear. The other funny thing about it is usually when you go to a job interview, people will tell you what the job is about. Right? I was, that was our next question. But actually, what is interesting is, what is the search job? But nobody, at any point, really, like, got into what the job was about. And I realized later that it was in part because everyone in government has a slightly different perception of what the job is. But there were a whole bunch of those conversations. And at some point, I think, a few months later, so July 10th, I got the first call,

I think probably about two or three months later is when I got word that they had settled on me as a person they wanted. And then they began a very, like, intensive vetting process. So where they go through, like, everything in your life. that you said publicly, what people have said about you, because they want to know if they put you up to be confirmed by the Senate, are you going to end up being an embarrassment

to the president? Is your confirmation going to fail? Yeah, it's like an intense background check. It's like the craziest background checked you could have ever gotten in your life. That's right. And then finally in November of that year is when they made the public announcement

that they had nominated me. But it didn't, that's actually, that was the easy part. From that November, for the next 13 months, I went through a very intensive confirmation process that initially looked like it would be easy, but then what happened, because initially, you know, I'm already exhausted.

Like, this sounds exhausting. Oh, no, I know. The crazy thing about being nominated for these positions without any confirmation of, or guarantee of being confirmed, is you don't know if you'll be able to do stuff. And while you're in confirmation process, you have a lot of restrictions on what you can do publicly, so you can't go out and give talks,

who can't write papers, you can't do, you can't do interviews, can't do any of that. So who's confirming you? The Senate. So they have to vote, and, you know, in a very partisan environment, you never know how things will fall. So in that case, like, it rested in part on my hearing. And so I went for this confirmation hearing in February of the following year, where I was, you know, grilled by senators. And I had previous prior to that, I'd done a whole bunch of one-on-one meetings with them.

And at the end of that confirmation hearing, everyone felt quite optimistic. There were Republicans who were, you know, seemed enthusiastic and open. Democrats were enthusiastic. And we thought, okay, we'll have a nice bipartisan. confirmation here. But then on the day of the committee vote, so typically your committee will vote first in the Senate, and then the whole Senate will vote on your nomination. But on the day of the committee vote, the National Rifle Association, the NRA, largely in partnership with one of the members of the Senate, launched sort of an attack, if you will, and issued a letter

saying, to all the senators saying, if you vote for this candidate, then we will score you, which means that we will give you a letter grade, and that will impact whether we run ads against you, whether we fund your opponent, things of that sort. And so all of the Republicans who had indicated potential interest in support went back to their corners. And about 12 Democrats who were up for reelection or come from states, you know, of mixed sort of political background, also went from the yes column immediately to the no or maybe oh why why in 2012 after the tragic shootings in newtown connecticut where so many children were were murdered um i had posted a few tweets around that time in which i had said that gun violence is a public health issue i had

also said that i thought it was shameful that instead of passing legislation to safeguard our children that Congress is being scared of interest groups and is shying away from taking action. And I had organized actually a petition as part of an organization that I was leading with my wife Alice called Doctors for America to actually bring physicians around the country together to advocate for sensible legislation

to prevent gun violence. And it was on the basis of that that they issued the letter. So nobody thought I would be confirmed. In fact, it was given like a 1% chance. Really? Yeah. And so I remember the day the New York Times wrote a story saying, you know, the White House is likely going to

withdraw this nomination, and every media outlet was running stories about, because this was, it ended up being very big news. And it's a weird, although I'm sure to you both of you a very familiar feeling, to be talked about a lot in the media, knowing that you can't go out and say anything about it. I know. That's right. You have to keep your mouth shut. Because my views were based on science and public health. It wasn't that no one should have guns. It wasn't that, you know, everyone should have guns. It wasn't about that. It was that we need to let science drive our policy and put sensible reforms in place so that, you know, we safeguard our children.

I mean, what should be more important than making sure our kids are safe, you know, especially when they're at school. So what happened is, though, you know, after that point, I remember that day that the New York Times story, when it came out, I went and met with the president's sort of his inner circle team at the White House. And I asked him point blank, I said, do you want, and does the president want to withdraw the nomination? And they said, no, they said absolutely not. I said, I know he has other policy priorities. You're going to have to spend political capital on this with no shred of evidence that there may be a return on it. Like you may still fail.

