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The Other 80

The Other 80

By: Claudia Williams
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The Other 80 podcast — brought to you by Claudia Williams at UC Berkeley School of Public Health — hosts real, honest dialogue about the things that help keep people healthy beyond traditional medical care, like housing, social connections and food, and the cutting edge policies, research and programs supporting whole person health. Join former White House advisor, entrepreneur and host Claudia Williams for deep conversations with the innovators, implementers, researchers and policymakers bringing these new models to life. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s not and how to move towards whole person health rapidly and equitably across the US.Copyright 2026 Claudia Williams Hygiene & Healthy Living Physical Illness & Disease Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Rebuilding Primary Care with Rushika Fernandopulle

    Rebuilding Primary Care with Rushika Fernandopulle
    Jun 17 2026
    Healthcare pioneer Rushika Fernandopulle joins us to discuss his new venture Liza and why this is the perfect moment to build new primary care models from the bottom up. Rushika argues that “shareholder value” has usurped the needs of patients in US healthcare, and that fundamental rethinking, not optimizing or tweaking at the edges, is needed. Rushika shares the ‘build principles’ for Liza:Backload constraints - don’t frontload them. First show that a new approach works, then figure out the business modelTake cues from conscious capitalism: the purpose of a business is to create good in the world, not to optimize shareholder value Figure out the right thing to do, not a business that fits how healthcare is brokenRushika argues that AI invites us to rethink healthcare based on abundance, not scarcity:“We've built our whole economy, all our processes with this assumption of scarcity, that there were a scarce number of human brains who could do things, right? Doctors, teachers, et cetera. And now all of a sudden that assumption has gone away. So we need to rethink from scratch how we build these systems. So that's what we're trying to do at Liza. Like, what if we started from scratch?”Relevant LinksMore information on LIZA HealthThe book Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey et alPodcast episode where Tim Ferris and Jerry Colonna talk about sabbaticalsArticle by Sara Riggare about living with Parkinson's and her image of blue and red dotsAbout Our GuestRushika Fernandopulle is a practicing physician who is the CEO of Liza Health, a startup building a new AI-enabled platform for Primary Care. He was the co-founder and CEO of Iora Health, an early innovator in Primary Care redesign which was acquired by Amazon in 2023. Prior to this, Rushika was the first Executive Director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement and Managing Director of the Clinical Initiatives Center at the Advisory Board Company. He is a member of the Schweitzer, Ashoka, Aspen, and Salzburg Global Fellowships, on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He serves on the boards of the Asian American Foundation, Families USA, and Premera Blue Cross, and is a member of the Lancet Commission for Person Centered Care. He earned his A.B., M.D., and M.P.P. from Harvard University, and completed his clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts General Hospital.SourceConnect With UsFor more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedInSubscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
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    43 mins
  • Drug Story: Thomas Goetz on Drugs, Diseases and The Medicalization of Everyday Life

    Drug Story: Thomas Goetz on Drugs, Diseases and The Medicalization of Everyday Life
    Jun 3 2026

    Does the history of drugs tell us something bigger about the world? That’s what former Wired executive editor and UC Berkeley Senior Impact Fellow Thomas Goetz is betting on with his new podcast Drug Story. He joins Claudia to talk about how big drug breakthroughs have shaped how we live and what it will really take to build health in our society.

    Thomas and Claudia dive into:

    • Fluoride: The paradox of public health success becoming invisible
    • Why modern culture medicalizes ordinary human experiences like sleep, aging & energy
    • How public health needs to communicate differently, think bigger, and position itself as essential infrastructure for everyday health

    Thomas says the illusion of free will makes consumers feel like unhealthy choices are their choice alone:

    “There is some agency, like somebody decides to take a cigarette out of the pack. People decide whether to have a Coke instead of a glass of water or what have you. But there's also this vast machine, an invisible universe that is so powerful in compelling us from the commercials that are on our TV shows to the infrastructure of fast food in our neighborhoods. And it just is this easy inertia where oftentimes we don't actually have free will… We have much less free will than we think we do when it comes to things like what we eat, how we get our entertainment, where we live. There's a lot that is not really up to us and our choices.”

    Relevant Links

    Listen to Thomas Goetz’s podcast Drug Story

    About Our Guests

    Thomas Goetz is an award-winning science journalist and author. He has won National Magazine Awards (print and digital), Webby Awards, and FDA contracts. He created Drug Story as an Impact Fellow at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.

    The former Executive Editor at WIRED, he has worked at The Wall Street Journal, Inc., and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has written two award-winning books about technology and medicine. His writing has been selected for the Best American Science Writing and the Best American Technology Writing anthologies. He spent much of the past decade developing digital tools to help people make sense of prescription medications, including leading the development of openFDA for the Food and Drug Administration, and building an economic research team and editorial operations at GoodRx. You can reach him at thomas@drugstory.co

    Source

    Connect With Us

    For more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedIn

    Subscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
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    40 mins
  • The ARPA for Philanthropy: Kumar Garg on Funding 'Big If True' Ideas in Science and Tech

    The ARPA for Philanthropy: Kumar Garg on Funding 'Big If True' Ideas in Science and Tech
    May 20 2026
    After spending time in the Obama White House, Kumar Garg came away with a toolset of skills to help drive change, spotlight good ideas and scale them. Now he’s applying those ideas to philanthropy. As the co-founders of Renaissance Philanthropy, Kumar and Tom Kalil have built an organization around a deceptively simple idea: What if philanthropy could help scientists, technologists, and innovators think bigger — and then actually fund the work at the scale required?Kumar and Claudia dive into:Renaissance Philanthropy’s approach: time bound and thesis driven fundingHow Kumar would spend $500 million on health right nowHow public health and academics could think biggerKumar’s intriguing ‘open notebook’ idea:“It's very valuable to me if a researcher has the equivalent of an open notebook. These are all the ideas… Here's my active research projects. Here's all the interesting sort of experiments I've done… you can imagine then sending an agent out and read[ing] people's open notebook.. it would be a way to discover people's work.”Relevant LinksLearn more about Renaissance PhilanthropyGet info on the Big If True Science Accelerator (BITS)See a photo of Kumar’s White House white board on TwitterAbout Our GuestsKumar Garg is the President at Renaissance Philanthropy.Kumar has helped to shape the science and tech landscape for almost two decades. Working with Eric Schmidt, he helped design and launch moonshot initiatives in education, provided early support to game-changing ideas and pioneers, and built ongoing multi-donor and multi-sector collaboratives.Prior to that, he helped set budget and policy priorities for the Obama Administration as part of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and drove progress on topics ranging from education and workforce issues, biotechnology, entrepreneurship, space, advanced manufacturing, broadband, nanotechnology, behavioral sciences, digital media, incentive prizes, and broader innovation policy.In particular, he led the Obama Administration’s efforts to bolster science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, including development of major budget and policy initiatives in the State of the Union to train 100,000 excellent STEM teachers and bring computer science to all K-12 students, development of the Educate to Innovate campaign with over $1 billion in in-kind and philanthropic investment, and creation of iconic events such as the White House Science Fair.Prior to his time in government, Kumar worked on behalf of parents and children seeking educational reform as an education lawyer and advocate. Kumar received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and a law degree from Yale Law School.SourceConnect With UsFor more information on The Other 80 please visit our website - www.theother80.com. To connect with our team, please email claudia@theother80.com and follow us on twitter @claudiawilliams and LinkedInSubscribe to The Other 80 on YouTube so you never miss our video extras or special video episodes!
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    37 mins
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