In fact, it's likely to fail, are you sure? They said, you know, this is important. It's important to us. It's important to him. And it's an issue of principle. And we want to keep working to get this done because it matters. And no one should be, you know, using the Surgeon General's, you know, nomination and confirmation as upon in a policy debate, and this is not a politicized role.

So they stuck by, you know, the nomination, and we kept at it, and through a series of circumstances at the 11th hour, after the 2014 elections during what's called the lame duck period, when just a little bit of legislation gets done before people go home for Christmas, the very last moment they were able to bring up the nomination, and it received enough support to actually pass. Oh, my goodness. During all of this, how did you respond? Well, to the initial nomination, I mean, shock and just awe because such great things,

potential things were happening to him and he works really hard. And then, of course, just feeling really devastated when that we were all there for the confirmation. Oh, you're going to get emotional. I'm going to get emotional. it's crazy it's so much joy i don't like the word pride but i love the word joy you know for having those moments and having worked so hard but also having to be be upon which is really what happened and it you know and not deserving so you know obviously when it didn't go through

we were all devastated that you know because all of us knowing him for so long knew the kind of impact that he would have in this role, you know, for the country and being on a such a large stage, being able to affect millions of people, you know, in a positive way. This is what he has always wanted to do. The downward spirals are always preceding great moments in life, right? And so the immediate aftermath was this whole group of people that just got together and said, you know, know in a grassroots level, we have to make sure this is going to come to fruition and just seeing all that energy, you know, from the people, not necessarily the White House or administration or anything like that, but people, you know, making sure that they did one-on-ones with people,

you know, people in the Senate and trying to turn the tide. So at that moment when he did receive the confirmation. I mean, just elation. Was it just the best? Yeah. And did you celebrate? We were all in D.C. together for that, for the vote and the roll, the roll call. And you ate it a decent hour. And you ate it a decent hour or not. Now, I wouldn't be doing my brother justice right now if I didn't ask this question, because this is the question Oliver would ask. Okay. Which is, in that moment, as a doctor,

Was there any part of you that felt any kind of envy or was it pure excitement? This is Oliver's whole thing. You'd be like, oh, exactly. Of course. No. I'm just saying, I have to ask it for you. You're being represented here. No, no.

I don't, one thing about a relationship from the beginning of time, I've never been jealous of him, ever. Oh, no. It's just so amazing. That was very emotional what you just experienced. Thank you for sharing that, honey. You've done philanthropy, which is something that you did, you know, to really affect and bring awareness to the AIDS issue that was going on here and in India. And the other foundation that you created, this supports a lot of the various things, as I see you, and I see you, and I, read about you, what does your past look like and what the trajectory of your, of your future looks like? Because you're extremely caring people. You have a lot of empathy and a lot of energy to be able to help mankind, whether it's through writing your book or whether it's through

the various things that you can do that help people. And it's, it's a beautiful grab bag of gifts that you can give. And you like that. It makes you happy. When did you start your foundations? Were you in school? Did you start them after school? When did you start knowing that you two together wanted to create this kind of way in order to affect people's lives positively? The first nonprofit we started was a freshman year of college. So that was the one that focused on HIV AIDS in India. And, you know, Goldie, I would love to tell you that this was part of some grand plan, but it was kind of by accident that that happened because my dad called us one day.

And he said, hey, this is philanthropist in South Florida who wants to give money to a cause, but he doesn't know what the cause is. He said, you haven't mind. So my dad asked us if we had any ideas that we wanted to submit to him for support. Now, this was not at all on my radar. I was just freshman in college. I thought, I'm there to study, get some stuff done, figure out what I want to do. with my life. But after reflecting on it more, we came to this idea of working on HIV because

we knew it was a growing problem in India. We had done some volunteer work on it in Miami. And we thought, hey, nobody's really thinking about young people as a force for addressing HIV and educating populations about HIV. But if we could go and work with young people in India and help mobilize them to do more education in their communities, and maybe young people could be the force the country needs right now for prevention. So that was the idea behind the first nonprofit that we built. And then the next one? The next one, we started a couple in 1999.

So, well, a couple of years later, I would say we were finishing college. And this one was focused on training young women in a small village in India to be community health workers, so to provide basic health care education and services to people in their village, which they did often by going door to door. Look, we didn't know a lot about how to build organizations at the time. So we were just learning, you know, by the seat of our pants. It isn't easy. I've been doing it for 17.

with Mind Up and my organization, and it is difficult. But it is the question of why we do what we do and why we're attracted basically to neither medicine or helping others or, and this is a kind of part of who you are as a person and you as well, and your family. So, I mean, it really is heartwarming to be around it because you're extremely successful in what you've done and and yet there's still this aspect. And now we get to the book. Was it right out of school and right into the workplace that you started looking at this and going,

there is an epidemic happening and it's called loneliness? So I don't think I appreciated it that much in the beginning. I think I was seeing it, but I wasn't sure how common it was. And I was like, maybe these are just peculiar later to my own experience. But what I was seeing was this. I was seeing people, patients coming into the hospital, with serious illnesses and having to make some big decisions about whether to get a certain test or a certain treatment.

And I would sometimes ask them, is there somebody you want me to call so that you can have some family here to support you as you make this decision or talk it over with someone? And a lot of times the answer is no. There's nobody to call. They're like, I'd love to talk to somebody, but I don't have anyone to call.

And that always made me very sad. It was because I know I wouldn't have been able to make those decisions alone if I were in their shoes. And then even there were many times when patients died under our case. care after a long illness when the only ones who were there with them in their final moments were us their doctors and nurses in the hospital and there was no family no friends around them um and as i talked to people i also started to realize that many patients hungered for more connection

uh for many of them the only people who they had to talk to were the nurses and doctors and some of them would actually come in often to the hospital and sometimes the staff would be upset and say why do they keep coming in they don't really need to be here in the hospital but i think what we didn't often understand was they were coming in not necessarily to meet a physical need but to meet a social need which is just as important to them so despite seeing all of that though like i didn't know kate if this was just my own experience or not it was only actually when i became surgeon general and began talking to people in communities all across america and small towns big cities fishing villages in alaska everywhere that i started to realize that behind so many of the stories of addiction and

violence and depression and anxiety that people were struggling with were these threats of loneliness and people wouldn't come and say hi my name is goldy i'm struggling with loneliness they would never say that for reasons i can talk about but what they would say are things like i feel like nobody cares about us i feel invisible i had so many college students who would say i feel like i if i disappeared it just wouldn't matter nobody would miss me time and time again that sense of being alone of being abandoned, of not being seen, of not mattering, kept surfacing in so many of these conversations. And then I, so that's what led me to do two things. One is to surface it more explicitly myself in these town halls and community meetings in very simple ways. I would just ask

people, you know, how many people think that loneliness is a problem, you know, in your community and, or for you the people you love, or maybe even in your own life. And I'll tell you that of all the issues that I worked on when I was in government, including opioids and Zika and you Ebola and everything else, it was this issue that resonated most strongly with people because I would see this visceral flicker of recognition in their eyes that said either I've been affected or somebody I know has been affected, but this is real to me. And that was a really powerful signal to me. It helped me realize that what I was seeing in the hospital all those years was not unique to my experience. It was much more representative. And then I started to delve more

deeply into the science of what was happening and realized that, wow, loneliness is not just extraordinarily common with more people struggling with loneliness in the U.S. today than have diabetes or who even smoke, but it's really consequential. It has profound impacts on our health, including shortening our life and increasing our risk for heart disease and for depression and for dementia and anxiety. Even that mortality impact, you know, people who struggle with loneliness live shorter lives on average than those who don't. And that mortality impact is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's greater than the mortality impact of obesity or sedentary living.

And I think about how much time as Surgeon General I spent talking about those three issues, smoking, obesity, and physical activity without necessarily realizing that there's something else that may have potentially just as much of an impact on our health. And so I was educated by the people that I met all across the country to really look in to this issue. What I loved about how you went, because your book together is really quite wonderful and I think it's very important for people to read because you can, we can in many ways as humans, identify with this problem. And when we look at sort of the understanding of the genesis, you know, the beginning of how these problems can happen, we talked a little earlier,

about our children, about how we nurture our children, how important it is, and the theme of today in many ways has been about family and interconnection and togetherness, the title of your book, together, and that it is so vitally important that that from the early, early brain development, days of our babies have to know that that secure attachment, that we as parents must give this time to our child because the statistics are not good when they don't have it. The trajectory of their life does not look very healthy. It doesn't look very good and they're very vulnerable to all kinds of physiological diseases and emotional instability. So this here makes me excited to be able to be in your presence and speak to you about this because I've been looking into this

for a long time now and doing what I could do, I think, with Mindop to be able to give this to children, to give them something to create interconnectivity even in the classroom where they could build that. So you're helping so many people by trying to understand, you know, the reason why, you know, the issues around this problem and how to fix it. But my question to you and all of it is how do you, being someone who is in the area of wanting to help mankind, to help this particular area, you've written a book. What are the solutions in your mind or potential solutions? So I think there are, first of all, thank you, Gouldley, for this very kind words. This book has been, it's been a journey of discovery for me. I feel like I've learned

as I've written the book, and I'm grateful to have the chance to share it with the world. Part of what I think, part of my hope in writing the book is to take the first step of what I hope will be a longer journey in trying to nudge and support a movement in society that shifts us from a society that is focused increasingly on wealth and reputation and power to one that centers itself on people, not that those other factors don't matter, but it's a question of where they fall in the priority. list. I find it striking because if we were to go out on a street corner and ask a hundred people, tell me what the three top priorities are in your life. I can guarantee you that most people their top priority would be somebody in their life. It would be their child or their children or their mother or their father or their spouse. But if I look at how society pushes us to spend our time, it's often not necessarily with the relationships that are most valuable to us. society is telling us we need to work harder so that we can make it big so i think that the signals

that we're receiving from society and where we're being pushed is to invest in that to get that promotion to build our brand to get out there on social media so that we can build followers and people know us and we can take our message forward and at some point the question becomes like where do people fit into them like where are we investing our time in the relationships we have and also in interacting with people who we may not know well but strangers and others. Walking on the street now is very different than it was 20 years ago. You don't often say hello to people or make eye contact anymore

because people are listening to devices. They're talking on the phone. They're doing their own thing. Totally isolated, yeah. Right. And again, on their own, none of these things are bad. There's so many advantages we have from being able to use, you know, mobile phones from being able to, like, connect from anywhere.

But I think what's happened is that our use of these technologies has raced so far ahead. and so quickly ahead of considerations around things like relationships and families that we have not established the right boundaries. And we're just now trying to figure out how do we strike the right balance here? And so as I think about this, again, on a very personal level, because I myself have been guilty so many times of allowing both my devices and also the greater connectivity that I have to allow work

and so many of these other considerations to infiltrate pieces of my life that should have been restricted, for family. Well, also just family, just having a conversation. How many times have we just wanted to text instead of have a conversation? Allie wants him so bad. Poor, poor, no, I just wanted to say the irony of it all is that, you know, the technological advances. We're advancing technologically to help us all connect. We are more connected than we've ever been from a technological standpoint, but that connectedness has actually caused a disconnect with sort of human interaction. So therein lies the sort of dichotomy of it all, you know,

which is just interesting. The other thing that I wanted to say, and then I'm going to, and I'll duck out of frame again, is the loneliness in itself, the word lonely, it's a state of mind, really. about how many people you're with. You could be in a room of a thousand and be lonely, you know? And I was, I wonder that, you know, it's about the individual. Some people it feels, you know, can be satiated and content by themselves, you know, and then some people might need a group of people to, you know, to feel connected. I guess it would vary, wouldn't it?

But loneliness, I think loneliness is a symptom. I mean, I think it's actually a symptom as well of what your deficit are inside. In other words, loneliness is basically a byproduct, a byproduct of anger, a byproduct of fear, a byproduct of things that they've never resolved, which ultimately add up into a sense of being alone. It also has to do with how much do you trust someone, how much, what was you, how were you raised, what are the areas that actually create the barrier for interconnectivity for other people? So in a way, aside from the fact that loneliness doesn't live unto itself, it's an epidemic.

It's an epidemic in a way that you can try to look at the cause. What are the causes of loneliness? You know, in the UK, they had a minister of loneliness, and I met with her, and I thought, what a horrible calling card. I'm the minister of loneliness. My God, I want to kill myself. But it is a problem there, a very interesting problem. And you think, well, right away it's old people.

But now because the work we're doing in schools and what we've learned and what we know is that children are also lonely. And a lot of them feel isolated. One of the things, which I would like you to speak about, is the three dimensions of loneliness. You say intimate, relational, and collective. Yeah, so we can be lonely in different dimensions. Intimate loneliness is when we lack, you know, either the connection that we enjoy from a spouse or a really close friend. Relational loneliness or that a number of friends we may have around us, we see occasionally we might go out with on Saturday nights.

They're the friends we may not trust, entrust with our deepest and darker secrets, but we enjoy their company. and they enjoy ours and we feel known when we're around them. And then the more collective loneliness has to do with missing a community with which we have a shared identity. So being a part of a neighborhood, being a part of a parent group, and knowing that, okay, there are these other folks

who have a shared interest, maybe it's our children, or maybe we have an interest in helping and clean up our community. There's some other identity we have that we share that makes us feel like we have a sense of worth. We all need connections in these. three different dimensions and what happens is that when we don't have connection in our life it manifests in different ways sometimes loneliness can look like anger sometimes they can look like

depression sometimes it can look like anxiety i think it can feed often in uh to substance use and addiction because loneliness is associated with emotional pain and when we feel pain we'll seek to relieve that pain and then the question becomes what do we reach for to relieve that pain that we We might reach for the phone to call a friend. We might reach for alcohol to numb our pain. We could reach for drugs. We could reach for food that may not be good for us but makes us feel good in the moment.

We could reach for work. There are socially acceptable ways to be addicted, quote unquote, which seem okay, but which are harmful. So we can do all of these different things. And this is I think one of the reasons why loneliness is hard to see around us because it looks and manifests in different ways and also because of that shame around loneliness.

People feel like if they admit, that they're lonely, that somehow they're not likable or they're not lovable in some way. Whereas the reality is that all of us at points in our life struggle with loneliness. And the reason I think this is like so essential is when I think about like the future that like our children will inherit and what's going to make the world hospitable for them, what's going to ensure that they have a fulfilling, happy life. To me, it's going to depend in large part on what happens with relationships in their life and the degree to which relationships are prioritized in the world around them.

If they care about relationships, but the world that bring up and deprioritizes relationships, you know, in search of fame or fortune or power, that's going to make it harder for them to find relationships. If they live in a world where kindness and compassion are seen as signs of weakness instead of what they really are, which is our source of greatest strength

because they're both manifestations of love, then we're going to be in a situation where there are chances of being truly happy, I think, are going to be diminished. But doesn't that start, that starts with the home, that starts at home, that starts with the family? It does, Oliver. It does start at home. I think if you're lucky, as it sounds like, Oliver, you and Kate were,

then you get a lot of that love at home. We were certainly lucky to get a lot of that love at home. But the problem for, I think, a lot of young people growing up now is sometimes they don't get that at home, in part because their parents didn't get that at home. And for many who don't have parents growing up or are in difficult situations, especially where they're experiencing

a lot of trauma growing up, what they rely on is the world around them. And so that's where I think it comes back to this deeper question that, you know, fueled me in writing this book, which is thinking about fundamentally what kind of world do we want to create? Do we want to create a world that it's centered around people

and relationships recognizing that that is our greatest resource and our greatest fuel? Or do we want to allow those that continue to slide? down the priority scale, not intentionally, but just out of neglect, which I think will make the world worse for us and for our kids. As a surgeon general, as you were and a doctor, you're a perfect person to speak to the effect of our neurology affecting our biology and how we can stay healthier by having a positive mindset, a way to look at things and connectivity, and having an understanding of what it is

to give and receive. These are the things that actually will help people stay healthier. And that's the messaging here, which is, you know, our mind and our body, the way we think and feel in our environment. The epigenetic studies can actually prove that, is that we can improve our health. And so it started with you actually being a doctor to help people who were already sick. But what happens when you could relieve the human from their anxiety, their fear, their anger and create an ability to self-care. Well, what are some of them, like a real tool that people can use if they are suffering from loneliness?

So I think there are a couple of things that we can do. So one is, and this is an unexpected finding for me, but one is to recognize that service is a very powerful pathway out of loneliness because what it does is, Let me back up for a second. One of the real challenges of loneliness is that it has a paradoxical effect of changing our focus to be more on us than on other people. And it also raises our threat level. And so it pushes us to actually perceive threat where there may not be threat. And there are evolutionary reasons why that happens.

But it has a collective effect in the modern world of actually pushing people away from us. Service is so powerful because it breaks that cycle and it shifts the focus away from us to someone else. And it also reaffirms to us that we have value to give to the world. It also makes other people feel good. And so service is not just volunteering at a soup kitchen or for a cause in your community. You can serve by helping those in need at work, you know, or fellow students, you know, if you're in school who are in need. You can serve within your own family. So service is one.

I think the second is to think about time and how we can better use time to strengthen our connections. And we can do this in two ways. One is I like to start small and just say, if we can spend five minutes a day, just five minutes, making sure that we are talking to, writing to, or seeing someone that we care about, just five minutes a day, that can have a lasting impact on how we feel that goes well beyond that day. If we also, when we think about time, focus on the quality of that time. Because one of the things that's hard in modern life is to think, well, how am I going to find like two hours or three hours or four hours in a day to suddenly start hanging out with more friends? friends, you may not have that time immediately, but we can look at the time we spend already and ask, how could I make that higher quality time? And I realize that I've been guilty of doing something terrible, which is I've allowed so many of my conversations to be diluted because

I'm distracted by what's around me. So, you know, there are times where we might be talking to a friend on the phone, but we're also scrolling through our inbox or looking at social media. We may catch up with a friend who's in town for dinner, but we've got our phones on the table. And we know that even if we think we can multitask that the science very clearly tells us that we can't, that we're not very good at it and we're distracted. Here's the one thing that I found really interesting. It was about research, is that they took a research to do this research. They put kids and they put the phones right there on the desk and they had them do the test, right? Okay. Then they had another group, the control group, and they put their phones outside. What they found was is that obviously the children who put it outside did far better on their.

test than the kids who were distracted by the phone on the desk. So right there alone, it can show how you literally need to, that focused attention, which is a wonderful thing that basically meditation helps you do, is strengthen that ability to attend, right? That's right. But this, you know, multitasking also works the brain in a certain way. And you can't stay on one thing for too long. That's right.

It's hard. I mean, I think one of the things. in that line that I also sort of recommend that people do is to think about how to create sacred spaces in their life that are free of technology. That might be a half hour before bedtime, it might be a longer period of time on weekends. But having time where your mind is not distracted by the things where you can just have solitude is actually really essential. One of the things that we've been robbed of by technology is white space in our life, right?

So all the cracks are filled in. That transition time you had maybe from going to your room down to the lock, is now filled because you can check your phone during that time, you know, walking down the street you can listen and talk to somebody. But it turns out the reason this is actually so important is because if we really want to address loneliness, we just, we need to not only strengthen people's connection to each other, we actually have to strengthen their connection to themselves. And what that means is to be connected to yourself is to know that you have worth and that you have value. It's to know who you are and to be accepting and embracing of that

person, because if you don't embrace who you are, then you are constantly going to be preoccupied with what you lack and with your insecurity. And this is why I worry so much about our children, but also adults. Because if you're in the social media environment constantly, what you're often bombarded by are messages that are telling you how you're not good enough, right? So I meet so many young people in high school and college today who feel like they're not thin enough, they're not good looking enough, they're not rich enough, they're not funny enough, they're not popular enough, they're not enough. And if you're preoccupied with that, it makes it hard to be fully present, like when you're interacting with other people. So I think that the hallmarks of connection

to oneself are grounded in self-knowledge, but also self-compassion. You know, we're all on these journeys of figuring out who we are and understanding how we want to be in the world and how we want to show up. And we're going to make mistakes. But if we can't extend compassion to ourselves in the same way that we hope to extend it to others

and that will only eat away at us inside and actually it will be harder to connect yeah couldn't agree more

I love that so much so much Oliver my forehead my forehead agrees Ollie thanks honey I'm sorry

you're sick I know we're so sorry I'm sorry to me I'm sorry you were sick but I'm really happy that I was able to take

your place because I love this idea of compassion okay because i think it's extremely important along those same lines though it's about self-forgiveness as well because we all fuck up this is just we're we're that's as human nature there's no such thing as perfection i think a lot of the times that we we don't give our we we don't forgive ourselves enough for our fuck-ups and that can that can cede inside of us and cause pain and dissent and along with the self-compassion is that self-fort

forgiveness, you know, because we, I personally have held on to a lot of things that I have not, not forgiven myself for, and I finally have. And it is allowed, it's allowed me to sort of, you know, free myself up and open up, you know what I mean? So that's amazing that you've done that, Oliver. And thanks for mentioning that, because I think you're right, that forgiveness is such an important piece of the compassion. You know, at the very end, the very end of the book, I shared this experience of one of my own like really profound failures around my daughter's illness and um you know that was an important moment for me because i you know i was sitting in the hospital with our daughter who was a year old at that time we she we just woke up one morning and she just wouldn't

put her foot down on her and wouldn't bear weight on her leg so her right leg and you know we've ended up lung surgery we took her in and found uh after a long you know long long long time in the ER trying to search for this and do imaging and blood tests. We found that she had a collection of bacteria that had settled in the soft tissue right by the bone of the femur, which was the long bone in the thigh. And it was right next to the bone, meaning that a little more time, it could have invaded the bone and affected her growth plate in her leg. And if it spread to her bloodstream, it could be life-threatening.

And so we were really, you know, obviously wanted to get it dealt with quickly. But in that emergency room that night, as we were sitting with that uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen to her, I just felt like profoundly alone. You know, we had, you know, our families, and I immediately called Rashmi, I called my parents, told them what was going on.

But they were thousands of miles away, right? I have close friends, but they're in Boston and San Francisco in other parts of the country. And I realized that in effort, during my time as a search in general, to focus all of my time on doing as much good as we could because you never know how long those jobs last,

I had neglected the relationships in my life. And it all kind of came to a head on that Saturday when I was sitting in the ER in President State weekend, feeling, wow, like profoundly alone, but realizing the cost of those decisions over the last few years. And feeling like if we make it through this, if our daughter makes it and if she's healthy, what do we really want to model for them?

What kind of life do we want to live with them? And it made me realize that there was a gap between the values that I had where I wanted the relationships to be in my life and the reality. And so I realized I need to close that gap myself. But part of that, to Oliver's point, was around forgiveness, was not continuing to chastise myself about the decisions I made years earlier, about focusing too much on work and this and that.

But to realize that, you know, we all, you know, ebb and flow in terms of being the people we want to be in life. And if we're blessed, we have an opportunity to remake ourselves and to be who we are really want to be and to live up to our highest values. And if we're really lucky, then that can influence our children for the better. That's so beautiful. So right. So this is the not as heavy, fun stuff. This is our speed round. One word to describe the other.

Compassionate. Oh, my God. I was going to say the same exact word. That's crazy. I was literally going to say compassionate. Oh. Wow. Because, like, anything that happens in the family, he'll come.

So my grandmother fell maybe like two and a half weeks ago. He and Alice came. When she fractured her wrist, he was on a plane the next day. He came. I mean, the screw the thing is she does that 100 times because what I do. do because she lives there and she's always coming over and spending the night at the hospital with my grandmother and

she puts so much more time and effort in because she chooses to be there which is extraordinary so I love you guys who calls the other more I think it varies I think my schedule is a little bit

more flexible so I end up I feel like I will initiate a lot of silly calls you know right what are you doing yeah and sometimes we're on the phone and we're not talking to each other but you know it's like being in the same room with each other we'll just FaceTime and just

we're on and things are happening kids are rolling around creating chaos and we do that too it's like and then all of a sudden you're like oh I'll call you later and you just yeah yeah exactly it's something nice about that yeah the person's there who's got like the better street smarts if you had to talk your way out of a speeding ticket.

Oh, Rashmi. Interesting, because I was going to say you. When we were young in India, like he had the gift of words. So he would barter. And my dad would encourage this biggest part of Indian culture, as you probably know, is barter. You know, you got to negotiate for what you want. You can always talk someone down. And so my dad would, he would go with my grandfather or we would all go with my grandparents

to the market every day and get vegetables. And when it was with my dad, he'd say, okay, go buy something. Yeah, you know, and so the lady would say, like, 60 rupees for this. He would like, oh, I'll give you 30, I'll give you 40. And he would, like, sit there and negotiate. Something your sibling is really bad at. See, Rashmi is not good at making time for herself. Oh.

He's not good at self-care in the way of meal prep for himself. Oh, that's terrible. Like, he used to cook all through college and, you know, but then residency. Did you grow up in a very, like, lots of food. food. Yeah, my dad would, when he cooks, it looks like, he's like the Tasmanian devil. So the whole kitchen, you can tell he was in the kitchen, but he'll make the best unscripted meals in 20 minutes.

And it'll be like a four-course meal. Who's funnier? She's the one who always makes everybody in the family laugh. Like my mom, like, so we do these like group conference calls all the time. So this is a, was something my wife had to get used to when she first. met me, but we talk, like, all the time in my family. So I'll talk to my mother probably two to three times a day. I'll talk to my father, you know, once or twice a day. And I'll talk to Rush Me, like, once or twice a day. And one of those is usually a group FaceTime or

phone, you know, conference call. And so we, she's, my mom is always like, hey, call Rush Me, because she'll make everyone laugh, like, on the phone. So there you go. You're a comedian. You don't know it. And you still do that. You still talk to each other multiple times a day. Yeah, we do. It's not like for a long period of time. It might just be a Check-in? Yeah. Yeah. Check-in.

Who's better at making decisions? I think it depends what kind of decisions. I think that's a really good answer. Who keeps a better secret? I mean, we're both steal traps when we need to be. Yeah, it kind of depends on what it is. If it's like a, I don't know. If it's about concern for a parent, no.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Not a good secret keeper. I'll call him in two seconds. Exactly. So your first celebrity crush. Oh, first celebrity crush. I think it may have been a Bollywood actor, either Sharakan. I mean, he's the guy, right?

He is, he is, was the dude, yeah. For me, probably Julia Roberts. Ooh, I love him. Secret talent. Rush me sings. Oh, Carnotic music. So classical South Indian music. I love South Indian music.

And he plays the Murdungam, which is a percussion instrument in South India. So we often would, when we were growing up, play together, they'd have, you know, concerts in the temple. And so we would perform together. Well, that's awesome. That's like the best orchestrated by my mother, pun intended. Same part of the brain. Exactly. Favorite book of all time.

Conversations with God. Okay. Many lives, many masters. Oh, yeah. So the last question we always ask at the end with the siblings is if you could take a characteristic that each other has for yourself, that you would love to have more of that kind of characteristic that they have that you admire, what would that be? And then the other part of the question is if there's something you could alleviate from your sibling that you feel

would bring them more peace or sort of better their, better their life, what would that be? So for Vivek, taking away, I guess this is part two, taking away something would be, he worries a lot, like about the family, any little thing gets, you know, goes wrong or, you know, despite everything else that he's got going on, he will focus on that and worry about that person. And so that's probably something that would be worthwhile reducing. and something that I could emulate a little bit more would probably be his patience because that's my shortfall. I get impatient, sometimes with my parents.

Maybe it's because I'm with them all the time, so you feel the leash is a little short. And then I feel guilty when I'm not patient. But he is always, always patient and methodical about, you know, a disagreement or changing somebody's mind. And, you know, very good about that. He's a good sign. Unflappable.

Well, it's also because I have more breaks, though. So one thing I wish I could take away from Rushmey, speaking of the breaks, is I wish I could take away some of the family responsibility that she has because she's three blocks from my parents. Like whenever there's a crisis, she's the one who responds. She's the one who always stops by with my grandmother. She's the one who's always in the hospital. So I wish I could take some of that away and actually send her out on breaks.

But it's not a burden. It's not. And it's not that it's a burden, but it takes emotional energy, right? And one thing that I wish I could emulate more is I feel like I feel like Rushmi has better perspective in terms of keeping things in balance and not being too perturbed by challenges that come her way. Whereas I feel like she feels like a big ship

that doesn't get pushed too far by waves that hit it. Whereas I feel like I'm just rowing in a small dinghy. you know and like the smallest wave that comes and just like throws me off and I just get worried and stressed about it so I think I think a lot of that is because I think I I mean since we're being open

I think I doubt myself a lot you know and I think I I have to remind myself that my instincts I think are usually right but I question them you know a lot and that leads me to sort of like worry just in general about things so I also feel that it's so important

especially today for people to hear really influential and intelligent people talk about their own doubts because, you know, that even you could be, you know, the surgeon general and still, you know, have doubt. I think it's important for people to feel open talking about this. Yeah, the frailties. We've all got them. Well, I loved every second of this. I know you guys have to go.

This was so much fun. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Mommy, I love having you. The best. I know. I know. Sibling Revellerie is executive produced by Kate Hudson, Oliver Hudson, and Sim Sarno. Supervising producer is Alison Bresnick.

Editor is Josh Windish. Music by Mark Hudson, aka Uncle Mark. I always had to be so good no one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling. The limitations from degree screens to stereotypes

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